(II) Surface

112 (II) Surface

Skill Gained: Deception 1 (Common)

Psychomancy 12 > 13

Dread Aura 89 > 91

Shiv triggered his Song of the Vigilant to focus through the pain. He ripped his Psychomancy out from the rider—Shiv groaned as he tried to shake off the memory spillover. Uva had warned him about stuff like this. It made him feel like he was himself and not at the same time.

A Woundeater snaked across his body and consumed all his current injuries. At once, the bulk of Shiv’s pain faded, but Gold-10 kept screaming as the Paindrinker continued affecting him. Shiv stopped time. Gold-10’s screeching went silent. Pressing himself against the open chasm of mangled flesh he made of the dragon’s left arm, Shiv stared out from his personal “and tracked where the other enemies were with his Biomancy. Two more dragons got within two hundred meters of him. That left just one dragon outside that distance.

I can work with that.

Shiv stopped time. As soon as his temporal shell fused over his body, the dragons triggered their Chronomancy as well. He felt their Strider of the Unbending Path Skills activate in tandem with his. A shuddering vibration passed through Shiv’s time-armor.

He seized the dragon he was in and spiked it into its nearest counterpart. A massive collision shook the dragon’s insides, and Shiv let out a shout of exertion as he worked to get his stabbing port in line with the dragon he was trying to stab. The body of another dragon came into sight. It was still twenty meters away from Shiv.

Twenty meters was nothing when you could change the size of your knife.

He pushed his upper body out from the wound and slashed. The Skysplitter’s Size-Shifting Enchantment activated. It expanded from a thirty-five-centimeter dagger to a hundred-meter-long blade and crashed against the other dragon’s neck.

The beast’s scales shattered but held together. The softer tissues they were supposed to protect did not.

Shiv’s Deepest Edge carried the cut through veins, tendons, tissues, and more. Blood erupted from the dragon’s jaws. He cut it twice more for good measure. The bones in its neck parted then. The dragon’s head slumped over at an awkward angle as it fell from the sky, trailing blood from between its serried fangs.

Another dragon accelerated toward him. Shiv spiked his gravitic field twenty times. Gold-10 combusted and then turned to bloody mist beside him. Something inside Shiv cringed.

Shiv twisted the dragon he was in to face the dragon that was coming at him—and cursed as a stream of Necromancy exploded just a few meters under him. The dragon Shiv was inside of turned black inside and out. Its organs withered. Its scales darkened. A piece of its soul . Suddenly, its Chronomancy winked out, and it went still. Shiv realized what had happened in an instant. The thing that shattered inside it was a skill—its strongest skill. Chronomancy was lost to this dragon. It would never be able to stop the pace of time again.

A terrible feeling churned in Shiv’s gut as he extended his blade to two hundred meters and drove it into the chest of the dragon that had unleashed the beam. The tip of the Skysplitter sang out as adamantine greeted adamantine. But where he failed to pierce the dragon’s barding, its insides were punctured by his progressing stab. The golden-scaled behemoth reeled back, clutching its chest. But it didn’t die. Not until Shiv dragged his blade across its throat.

Screams exploded over and over in Gold-01’s mind as he watched the disaster unfold. A massive, gleaming blade had materialized and had burst free from Gold-10’s dragon—from the wound where its left arm used to be. Gold-02’s dragon fell. And now Gold-08 was going down too. An explosion of force deformed the insides of Gold-10’s dragon as it was unnaturally ripped out of position. The enemy Pathbearer was dragging it around from the inside.

Gold-01 guessed.

An entire patch of the dragon came apart in spilling chunks of festering flesh. Gold-01’s heart screamed in pain. Gold-01 loved dragons. They were great and terrible creatures, and Gold-10’s dragon was as mortally wounded as any dragon could be. Its Magical Resistance had been broken at some point, and a subsequent beam of Necromancy carved deep into its soul.

Gold-01 couldn’t feel Gold-10’s mind either. Gold-01 tried not to think about that.

The squadron had been drawn out of position trying to save one of their own, and now they were paying the price. Two riders dead. Three dragons slain. They couldn’t afford these losses. Not with the siege of Blackedge still ongoing.

Master Irene’s voice surfaced in his mind.

He hadn’t thought about her in years. He hadn’t thought about her since the Stygia Raid… Since he shot her down over the skies of Vulketh. He tried not to think about her. Gold-01 thought she was his wound, his severed limb.

He was wrong. This was the moment he cut off his arm and mauled his heart. This was the time he sacrificed one to save the others.

Gold-01 said. He didn’t realize when he started crying, or if Gold-10 could hear him, or if—

It didn’t matter. He cycled his Necro-Thrower and fired. He struck Gold-10’s dragon in the back. More corrosive foulness consumed the dragon’s golden scales. Gold-01 felt like he just tore out his own heart.

A flood of reluctance and trauma washed through Gold-01 from the other riders, but they listened. They were good riders. Good soldiers. They knew. They just refused to accept until he ordered it. They had fought together for years, starting as little more than wyvern riders. The dragons had been with them for a decade as well. Gold-Primary was a squadron of Master-Tier riders, and now, for the first time in years, they were going to need to train new riders to make up for their casualties.

The massive blade swaying back and forth through the air shrank until it vanished from sight. A half-second thereafter, a small shape exploded out from inside Gold-10’s dragon and slammed hard into Gold-06’s dragon. 10’s dragon came apart in a blossom of viscera and decaying flesh—but the pieces promptly combusted and dissolved as the small shape accelerated even faster. It tore clean through the neck of Gold-06’s dragon—beheading it before Gold-01 could react.

Only then did Gold-01’s Divination Matrix respond. It highlighted the target. They glowed a deep violet, and Gold-01 snarled as he tried to turn his Necro-Thrower on the target.

Gold-01’s mind screamed.

He didn’t get to finish that thought, as everything around the target blasted outward in a cataclysmic explosion. A wall of flame and force crashed into Gold-01 just as he fired his Necro-Thrower. His dragon was launched backward. One of its wings dislocated from the sheer whiplash. The beam cut skyward and struck nothing, and that was the last thing Gold-01 saw as another three waves of crushing force smashed into his dragon and drove him headfirst into the ceiling of his capsule.

Stolen story; please report.

Strider of the Unbending Path 123 > 124

Adamantine Adaption 156 > 157

Inertial Overdrive 106 > 107

It didn’t take long for the dragon to start rotting around Shiv. Necromancy was horrifying in the way that it made you with each hit it inflicted. Gold tarnished and withered into flaking blackness. Organs shriveled. Blood dissolved. Bones crumbled away into ash. In seconds, Shiv’s meat shield started decomposing around him, coming apart in body and spirit. He'd expected them to hold back a little longer since he was effectively using one of their own as a shield, but once again, the other riders adapted.

And that was the biggest difference between these Pathbearers and the ones he'd fought before. They learned. Constantly. This entire exchange wasn’t a clash of force against force or strength on strength, but choice against choice. Shiv had his speed and surprise going for him. They had numbers, Chronomancy, and Necromancy.

Necromancy that was about to punch through the flesh of this dragon and set Shiv off like a mana bomb at any point.

Shiv thought.

He cast his Skysplitter in the distance again. He didn’t care where it went, so long as it was away from here. The glow of Necromancy faded, but the dragon was still falling apart around Shiv. Time for a new plan:

Shiv spiked his gravitic field fifty times. He started breaking apart like the dragon he hid within. The air around him exploded with fire and displaced kinetic energy, and he burst out from the dragon’s body in a rush of speed. Blood gushed out from his eyes and ears as he sailed through the air toward the densest concentration of dragons. Darkness and crimson danced around the corners of his vision. Shiv groaned as he fought hard not to black out.

Five dragons reacted to his sudden appearance. He could see the Necromancy crystals on their backs brightening. But that was as far as they got. Shiv burst his inertial sheath. A solid wall of destruction surged out in a rippling wave. The sheer amount of force released also folded Shiv in half at the point of his lower spine.

The Deathless let out a ragged cry of pain—and then reverted time to a second ago and repeated the same action.

He detonated his sheath again. His body broke again. His temporal shell reached the breaking point. He cast himself back in time once more. Shiv shot forward and burst his sheath again. His Chronomancy broke, but before it came apart entirely, he activated his Outside Context Problem.

A rush of coldness passed through Shiv as he focused on his senses. Everything around him was on fire. His inertial detonation spread wider and wider, displacing clouds and dragging dragons along in its wake. Shiv himself barely looked human—felt more like a mangled bag of flesh containing shards of displaced bone. He was so badly injured that if his Song of the Vigilant wasn’t active, he wouldn’t have been able to finish the spell.

A Woundeater passed through him, swallowing injury after injury as his body snapped back into shape. Shiv let out a slight groan as he looked around. The time dragons had been ragdolled in different directions. Most of them seemed to have broken wings. A few weren’t responsive at all. It was a testament to just how tough they were that they didn’t die outright. Maybe the same couldn’t be said for the riders.

The warrior in Shiv called out to him, demanded that he keep pursuing them—that he finish off each and every one now that they were scattered and vulnerable. But he could hear Adam’s voice in the back of his head. Uva’s, too. The Necrotechs had responded , and if they could send out one team of dragons this quickly, they could unleash another.

, Shiv decided, triggering his Skysplitter’s SpatialHe teleported to the blade in a blast of displaced space and promptly smashed through a verdant hill. Grass and dirt exploded over Shiv, and he spiked his gravitic field up to right himself. As he sailed through the air, his helmet broke apart, and Shiv cursed.

He triggered Chameleon and Silhouette as he decelerated to avoid environmental destruction and kept flying low, waiting to see if dragons would catch sight of him again.

Seconds passed. Everything was quiet. Shiv let out a breath and came to a stop. “Well. Guess I finally managed to lose them. Time to keep—”

Just then, he caught something in the corner of his vision. A star glowing brighter than most, just over the Tidewall.

He turned. The star grew even brighter. Shiv's eyebrows made it halfway up his forehead before what he'd assumed to be a star arrived right in front of his face, and then he found out how it felt for one's body to be reduced to its component atoms.

Revenant 41 > 42

Shiv blinked as he respawned.

The world was . A column of blinding fire drilled clean through the land and swelled out, scouring everything between the clouds and the earth to the edge of the horizon and beyond.

Everything in sight faded into the blinding dawn of an exploding sun.

Shiv's mind remained blank for a moment. Then the cold started getting to him. He needed to drain vitality, but—

Roland’s eyes narrowed as he watched the figure emerge victorious from their battle against the squadron of dragons. A massive shroud of destruction was birthed from their body every time they released all the kinetic energy they had built up. Roland wasn’t exactly sure what kind of Reflexes Skill that was, but he knew it was Heroic-Tier at the least, and that this Pathbearer wasn’t friendly to Sullain.

They were fighting the vicar’s patrols, tearing across the land and air like a fast-moving mana bomb. It was like they were deliberately drawing attention, trying to provoke notice.

Roland realized.

The Pathbearer vanished from the sky just then. Roland thought they used their Chronomancy again, but the Town Lord noticed a pulse of spatial magic about four kilometers away. He sent one of his arrows on approach. Whoever this stranger was, he wanted a better look at them. If this was another one of the Inquisition’s special operatives, he wanted to know why—

Then, as the unknown Pathbearer launched themselves across the land with a pulse of force, their skull-shaped helmet broke apart.

Roland’s heart skipped a beat. His stomach rebelled. For a moment, he thought he was looking at Harlon—but no. Harlon was dead. This was his This was the Omenborn born from the ritual that killed Rose, that took from Roland his daughter.

This was . The boy who called himself Shiv.

He looked different. His irises were a brilliant white now, and he was practically twice as large as he used to be. He had skills. Skills meant a Path. And that meant the reports—his Biomancers claimed to have recovered multiple bodies that belonged to Shiv, but Roland had been occupied every second since the battle had begun—he had constantly—

Roland’s heart plunged into an abyss of cold terror. This couldn’t be happening. He refused to even entertain the idea.

Tanner was accelerating toward the Tidewall, clad in the vestiges of death. That meant—that could only mean one thing—

Roland gritted his teeth. He couldn’t allow this. He wouldn’t this.

The Starhawk’s light spilled out from Roland as his eyes began to glow. He had been a fool. Too soft. Too weak. Too—he just couldn’t do it. He couldn’t just murder a child. And now he was paying for his mercy. Now, the Omenborn was on his way home.

Roland growled.

“Lord Arrow?” his personal Psychomancer said, taken aback by the sudden spike of terror she sensed in the Town Lord.

Roland’s soul was his arrows. But they also contained the boundless power of the Starhawk. The promise of a dying star’s last glow. And in a fit of dread and fury, Roland primed 244 of these arrows and directed them down to Old Santabar.

And so they fell. Like shooting stars, traveling from the upper atmosphere to the earth in an instant. He felt three of the Solar arrows hit Tanner. He felt the Omenborn’s body break, burn—but also endure for a moment. Roland’s eyes widened.

Then the other 241 arrows crashed into him.

In a flare of radiance likely visible all the way from the broken fragments of the moon, half of the Old Santabar region vanished beneath a blinding pillar of purifying flame.

Roland fell to his knees, more emotionally shaken than magically exhausted. As his personal guard and aides rushed to help him back up, he wasn’t focused on them. Rather, he stared down from the other arrows he left in the void, and he watched. Watched and made sure there was nothing left of the Omenborn. He watched.

And kept watching…