(II) Vicar

116 (II) VicarShiv’s blood turned to ice in his veins. Even the soul-rending pain was forgotten.

The skeletal visage of a titanic serpent hovered right above him, the oscillating flames in its eye sockets bathing him in a pale glow. Behind Shiv, a veil of darkness had formed, and the detonation of energy that had left Shiv’s body when the wave of Necromancy struck him was slowly being siphoned into a sphere of red and white grasped by eight of the vicar’s countless hands. The vicar himself was . Translucent.

Sullain gave a gasp of effort as he wrestled Shiv’s exploding vitae under control.

Shiv took a step back, and he barely stopped himself from shrieking as a rush of pain sliced through his body.

Vicar Sullain let out a slight laugh as he flicked the now-controlled sphere of vitae up into the air. It hovered beside the kilometer-long serpent as he looked down at Shiv. The face of the Vicar was oddly expressive, despite being mostly made of a black alloy. He somehow looked sorrowful.

Shiv tried to reply, but it was all he could do to stop himself from shaking.

“Yeah, well.” Shiv bit back a whimper. “Maybe if you stop sieging the town and just go back down into the Abyss, we can call it even?”

The Vicar stared at him.

Despite how bad it hurt, Shiv shrugged. “I just… take things as they come.”

Cracks formed throughout his temporal shell. But the Vicar made a brief gesture, and a tidal wave of gold splashed through Shiv, restoring the skill’s integrity in a flash. Shiv blinked in surprise, but then he let out a gasp as he felt the Vicar’s Chronomancy tighten around him.

the Vicar commented. He slithered down from the air in a smooth, spiraling motion and drew close to Shiv. The dense sphere of Vitae extracted from him bobbed above the serpent like a small star.

“A certain eldritch abomination decided to start hitting me with its past selves.”

“Recollector?” Shiv breathed. “There’s more like it?”

the Vicar said, chuckling.

Shiv couldn’t imagine facing a trillion of anything. He couldn’t even imagine how large a trillion was.

The great serpent crossed its many ethereal arms.

Shiv’s eyes widened. “That… bad…”

Sullain said, turning to gaze at the Vitae sphere.

Shiv tried to jump back in time, to the temporal anchor he had left right outside the Surface Gateway. His Chronomancy moved—and jolted in place as it crashed against the Vicar’s magic. A shudder passed through Shiv’s soul. Pain exploded inside him—that’s how deep the burns went. Against all odds, Shiv didn’t collapse. He even held back a scream.

Sullain asked again, with a bit more weight this time.

“Yeah, you also kind of set me off like a bomb,” Shiv hissed. He tested his Biomancy, and when he realized it was unconstrained, he tried to remove it from his body. Only to discover he couldn’t separate when his tissues began and his bone armor ended. At that moment, he was glad he didn’t have a mirror. His stomach turned.

Sullain said, answering Shiv’s thought.

Shiv gasped internally.

Sullain said.

Shiv stared at the Vicar for a moment as he fought to get his mind back under control. When he managed to focus enough, he was going to use Outside Context Problem and see if he could jump back to the Surface Gateway. For now…

Maybe gathering some intelligence wouldn’t be so bad either.

the Vicar agreed.

“Shiv,” he finally said to the Vicar. “I call myself Shiv. It’s the only name I’ll ever accept.”

the Vicar echoed.

“Yeah.”

Shiv nodded slowly. “Kept me safe on the streets. Kept people away. I liked that about them. Made me feel safe. Made me feel powerful. So, Shiv.”

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Slowly, the Vicar leaned in and stared at Shiv for a long moment. Faint, blue mana gleamed within the Vicar’s glass eyes, and his long, metallic teeth clicked together as he let out a reverberating breath. The Vicar held up a hand, and a crimson helix danced upon the palm. Two more sets of helices superimposed themselves over the first, and the Vicar sighed.

“Seems everyone knows more about dear old mom and dad than me,” Shiv ground out.

“Yeah, I don’t think so,” Shiv said. “And I’m not something to be returned to anyone. I’m my own man.”

And Valor pretty much said the same when Shiv left the gate.

Sullain breathed. He was suddenly much closer to Shiv, eyes gleaming.

the Vicar said.

“Something like that,” Shiv said, not seeing the point in lying about this. “Most people who live on Blackedge are sacks of shit to me. But they don’t deserve to die just for being sacks of shit. There are people I care about there as well. And there’s a certain Town Lord whom I need to punch, and you’re cutting in line.”

“Just wanna hit him in the face a couple times. A couple hundred times. Until some of his teeth are broken, maybe.”

An amused chuckle escaped from the Vicar.

“And yours isn’t?” Shiv asked. He considered his next words, but let his intuition guide him. “I know about Submission. Well. Something about Submission. I want to understand why you’re doing all this. What the hells is the point of sacking all of Blackedge? And why have you allied yourself with the Inquisition to do it?”

Despite his words, the Vicar sounded surprised more than ashamed.

And just then, Shiv realized there was something he could do to the Inquisition, just by telling a distorted story. “Know about them? I ran into the Inquisition bastards at Theborn—those idiots lost your Animancy Core.”

Silver Tongue 21 > 22

The Vicar went still.

“Yeah. They lost your core. It was supposed to pass through the gate and be delivered to you, right? It’s with Lord Scorn now. Well, scattered all over his world, more like. Because it went off on Vulketh.”

Sullain shouted.

Shiv didn’t even bother hiding his shit-eating grin. “Because the dumb bastards tried to take it from that neurotic Gate Lord by force, and things went to shit in the process. Although I think they were planning on stealing it from you to begin with. To withhold the core from you as leverage, and leave you without any way to empower your weapon. They want Starhawk’s Perch, and they were afraid that you were going to—”

The Vicar let out a rageful cry. An anvil of fire crashed down through his body, knocking Shiv down. The Deathless did black out from the pain that time, but he woke shrieking as his ruined flesh impacted the ground.

Twin voices filled the air in the time-frozen ruins of Lost Angeles. Shiv’s throat almost tore from the force of his pained screams, but they were drowned out by the Vicar’s wrathful declarations of hatred that he directed at the sky, promising to unmake the Inquisition whole.

Deception 11 > 12

After a few seconds of screaming, Shiv finally managed to master enough of himself to close his mouth and crawl into a sitting position.

The Vicar’s words smashed into Shiv physically. Blood erupted from his mouth as he blasted across the ground. Shiv slid for a good hundred meters before he finally stilled. It took seconds to stop his agonized wails. As he tried to rise, the Vicar loomed over him.

Shiv spat blood up at the ethereal serpent, only for it to splatter back down on his own face. “If you head south, you can ask City Lord Havel yourself. When he finds out the core is lost and he has no leverage on you… They might just decide to wipe you off the board for good measure.”

The Legendary Pathbearer stilled.

Shiv snorted, blood spraying from his nostrils. “They want the Perch, and… now that you did most of the work, you're no longer of any use.”

Shiv guessed the Vicar would be able to easily tell if he told him outright nonsense—even with his claims about not wanting to dig deeper into his mind—so he told him what he believed to be the truth. The Inquisition was probably going to do that—just maybe not immediately.

The Vicar shook his head.

Shiv winced, then. He was losing track of time. Taunting the Vicar wasn't what he had been intending to do here. He needed to focus. He needed to…

When Shiv’s focus snapped back, he found the vicar looming directly over him.

“Nothing else,” Shiv growled. “That’s all I wanted to tell you—”

He gritted his teeth as the Vicar made a gesture at him. It felt like his soul was twisting inside of him, growing tighter and tighter. Shiv’s eyes rolled. It wasn't the worst pain he'd experienced, but it felt incredibly ominous. Like some fundamental part of his being was in someone's grasp. “Piece of shit…” he spat. “What happened to being… polite? Fucking… torturing me as a second resort?”

the vicar declared with conviction.

Shiv couldn’t help but laugh. Yeah, Vicar Sullain was a That nice and caring bullshit lasted seconds. This is who the big snake really was.

Sullain snarled, clenching his hand.

Shiv felt the Vicar trying to break his body physically. He pushed back at the unseen field with his Biomancy. The Vicar scoffed and Shiv’s Biomancy field like it was nothing but paper. Shiv gagged and vomited from the agony. He started seizing as the Vicar broke all his limbs at once. Compared to even just the pain of his field being ripped apart, however, it didn't hurt particularly badly. The Vicar clearly didn't know much about torturing people.

“F-fuck you,” Shiv wheezed. Someone was screaming at him—screaming from inside of him—

Sullain reached for him again.

Shiv triggered his Outside Context Problem and plunged into his own Vitae. A badly corroded layer of black and white enveloped Shiv. The Vicar lurched back, confused. Shiv cast his Chronomancy back in time—back to the very first anchor he planted right outside Gate .

Shiv blinked across existence. It was like he was being reeled back across his personal history by a cord of mana. The pain faded for a moment during the transition. Shiv thought he was going to revert to a point where he wasn’t wounded, where he was still whole and hale. The assumption was proven wrong the moment he blinked back into existence. His flesh combusted and melted into his armor immediately.

Every soul-wound he'd suffered moments ago returned to him all at once. His Chronomany might have been able to revert the wounded state of his body, but when the damage lined his Vitae—

Shiv collapsed and began to shake. He didn’t even scream anymore. It was too much. It was all too much. He shook and twitched on the soft soil, but there came no relief. The pain never ended. It just built and built and built and built.

Even as a blue light splashed over him.

Even as he heard Adam screaming his name.

Even when he died.

Revenant 50 > 51 (Skill Evolution Reached)

And it only got worse when Revenant started to evolve.