(II) Helix

135 (II) Helix

"It is a dangerous thing to admit that much to an orc," Helix said.

Shiv simply shook his head. "You gotta ask yourself why I'm willing to admit that. Why I'm not that scared at all. And that's because of the Deathless part. And it's also because you're going to figure it out soon anyway. So I got no taste in wasting any fucking time. I called all the Biomancers out because I wanted to start learning properly. I had another instructor, you see. But they're a little bit far away, and I almost never get any time to read or practice the technical aspects of my Biomancy."

"Ah, so you are recruiting instructors." The orc nodded vigorously. His expression shifted from disdain to begrudging acceptance. "This is good. This is good. I would have despised answering to a pure brute." The orc’s eyes flicked over at Mortar for a moment. "The fact that you are willing and actively seeking means to make up for your atrophied education is proper.”

"What, you were planning to personally tutor me?" Shiv folded his arms and looked Helix up and down. "I mean, you're pretty powerful, but—"

"But nothing," Helix said, cutting Shiv off. He looked over his shoulder, staring at the other orcs. A small group was marching toward the mountain, while others began to shift and rearrange themselves.

Shiv's jaw dropped slightly. He expected some kind of chaotic clamor to break out among the gray-skinned brutes. Some kind of delay or chaos he needed to handle. No. After he dispatched his orders, the orcs responded in an orderly and hyper-disciplined fashion. None of them fell upon each other in a frenzy of violence. None of them complained or tried to incite a rebellion. None of them attempted an assassination. In fact, they were even chattering in a borderline polite manner.

"There are no orcs capable of matching my knowledge, my experience, and my insight into Biomancy. And I will not be led by an Insul ignorant to the true promise of his strongest Magical Skill."

"You know what? I can accept that. Saves me the time of wrangling a group of Biomancers and trying to figure out if they're planning to assassinate me or not."

"Yes, about that." Helix adjusted his spectacles. "How does your deathlessness work? Because I know it does work. But are there limitations or issues?"

Shiv raised an eyebrow. "Yeah, nice try."

The orc rolled his eyes. "Oh, come now, boy. We're going to find out sooner or later. One or both of us will die at some point. And the other will eventually learn. You especially are fighting alongside all these orcs. You think we don't speak?"

Shiv considered that, and he decided to offer Helix a partial truth. A little bit of detail and not the whole picture. "Vitality."

Helix blinked. "Excuse me?"

"Vitality. If I die, I drain it to come back."

"Oh, is that all? And specifically your killer's vitality, or..."

"No, any vitality will do."

"Then be specific," Helix spat. "Why are you so vague, so general? We need to cure that in you."

"Cure what?"

"If you're going to be a good Biomancer and eventually a good blood coder for that matter. You're going to need to be specific. The demons are in the details. The small, tiny, little details. Smaller than the cells themselves. Indeed, if you were meticulous, you would have noticed that you are dying right now."

Shiv stared at Helix. "What the hells do you mean?"

"I gave you cancer."

"What?"

"I have given you cancer," Helix repeated, slightly louder. "There's nothing wrong with your hearing, is there?"

"No," Shiv replied. "When did you..." Then, as he turned his Biomancy inward, he felt a spreading patch of tissue inside of him. Inside his...

"Yes, it's inside your blood," Helix said, frowning. "How low is your Awareness? It must be below Adept as well." Helix sighed. "This will not do. This will not do at all. We're going to need to coordinate your skill development. Both your Practical Metabiology and your Awareness need to evolve at the same time. Hopefully, that will give you the Mystical Cell Skill Evolution."

Shiv felt more of the cancer spread through him. And the first hints of weakness traveled through his body as well. His jaw fell open. He considered punching Helix in the face, but the orc simply carried on.

"Now, the first thing about cancer is that practically everything can develop cancer. So you need to learn how to get good at treating cancer. Now, do you know how to clear this out of your blood?"

"If I did, I would have already ripped it out of myself and thrown it at you," Shiv said, barely keeping his agitation in check. His Woundeater flared around his arm, and Helix placed the back of his hand against his forehead as he nearly fell backwards.

"Is that a Woundeater? Is that your Master-Tier Skill Evolution? By the Challenger's whim! He's broken. He's broken beyond belief."

Shiv looked down at his wyrm and frowned. "What's wrong with my Woundeater?"

"The question is how you managed to get the Woundeater in the first place. You clearly didn't evolve your Biomancy through any rational or well-studied means."

"So I was trying to heal two people, all right?" Shiv said, a little heat entering his voice. "I tried to close their wounds or pull their injuries out of them."

Once again, Helix nearly collapsed dramatically, and Tequila held him up. "Pull... pull the wounds. He's treating the body like an arts and crafts project."

Elsewhere, Shiv could hear orcs laughing. He glared down from the mountaintop, and he saw Biomancy fields spreading out from them as well. The Deathless gritted his teeth. This godsdamn orc was embarrassing him in front of the other Biomancers.

"Listen—" Shiv growled.

"No, you listen first," Helix said. "I need to evolve you. I need to save you from the folly of your own actions and woeful experiences.”

And just then, another orc arrived. He stomped up the mountainside, and Shiv immediately noticed how large he was. Even after being made over three meters tall by Plaguefueled, this orc was still twice Shiv's height. His bulky body was uncovered aside from a loincloth, and he had what looked to be a colossal tree branch resting on his shoulder.

"Insul," the orc said, his voice a dull mutter, "I am Bonk, reincarnation 1001. I… I no think good.”

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Shiv raised an eyebrow.

"Bonk," Helix said, turning around and letting out an exasperated sigh, "I'm in the middle of something right now."

"He needs to be saved." Bonk blinked. "Hey, Helix, what do you need to be saved from?"

"And knock it off. He's not stupid." Helix gave Shiv a desperate look. "He's just undereducated. You can play your games with someone else."

Bonk sulked. "Damn it, Helix. I saw his face. He almost bought into it. I could have convinced him."

"And what would that do, Bonk? What would that do? What is the point of such a thing?”

"It would have been very funny when I solved an incredibly complicated problem or said something highly intellectually astute, but then went back to pretending to be mentally challenged," Bonk said, gazing wistfully out at the horizon as if imagining a future that would never come to pass now.

Tequila sighed. “Classic Bonk.”

Shiv let out a breath as he processed the orcs’ conversation. "Man, Adam is going to hate you guys."

Speaking of which, immediately Shiv pulled on the cord between him and Helix. The Biomancer gasped as Shiv clutched his head. He drew Helix in close, froze time, took Helix's glasses off, and put them on his own face. When he finished that, he stood behind Helix and let time resume. The orc Biomancer nearly fell over, but Shiv reached out and caught him again.

"So," Shiv said, his voice loud and authoritative. "You're not that fast, Helix. Lacking Reflexes. You feel kind of soft, so I don't think you got much Toughness. I'm guessing you're not a frontliner orc."

Helix slowly turned, and Shiv pulled the spectacles off and handed them back to the orc. Helix blinked and put the spectacles back on.

"I'm going to state this very plainly," Shiv said. "If you give Adam cancer, or if you give Uva cancer, or if you hurt anyone on the gate... If you hurt anyone in the gate," he pointed through the gateway, "I'm going to do things to you that will make you wish you were Band. I'm going to find your Biomancy skill, and I'm going to crack it. I'm going to break it for good, and then I'm going to go for your Practical Metabiology, and I will break that too. And that's it. That's all I'll do. Now, if you commit suicide and reincarnate with a fresh soul, or however that works, I will find you again, and I will break your two most valuable skills. Do you understand? You will always be a partially crippled orc. Intellectually crippled. Magically crippled. Crippled in every way you care about. You will never be able to exert your desired dominance on anyone. Do you understand me?"

With each exchange and with each sentence spat, Shiv leaned against Helix harder and harder, while the fear cord between them grew thicker and thicker. And finally, by the end, the orc Biomancer just nodded. "That is most understandable. And I am not interested in whoever you just mentioned, either. It's you. You are the Insul. They are trivial. Although... are either of them Biomancers?"

"No," Shiv growled. "And so long as you're here, they won't be."

Just then, a pulse of Dimensionality swelled out from the gateway. It rose into the air, and with a clap of pressure, the Court Leviathan emerged. It spread its massive tentacles out, swishing them through the sky. Its kilometers-long body was shrouded by a backdrop of raw, red, rash-stained clouds. And the massive creature held a cave-biter in one tentacle, waving it around.

Adam briefly popped his head through the gateway.

"Adam, get the fuck back inside!" Shiv snapped.

Adam eyed the orcs, looked at Shiv, and retreated with a grimace. The chains between him and Shiv grew even thicker.

“Godsdamn it.” Shiv sighed. “I was too rough.”

Helix turned, but before he could get a good look at Adam, Shiv grabbed the orc by the chin and wrenched his face over to face him. "I want you to understand something, Helix," Shiv continued. "If you think that he's going to be my weakness, I want you to look at this another way. If you hurt him, or if you hurt Uva, or if you hurt anyone I decide I care about, I am going to devote my life to rendering you a mentally challenged orc. Like the kind of orc Bonk here was pretending to be. Literally. Is that understood between us? They are not people you can threaten. They are people that, if you so much as approach them, I will torture you endlessly for. I will go beyond your notions of monstrousness. I will have the other orcs begging me to stop."

And as Shiv finished his violent, angry rant, both Mortar and Whisper began to clap. The absurdity of the moment nearly made Shiv let out a chuckle.

"Well," Helix said, taking a step away from Shiv. He adjusted his coat, and one of the small creatures that constantly stitched new lines of silk poked its head out and stared at the Deathless before retreating under a few of the strands. "That was... Yes. You should strive to always be as thorough and as specific as that," Helix said, nodding vigorously.

Shiv noticed that the cord between him and the Heroic-Tier orc Biomancer was now as thick as a rope. Shiv thought. "Fine. Now, let's get back to the part where you were talking about my Woundeater. What's wrong with it?"

"What's wrong with it is that it's a limited skill, used to transplant injuries, organ deformations, and whatnot. It's potent, I suppose, for someone who's using it as a brute force instrument, but you can do better. In fact," the orc pointed up at the Court Leviathan, "we have direct means of progression for you."

Shiv stared at the Court Leviathan. "What, you mean the regeneration?"

The orc Biomancer let out a scoff of disappointment. "That's not what it’s doing. What it's doing is . The regeneration is merely one of many capabilities it has inhabiting its body. It can also shift its flesh and grow new organisms. And it can assume the qualities of those organisms. Don't tell me you didn't examine its mana core."

Shiv frowned at the orc. "I didn't really have time."

"Well, now you bloody do. Wait, how far are you from your next evolutionary threshold?"

Shiv looked at his status. "I'm 90 with my Woundeater, so, assuming it evolves again, ten levels."

"Ten levels," the orc said. "And no Practical Metabiology advancement." He let out a hiss of displeasure. "We might need to force your Biomancy first. You're capable of having monster skills, so why not give you a better one? Instead of just taking wounds, we let you learn how to integrate flesh. It will save you the misery of more cancer, and it will save me the misery of watching you constantly drop dead from cancer. You can just draw that into yourself… Yes… It will require significant strain.”

And just then, Shiv felt the first surges of deeper weakness wash through his body. "Yeah, about that," Shiv groaned. "Can you take the cancer out of me?"

"No! We're going to have you try removing it yourself. It should be good for your Practical Metabiology, even if you fail."

"You know if I die," Shiv said, "I'm going to be draining your vitality, right?"

"Yes, yes. Just remember not to kill me, for I am the only one who can—"

"Yeah, listen, you already sold yourself. I needed a Biomantic tutor, and here you are. Just tell me what you expect and what you want me to do for my next Skill Evolution."

"It's quite simple. The first thing we're doing," Helix turned as he stared at the horde of orc Biomancers, "is that we're boarding the Court Leviathan. We're going to get this thing working again, and we're going to be using it to its maximum potential. Second thing is that we're going to have it digest you while the rest of us tear you apart over and over.”

Shiv stared. "What?"

"Yes, it will assimilate you. You should resist that.”

"Wait," Shiv said. "I've been assimilated a few times before, but how's that supposed to help?"

"By resisting!" Helix cried out. "You're going to resist the assimilation. You're going to die over and over, until finally, your Woundeater is going to hit a proper threshold. Now, while this is happening, I and the other orcs will constantly be attacking your mana field. It will be extremely painful, but your deaths should help you focus.”

Shiv simply shrugged. “Yeah.”

"Oh," Helix said. "You're not bothered by that.”

“Death makes me better.”

Once more, the orc gave him a rare nod of appreciation. "Fine, then this should be easier than I expected. We're going to try to get you past level 100, and then when we do, we're going to try to get you a proper evolution, rather than progressing entirely. It can be done with enough strain, with enough struggle."

"Good," Shiv breathed. He was looking forward to this. "But does it have to be done now? I need to talk to the other—"

"You're not talking to any other Heroes!" Helix let out a loud declaration as he pointed up at the Court Leviathan. A group of orcs paused behind him. "They will all eventually board the Leviathan anyway. You might as well use that as your central command center. We can carry battle groups around in that thing. The Heroes and Masters will come. They will board. They will wait for you to undergo your new Biomantic metamorphosis, and when you emerge, only then will you talk to them as a Biomancer.”

"So what kind of skill do you expect me to get from this anyway?" Shiv said.

Helix narrowed his eyes. "The very same skill that empowers the Court Leviathan, of course. ."