(II) Capture

144 (II) Capture

Inquisitors bearing tower shields slammed their weapons together, and flashing walls rose before them, resembling the battlements of a stronghold. Orcs crashed into these battlements, and the shield-bearing Inquisitors on the outside cried out as they were driven back. At the same time, Shiv’s Vitae golem smashed into another column of magi and detonated its sheath. Bloody mist painted the air, and the white and red form of the golem flashed gold as it reverted back two seconds in time to perform the same action again against another column of magi.

Shiv thought for a second, then triggered his Chameleon enchantment and vanished in the chaos. His Shape of Monstrosity fed his palate the flavors of morale-breaking terror along with the coppery stench of blood. And dread was . Shiv applied his Psychomancy against himself—and only then noticed how Uva was tearing and breaking minds all around him.

The automata Inquisitors were also unresponsive. Their bodies were rigid, and their eyes were flickering. Shiv guessed Can Hu did some kind of machine-telepathy bullshit just now.

Shiv charged through a group of magi—and found most of them with Veilpiercers in their eyes. He prepared to behead a tall elven Pathbearer—only for the poor fool to get dragged into a pocket dimension by . Orcs emerged from thin air to drag wicked blades across throats or unleash coiling serpents made from Necromancy. Shiv hissed and avoided the corrosive serpents—and felt someone bounce a knife off the back of his head. Shiv swung his knife in retaliation. It sparked off another blade as he took a boot to the chest—but Shiv pulled his field forward, tackling an invisible foe through a group of enemy Pathbearers.

As Shiv and his adversary rolled across the ground, he found himself grappling with an orc wearing a mask stitched together from flayed human faces. if judged by the smell.

“Godsdammit,” Shiv cursed, pulling the orc back to his feet even while the gray bastard kept trying to stab him. Shiv disabled his Chameleon and Creeping Void. He should've kept the former disabled after all. “It’s me, dumbshit.”

The orc froze mid-stab. “Oh, Insul! Apologies! Quite the quaint little slaughter, eh?” And then, like he hadn’t been trying to murder Shiv for the past few moments, the orc vanished again.

Uva cried out inside Shiv’s head.

Valor said sourly.

Shiv shook his head and continued searching for Sijik. “Where is that bald bastard? And how the felling shit am I supposed to find anything in this mess?”

The world around him had dissolved into pandemonium. The Inquisitors were retreating closer and closer together. Rippling blasts of fear bled from their very souls. Shiv looked over the heads of the Inquisitors and beheld a nightmarish sight. The orcs had strapped mutilated shield-bearing Inquisitors to their own tower shields and were using them to bash their fellows. Somewhere in the backdrop, Shiv thought he heard the sound of a wailing of a newborn—followed by a sickening crunch.

A loud burp came at the end of that. “Ah. Elven babies are the best.”

As a limbless body splattered against Shiv, he caught sight of a bald head as a beheaded orc blasted through a group of soldiers. Between scurrying bodies, darting arrows, and tides of fire was Master-Inquisitor Sijik. The man was dangling high in the air, and a swirling haze of ash shrouded his body. He was kicking against something unseen, and a second thereafter, an orc Shadow turned visible. Waves of shifting Aeromancy bled off the orc’s body as he laughed at the struggling Inquisitor. But Sijik shaped a spell with a single gesture. The ash surrounding the man’s body poured into the orc's orifices in an instant. The beast stumbled back, and his head detonated in a welter of gore as obsidian fragments hatched free from his skull.

Shiv noted to himself. He blasted towards the unaware Sijik. At the same time, the Vitae Golem returned. It detonated itself again among the Dynamancers, and as an ambient weight pressing against him vanished entirely, the Deathless got even faster.

Screams. All Sijik knew were screams. All around him were screaming Inquisitors and deaths and and so many orcs—

Something clipped his shoulder. Pain blossomed across his limb. But Sijik stared on, shell-shocked by the carnage unfolding around him.

These were scenes from a nightmare. A nonsensical nightmare. He was on the way to negotiate or force the release of the Animancy Core from Gate Lord Confriga and Compact. To claim the head of that traitor, Oldsmith. But now… Now he was caught in the jaws of madness. His expeditionary force of Masters and Heroes had been massacred in an instant.

All around him, his people wailed. The orcs laughed with glee as they battered the Inquisitors down, ripping both armor and limbs from bodies. The clouds beneath Sijik’s feet vanished as the last of his Aeromancers abandoned the spell. Weightlessness took him. The Master-Inquisitor drew upon his Pyromancy and Geomancy Skill Fusion. His washed around him, and he flew up while so many of his people fell.

He needed breathing room. And then—and then he needed to—

Something slammed into his chest. Sijik felt his protective ashes burst apart—and his ribs shatter. The Master-Inquisitor choked as one of the bones punctured his lung. But just as suddenly, his injured rib snapped back into place. His lung reinflated. A breath washed through Sijik’s body—but he never managed to exhale as a strong hand clenched his torso.

The Inquisitor gagged as a massive humanoid shape materialized before him. For a moment, he thought another orc had its hands on him. But this was no orc. No. They wore bone-like armor that also had the texture of scales. Bright green fluid dripped from the cracks of the armor as Sijik shaped a spell.

Or tried to.

The giant squeezed. Sijik’s sternum broke in half. His spell died before it could take form, and he let out a piercing cry. “Unhand me! Vile…

The large figure chuckled amiably. “Ah, but I prefer to be called . Inquisitor Sijik. Adam’s gonna be happy to see you.”

“Adam?” Sijik gasped. He writhed and struggled. His mind was awash in terror and pain. But from the sky came another voice—a voice he knew.

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“Release him!” Sijik looked up to see Hero-Inquisitor Athena plunging fast atop her dragon. Relief and self-loathing flooded Sijik. For one, he was about to be saved. But he was going to be saved by an impossibly arrogant woman that thought herself his better just because she had a Heroic-Tier Skill.

“Oh, good.” The bone-armored giant laughed. “You’re back again.” He regarded Sijik and looked down at something between them. Sijik then noticed a cord connecting him to the giant. It resembled a rusted chain with barbed needles poking out from it. “Yeah. You’re not going anywhere. This won’t take long. I’ll be right back. Uva. Put him to sleep. He’s going in the garden.”

“Wait—” Sijik called out.

Then, something pierced through his broken Magical Resistance and ripped into his mind. The world turned into a haze of swirling colors and incomprehension. The last thing Sijik saw before he lost track of himself was a dimensional cape swallowing him.

Shiv’s Chronomancy field tremored as he glared at the fast-approaching dragon. The dragon flared its temporal shell first, and Shiv manifested his own Strider of the Unbending Path to counteract them. Time halted. The battlefield beneath them went still. The rider pointed her lance in-line with his skull this time, and Shiv held his arms open.

He also unleashed his Creeping Void and launched a decoy corpse to take the blow in his stead.

Shiv laughed as he watched the lance pierce through his decoy’s head. He cut off his Creeping Void before it could fully swallow the battlefield, then launched himself higher. As the dragon rider drove her long lance further through the decoy’s skull, Shiv lashed out with both Vitae and Biomancy to seize the offending Rider.

Deception 21 > 22

She thought she had impaled him—was accelerating even faster. Her vibrating lance drilled clean through the corpse’s skull at an alarming speed. Shiv winced at just how potent her weapon. Or maybe it was her skill.

Whatever the case, it was a good thing she'd missed him earlier. That would have cost him a life without a doubt.

His Vitae and Biomancy crashed into the rider at the same time. Her Magical Resistance flared bright and fractured from the impact. The rider let out a shout of pain—

can be used!

Adam felt his azure dawn erupt into a supernova as his arrows took a hundredth victim. With Propagating Salvo, every person he struck with his arrow resulted in a propagation of his Veilpiercers. The Inquisitors were hard of armor and Toughness, but with the orcs ripping through them as well, their deaths climbed.

And when they did die, Adam felt it. He tasted their vile deeds. Brief imprints of torture, of unlawful murder, of deceit, and sacrilege passed through his mind. The faces of innocents castigated for crimes they didn’t commit—or merely for using a skill the wrong way—washed through Adam’s psyche as well.

He tried to hold onto those memories, to remember the ones that suffered. They vanished as quickly as they came, cast off into the howling dark by the hands of the Inquisitors.

Between the orcs' jovial atrocities and these fresh horrors rushing through his mind, Adam’s sanity screamed. But then something emerged from his azure dawn. A stream of light flowed out into one of his Veilpiercers, infusing it with the colors of dawn and twilight. It contained the full weight of his wrath as well—the hateful screams of undeserved victims and noble souls delivered unto undignified ends.

a wrathful chorus of voices screamed in his head.

And laid upon his bow was an instrument of death incarnate. Its brightness was a second star born upon the land, and as Adam tasted the power within his Feat, he cast his Awareness skyward and drew his bow back.

A dragon came for Shiv as the slaughter of the expeditionary force continued on beneath them. A dragon with scales of gold, mounted by a woman with a Corinthian-style helmet. He could see her bloodshot eyes—but more than anything, he could taste the radiating from her body.

She was an infection upon the world.

She was an enactor of wrongness and cruelty.

Her spirit called to his death-charged arrow, and the voices of the lost, the damned, the broken, and the meek goaded Adam to release his shot.

His eyes came aglow with Divination mana as he cast his Mark of the Seeking Clairvoyant against her. Her dragon flashed with Chronomancy—but its path was sealed by the narrative of existence.

For the first time, Adam unleashed a soul-smiting arrow, and the world faded into a chasm of growing light.

—and she tore free from her saddle, slipping out of the dragon’s temporal shell as well. Shiv prepared to finish her now that she was frozen in time—but just then, the dragon’s tail lashed out and knocked him back a few dozen meters by pure chance. Shiv turned his glare on the time dragon and promptly batted it across the head with one of his mana hydras. The dragon’s face snapped off to the side with a blast of Biomancy, and Shiv slammed into his neck a moment after.

He drew his blade back—and froze.

Shiv struck the dragon’s Magical Resistance again, and as it shattered, he reached into its mind using his Psychomancy. Animal instincts and feral rage spilled over into his consciousness. Shiv gritted his teeth but projected an order at the dragon.

He seized the dragon by the neck and decided to choke it out instead. He had to use his Biomancy to figure out where its arteries were to properly apply his blood-choke. The dragon thrashed for a moment, and Shiv nearly smacked himself when he realized he could have just pinched the dragon’s blood vessels with his Biomancy instead of doing this the crude way.

The dragon wriggled hard, but despite being behind nearly three hundred meters, it couldn’t quite reach Shiv with its arms, and it couldn’t turn its head around to bite at him. It briefly tried to go intangible, but Shiv smacked it across the head to spin it. Then, he continued on with the dragon strangling until it finally went still. Its temporal shell faded. He dismissed his Chronomancy as well.

Gravitic Wrestler 147 > 148

Shiv held on to the dragon with both hands as he chuckled to himself. The massive beast was limp but alive. “And now, let’s deal with—” A scream sounded behind him as the rider flew through the air, coming at him with a knife of liquid fire.

The Deathless prepared to swat the rider across the sky using her own dragon, but before he could do anything, a chasmof azure radiance tore open beside him, and a streak of pure light struck the rider’s chest. The world vanished into a swell of all-consuming brightness. Shiv spiked himself back as he tried to blink the blindness out of his eyes, and judging from the screams coming from below, he wasn’t the only one.

Uva cursed, seeming to flinch from the light.

Shiv grimaced and swung his makeshift dragon-club from left to right. “I don’t—” The light faded as fast as it came. And through the air came a half-melted helmet that crashed into Shiv’s chest and dissolved on impact. A helmet worn by the rider. The rest of her body was as well.

Shiv blinked.

The orcs below blinked.

The Inquisitors mostly hadn't noticed. Mainly due to many of them having been blinded and tortured by the orcs.

Nearby, a massive dimensional chasm remained in place. On the other side, Shiv saw Adam hovering in the distance, his own expression slack, and his hands still in the position of having just released a shot.

The Deathless and the Gate Lord just stared at each other for a beat. Then, below, the butchery resumed. The screaming restarted as the orcs got back to scratching their itches. Shiv awkwardly held his new dragon up using both hands and pulled Inquisitor Sijik out from his cape via a mana hydra. “So. I got Sijik and a new dragon.”

Adam nodded slowly. “I can see that. Well done.”

Shiv grunted. “So. Uh. What the felling fuck did you just do?”

The Gate Lord’s mouth opened and closed. “I shot a… very angry arrow.”