(I) Stolen Flesh

—Longinus the Wanderer to Georges Archambault338 (I)

Stolen Flesh

Though Georges’ head shattered, his lifeforce continued to burn bright. Even deep in the throes of emotional anguish, Shiv's mind remained clear: a counterattack was certain to follow. An Avatar of the Auroral Ascendants was not so easy to kill. Furthermore, there were other concerns: the rage that swelled inside him and the pure misery that came with murdering a facsimile of his father figure boiled like a cocktail of clarity in Shiv’s core.

Sage of the Enkindled Heart:

Shiv let his skill guide him. He was too raw to form his own thoughts, and so his subconsciousness became his governing mind. He Phase Framed just in time for a spear of divine incandescence to erupt from Cuntus’ ruined body. It left a blazing wound across existence in its wake and opened a dimensional gash that caused a flood of fire dimensionals to pour through. Concurrently, Cuntus’ crushed head reassembled itself in a flash of steam and flame. Shattered bits of skull and smears of brain matter and gore dissolved into nothing but vapor.

Sage of the Enkindled Heart:

Shiv's body flowed on instinct. The massive Pyromancy arrow shaped by the fire dimensionals on the battlement walls blasted through the air as the siege spell hit the point of completion. The world shook. The atmosphere simmered. The heat arrived before the flames, and all the slaves trying to flee across the bridge boiled in an instant. Their screams proved indistinguishable from the wailing whistle of steam that erupted up into the sky.

Henry, the boy Shiv tried to save, dissolved outright—his body combusting into a puff of ashes before the Deathless could respond.

Their deaths came fast; there was no chance for them to survive at all. Shiv reached out to wield magical fields that weren’t there; his Severed Shadow was still outside, far along Plum Blossom’s table, and now there was an alien force pulling at his Revenant form as well.

In their demise, Shiv saw a flicker of all who died in his previous fights: of the boy 811 killed in Theborn; of all the slaves buried beneath the rubble during his battle with the Recollector; of the girls Daughter wore as vessels against their will.

Something else broke deep down inside of Shiv, but what leaked forth wasn't emotional pain but raw, molten hatred for the System, for the world, for Longinus, for the Ascendants, and for himself. For not living up to the promise of his stealth. He was supposed to be better by now. He was supposed to stop people from being meaningless casualties.

The noise that escaped him was animalistic. The tooth fairies screamed out as he tried to unequip his armor.

“Fuck the Princess,” Shiv snarled under his breath. He tried to break her bond, and when it wouldn’t unequip, he switched to ripping his way out of it. The tooth fairies shrieked. Shiv didn’t care. It didn’t matter if they could offer him a second Path. It didn’t matter that he truly wanted to cultivate and develop the armor’s skills. If he couldn’t choose when it came off, then it wasn’t armor, and that made it a leashed collar rather than a proper gift.

A rush of Shapeless Tides rent the Vestments asunder. Foodstuff was blended as accelerating vectors circled around Shiv’s person and ground all that he wore apart. The fairies perished, screaming much as the slaves did.

Just another chorus of voices to join all the others.

Equipment Destroyed:

Your actions have offended the Princess of the Harvest! You have been Cursed with—

Curse Gaine—

Curse—

Shiv ignored all the notifications. He ignored the fact that his Revenant form had been ripped across space and deposited right in front of a raging Princess Plum Blossom—probably because all his equipment was bound to his Severed Shadow since that was his true self, causing it to be summoned to the Princess’ side instead of his physical form.

His fight was right here, right now, in the Boiling Toad. And he wasn’t going anywhere until Longinus was dead and done.

The air trembled and then combusted as Shiv slammed a palm against the colossal arrow of flame. His overflow vectors zipped dead-on against the other arrowhead, and the following struggle proved brief. It was Legendary Physicality and Magical Resistance against a concentration of Mid-Heroic Pyromancy, and the psychological fires of madness-inducing anger infused in the flames merely melted into Shiv and empowered his Psychology. He didn’t even target the magic. Instead, he forced the vector back the other way and—

Two impacts resounded.

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The first came as a clocktower-sized arrow of flame flung back the way it came. The second was a gleaming lance shaped from a stream of incandescent ichor piercing clean through Shiv’s chest. He had no idea where it came from. Its speed possessed a jarring quality. One moment, he was in the air above the bridge, returning a spell back to sender, the next, he had a length of liquid divinity threaded through him, dragging him down from the air.

Shiv's thoughts only caught up with him as the arrow returned to Longinus’s grasp—with Shiv still impaled on it. The thing wearing Georges’ face seethed with lust and hatred. He caught his lance with his left hand and halted it dead. His right arm thrust forth, and a clean wound tunneled its way through the upper left of Shiv’s torso. Wind rushed through the hole. There was no impact or stab or attack of any kind. Longinus made a gesture, and it was like everything before him just opened up in a circular shape.

But Shiv was too battle-hardened to let a paltry thing like a missing lung stagger him.

Longinus wanted to say something—Shiv took the opportunity to vomit a mouthful of blood into the bastard’s face. Eldritch Physiology triggered. Shiv ripped himself free from the lance. His recursive biology reconstructed itself as he spiked down with a surge of tides. He crashed into Longinus once more, tackling the Avatar across the bridge and slamming him face down in the melted corpses of the slaves, in the smoking remnants of the ogre that had tried to escape. The sight of Georges’ face being defiled in such a way was nausea-inducing, but it was what the bastard deserved.

“LET GO OF HIS FACE!” Shiv screamed, snarling words that bordered on incoherence in the face of his enemy. “GIVE BACK HIS FLESH!”

Longinus broke like clay, but he reformed like such as well. When the Avatar’s flesh parted in spills of crimson, what followed were trails of steam that glided back to replace that which was lost. Shiv’s Shapeless Tides destabilized the process slightly, but Longinus laughed as he regenerated regardless.

He and Shiv slammed into another set of adamantine gates, and Shiv blasted a hole through the incredible alloy like it was a sheet of plastic. Even more overflow tides were expended as they curved free from Shiv’s grasp and stabbed against Longinus’ body. The Deathless fought to find purchase on his enemy’s mana, to tear him apart at the foundations of magic.

Longinus sneered as he understood what Shiv was trying to do. And he had good reason to sneer, for it was like Shiv was trying to use fingers of mortal flesh to dig into a mountain forged of godly alloy.

There was still an oceanic gulf between the greatest of Legends and the smallest of Divinities.

Longinus’ words were infused with a hit of burning lust. The sickness of his nature echoed out in a plume of Psychomantic mana, and they hit Shiv with a world of depravity. Shiv’s Psychomancy field popped outright while his Shapeless Tides screamed as they strained to hold back the worst of the assault.

An entire sea of disgusting urges clawed at him, tried to force a burning urge to roar awake inside him as well. An emotional sickness gnawed at him, tried to burrow into his core, begging him to surrender and give himself to Longinus.

For the first time, a Psychology Skill wriggled against Shiv’s mind.

The Sweetest Surrender:

Horrific memories lashed at the surface of Shiv’s mind—he found himself trapped in other bodies, caged inside other people, seeing from their eyes, hearing from their ears, and . And in those few fleeing, harrowing seconds, he realized the vileness that came with Longinus’ affection.

He realized what the Ascendant had been doing to Henry—what he had done to so many others. Using Georges’ body. Using Georges’ .

The wrongness of Longinus’ deeds greeted Shiv’s emotional core like a sea of napalm cast into a world of flame.

Sage of the Enkindled Heart:

Whatever touch of desire Longinus sought to infest Shiv was purged through flaring anger. He used his Master of Rage Feat to turn his Enkindled Heart into a righteous conflagration. Only a pure distillation of hatred lingered in the aftermath, a pure hatred guiding a purer urge of violence.

Shiv’s tides stabbed downward. He drove Longinus into the ground and held him still as his own arms, legs, knees, and elbows turned bladed, and from each edge ripped forth a cutting aura of crimson that tore through matter, magic, and metaphysical soul.

For the first time, Longinus gasped in genuine pain, and his godly exaltation made the world gasp alongside him. Shiv’s slashes painted crescents of pale redness across Longinus’ body, and though they didn’t hew deep, they did leave scratches on the surface—ones that didn’t heal, that lingered even as the steam-shaped form of Longinus rebuilt itself constantly. The Avatar’s eyes grew wide. All semblance of Georges was lost as his expression turned imperious with offense.

With that change in expression came Shiv’s first death.

Another lance struck Shiv from the side, but this one tore through more than his body. Tissue burst first, but the lance never emerged on the other side.

The Wanderer’s divine weapon carved a gorge deep into Integration itself and buried itself deep inside Shiv’s Vitae as it mutilated the deepest architecture of Shiv on a metaphysical level. The Deathless flinched and hoarsely gasped as he felt it strike and rebound off his skills. The foundational pillars of Shiv’s soul cracked and deformed. The pain was—

Longinus’s lance shattered—taking Shiv with it and breaking one of his Skills outright.

Pillar of Orichalcum 383 > 388

Phase Frame 94 > 96

Sage of the Enkindled Heart 169 >174

Inertial Overdrive 290 > 296

Leviathan of the Shapeless Tides 530 > 532

Return to Sender 158 > 162

Eldritch Physiology 80 > 87

Psychomancy 34 > 39

Pyromancy 33 > 37

Non-Sequitur 185 > 191

Skill Damaged: Eldritch Physiology

The sundering of his physical body came with an explosion of agony.

For most Pathbearers, the fight would have been over. If they weren’t broken for good, then this pain would have left them a quivering wreck until their soul could be repaired.

Shiv wasn’t most Pathbearers. There was almost no one who knew pain like him, who mutilated their own soul as much as him, and who was so incomprehensibly enraged that it just didn’t matter.

Sage of the Enkindled Heart:

Shiv cast his Severed Shadow back in time to where his physical body was. Princess Plum Blossom’s eyes were wide, and her fairies were looking about for him. A wave of unspeakable hunger crashed through him. He ignored it as well as his temporal shell snapped him across time and space back into the Boiling Toad.

Curse Gained: Starvation’s Agony - You have offended the Princess of the Harvest and broken decorum. You must be punished for your transgressions! You will never know satiation. You will always hunger for food and drink and never be full.

Shiv reappeared in a flicker of gold and kept his Chronomancy field active, seeking to surprise the Ascendant.

If only things could be so easy.

He had left a warpath across the Boiling Toad when he smashed into Longinus and through the inner walls of the infernal kitchen. They had cleared well over ten kilometers in a blink, tearing through walls and toppling buildings. But though they bore something of a superficial resemblance, the insides of the Boiling Toad weren’t exactly like the Yellowstone Republic capital, nor did they possess a proper castle at the center. No, the best way to describe it was a mess of ghettos and work camps built around a few massive cooking stations. Even enlarged and hefting city-sized pots and cauldrons, Shiv could recognize them for what they were, could see the turned mana dials, and mountains of half-prepared ingredients that rose so high into the air that the peaks were coated by a layer of frost.

Presently, Longinus had been driven across the flat-top expanse of the grill station. The metal sheet beneath him gleamed white from the sheer heat-convection channeled into it. In the distance loomed sizzling steaks and hissing legs that looked like they belonged to a Tarrasque.

But while time was held in stasis for Shiv, he was reminded that he wasn’t the only one who possessed such a skill. Georges’ body remained unmoving, but the centaur-like form of Longinus himself that revealed itself to be looming over him was not so impeded. And Longinus did not stand alone, for in his hand was a divine lance with strands of fluid crimson spilling out from behind it, and each cord was connected to another, smaller lance dancing in the sky.

The one thing they all had in common was that they were pointed at Shiv.

Longinus chuckled, any hint of Georges in his voice gone, replaced by a sharp, deep basso. The Ascendant’s eyes burned violet and gold as he beheld Shiv through Divination and Chronomancy.