(I) Cocoon

—Legend-Headmaster Hades Hymn256 (I)

Cocoon

Uva's shattering came with no pain nor death. Instead, her perspective split into a thousand different viewpoints, a thousand different versions of her. Suddenly, she was spreading out, becoming an expansive swarm unto herself. And her body felt strange, less like it was broken and more like it was expanding in ways that went beyond the flesh.

Skill Evolution: Shaper of the Aberrant Fractals (Heroic) > Summoner of Severed Correspondence (Unique)

Skill Evolution: Non-Euclidean Morphology (Master) > This Flesh Untangled (Heroic)

Skill Fusion: Summoner of Severed Correspondence (Unique) - This Flesh Untangled (Heroic) > Hivelord of Unshattered Correspondence (Unique)

Skill Evolution: Viper’s Kiss (Adept) > The Shrieking Sting (Master)

Skill Evolution: Dreamtaker’s Gaze (Master) > Gaze of the Unclaimed Paracosm (Unique)

Feat Gained: She Who Taints the Heavens (Unique) - ...and changed it into something that suits your service, or the service of one you are bound to. The power of one absolute has fallen to you. You have breached the innermost sanctuary of a Divine being’s soul and breathed your venom into their marrow. For this triumphant transgression, you are to be marked, condemned, and rewarded. From now on, all of your Skills count as attuned mana, for your very essence has been defined by this envenoming. Any source of attuned mana you bind to your presence will be tainted by your unique essence, and from you, madness and colors unknowable will spread…

As she read through her ignored notifications, she realized that it wasn't just her flesh that was changing and expanding. Her soul was like a cosmology experiencing its true birth. Her skills erupted, and rather than shattering, they broke into pieces and reassembled themselves; the shrapnel they sprung collided, and new aspects were formed within.

Baguette-shaped missiles infused with magical yeast and all-consuming grains cleaved past her, piercing through the place where her body once was. The Bread-Knights had not anticipated the scattering of her person, and neither had she. But where surprise dulled their reflexes, hers remained sharp. She caught sight of what she was changing into, and the anomalous nature of her new physicality left even her astonished.

Where her old Non-Euclidean Morphology allowed her to twist and bend, to stretch her body along axes unreachable for most, her new shape resembled a set of detailed fragments imprinted upon the fabric of reality. She wasn't a thing of flesh anymore. She was a chasm, and the detailed crevices that now comprised her were made up of fractal edges—geometries and constellations that painted her in detail.

Uva Mettabon was more than matter now; she was a doorway left ajar, a slight breach in the fabric of Integration. She was separating and serving as a gateway between the System-ruled dimensions and the reaches of distant and unmapped reality it had yet to fully drown in mana.

With every change, she grew further from the person she used to be, and the memory of the Umbral that was became ever more distant. At the same time, however, she found a strange and intoxicating delight that also unnerved her. She liked transforming, she liked going further, so long as it was her will to do so, so long as it was not forced upon her. And it was from that intrusive insight that her psychology leveled as well, for she could see how gods became monsters and how Legends grew distant from mortals.

Sympathy required a synchronous perspective, after all, and should one evolve beyond their fellow kin, without the ability to peer out from the eyes and thoughts that comprised another, it was easy to be lost in the silo of one's own ego.

And she felt it, the isolation, the siloing, the narrowness of everyone's perspectives, all the minds she was still connected to: the slavers, the slaves, the dimensionals. They were all just facets of reality. They saw things from behind blinds. Everyone existed at the bottom of their own well. Even her. And there was so much trauma festering inside them as well. So many fractures that lined their minds, that broke them before they could truly become who they were, to see the world as it was.

A tsunami of overwhelming sonder nearly drowned Uva. Every single person was an ocean unto themselves: an ocean of experiences, beliefs, and complexity. And now, more than ever, she felt her mind connect to her body—a strange sense of symmetry binding them, feeding her evolved gaze.

Uva moved through the world as a series of traveling cracks. The space she occupied was fractured. The space she departed mended in an instant—but the fissures still took time to fade. Hence, stray spells and projectiles missed her, and the few that crashed into her and detonated against her were deprived of their full power as her mana infested the incoming onslaught. Bolts of Pyromancy, Dimensionality, Dynamancy, and Fae magics unfamiliar to her fractured from within as she turned her attention upon them, touched them with her strings and her shattered form.

And she could reach far; her fingers stretched, not in elongations of flesh, but as extending constellations and ruptures. And those ruptures spread into the incoming attacks. They still burned her, still battered her, and hammered her armor's Magical Resistance, but their full potency was diminished. For a part of the incoming magic was cast into the jaws of the Outside, bleeding over into the Dreamtaker’s evolving realm, and from the other side, the colors and feathers of the Dreamtaker’s progeny spilled over in return.

Once more, eldritch serpents that resembled feathered tongues slithered over into reality. Some of them were the classical variant, things that burned with mind-twisting colors and bit down into their victims, wrapping them in bindings of unnatural flame. However, there were other variants as well. The cartoonish snakes, tinged by the legend of the Red Riding Wolf she'd taken over, joined in. Every third one seemed to be a two-dimensional entity that comically slammed about and, with every impact, let out massive exclamations within swelling balloons of text that caused incoming attacks to bounce off.

Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

And then there came a third variation, and a most disconcerting variation of progeny at that. They were not serpents. They rode forth in the shapes of centaurs, sprouting the head of a spider. Where little bits of humanity were, Uva saw more of herself than Longinus, but there were definitely parts of the Wanderer there. The cheekbones of the newspawn most definitely found their inspiration in him. And rather than a blazing lance empowered by divine mana, they bore long, fractured blades, tethered together by strings of encoiled Psychomantic twine.

In seeing that, Uva realized she'd been wrong. She wasn't just a pathway between the Outside and Integration; she was also a filter. The Outside reflected upon her, and she reflected upon it as well.

Still, parts of her were singed, and bursts of pain rattled through her being. Pain that radiated to her very core. It was like her limbs were being fried and lashed by lightning. Her shattered physiology spasmed, still exhibiting aspects of biology—eldritch constellations shouldn't have a nervous system, after all.

an instance of her muttered.

That theory was issued by one of her idle stacks. The rest of her consciousness was a whirlwind of activity. She was a hive unto herself; a queen, workers, warriors, all interchangeable between the layers of her consciousness, and all dedicated to preserving her life and the lives of her charges.

Her companions and the Dreamtaker's egg still resided in her grasp. Rather than being wrapped by her flesh, she had them clutched between her fractals. At the same time, she felt crushing waves of pressure pull at her, and this happened in a series. More and more enemies were being teleported in, and the Fae guards serving Princess Plum Blossom emerged from kilometer-wide gateways of Dimensionality. Massive gashes of static black mana unleashed thousands of moving forms. Not all of them were Bread-Knights. Others appeared as taller, thinner elves, and their bodies were clad in prismatic armor, the same color as Confriga’s sword.

she remembered it was called.

But more important was the chain of impossibly potent mana fields battering her.

She felt the magic the Fae possessed, and it was overwhelming. They had of Legends among their ranks, and a few stood even beyond that. The chaotic state of Ser Cuntus’ kitchen realm and Uva's metaphysical state of being wouldn't be able to confuse them for long, and once they locked onto her, she could only pray Evanescia would be nice enough to lend a hand.

But that wasn't something she would rely on; she needed to find a way out, but the gate that Shiv had first entered the Boiling Toad through was blocked off by a single foe. A ten-meter-tall, three-headed, four-armed dragon who wore a poncho made from… golden slugs? No, those weren't slugs. And that wasn't gold, either. That was an infusion of Chronomancy, and those were bullets. She remembered seeing them in the museum—Can Hu had spoken at length about them.

Uva thought dryly, stealing a phrase that Shiv had snarled before.

Sister Uva Mettabon never considered herself to be a creative soul, at least not compared to most of her siblings or comrades in the Order. At this moment, however, thinking out of the box was less of a recommendation and more of a necessity, lest this escape attempt of theirs be stopped before it could even begin.

The first thing she needed was a delaying force. The last of Longinus' dimensionals were being overwhelmed. Waves of destructive mana tore pockets in the air, extinguishing dozens of glowing forms. Uva's connection to her stolen army was being reduced by the millisecond, and she glimpsed complex arrays forming in the air, shapes so detailed, vivid, and layered that they made her head spin. A swell of gold was spreading through the world. A Chronomancy spell was about to be unleashed. She couldn't allow it—had to see it interrupted before she was overwhelmed.

Saturation was her solution. Reaching into the minds still connected to her, she drained them dry of their traumas and imbibed that madness, alchemized it within her body. Then she tried summoning an Aberrant Fractal. She had no idea what would happen now. Earlier, when she'd tried, her body broke apart, fractured into this eldritch constellation she now existed as.

This time, her fractures widened, and from within her emerged a swarm of geometric spiderlings. They were connected to her by thin rifts and poured forth in a counter-tide, greeting the oncoming Fae. Instead of being a mess of drifting pieces like before, they were geometric arachnids that were composed of more than just madness—they carried chunks of their physical environments within them. The shards making up the fractals became prisms, which distorted the space they occupied. The nature of their existences was further entwined with Uva's as they felt like her fingers—extensions of her body that she could afford to lose.

Perhaps fingers were a bad metaphor. They were hairs she could control.

A wall of projectiles descended upon her, but the fractured spiderlings she spawned leapt out to take the hit on her behalf. And most of them didn't even break. Instead, they captured the incoming spells inside of themselves, sustaining the damage while trapping the ruinous magics within the alien geometries that comprised their bodies. The fractured spiderlings pushed out, forming a protective line around Uva’s person. She kept spawning more, and they spilled out from her like an unceasing tide. For every one that was struck down, ten more took its place, and soon she found herself living up to the title of .

Yet she couldn't do this forever. Already she'd expended all the trauma she siphoned earlier; attrition wasn't a choice. But she wasn't the kind to throw herself recklessly at the enemy anyway. That was more of Shiv's specialty.

Uva extended her body, and her fissures spread far and wide. In a moment, she went from being a constellation the size of her own body to stretching past a hundred meters and then more. Extending herself came without strain. She wondered just how far she could reach before the skill met its limit, but now wasn't the time to experiment. Instead, with the spiderlings protecting her, she became her own counter-encirclement, wrapping both arms around her enemy and spawning even more summons amongst their midst.

The Fae magi turned their spells upon her, Legends decimating entire portions of her swarm. She had but seconds before they breached her spiderlings, but as the fractured little creatures were part of her, so too did her new Feat extend to them. Her infectious mana compromised the mages, and new cracks began forming in their spells. To her surprise, the aberrant infection she brought forth afflicted those most puissant in magical attunement with the greatest severity. Though the fractured spiderlings were eliminated by the dozens, when the first smashed into the Fae, her power spread, and the Outside crept into reality evermore.

A psionic scream escaped the Fae commander issuing commands. Through the eyes of her fractured spiderlings, Uva saw one of the cartoonish snakes burrow into the humanoid Fae's body and start unraveling him from the inside. Her astonishment grew as the cartoon snake ruptured, causing even more to spill out from the shattered Fae, who let out an excessively theatrical scream and flailed around in horror.

“Oh, by Princess Plum Blossom's appetite! Ser Amerius has burst! They're not Outsiders! They're not!”

But they were, or at least Uva thought they were. They should be. Something about the Dreamtaker was changing. She was moving away from being a purely eldritch entity, and so her powers were starting to affect the Fae as well.

Uva realized.

She started casting her own spells through her fractured spiderlings. They served not only as disposable minions but also as channels for her magic. She bombarded the Fae with her time-halting frost spells and unleashed a torrent of psychomancy that flowed through the faeries like a sea of willow leaves. Her power wasn't enough to breach their magical resistance, and she found her psychomancy overpowered, her strings split and severed by the other mind mages among the Summer Court, but the Fae she did touch were infected, and their mana soon fissured, becoming gateways to a place beyond. A place that might not even be the Outside anymore.

Carnage unfolded. Uva realized she was every mage's nightmare now. Anyone who could unleash a spell was now a prime candidate to receive her mystical virus.

She targeted their backline as much as she could, even as their Legends and greater battered her, tried to pry through her swarms. She had seconds left, but in those seconds she could do something that bought her seconds more.

Mustering her last sliver of volition, she triggered her gaze, now linked to a place called the Unclaimed Paracosm. She wasn't sure what that was or what it entailed, but there was a depth to her. There was an endless ocean untapped inside her, and she let it out.