(II) Cocoon

356 (II)Cocoon

When Uva unleashed the colors of the Outside through her eyes, instead of simply drenching her enemies and bathing them with the Dreamtaker's power, she painted something over the world. A sea of shifting colors erupted from her fractured presence. The world was stained, and where it was stained, everything changed. The architecture of reality was usurped as the laws of distance and matter came second to cognition and awareness. Those who possessed the strongest Awareness Skill occupied large sections in this new over-reality.

They still resembled themselves, but there was also a place dedicated to them, a section of the world not consumed by a dense weave of fractured webbing, something that Uva knew belonged to her. This place was her subconscious, or at least a mirror of it, and she'd just unleashed it forth upon the world, shrouding everything in a dense web that even she could barely navigate.

Her fractured spiderlings moved freely between the webs, and the eldritch creatures spawned from the Dreamtaker's mind swam through the threads like they didn't exist at all. The same couldn't be said for the Fae, aside from their Psychomancers, who possessed the magical might to force paths open and push deeper into her space. Most beings were simply trapped within the expanse allotted by their Awareness.

Everyone got a small clearing in this revision of existence. The clearing moved with them, and the fortunate fairy guards managed to overlap with each other, rejoining their units. However, the formations were spread out, and so, though a few of the Fae found each other, most of them were lost, desperately trying to navigate an eldritch landscape that had emerged without any warning and rejoin the rest of their forces.

And though the fairy Psychomancers could tear through her dense web and punch a gap into this new eldritch dimension she'd manifested, that meant interfacing with her magic. That meant further allowing themselves to be infested. That meant they went from enemy to carrier.

She wasn't inflicting any true harm upon the Fae. Most of them were too sturdy in terms of Toughness, but they were alarmed and panicked, and the chaos brought havoc upon their morale and coordination, leaving them fighting individually—crippling their mages, especially.

Even so, the Legendary mages tore gaps in her dimension, and a few of their casual spells nearly swatted her from existence. Blind luck became the only reason she was spared an untimely death as missiles born of Fae magic tore gashes through this altered section of reality. Uva projected her gaze, replacing what had been destroyed, but as she patched the missing sections of her anomalous zone, an agonizing feeling came over her, the feeling that she was expending her consciousness to maintain this environment.

The stacked instances of herself began winking out. There were numerous Uvas that comprised her totality, but some of them went gray. She didn't have an infinite subconscious after all, so she couldn't simply keep spinning out more of this… this Unclaimed Paracosm without end. It also left her strained to the extreme. Just thinking came with ebbing waves of pain, like her mind was about to be wrenched free from its foundations.

An invasive, nostalgic memory came to her then—one of her earliest memories. She recalled picking up her mother's short sword as a toddler, trying to swing it as she saw her mother do so many times during practice, but the blade was too heavy for her arm and stature. She managed a partial strike, but the weight and momentum ripped her from her feet and nearly dislocated her right shoulder.

What she felt now was the same thing. It was too great of a skill for her Tier, and she likely lacked the requisite support skills for her to use this properly.

Uva hissed.

A series of loud cracks stole her attention. Using her fractured spiders, she saw fast-moving projectiles coming right at her. Somehow, that three-headed dragon wielding four different guns knew exactly where she was and had fired a salvo of bullets.

They passed through her web, crashing into and then slipping between the fabric as the projectiles themselves shifted mana types, going from Chronomancy to Psychomancy. They cracked and fissured, but they weren't being corrupted fast enough. Even as eldritch creatures spilled out from the bullets' trajectories, they remained in motion and were on track to strike her.

Uva called some of her spiderlings back and had them form a phalanx. Then, guided by her intuition alone, she formed a layer of time-stealing frost over herself.

She was rewarded for her paranoia.

The bullets fired by the gun-slinging dragon transitioned once more—turning gold again as they accelerated past Uva's spiderlings. Everything around the bullets was slowed, and they curved unnaturally, losing neither momentum nor sense of direction as they all crashed into Uva at once.

The bullets fragmented and flattened against her protections. Her Cryo-Chrono armor served its purpose in sparing her life, but she felt her mana field crack and break. Another hit like that and she wouldn't be casting anything using her fused magical skill for a while.

The three-headed dragon spun the guns in his hands and fired again. Uva made her decision. She went straight down toward the badly damaged grill top that made up the front section of the Boiling Toad. She called all her fractured spiderlings back as well. All twelve of them.

Three seconds of time had elapsed since she'd first shattered. She drained trauma from thousands of minds to spawn forth thousands of spiderlings, and that was all the time they'd bought. Her gaze had run its course as well—to use it again meant rendering herself hollow, and the thought of burning her consciousness dry frightened Uva. She didn't think she could return from that, not like Shiv could.

The only way out was down. She would need to make her own path through the steel, create a tunnel past the convection plates and—

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Uva realized something else. The Boiling Toad was a glutton for mana. The amount of Pyromancy it took to fry mountains worth of meat and prepare dish after dish, day after day, without fail, to feed a titanic princess would be immense—and attuned to mana ripe for her infection.

She wasn't just the bane of mages; she was the bane of magical devices now. Suddenly, she wasn't quite without options after all.

But she needed to evade the bullets long enough for that to happen.

Twenty-four mana-infused projectiles chased her. She dispatched a few of her spiders and coated them in what remained of her frost magic to act as interceptors; the bullets curved around them easily.

Uva had anticipated that.

She wasn't faster than the bullets, and her consciousness and reflexes were diminished by the use of her gaze. However, her sense of timing had always been pretty good, and so she waited until the bullets drew close. Suddenly, she shrank herself, pulling everything she held onto in tight. Her constellation collapsed, and she shrank down to her natural, or at least original, size.

Her sudden shift caused all the bullets to miss. They passed through the dense webbing that shrouded the world that she swam through without difficulty. At that moment, she caught sight of the first bullet, mere meters away from her. It wasn't just a thing of metal. The damn bullet had a face. It had an angry face scribbled onto it, and as it caught Uva in the corner of its eye, it turned, swiveling to a screeching halt.

“Hey, hey, hey, wait a minute, you idiots. She's that a-way!” the bullet shouted, glimmering with an aura of fracturing gold as cartoonish serpents coiled around its shape. More Newdreamt were prying at the cartoonish fairies that once again aimed at her, but they wouldn't slow them down fast enough.

A defeated exhalation left Uva as they all came at her at once. They passed through the webbing that shrouded the world as if it didn't exist for them either, as if they were partially eldritch too. As they drew closer, she sensed something within them, a series of eyes lining their sides, eyes that reminded her of the Stranger.

Uva's sigh became a choked rasp of disbelief. These bullets weren't just Fae. They were blessed with the Stranger's power, of all things. Just who exactly was this three-headed dragon gunslinger?

Before the barrage of bullets could perforate her, however, something zipped past her, followed by a thunderclap of force that spiked her down against the ground. With her Toughness skill damaged, she was in no shape for a fast landing. Thankfully, Shiv cushioned her blow. Not so thankfully for him, however, as he began coughing blood all over her face and chest.

“Fuck…” Shiv groaned.

“It's okay. It's okay. I'm sorry. We're going to get out. We're going to get out.” Uva apologetically brushed Shiv's face, and she saw how his eyes were fluttering. He clung barely to the borderlines of consciousness, but he wasn't going to be any help in this fight. He wasn't going to be able to summon any skill. It was still up to her.

The Culturist landed behind her. Then Adam followed as well, bouncing off his body. The Legendary orc still had a serene expression on his face, as if he was experiencing some manner of higher enlightenment.

Meanwhile, she was out here fighting for their lives.

She still had a few fractured spiders left, and to her delight, they worked as the Aberrant Fractals they once were, cleaving into matter and parting it without difficulty. The steel surface that comprised the grill district was flayed wide open, and the spiders crept down, connected to Uva by threads of outsider essence.

She jumped in after them, carrying with her the Culturist and Adam. It was at this point that she remembered the bullets. They should have come after her. That shockwave might have flung her down onto the ground, but the bullets were barely ten meters away. She shouldn't have been fast enough to dodge that. The blast shouldn't have propelled her nearly quickly enough to avoid any harm.

She stole a glance via one of her rear spiderlings at what was happening behind her and realized all the bullets were missing.

In their place was a long envelope of Dimensionality. A massive cleft of static mana began bleeding into her Unclaimed Paracosm, splitting even her overlapping dimension. The bullets could be heard from the inside of that dimensional wound, calling out to each other, confused about how they missed and where this doorway came from.

Uva most definitely did not create that dimensional wound. Adam was still down. Was this Evanescia's doing? Had the Usurper-Narrator intervened on their behalf?

The group had bested Longinus after all. Maybe this was her way of showing her favor.

Uva didn't bother spending too much time considering that. Instead, she kept descending, and finally, her spiderlings hit a point where they brushed the convection plate that spewed forth a wall of densest Pyromancy. The heat was miserable, and without her Toughness, Uva would have been practically boiled alive. But she pushed on, her natural physiology granting her the power to endure temperatures that would have once seen her fried.

The moment her spiderling touched the convection plate, her taint began to spread. The heat sputtered momentarily as fissures connecting Integration to the Outside expanded. It was like seeing the beginnings of a festering rot crawl across a body. The gleaming, bright orange mana of Pyromancy was split asunder like skin peeling from the outside, revealing the raw red below. Except instead of deeper layers of subdermis, she beheld unnatural creatures that belonged elsewhere.

A flood of feathered beasts, mounted riders that bore characteristics of Longinus and Uva, spiders, and centaurs shot past her, squeezing by her body and traveling up the tunnel behind her to rejoin the battle above. With each passing second, more of them came forth. More and more and more, as all the mana that once powered the Boiling Toad was usurped for a new purpose.

This was as far as her planning went, however. Unleashing more Outsiders upon the Fae guards would buy her a bit more time, but she needed to find a way . The convection plates needed to be connected to something. Maybe she could follow her traveling taint and discover an exit to the keep. Maybe—

There was a sudden clench of pressure behind her.

Uva reacted.

She swung her arm, and suddenly the shape of her limb reconstructed itself into a series of flensing fractals.

Her blade cut through nothing but open air, and as she finished her turn, she found herself staring through a dimensional gateway shrouding the carved path she'd just descended. The tunnel had been cut off, but on the other end of that dimensional portal was not an onrush of Fae.

Instead, she found herself faced with a shrouded figure, only made visible by two piercing, glowing eyes. Eyes that looked like the optics of an automaton.

“Cross over,” the stranger called with a masculine voice, waving for her to pass into his portal.

Uva glared at him and prepared herself for another battle. “Who are you?”

“Probably your only way out. But you made it a lot further than I expected you to. Nasty skill you evolved there.” Artificial mechanisms within the man's eyes visibly shifted. “Hm. Unique Feat. Unique Skills. Nasty. Absolutely nasty. Yeah, the Deathless’ fire is all over you too.” His attention turned to the groaning Shiv. “ What happened to—Never mind that shit, get over here. If I wanted you to die, I wouldn't have intercepted all those bullets for you earlier.”

Uva really, really didn’t much trust mysterious strangers, but desperate times and acts of trust pushed her toward unwise risks. Crossing into his portal put her at his mercy. But staying here damned her to the Fae. “Composer guard me.”

“Yeah, probably going to be the other way instead.”

“What?”

“Just get over here. Weave’s in danger, you’re in danger, the Deathless is a literal goddamn danger, and I’m not equipped to fight off an army of angry Summer Court guards.”

Tightening her fists, Uva made her decision.

Not like there was any real choice in the end.