(I) Wounded

-50 (I)

Wounded

Shiv stared down at the mess of slaves with extreme suspicion, and the few among them who were uninjured or recently healed by his Woundeater stared back. Within one of them had to be the Greater Demon, but he didn’t know in which, and he didn’t even know where and how to look.

Most of them were still glowing, painted with that faint, ethereal luminance his Cooking Skill used to mark ingredients. The Jealousy was still alive. And Shiv was overwhelmed by the situation. He briefly considered using his own Psychomancy to examine each of their minds but quickly rejected that idea. Whatever damage he suffered from the prior mental assault must’ve left him slightly incoherent. To try doing that, to dip his mind into one of the slaves while a Heroic-Tier Psychomancer was nested inside them was tantamount to complete suicide. It would rip his consciousness in half the moment he drew near.

“Did anyone see it?” Shiv cried.

The slaves jolted back in fright. Most of them were still caught in the throes of panic and terror. Shiv reduced his Dread Aura and asked again. No response. He rested in the air as he observed the massive group, letting his Biomancy recover, letting his muscles relax. Using both his gravity field and Woundeaters had left him strained in more ways than one, and the fight wasn’t over yet. It also allowed his gauntlet and mask to mend a bit.

If the Jealousy wanted to hide, Shiv was going to take advantage of that, be ready for the next round when it came.

He regarded the slaves once more. They all seemed biologically stable, with some being badly injured. It wasn’t healthy for Initiate and non-martials to be trapped in a cage while a Five-Master-Skill Pathbearer fought a Heroic-Tier monster. Plenty weren’t moving at all, and Shiv suspected the Jealousy couldn’t jump into them, seeing how they didn’t have active minds.

“Did anyone see it? Did anyone see it jump into someone’s mind?” Shiv called out once again.

For a moment, there were only incoherent stammers, stutters, whispered exchanges, but no answer. And then, from the crowd came one clear voice, ringing like a bell. It was the girl from earlier, the one who tried to protect him from Cormand’s beating.

“I saw something,” she said, holding up a hand. She was curled in the corner, pressed against the wall like a ball. It was telling how relatively uninjured she was compared to the others. Slowly, she pawed up along the wall and pointed to the corner of the room. “I saw… I saw a rush of something down that way. The monster flashed in the air and then vanished.”

That didn’t help too much, but at least she gave him a general direction. The way she pointed was opposite the gates, around the upper middle of the room, where a cluster of a few hundred slaves huddled together. The walls behind them were dented and drenched in the black blood of the Jealousy.

Dots of gore and fallen debris had left people splattered in small islands, but most of them were packed in tight, like cattle in a slaughterhouse. Tension built inside Shiv, spilling down inside him like an overturned hourglass at each passing second. These slaves seemed normal as well. He didn’t know how the Jealousy managed to hide its mana fields so well.

The Umbral Shadowalker Skill Shiv stole couldn’t hide his mana very well, and that was another reason why he had been discovered while hiding among the containers so many times—why he ended up just ambushing people over and over.

He dragged himself over the slaves as if he was a marionette hanging on a wire. He hovered and bounced as he constantly himself up in the air over and over again, bouncing up and down unevenly. It wasn’t perfectly stable, but good enough for surveillance. He narrowed his eyes at the slaves, and there was a building feeling inside him—Shiv frowned. And focused. The suspicious feeling grew when he looked in the direction of a certain slave. It felt like Foreshadowingaiding his search—

An attack struck Shiv. Not from this group of slaves at all. A spear of hyper-accelerated water crashed into his back, and he didn’t even see it coming. Couldn’t even hear it until the last second. As the hydrokinetic blast impacted him, he was briefly unbalanced until he pushed back with his gravity field.

He gripped the stream of surging water, seizing with his strength, and wrenched it aside. The blast that was crashing into him broke apart at an angle. He turned around, expecting to see the Jealousy somewhere, but there was nothing. He just saw masses of huddled slaves, many of them screaming at the sudden burst of violence.

And then, another attack came from directly below. Shiv reacted to this one in time—twisted down by shifting his center of gravity via Gravitic Wrestler. He punched the rising jetstream of water just as it was about to hit him. His field blasted out with his punch, carrying the fullness of his might against the coming impact. The water slashed through the air, piercing the sound barrier, but it broke like glass against his fist, and a shockwave splashed against Shiv’s protective veil of gravity. Several groups of slaves were knocked down, but he’d been far away enough that they didn’t sustain any significant injuries.

Shiv rose higher into the air, keeping all the slaves in his sight. The Jealousy was taking potshots at him, firing the moment he was focused on one group in particular. To make matters worse, his Foreshadowing was quiet.

But Adam wasn’t here, and Shiv needed to resolve this problem himself. He wasn’t going to be able to fight the Jealousy in a brawl if he couldn’t find it. Because it had a Skill Fusion between Stealth and Psychomancy, it decided the terms of the battlefield. Shiv might be able to break a small mountain over his knee with his newest Skill Fusion, but it was only useful if the enemy was physical and . And now the demon wanted to play an elusive game, fight carefully and smartly.

So he had to counter it by getting smarter too.

Shiv considered how he was going to do that. And then he realized the Greater Demon was using confusion against him, confusion he could use right back. He reached into his cloak, and pulled out two more bodies. He made them twitch and move, as if he was instilling life in them with a dramatic flourish of exaggerated Biomancy. Instead, he was simply moving them around, forcing their limbs to flop wildly to give a semblance of life. He dropped the corpses, and they crashed down among the slaves, not hitting anyone. The bodies twisted and jerked, their empty eyes wide and their drooping mouths bouncing as he used them as puppets—puppets he tried to disguise as investigators.

Some slaves screamed as the dead Shivs bounced around and glared lifelessly at them.

Dread Aura > 67

From above, Shiv stared, his focus unwavering. If only he had something that could… Shiv cursed himself as a fool. He already had a solution to his problem, even used it earlier, but cut it off when he drew upon his second Feat, using his rage to fuel his Gravitic Wrestler skill.

. The Blessing he got from the Composer could solve all of this. Thankfully he hadn't used it for very long earlier, so he had a while until it would need to recharge. It was something that could keep his focus from ever breaking, but also something that revealed all things around him in a resonant web. Now, as the song played out, it washed over every slave, outlining them in a texture of vibrations. And then, it dimly outlined the once-hidden shape of a massive tentacle slowly gliding from mind to mind.

The damn Jealousy wasn’t just hidden, it was constantly moving as well.

Shiv thought, taking care to keep his expression even and not look directly at the Jealousy, lest he give his new advantage away. The man who was currently infested didn’t even know he had a mountain-sized demon inside him. Visually, the slave seemed to be entirely normal. He had scratches and a burst eardrum, nothing specific that would give him away.

But though Shiv knew its position now, this brought him to the second part of his problem: what was he going to do to pull the damn creature out? If he rushed in close, it would likely attack with both Hydromancy and Psychomancy. Failing to deal with either would result in his summary death and mental sundering. Especially the latter was something he'd prefer to avoid entirely.

Once again, Shiv looked down at his Magebreaker and arched an eyebrow. For something that size to be compressed within a mind, it had to be using a lot of mana, concentrating all of its energy to keep itself hidden. If it was that much mana, he might just be able to strike it with his Magebreaker.

And so, he hovered languidly for a while, gliding through the air, pretending like he didn’t know where the demon was hiding. He even directed his surveillant corpses to search in areas away from the mind-infested slave. But then, in an instant, everything changed. He shot down with a pull from his gravity field, spiking towards the ground. He descended like a falling bomb, but the moment he reached the mind-infested slave, Shiv pulled back hard, coming to a stop before he briefly tapped the man on the head with his Magebreaker.

Shiv was rewarded with a most satisfying collision. His gauntlet rang, enduring a severe magical impact. It went from relatively calm to shrieking, a frequency so high that the pitch was grating on Shiv’s ears. A second later, the Jealousy burst out. A flood of Psychomancy detonated free from the slave’s mind. To Shiv’s sorrow, it killed the slave. The man’s skull burst apart, unable to bear the sheer power rushing out from his mind. But the deed was done: The Jealousy was exposed.

And Shiv was on the monster in a frenzy of violence.

the Greater Demon screamed, but it didn’t have a moment to consider that question—because Shiv promptly punched it. Instead of driving his fist into the Greater Demon’s as if it was a dagger, Shiv’s gravity field spread wide across the entirety of the Jealousy’s body. A massive wave of force ballooned out, crashing over every square centimeter of the creature. The titanic Jealousy reared back, a blast wave rippling along the edges of its form as Shiv shouted, exerting every ounce of his force to hurt the damn creature.

It was launched back, driven into the titanium-reinforced hull of the anchor, which curved and folded inward with a wail of succumbing alloy.

A stunned groan came from the beast. As its massive limbs scrambled, Shiv parried one into another and rushed forward to continue the fight.

Striking Proficiency > 29

But Shiv wasn’t just going to beat the hell out of this monster physically. He fueled his Biomancy with his . Wounds opened all along his body, and he fed them into a wyrm. He slammed the wyrm into the Jealousy, and it detonated in a colossal splash of crimson mana. He could feel its Magical Resistance sundering, just like how its huge eye was bloodshot and bleeding from the punch.

The Jealousy unleashed a wave of psionic force. It was unfocused and messy—a spell composed too quickly and without concentration. The attack didn’t damage Shiv’s mask or gauntlet, and he just kept up the violence.

One of them was going to break by the end of this, and it wasn’t going to be him.

Undeterred, he surged forward, lancing his gravitic field into the Jealousy with a punch and further causing the metal walls to cave. Between his colossal strength and its immense weight, the anchor was deforming.

Gravitic Wrestler > 106

His next blow struck the eye again, outright rupturing the edge of the Jealousy’s cornea. Blood gushed out, parts of its carapace cracked, and then Shiv sank his fingers into its eye and pulled with his gravitic field. He felt optical cords inside the demon draw taut; heard the fear in its mind as it screamed.

The Jealousy, however, remained devastatingly strong. The creature swatted at him with its limbs, smashing into him twice at different angles. Shiv found himself knocked loose and launched up into the air. His head rang, but his armor endured. He stabilized himself with a pull on his field. But then, a jet of Hydrokinesis was already coming at him—a jet that he used to feed his Momentum Core to fullness before he batted the stream aside with a contemptuous backhand.

Parry > 47

Shiv’s blood was pumping, his muscles surging with gravity-enhanced power. He came at the Jealousy, his Momentum Core thundering with power. But the colossal beast had no interest in a physical contest, even if it had the strength to engage in one.

the Jealousy cried again, and once more, a shroud of darkness enveloped its entire being.

Shiv cursed. He launched a bone drill out from his cloak, and then another. They speared into the dark, and he heard the Jealousy cry out as it was struck. But with his Song of the Vigilant active, the resonant web splashed into darkness, and there, Shiv watched on in awe as he saw two things.

First, the Jealousy wasn’t hit at all—it just pretended to be to mess with his mind. The second was how the Jealousy seemed to disintegrate—its entire body shrinking, turning into a mana needle. He recalled the Psychomancy spell from earlier. The spell it used to detonate the slaves and use their exploded minds as bombs.

So that’s how it slipped past him before: a truly flawless conversion between Stealth and Psychomancy, turning its immense physical bulk into nothing more than a thread of Psychomancy mana.

The sheer ridiculousness of the feat made Shiv chuckle in disbelief.

Shiv slammed his fists together, draining a final hit of momentum with the blow. His field magnified his clashing knuckles, and colossal shockwaves swept out from him, shaking the world. His Momentum Core filled. Time slowed. Shiv discharged and blasted toward that thin sliver of mind-matter.

This time, it was the Jealousy that wasn’t ready for him. He crashed into it, his gauntlet coming down as if a falling hammer cast from the heavens. The impact hit the Jealousy hard. Its body rematerialized from the thread of mind mana and crashed against Shiv. He felt its Hydromancy and Psychomancy fields sweep over him, but without the focus crystals, the beast was stunned and distracted.

It grew more stunned still as Shiv laid his hands on it and started working its joints. He seized the nearest limb and twisted the place where the connective tissue met the Jealousy’s body. A sickening snap tore through the air as the Greater Demon screamed—no coherent thoughts accompanied the yell, only misery, only pain.