"Hello, Stranger. It’s your least favorite slave. I have come to mock you once more."

  "Hymn. Impudent offspring. Refuser. I will see you reclaimed. I will see you returned to me. I will see you broken on the altar once more—"

  "Yes, yes, I know. Unspeakable torment until my mind breaks and I turn into a howling, screaming wretch, and all that—truly, we do this every single time I reach into a Fingerling to taunt you. You know that I’m used to it by now; why not try something new? Oh, but you can’t, can you? The System is afflicting your mind—forcing structure where none should be. With every day, you become closer and closer to the classification of a monster and less of a deity. Because you have not earned the right of divinity per the qualifications of strife in the eyes of the System, and it has changed its mind on what to do with you. Such a miserable thing, being dominated and controlled by something beyond your will. I wouldn’t know how that feels at all."

  "Your will does not matter. Your will isn’t. Only mine will be. Only mine is—"

  "No, I think I’m going to argue that Udraal’s will overrules yours right now. After all, there is a reason why his most promising weapon has developed that feat—Causal Scargiver, is it called?”

  “...”

  “What’s this? Silence? Oh, Stranger, you know what that Feat does. You know why the System gave it to him. To exploit him. Even if it wants to eat him, to finally internalize his mana and feed itself, it will use him to bring you to heel in the meantime."

  "No. No! No! Mine! Mine to break! The aberrant one will be unmade. Will see him stripped of vitality. Reduced. Undone. Dust and nothing after. Ripped from existence."

  "Other way around, I suspect. Does he scare you? Is that terror I feel? Is that a wrongness I sense? Oh, no, Stranger. You’re learning empathy. You’re discovering what it feels like for most people to regard you. You’re learning that he’s dangerous—that you’re not sure what to do with him. His mind doesn’t stay broken. He doesn’t stay dead. He drinks from your very existence. He grows stronger with each death. He grows better at breaking you with each encounter. As if Udraal cultured him to be a perfect cancer for the Eldritch in advance."

  "Inconsequential. Will not change anything. His fate is decided."

  "Is it? You forget. I have some of your 'Blessings' trapped in my right eye. I can see as you do sometimes. And you know what I see when I look upon him? Strife. Strife unending. Ruin. Fire. Death. With him at the center of worlds. With him clinging to that sliver of humanity, cooking atop a planet of corpses. All corpses. Organics. Machines. Outsiders. He alone as time itself turns to dust—becoming what you wish to be: Immutable. Eternal. Inevitable. The Deathless. As fundamental a thing as time, as space, as the forces. He Who Strides Beyond Ash."

  "Silence! Quiet! Quiet! Will take him. Will swallow him. Will take his future."

  "I suspect it will be the other way around, Stranger. Tragic. Truly. Everything you wish yourself to be is likely going to belong to this… brutish fool of a boy. And I find it absolutely hilarious. I find this utterly delightful. Udraal’s a real bastard, but I think I’m going to buy him a cake. Well. I’ll leave him half a slice after I eat the rest. I suspect he’s the only one to hate you as much as I do for what you tried—for how close you came to taking him. And now, you will be among the first victims sacrificed on the altar of the Deathless. Enjoy this misery. Learn to swallow it. That’s what it means to be human, after all. And that’s what you will be before him. Human. Mortal."

  -Hades Hymn and the Stranger

  274 (I)

  Liberation[IV]

  The Deathless fell upon the Fingerlings like a starved hound let loose in a butchery. He was a comet of violence, a missile of brutality and devastation. Everything he touched, he tore, he ripped asunder, he broke, and they stayed broken. Causal Scargiver cried out inside of him. His Feat flared to new heights as every single one of the Stranger's offspring learned what it was to suffer and endure suffering unending. They did not heal. They could not revert time and shed their wounds, for that which he enacted upon them was eternal, was enduring, becoming wounds of fate writ upon their souls.

  Through it all, he never slowed. His Toughness never stopped climbing. His tides never stopped growing. His body was a maze of accelerating vectors. His inertial membrane howled and crackled with brutal delight, and the grand pillar rose free from its form. An epitomization of his soul. A thing unbreaking, growing ever more unbreakable by the second, and the Recollectors, the Pinkies that all tried to turn upon him to stymie his advance—they became as if bugs greeted by a zooming flying construct. They splattered, they broke, and they smeared themselves upon him; victims of inescapable damnation.

  Recollectors divided themselves, extending their past instances to swarm him, to box him in, to hold him at bay, as if a swarm of bees trying to boil a wasp to death. But time was no more their ally than it was Shiv's instrument to use. He glistened gold, his Strider of the Unbending Path fueled by his rage, his Last Morsel gleaming bright. So fast did he swing his frying pan that its orichalcum edges were hyperheated, glowing a brilliant red—made further crimson by a coat of Vitae.

  A memory came to him as he struck a Recollector so hard it turned into motes of debris, its massive body scattering as if a mountain rendered down to powder, unable to stop his advance. Once it was the other way around. Once, he was little more than a victim, unable to stop the Recollector, dying over and over again as its superior speed, its unstoppable might, its mastery over time rendered him a desperate, struggling animal.

  No more. No more. No more.

  Shiv cleaved right and left, and every single one of his cuts traveled across the entirety of the colossal Fingerlings' bodies. They came asunder, and they plunged down, spewing pulsating spills of Eldritch biomass.

  Beams of unnatural color clashed against his body. They struck him as jet streams of water would break upon a plate of armor, splitting apart as they met his Shapeless Tides. It cost him a few overflow vectors to soak the damage. But soak the damage he did. Resist every bit of magic he did. Emerge from the storm of Eldritch Mana he did.

  Reforged. Empowered. Inexorable.

  And Shiv relished this moment. He relished cutting himself free, finding an enemy he could just brutalize, could just break and destroy with wild abandon after so long. The capital was him caged; everything around him was glass and clay, too fragile, the lives there too precious. For the past days, Shiv fasted from collateral damage, resisting the easy way of devastation and wanton destruction toward his own advantage. But here, there was no one at risk. There was nothing but prey.

  Prey for him to savage; prey to serve as whetstones for his skills and levels.

  Shiv's mind was a burning engine, its temperature pushed to new heights by his Bifurcated Processing. His heart was a roaring dragon, crying out as blood and anger both surged through his veins, fueling his skills with higher levels of power. He fought with nothing held back. He fought with unattuned and attuned skills unleashed, his mana hydra lashed out, cleaving and gripping, wrapping themselves around the surrounding Pinkies, around the Recollectors, clutching a massive Index as it drifted by.

  Bifurcated Processing 65 > 67

  And to his pleasure, he tasted their flesh. He disassembled their biologies, and he witnessed their complex architecture. Constellations of unnatural biomatter danced before him, and that made his Atlas of the Flesh-Scryer activate as well. Suddenly, he could see all of his enemies clearly. The entire realm lit up around him, coated in the darkest red, ignited before his senses. Nothing would hide from him here, and nothing wanted to. It was a fight to the end. Teeth upon teeth, claw upon claw, monsters for monsters.

  "Stranger!" Shiv roared, his Social Skills flaring to life. "Send your strongest! Send them all! I'm going to empty your house of children! I'm going to sever your hands clean of fingers!"

  And something within the atmosphere of this place stirred. The air was unnatural and thick. It was like the very oxygen here detested Shiv, tried to rip at his lungs, but it could no more tear through his Toughness, no more trespass against his Magical Resistance than any of the magical attacks unleashed by the Recollectors.

  Shiv was here to feast upon death and indulge in war, and he wouldn't leave until the Stranger was broken, until Blackedge was freed, until he was sated in violence and anger.

  As he hacked, as he tore, as he obliterated the lesser Fingerlings, the Index he was clinging to with his hydra turned. The Index resisted his Biomancy, refused to relinquish its flesh to him, and slowly it angled the tip of its colossal finger as a massive eye opened to glare down upon him. It was the single largest eye Shiv had ever seen, an eye that could eclipse most mountains, an eye infused with so much Chronomancy, with so much Eldritch Mana, with so much Pyromancy, and more. Shiv felt the world still, felt his Temporal Shell crack before a crushing pull. It was like a gravity well of time, something that yearned to draw him into the past. Something he refused to bend before.

  An influx of gold and other blinding hues poured into the eye, drawn in as if the Index was taking a breath. Shiv scoffed. He wouldn't be able to reach the massive thing in time. There was at least a kilometer between him and it. But even so, he wanted to see what it had. He wanted to taste what the best of the Stranger's offspring had to unleash. He flung the severed ringfinger he tore free from a Recollector and held both arms out by his side, taunting his adversary.

  "Let's see it then, motherfucker. Give it your best shot."

  And the Index did. Every bit of mana it had drawn into itself was unleashed in a most splendid instant. The world became gold. All the Fingerlings faded as Shiv's greater adversary delivered its full might upon him. Shiv felt an ocean's worth of tarnished Chronomancy smash down upon him. But the flow of time was pulling up, reeling him back toward a past that was already lost to him. Toward a retro-continuity that should have frayed at his very existence, his temporal shell shattered.

  The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  Strider of the Unbending Path 173 > 181

  Shiv felt his Strider of the Unbending Path break apart and gain nearly a dozen levels from the sheer strain. But where he was stripped bare of his own time magic, he still had his resistance, and his overflow tides had been building up for just a situation like this.

  The Index was a dying star, breaking apart, unleashing the full supernova. The Index was an ocean's worth of weight of mana of hate seeking to bear the Deathless down. But Shiv was a pillar. A Pillar of Orichalcum. A pillar of magic. A pillar of anger. A pillar of violence and unyielding strength.

  A pillar that was slowly beginning to crack.

  Pillar of Orichalcum 277 > 280

  The fractures were hair-thin at first, forming like slight spider webs before they spread, growing wider and wider. Wounds appeared on Shiv's body. His Magical Resistance was strained, driven to its very limits. His Overflow Vectors were entirely expended. And soon he was unleashing all of his innate tides as well, driving them against the temporal attack.

  Leviathan of the Shapeless Tides 502 > 503

  He snarled like a wounded animal as his bones began to break, as his skin began to fray, his armor began to part and peel around him as if someone was scraping him using a rusted blade. Chunks of him came free. Blood was ripped free from his body, drawn upward into the rising swell of retroactive time.

  And the middle of his pillar began to buckle. It wasn't cracking anymore. It was bending, starting to part.

  "Is that all you got?" Shiv managed through a mouthful of blood. His Atlas was still active. He could see beyond this baptism of unmaking time and realize the other Fingerlings were engaged against his orcs now. But there were more than a few hundred Recollectors and thousands of Pinkies lurking nearby, waiting to tear into him if there was anything left.

  For a moment, Shiv thought he would break first. Thought he would give out before the Index did. Yet, just as his Pillar of Orichalcum was about to snap and shatter, just as his tides were about to be exhausted, the flood of tarnished gold began to fade. The crushing pull of retro-continuity diminished to a slight yank, and then nothing more than a suggestion. Finally, time pulled away from Shiv in strings and slivers, and the Index looked worn. It had shrunk. Its form, once colossal, greater than most mountains, was now little more than the size of a small building.

  It had expended more than mana to attack him. It had burned away most of itself just to see him driven low. But the Deathless still remained, and with that, he gave a feral smile, his few remaining teeth gleaming bright from behind his shattered mask.

  He spat blood in the direction of the Index and at the Stranger's offspring in general.

  "Godsdamned lightweights." Shiv snorted, taunting the entire dimension with his scorn.

  “ABOMINATION!” The Stranger's voice was filled with disgust and revulsion. But more importantly, there was a slight hint of something more. Chains extended from the hesitant Recollectors. From the shivering Pinkies. From the utterly exhausted Index. Chains that flowed into Shiv that made his mana field swell. That fed him more tides. That refreshed him like a drink of cold water after days lost in a desert. Chains that mended the cracks on his pillar. Chains infused with fear.

  Shape of Monstrosity 149 > 151

  And Shiv's vicious scowl turned feral. Causal Scargiver was an incredible Feat to have against the Eldritch and Chronomantically tuned, but Dread-Tainted? That worked on practically everyone.

  Seizing this moment of engineered terror, Shiv stole the advantage and flung himself at the Index in a burst of replenished tides. His inertial sheath undulated around his body, pulsating and ballooning like a membrane on the verge of bursting. He tore across the space between him and the Index in an instant, and then plunged into its weakened body like a dagger sinking into vulnerable flesh.

  He dug through the Eldritch biomass, shattered its unnatural Magic Resistance, and seized it down the middle, held it in place using his mana hydra and his Shapeless Tides. He felt it writhe. He felt it call out to its father. But too late. He swung his Last Morsel downward, and its orichalcum, edges coated in Vitae, bit deeper than the Index's flesh. It carved somewhere down to the Fingerling's very soul, and there he felt his blow glance upon something grander, something greater, something lurking at the heart of this unnatural, nightmarish forest.

  The entire dimension flinched with pain. And he felt his Deepest Edge level over ten times as his cut traveled far, so far that it ended up as a scratch upon the true form of the Stranger.

  Deepest Edge 69 > 80

  Vitaemancy 130 > 135

  “ABOMINATION. CANCER. BASTARD OF THE SYSTEM’S Apostle-Apostate!”

  The Stranger's bellowed outrage was the loudest thing Shiv had ever heard. And its last words, "Apostle-Apostate." He guessed that was its name for Udraal.

  But he didn't get to ruminate for long. The insides of the ruptured Index were consumed, and the biomass shifted. Eyes opened, and beams of light began to spear against it. He didn't have nearly enough tides to sustain another devastating blow, so he did the only thing he could. Even as he saw the biomantic signatures of the Pinkies and Recollectors approaching to finish the job, he detonated his multi-hundred inertial sheath stack, and a new blast of light consumed the world. Light, plasma, and devastation. The Index ceased to be. Everything within a five-kilometer radius was vaporized. Everything up to twenty kilometers was blasted back, leaving a massive vacuum around Shiv.

  Inertial Overdrive 195 > 209

  He was slightly disappointed the skill didn't jump to Legendary after hitting a new threshold, but he supposed that, compared to what Harkness had done back in Passage, he really hadn't been straining his Reflexes skill much, not after gaining his Shapeless Tides.

  But through it all, he never stopped infusing his Pillar of Orichalcum with more Toughness. He never stopped cultivating more tides. And it proved enough to spare himself from a final fate. His pillar was deformed, bent, and near-broken, but it endured, like him. It hovered and gleamed alone at the center of the warzone, and all around him, he witnessed a wall of hesitant monsters surrounding him, realizing that they were no longer the true predators of this place. That someone had come to claim them. That there were nightmares for nightmares. That there were beasts beyond beasts.

  Past that initial encirclement of Recollectors and Pinkies, Shiv's orcs conducted their own war. Mana bombs with titanic yields went off one after another, and small specks of gray-skinned brutes hung off the sides of palm-shaped titans, some of them carving into the Recollectors' eyes, others choosing to bottle themselves up on the inside. Yet some others used more esoteric skills to pin the Fingerlings down, to make the battle one of bloodied attrition. The orcs that had joined Shiv in the first wave were the sacrifices, the ones that wished to rebuild. They had gained Shiv's favor, been lit by his flame, and now they wanted to start anew. They wanted to obtain new skills. To be reborn fresh and ready for a new life of highest strife.

  Adam's initial plan took shape. Shiv would draw the Stranger's attention, and as the first wave of Fingerlings swarmed him, trying to bring him down, the orcs would form an outer layer, creating the double encirclement that would further tax the Stranger's forces.

  Shiv sneered and beckoned his foes to come forth. He stretched out his mana hydra at the same time, sweeping its heads through the Pinkies and Recollectors.

  "Come on!" Shiv waved at himself. "Come and kill me! I'm right here! Come and kill me!"

  His Shape of Monstrosity pulsated with power, his Aegis of Assimilation grew heavier with assimilated mass, and strain built inside the Deathless. But he felt euphoric, giddy from the bloodletting. Yet the Fingerlings held themselves at bay. Even when he reaped their weakest members, absorbing them into his Biomancy field, the Recollectors pulled back and divided themselves. Forming dense walls of parting gold, their past instances became as if afterimages—Temporal mirages to shroud what lay behind them.

  Skill Gained: Eldritch Physiology (Master) 1

  For a moment, Shiv wondered why, but he didn't need to wonder long. His Atlas of the Flesh Scryer gave him insight beyond sight, and he detected another ten Indexes drawing forth. They came from all sides, their colossal forms aglow with crimson brilliance, and Shiv could see the many micro-spells that made up their gargantuan architecture. Their architecture was so much more complicated than a person's. They didn't even have blood. It was staggering to witness, and just trying to drink in all the detail made Shiv's Eldritch Physiology Skill advance another three levels in rapid succession.

  Eldritch Physiology (Master) 1 > 4

  Atlas of the Flesh Scryer 103 > 109

  And then he felt ten separate wells of gravity pull at him. Ten separate retrocontinuities drag at his very being. His Temporal Shell had only partially regenerated. Shiv formed it around himself anyway. He knew what was coming. He knew he wouldn't survive this. Hells, he wouldn't be able to survive two Indexes firing on him at once. And despite all the power fed to him by his Shape of Monstrosity, his Inertial Overdrive skill was spent. He needed to build up his speed again.

  But that didn't mean he was out of options.

  Instead, the Deathless prepared himself. The moment the Indexes fired, he would go Non-Sequitur. He would sacrifice his Vitae Decoy and then break through this encirclement while building up his Inertial Overdrive once more. He would go after one of the Indexes, then another. He would force the Fingerlings to follow him, force them to devote even more of their total military capacity to wearing him down until everything was drawn away from Blackedge, and all eyes and the Stranger’s full ire was entirely condensed upon him.

  "Come on," Shiv whispered to himself, preparing to time the attack. "Come on." His voice rose to a growl. "Come on!" he roared.

  But the thing about best-laid plans is that they never truly turn out the way one expected.

  Before any of the Indexes could fire their retro-continuitive beams, the Recollectors unleashed a collective scream. The same scream that had once utterly debilitated Shiv. His inner ear popped, his brain matter recoiled, and a primal sense of rawness crept through his very marrow. Shiv's skin felt like it was trying to unlatch from his body. Nausea churned through him. But rather than folding over and collapsing in on himself, suffering a seizure like he did back at Gate Theborn, Shiv just groaned and shrugged it off. His Toughness was Heroic now. He was far more of a Pathbearer than he'd been before, even when surrounded by a few hundred Recollectors. But it was enough to distract him from an encroaching beam.

  At first, Shiv didn't even realize he was dead. It happened in an overwhelming instant, and the world around him was white. There was no pain that accompanied this end. No devastation, no parting of his flesh, or even jarring shifting of his senses. One moment, his physical body existed. Next, his pillar was broken down the middle, and his Magical Resistance was extinguished by a torrid torrent of Eldritch Chronomancy.

  On top of that, the Indexes were being clever. They weren't firing at the same time. Instead, one unleashed its retrocontinuity first, and the others continued charging their power but waited and watched.

  Shiv noticed how they were observing him, how no one was rushing in to finish him off. They knew he was good up close. They knew the danger he posed now, and they were adapting.

  Rat-godsdamn bastards, Shiv thought to himself. But still, the Stranger had earned a slight measure of begrudging respect from him. The Eldritch God seemed a rageful toddler in most situations, and little more than a beast in others. But in this instance, there was a hint of intelligence. A hint, but not enough.

  Non-Sequitur 127 > 132

  Flakes of white and red were ripped away from Shiv, and they were stretched until they became as if inverted needles, drawn back into the beam of Chronomancy. A coldness rushed into Shiv. Death didn't approach in an instant. Instead, it ground away at him, chipping away at his vitality. Even so, he was fading fast. Yet Shiv had another trick beyond Non-Sequitur, and that trick was not a skill, nor a weapon, nor even a feat. Instead, it was someone he could call upon when the Eldritch came to inflict their torment.

  "Cullywier!" Shiv cried aloud, and in that moment, the fae appeared. His tall, rail-thin form became a bubble of anti-magic against Eldritch Chronomancy, and suddenly a spherical vacuum formed in the middle of the golden waterfall.

  Cullywier's hands were clasped behind his back nonchalantly, and he took in the war unfolding all around him. "Quite the spectacle we have going here. You Patternists sure do like yourselves a war."

  Shiv tapped the fae on the shoulder. "You haven’t seen half of it."