274 (II)

  Liberation [IV]

  He wrapped a few red-white strands around his Enchained Heart of Life-Giving and began to absorb its vitality. A rush of heat combusted inside Shiv, and he quickly hatched free from his Vitae, resurrecting once more.

  The moment he returned to the fight, the other Indexes unleashed their retrocontinuative beams as well, and Cullywier's influence was diminishing. But that was all it was: diminishing. It didn't block him from consequence altogether, and soon threads of inverted time cut through, slamming against Shiv, glancing off his Shapeless Tides.

  Shiv doubled up on his fairy protection. He pulled the cold iron bar containing Toasty out from his cape, and suddenly the beams diminished even more, just enough for him to reach the first Index. And there he slammed headfirst into its body, driving his knee against its massive Chronomantic eye.

  All of Shiv's additional overflow tides were exerted. The immense creature buckled, and its eye shattered like glass, bleeding golden fractals into existence. Toasty wailed with outrage as he was thrown around in the cage, and Shiv extended a tendril of Vitae, dragging the cold iron bar back into his cape before it could sustain any additional damage. Cullywier had vanished somewhere in the frenzy, but that was fine. Shiv was up close and personal with his enemy again. And now he started ripping and tearing once more. His Last Morsel allowed him to carve a bloody path into the Index, and so he did, pushing his way deeper into its body. It writhed, its interior opened up in a cluster of eyes.

  Unnatural spells that made Shiv's sanity twist and strain rained down upon him. But he trusted his Magical Resistance as he swung his Morsel down. His Deepest Edge traveled through the entirety of the Index's body, and further enhanced by a burst of Vitae, it came apart in a spray of Eldritch biomatter. And then everything vanished once more. Gold consumed the world. Gold consumed Shiv. His Shapeless Tides screamed and dissolved, and Shiv felt his Magical Resistance being driven toward the brink.

  Nine interlocking beams of tarnished gold cleaved through the Index he'd nested himself within. The other Indexes cared little for their kindred. They simply wanted the Deathless dead. But instead of allowing himself to be consumed once more, Shiv went Non-Sequitur and repositioned himself. He burst free from his body, but immediately lost his decoy. He transitioned into an Outside Context state, and every last Fingerling froze, unable to remember who they were fighting.

  The world trembled. “WHAT IS THIS? WHAT? SOMETHING IS WRONG. SOMETHING LURKS BEYOND THE HORIZON. NOT THERE, THERE, AT THE SAME TIME. HOW, HOW?”

  The Stranger's palpable frustration brought a smile to Shiv's face. He accelerated away from the intersecting beams and began pumping out a swelling mass of blackness throughout the Eldritch Jungle. By the time Shiv emerged from his Outside Context Problem state, he was already upon another two Indexes.

  He considered using a few of his golems now, but held back. Those were to be unleashed in a special circumstance when he had no other choice left. Right now, he still had plenty of options. He came here to play, he came here to fight, but he didn't come here to do it alone.

  Drawing in another burst of vitality, his Enchained Heart was down to 50% of its original charge. Thankfully, Shiv had no shortage of volunteers all around him, and besides, he wanted to discover just how good an Eldritch entity was at obeying his commands and being infused into foodstuff.

  But he needed breathing room to experiment. So he tagged his friends in. "Adam, now!"

  The Deathless thrust his left fist out, and a Chronomantic bracelet locked around his arm flew free. A temporal keyhole expanded, and Adam's Chronomantic form erupted out from the other side.

  A new color intruded within the Stranger’s dimension. A new dawn rose in a sunless plane. The horizon was painted by the colors of an azure twilight, and pointed wings of purest white heralded the arrival of Blackedge’s truest son.

  Adam Arrow came, and he came bearing a hail of pointed death.

  The Gate Lord fired a series of shots, each one impacting a Recollector, a Pinky, each one then propagating, multiplying. A chain of death unfolded around Shiv. The weakest of the Fingerlings were utterly disintegrated by the dimensional arrows. The Recollectors were bombarded by a series of continuous spells. Blasts of time, of space, of mind mana, and more expanded as pockets all around Shiv.

  After less than half a second, Adam's Chronomantic projection plunged back into the keyhole. However, he returned once more, and this time he bore a radiant arrow. It was larger, grander, and brighter than all the other arrows. It was infused with the power of a thousand righteous kills.

  As Adam unleashed this shot, it cleaved through the world, leaving a trail of retributive light as it struck one of the Indexes. There was no true wound. There was no blood, no spray of Eldritch biomatter. It hit the colossal finger and, with a final burst of azure light, followed by the afterglow of twilight. The Fingerling went still, its soul immolated, its life severed.

  "You can be a real show-off sometimes, you know that," Shiv quipped to Adam. The Gate Lord simply flipped him off as he plunged back into the keyhole once more.

  “OPENINGS, RIFTS, SEIZE THEM, CLOSE THEM, TAKE THEM.” The Stranger's telepathic orders rumbled through each of his Fingerlings.

  Shiv was caught in the broadcast, and to his delight, he saw all the Fingerlings respond. Adam's many shots left countless dimensional pathways, a network forming all around him as even more arrows expanded, traveling from Fingerling to Fingerling. The Stranger no doubt thought that this was a vulnerability to exploit, that if they rushed the portals, they could strike at those on the other side. Unfortunately, what awaited them was immolation.

  Before any of the Pinkies could cross through the dimensional pathway, there came a flame. A flame unlike any other, a flame that burned everything: bodies, mana, and souls alike. A flame that erupted from all the dimensional rifts Adam left behind. On the other end of all the rifts was a nexus, a single location: The Tutorial. Orcs would emerge through these rifts to continue the war, to spend their lives in attrition against the Stranger's offspring. But before the orcs went through, the path needed to be cleared, and there was no one better at blazing a trail than Candles.

  Brightness. Brightness consumed the world once more, but it was not gold. No, it was heat. Overwhelming heat. Sweltering heat. Heat enough to make Shiv feel uncomfortable, even with his Pillar of Orichalcum active. Shiv began to sweat within his mangled armor, and it began to evaporate before it could even fall.

  And somehow, even over the roar of the raging flames, Shiv could hear Candles laughing. Could hear the sheer overwhelming joy in the insane Pyromancer's voice. It stood in stark contrast to the screaming of the Fingerlings. They struggled, they writhed, they burned, and all around Shiv, the eldritch jungle of the Stranger became a visage of hell.

  "Well, at least someone liked what they're—" And then Shiv's words turned into a ragged cry of surprise and pain as a jet of flame hit him from behind as well and turned his armor into molten slag. Shiv realized that Candles couldn't see through his Creeping Void either, and he was simply flooding the Stranger's dimension with as much fire mana as he could. And rather than running out, it seemed like the more flames that Candles produced, the more people he burned, the more intense his flames got, the more they spread.

  "Godsdammit, Candles!" Shiv cried aloud as he reshaped his armor and ejected the searing parts. But even if the Pyromancer heard him, he didn't slow down at all. In fact, the heat kept rocketing up, forcing Shiv to divert his overflow tides to strain against the Legendary Pyromancy. Felling… working with a group of maniacs.

  Then the Deathless got a hint of inspiration. Instead of struggling against Candles's magic using his resistance, he decided to cleave a piece of Pyromancy away from Candles' spell and put it inside his frying pan. After a bit of cooking, using fire to cook fire, Shiv reached in and swallowed a piece of animated flame.

  And with that, he merged with the blaze as well. Instead of being weakened, he was empowered. And for a few seconds, Shiv returned to the fray, melting into the inferno as he fell upon the Fingerlings once more.

  Pyromancy 18 > 24

  He just needed to keep the Stranger's attention locked to him, to keep killing, to keep fighting. He just needed to do that until Adam and the others managed to extract Starhawk's Perch and all the remaining survivors at Blackedge.

  ***

  "Candles! Candles! Stop! Stop channeling your fire! You can keep burning them in a moment. Just stop. We need to go across first. Candles! Candles!" Adam shook the Pyromancer violently from behind, trusting his Legendary armor to keep him from burning. Even so, he felt like he was being boiled within, despite Candles not even channeling his flames at him directly.

  Candles laughed and laughed, standing at an intersection of countless dimensional pathways. Dense beams of fire magic shot out from him in all directions, traveling across the openings into the Stranger's realm. And so everything burned and burned and kept burning and wouldn't stop burning. Some of the orcs began to chuckle among themselves, while others openly questioned how much it would take to behead Candles so that they could get a piece of the action.

  When one orc stepped forward to find out for himself, he came apart in over a thousand pieces as Gone flashed with golden lightning. No one saw her tear the gray-skinned brute apart. But there was also no doubt that she was the culprit. And everyone decided to be a little bit more patient after that. All without the little goblin saying a single word.

  "Thank you," Adam said without looking at Gone. Losing his patience, he snarled and blasted Candles with a meter-thick jet of water strong enough to vaporize a small army of Adept-Tier Pathbearers. A massive explosion of steam filled the space, and Adam absorbed all of it back into his body without missing a beat.

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  Finally, the Pyromancer broke free from his stupor, though the water hadn't cooled him down at all. His body was still glowing brilliantly, oscillating between red, orange, and white-hot. But Adam noticed something strange. Instead of turning ever more skeletal with every bit of flame he unleashed, the transparent, scarred flesh of his body was becoming visible, and more than that, it was slowly regenerating, his flesh knitting back to wholeness.

  And after a few moments, somebody who still appeared to be caging a star within their being, skin slightly translucent and glowing from within, but otherwise unscarred and whole, was revealed to them. A tall, slim, and utterly nude elf stood before Adam, staring at everyone around him with a confused expression. "What? Huh? Where am I?" And that lapse in concentration caused his body to burst apart once more, a blast of flame rising high into the air, flinging Adam backward. But before he could be thrown far, he felt himself slam hard against an unbending wall.

  As he looked up, he saw the Culturist looking smirking at him. "Stand strong, Gate Lord. This is but a paltry gale. The System will unleash whirlwinds far stronger than this soon enough."

  Adam snarled in disgust and pushed away from the orc without ever replying. The Culturist took no offense; he just let Adam go. Candles had stopped channeling his flame now, and the orcs were raring to go across. But Shiv had instilled a brutal discipline into them, and the Culturist seemed determined to see the Insul’s orders followed to the letter.

  A great horde of orcs waited for the clarion call to come from the Court Leviathan—the signal that they were clear to go across the dimensional pathways and wreak havoc upon their foes.

  The Pyromancer was staring at his hands, and between flickering embers, his skin returned in patches but never maintained its structure, breaking apart and being consumed by the flame coming from within again. Slowly, he turned to face Adam, and rather than pure mania, there was something else behind his flaming eyes.

  "I think I remember who I have..." And then Candles trailed off as his face cracked apart and was consumed by flames anew.

  Adam gripped the Pyromancer’s shoulder reassuringly. "Candles, you can stand aside! You've done good! You've done more than good! You can start burning again in a few seconds. You can go across the other side and burn as much as you want within the Stranger's realm. But we need to cross first. And you absolutely must not, and you hear me clearly now, must not burn Blackedge. Do you understand?"

  Candles stared vacantly at Adam for a few seconds before he finally nodded. "Yeah, I think I do." He spoke like someone who'd just awoken from a long nightmare but was still unsure if they were in the waking world, or if they'd tumbled headfirst into another dream. Adam didn't have time to help Candles navigate his mental issues. They had a town to save and little time to do so.

  With the flames cut off, Adam held up a hand and gestured at the orcs standing atop the Court Leviathan. Helix responded immediately. The great beast reared back and let out a deafening bellow. And that was all the orcs needed. They began surging across the many dimensional rifts Adam's arrows had left behind. They were connected to the other side thanks to a combination of the keyhole and the Slipgate, which had been transported across the Tutorial by him and Merrielmel.

  The threshold barring him from the once unbreachable Outside had been torn down. Now, crossing took little effort at all. And so came the second wave of orcs. Most of them were Vanguards, Brawlers, Lancers, or some other warrior-centric Path. They stampeded across with joyous war cries, and Adam counted ten seconds before he prepared to join the fray himself.

  He cast his nexus of Awareness through one of his dimensional pathways and found a foreign realm utterly beset by chaos and devastation. Fingerlings were burning. Fingerlings were being torn asunder. Orcs died, reduced to nothing but ash, laughing as they breathed their last, stabbing at the monsters they wrestled with, joyous in life, joyous in death—their souls destined for a warrior's samsara.

  The second wave of orcs entered the fray before additional Fingerlings could enter the zone. The burning Pinkies were cut down and smashed apart upon adamantine shields and storm hammers that cracked the sky and unleashed fissuring bolts of lightning.

  While the orcs had their fun, Adam searched for Blackedge and found it in little time. A cluster of mangled Fingerlings caked together drew his attention. A few hair-thin threads of Psychomancy glided through the air, barely visible in the flashing carnage. The gleam of incandescence was what made Adam so certain.

  Hymn hadn't lied. The survivors of Blackedge had somehow managed to repurpose the Fingerlings they'd mentally enslaved and turned them into a hive to disguise the town itself.

  Adam didn't know who to praise this tactic for: his father's brilliance, Uva’s ingenuity, or Valor’s wisdom, but he was overcome with the urge to hug and squeeze the life out of every single person he could save from his home.

  His home. Adam felt something inside him dip down to a point of near-despair. Blackedge was beyond defiled. To be reduced to such means for survival, to see his town carved down to little more than ruins and then coated with the remains of nightmarish entities that had come to feast on those who remained…

  He should have been faster. He should have reached them sooner. He should have—Adam silenced that voice. That nagging feeling of doubt. That black cloud of depression. He would face that later. Right now, he needed to be a Pathbearer. Right now, he needed to be a Gate Lord.

  "I have eyes on Blackedge," Adam declared.

  "Well, technically I had eyes first," Hymn noted. The man casually stirred a cup of hot tea nearby, unbothered by all the carnage, unworried about the orcs eyeing him like he was a cut of premium beef.

  Adam rolled his eyes but carried on. "Extraction team, we're going across now. Court Leviathan," he called aloud, gesturing for Helix, "prepare yourselves. We're going in fast. Ignore all Fingerlings that aren't in the way of the town. We get there, we secure the town, we administer aid to the survivors, and we get them out. There is no greater objective for us. We get them out. Everything else, including suicide via eldritch abomination, can wait until afterward. Are we clear?"

  A series of muffled agreements and general nods greeted Adam. Going in with him would be the Culturist, the Educator, Gone, Candles, Five, Mortar, Tequila, Whisper, and Bonk. The Court Leviathan would follow them to serve as support and a carrier for the refugees if Jessica couldn’t manage to break contact with the monsters she was fighting and draw the town into Rusty like she did before. Hymn had other duties; he would provide them with intelligence and continue confounding and confusing the Stranger himself. He would also reach into the minds of the Fingerlings who drifted too close to the town and redirect them into the fray where Shiv and the orcs were.

  As Adam took in his motley crew, he found himself lamenting the fact that he didn't have a group so powerful during the first siege of Blackedge. This group could have fought off Sullain and the Tarrasque, could have spared so many more people from dying. This group could have changed things. Why was the world this way? Enough, Adam chided himself. Stop! Focus! Stop letting your mind drift!

  “Focus!” The Culturist said, echoing Adam's mind: “You have this. Do not let your mind split. Whatever is to happen will happen. Do all you can to shape your desired future.”

  Though the Gate Lord wanted to snarl something, to tell the orc to be silent, he disciplined himself. He was a Pathbearer, and it was the right move to make. It didn't matter what the Culturist did to him. It didn't matter what other baggage Adam still suffered. He needed to do the right thing. He needed to be the right man for Blackedge, for his family, for the people around him.

  You will not break me, System, Adam pledged to himself. Fuck you, and fuck every bit of your strife. I will not yield. I will soar. Do your worst. I will soar regardless. Burn me down to cinders, and I will rise on wings of flame.

  And with that, Adam drew his rapier. At once it flashed, and a small army of clones flashed into existence along with it. Each of them held their bows high and nodded to one another. "Cross!" Adam cried aloud. "Cross! Cross!"

  Vector wings flared. The Adams soared. They plunged across the dimensional pathways as if it were a field for them to take off from. In an instant, they were through. But ahead of them was Gone.

  She tore ahead in a bolt of golden lightning, not even leaving an afterimage. And it was a good thing she went first. Right outside, a Recollector was thrown into their path, having been blasted away from the battle, missing two of its fingers. But before its hundreds of eyes could even focus on them, every single one exploded in a shower of eldritch gore, and in less than a blink, its kilometer-long form was flayed free of skin in strips—like an apple being peeled—before it was split in half entirely down the middle by a crackle of golden lightning.

  Adam felt his throat go dry as the titanic abomination came apart in a shower of oil-thick blood and shattering fragments of Chronomancy. There was still quite a distance between a Hero and a Legend, and Gone made that known. She also proceeded to kill another three Recollectors before Adam could finish his blink.

  By the time his eyes closed and opened once more, she was clinging to his shoulders, piggybacking him with her claws—stained black with the blood of the Fingerlings—wrapped around his chest. "Removed our impediments. I think we're clear."

  "I… Yes, good job, Gone," Adam rasped, swallowing. “That was…”

  “Quick?” She gave Adam a rare smile, and he, along with all his clones, plunged ahead behind the Court Leviathan emerging from a large pathway. Orc Dimensionalists were positioned within the massive flying beast, as was a small army of Biomancers. Soon, the Leviathan joined the fray as well, lashing out with its tendrils, its bio-matter reshaping down the middle, prepared to serve as a carrier for all of Blackedge's survivors.

  Soaring through the Stranger's realm, Adam and his many clones drew back their bows and fired as one. Pathways opened. The arrows impacted the hive of interfused Fingerlings surrounding Blackedge. And as soon as they struck, the Adams emerged on the other side, performing another jump—so as not to give away Blackedge's true position prematurely.

  The moment Adam emerged from the second set of portals, he felt a gliding sensation off his helmet. He realized that it was Uva reaching out for him, and he immediately dropped his Magical Resistance. "Uva, how are—"

  "Hurry!" she screamed. Her voice was filled with pain and desperation. "Hurry! I've done all I could. Get them across, now! Before I run out of—” Her voice cut off with a choked gasp of agony, and he almost vomited as he felt something fracture inside of her mind, inside of her soul.

  “Not yours anymore. Finally. No more time. Now! Now! NOW!” Another voice usurped Uva’s—one that sounded like her, but not nearly enough.

  She ripped her Psychomancy away from Adam—and his insides dropped entirely. There was no reason for Uva to do that unless she wanted to spare him from feeling her end, from being compromised by whatever was eating her from the inside.

  Adam's eyes widened in alarm. "No, no, hold on! We're here. We're right here! We made it!" He clenched his teeth as he prepared to cleave into the Fingerlings surrounding the town. There wasn't any obvious opening, and the Recollector's bodies were too durable for Adam to blast through quickly. He needed to—

  Once more, Gone vanished. He felt a burst of her Chronomantic lightning this time, and suddenly the path before him was shorn clean. A massive chasm was carved through the eldritch biomatter blocking him from the town itself. Then he saw it. After so long, his home, Starhawk's Perch, was revealed to him once more.

  The others followed close behind as Adam blasted inward. His many clones took up a defensive position, and he continued triggering his rapier intermittently, summoning more to replace the ones who vanished.

  As the Gate Lord blurred through the gap in the Fingerlings' flesh, he made for the apex of Starhawk's Perch. An apex where all the few remaining Psychomantic mana strands converged; an apex which was brimming with colors that made Adam's very sanity recoil. Colors that grew brighter. Colors that were at the precipice of bursting.

  "Uva!" Adam breathed. "We're here, just hold—"

  Before he could finish his desperate plea, the azure sun above his head was swallowed as colors he didn't have names for erupted out from the center of Blackedge in a catastrophic wave.

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