Path of the Deathless

361 Split [II]

—The Challenger361

Split [II]

As the orc god’s declaration left almost all Legends present cowed and frozen in indecision, there was one who stepped forth

“Back, Challenger,” Valor called, his eyes flaring with power, cloak rippling. “Away from my disciples. They are not yours to ruin.”

the Challenger’s voice rumbled with thunderous mirth.

A pillar of crimson lightning cleaved the firmament and pierced through the already gaping wound lining the top of Courtney. The Court Leviathan shrieked and bucked—and was nearly driven into the ground as something struck it like a hammer greeting an anvil. The bolt struck the insides of the captain's quarters, and with it came a baleful light and darker presence.

Shiv felt the Challenger’s choking presence before he saw him, before the light dissipated and revealed the god’s mortal guise.

The rot and decay of corpses. The vapors of the battlefield, born of melted rubber and ruptured fuel cells—chemicals that could form a concoction that would envenom a set of lungs from within. All that and more wafted off from the Challenger's body in consuming waves, and the orc god himself loomed a full meter taller than even the greatest of his lesser children—but his true dimensions remained unclear. It just seemed that he was taller, bigger, like a shadow looming even up close. Yet he was closer. Shiv could feel him, could see his empathetic core and the movements of his colossal mind. The Psychomancy which portrayed his thoughts revealed an ocean beyond Shiv's fathoming, an ocean larger than galaxies, perhaps. There was so much happening within the Challenger's mind at all times. He was connected to so many things, a million million threads of mana, spread out in all directions.

For the briefest of glimpses, Shiv perceived the sheer vastness of the Challenger's realms.

It left the Deathless lost. It left the Deathless reeling.

Longinus had been in power enough, power greater than his by a magnitude even now, but the Challenger made Longinus look like a crippled animal unfit for Divinity. Worst of all, Shiv couldn't see any imbalance, not in the Challenger's mind nor his heart, and his body... his body didn't even need to be mentioned. He was the idealized form of humanoid power, robust, immense, wrapped in a suit of armor that was designed in ceremonial homage to war itself.

The vestments chosen by the Challenger were a thing designed between brigandine and a nobleman's long coat. Shiv suspected that it was in mockery of Adam and his lineage. The layered plates that made up the Challenger's warforged coat were comprised of scar tissue, rusted metal, bits harvested from corpses, screaming faces, organs that still pulsated—a nest of flesh wrapped over beating hearts. This was a wretched parody of nature, for war had its own moss in the form of pestilence: flies swarming across the land, rot and decay swallowing ruins and mass graves, dying embers that kindled what remained of cities, of people, of history.

The Challenger proclaimed himself the God of Strife and Violence, so it was fitting that his Avatar was shaped from all aspects of strife and war, but there was something else. He was . Parts of him were being scalded, like a radiant infection was slowly eating away at his skin, corroding the very armor that protected him, inflicting a sprawl of glowing blisters. But rather than writhe in pain, a look of rapt fascination and borderline appreciation became the Challenger's expression. His eyes, bright like a city cast aflame, then red like pools of blood exsanguinated from a billion bodies, and dark at the center as if a pit leading to a boundless abyss for which all who fell would be cast and fed, were locked upon Adam, feasted upon the Paragon’s comatose form with something akin to possessive lust.

A gale of absolute terror swept through Shiv. His instincts were afire, begging him to move, to stop the Challenger before he could approach Adam.

Broken or not, he forced himself to move. The act was pure agony. His body was not ready for this kind of exertion, but pain and suffering be damned, he wouldn't let it be what this cruel bastard of a god had in store for his friend. Not in this life, not in any life, not in any dimension, reality, or timeline. It was impossible. He refused.

The Harbinger's desperate cries died as a rising scream. Things inside Shiv turned brittle and broke. His vitals spilled out of him in tumbles of red, and the Challenger turned briefly from Adam to smile at Shiv. The primordial orc's face lit up with glee as he saw Shiv approach him with a stumbling step

The glee stayed even as Valor drove an Animancy-infused blade at the orc god's eye.

It was followed by another, empowered by sickly green mana that was meant to rot and wither. Both blades shattered without ever touching the orc's skin.

Shiv didn't see what happened after. Only that the after-effects came like a mana bomb had gone off inside the captain's quarters.

One moment, Valor was behind the orc god, trying to drive his knives into his skull. The next, the Challenger had made a full turn, and Valor had seemingly been blasted through a series of walls, shredding the tissues of Courtney along the way. The shock wave from the impact wounded Shiv further—tore an entire chunk of Vitae out of his left chest and upper shoulder. It didn't stop him from throwing himself at the Challenger.

But he wasn't the only one who acted. Hymn, Jessica, Roland, Uva, and Can Hu were all on the attack. They recovered faster than Shiv did, and assailed the Challenger from all sides.

Their blows folded around the orc's form. Instead of causing him any injury, it simply caused parts of his armor and sections of his scarred flesh to flare, as if a cemetery lit at night. It seemed like the Challenger was absorbing the incoming wound that was meant to be. Cuts that were supposed to line his face were swallowed by existing tissues and rents lining his armor. Blasts delivered by Can Hu's missile salvos were merged with the sprawling tides of fire that continued traveling along the channels of the Challenger's plates. Roland's arrows lit the world with a glorious kaleidoscope of color, and one never flew alone. Each became a swarm unto themselves, then an army, then a tide, but none ever got anywhere close to the Challenger. For the orc held up a hand, and the arrows obeyed.

Roland let out a shout, and Shiv heard something snap inside the Town Lord’s soul. Still, Roland Arrow did not stop pushing. He infused his flock of projectiles with more power, and they burned ever brighter. So did he. His very form came alight with the Starhawk's presence. Even within the Challenger's realm, there came an intrusion, an invading god, a shadowy visage of incandescence and glorious retribution. For where an Avatar could not stand against the divine alone, another, more equal adversary should take his place and deliver the truth of his Domain of Justice upon the beast which named himself War.

Jessica struck now, Rusty flicking along the Challenger’s eyes. Any other being would have been blinded. Any other orc would have seen their skull carved in two. No such injury met the Challenger's form.

Valor returned far faster than Shiv could have ever imagined. It had been a fraction of a second ago when the ancient Pathbearer was knocked aside. Now he had returned, with new blades and a series of magical rays that wrapped around the Challenger, binding him in a cage of Necromancy. There was a patch open at the front, a patch for Shiv to approach, and he did, slamming shoulder-first into the orc god's body and trying to drain him.

Before Shiv could make contact, the Challenger performed a simple gesture: he pointed down with his thumb, and it felt like an entire world had slammed into Shiv's back. A second snap filled the room. This time, it wasn't a soul or a skill that was cracking. It was Shiv himself. His back split in half. All sensation left his body as his fingers became like steel logs, unable to curl, unable to move. What felt like electric fire crawled through his body, compromised his self-control.

That lasted until Shiv dove Backstage. The Deathless tumbled out of reality and context. But the Challenger was far too aware, his Reflexes Skill too far beyond mortal reckoning to be caught by surprise. If he suffered any confusion from Shiv's absence, he didn't show it. Instead, his downward-pointed finger curled just as the Starhawk came alight like a supernova above his champion and unleashed the Divinity-infused arrow, trailing fiery plumage twice Roland's height in length, and so potent that Shiv felt its piercing presence even beyond the veil of Integration.

The Starhawk loosed his shot. A shockwave tore its way across the world, leaving a swell of divine mana and screaming frequencies in its wake. Peering at the world from Backstage made magic more visible, but left the material obscured. Shiv couldn't hear anything aside from the screaming of excited divine ripples.

But he could still see, and separate everyone from their colors, from the hues that marked their magic. Jessica was a source of Dimensionality, static bleeding from her blade, but in her armor, she herself was clean, barren, like pure clay amidst a panoply of colors. Roland was bright and wrathful, furious like a star about to explode. While Adam was of a softer sunrise, yet blue and pure like the promise of the horizon, a promise of virtue and brighter days. Looking upon Valor made Shiv shudder. The ancient Undying was in pieces. It was like looking upon a dismembered flame. Bits of Animancy were wrapped around a coating of Necromancy, and then all other aspects of his soul were scattered, with only a few skills protruding. It was the equivalent of looking upon a mutilated body, except Shiv beheld a shattered soul. He couldn't fully describe it; he couldn't even understand it. He lacked the knowledge, but it disgusted him still.

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Yet the horror involved by Valor's scattered self could not compare to the nightmare manifest that was the Challenger.

The God of Strife was beyond mana.

Looking upon him was like looking into a new face imprinted upon reality. It was like looking at every atrocity committed during every war waged since the dawn of time, stretched on eternally, unto infinity, across all history. It was like looking upon worlds burned, billions upon billions of innocents impaled on pikes, kept alive by the foulest touch of Biomancy so that their anguish could be drawn on longer, so that their minds could be harvested into Psychomantic bombs that would be further used to brutalize their sibling worlds. It was the orphaning of babes, of orcs taking the children as janissaries and wielding them against their cousin peoples.

It was the depravity that followed when worlds once dedicated to harvest were rendered barren, countless trillions howling, eating their beloved pets and everything that still crawled between the cracks of their long-cold hearths. Parents fell upon children, children fell upon each other, and siblings made bargains unthinkable, even when they stayed together. They peeled bits of flesh and traded it, sacrificing limbs for days, then patches of skin for hours longer before they finally broke from hunger.

And within every act of wrongness laughed the Challenger. He wasn't just a physical incarnation of ruin and destruction; he was every cruelty, every action of war and those that followed, a face of the depths they fell to. He epitomized the horrors they became, the horrors enacted in the name of survival and triumph and dominance. It was he who dominated, for everyone who succumbed to their depravity, to their despair, to their base animal instincts, understandable or not, gave him power.

The worst among them were blessed by the Challenger. For he whispered to them in their darkest time, offering them an Orcish Skill—their only chance to survive the torments that he wrought. If only they would give themselves to him, and if only they would overcome the rage and brutality he imprinted upon their souls.

Within those visions, overwhelmed by those experiences, already driven to the brink during his fight with Longinus, Shiv came close to breaking psychologically. Even the briefest glance at the visage of the…

…was almost too much. But Shiv's mind wasn't purely human. It was built off of a thing that was meant to destroy and end worlds as well. Once the Challenger’s truth tore deep enough into Shiv's ego, it found something equally vicious, snarling back even as his sanity veered close to the brink.

“Get—get the fuck out of my head!” Where almost anyone else on Integrated Earth would have come asunder in heart and mind, Shiv shook his head and gritted his teeth until they cracked, snarling animal more than person, regressed to a near beast. But still the beast held on, and it dragged what was left of his humanity with it while his Harbinger echoed inside as well. The skill was vulnerable and fragile, but it refused to succumb, and it did what it could to hold him together and to keep itself alive. “Get—”

Shiv's words died into a horrified rasp in the back of his throat.

He saw then what was happening on the other side of Integration.

The Starhawk's arrow had not landed. The Challenger had not been pierced. Instead, a swirl of Dimensionality was open before him, and in his right hand dangled Adam, unmistakable from the nascent divinity he exuded.

Resting directly upon Adam's forehead was the Starhawk's arrow, halted just in time to spare the Paragon an unworthy demise.

A third snap passed through Shiv, a snap of anger that he'd been holding in for so long. With his psychology skill crumbled, there was nothing that could check Shiv's rage, and he went thoughtless. He didn't hear the girl who didn't exist screaming at him. He couldn't heed any of his battered and savage skills. He didn't even know himself, but he still felt. He felt strong. He knew what Adam was, what he represented, even if he couldn't manage the words, and so Shiv moved. He came behind the Challenger and leapt out from the Backstage, back into reality, driving his cutting aura into the orc god's flesh.

Cleaving into Longinus' mind and soul already felt like trying to slice through a mountain using blunt knives. The Challenger was nigh-infinite worlds of war incarnate, heat and fire, the falling of artillery, the desperation of families betraying nation and neighbor to save their young until they could not even do that.

Shiv's cutting aura didn't even leave a scratch on the Challenger. If he chipped the orc god at all, the wound he left was so slight he couldn't perceive it. But Shiv didn't care. He couldn't care. His emotions had slipped the leash of his mind, and he was tearing away, feral with violence. And he failed to notice how every act of violence he inflicted betrayed him. How his every blow fed more power into the Challenger, made his Domains flare brighter, gave his incandescence a greater glow. He didn't notice how his arms were cracking asunder until he was driving chipped and fissured nubs against the orc's unturned back. Still, Shiv continued stabbing and scratching. There was nothing, no thought, only an intent.

That intent was not enough.

Somewhere deep, deep inside him, he remembered the thing Jessica had told him: a true warrior would always slay an equal monster. And what hope did he have of beating the monsters of monsters if he was just a lesser monster?

The Challenger's voice was jovial, and it sparked a hint of cognition back into Shiv. Pain consumed every part of his body, but that wasn't what captured his attention.

What captured his attention was the evidence of what had transpired in his haze of rage. Roland had horrendous gashes lining his body. His armor had been punched all the way through, and he was down on one knee. Jessica was unmoving on the ground, her armor dented, legs folded in the wrong direction. Rusty lay beside her, almost snapped in half. Valor was not too far away, dormant and in pieces, and Can Hu fared little better, with the upper half of its body torn free from the lower. None of them was moving.

The only one who hadn't sustained any harm was, strangely, Hades Hymn. The Headmaster hid within a cocoon of crimson eyes, refusing to join the battle, and instead opting to use the Outside as some kind of shield to spare himself.

But neither he nor the dreadful states of the other Legends and Heroes present registered much in Shiv, for his gaze instinctively fell on the greater reason for dread before him.

Two of the Starhawk's four arms had been from his divine body, and he was clutching the wounds on his right limbs in open agony, incandescence bleeding freely into the air with notes that made reality seem to sing and scream.

A rush of confused disbelief and dread passed through Shiv. How had—

And suddenly he was seized. The Challenger's hand clasped him around his torso, held him tight, but gently. He didn't break any more of Shiv. The Deathless still struggled, still fractured himself trying to escape, but it was futile. He flinched back as a telepathic tendril licked his mind, injecting a flood of memories into him.

In the briefest of instants, in a span of time that was to a microsecond what a microsecond was to a second, in a moment that Shiv might have only been able to perceive if he held time still using his Legendary Chronomancy, the Challenger delivered his counter-attack, and he granted Shiv insight into how he struck from his perspective.

Pathbearers could be powerful.

Gods could be powerful.

Shiv had known power. The feeling and the actual concept. The ability to dominate and reshape even the rules of the world.

The Challenger was beyond powerful.

The Challenger was an axiom unto himself.

He was the darkness of war, personified and wielded by his own hand.

Shiv knew then that the Starhawk had made a mistake in firing his arrow at the Challenger. His action had merely been facilitating an aspect of the Challenger's power, for the act of justice and nobility rising to strike back against violence was still secondary to violence itself.

For might, though it did not make right, made law, and violence remained the first law before justice, before depravity, before all other things.

Violence was, and the Challenger was its face.

The Starhawk banished the eldritch with a fraction of his true might. The Starhawk was an Ascendant, and Shiv knew their wrath, but also their potential. The Starhawk allowed Roland to defy an overwhelming army, and Uva to survive for months, trapped in the Stranger’s Garden.

And the Starhawk was dismembered at a twitch of the Challenger’s finger—limbs coming free like the Ascendant of Justice was nothing more than a cheap figurine. Everyone else broke worse. Whoever directed violence upon the Challenger saw violence return to them a thousandfold. Valor's magics and stabs were turned on him, smote his soul, and cleaved his vulnerable being apart. Can Hu's missiles detonated inside of it, like they had never left, like his ammunition had always been compromised. Jessica's legs snapped as she tried to pierce through the Challenger, and Rusty broke beneath the strain, as if he were a blade of ordinary steel.

All this happened in an instant, faster than any of the Legends could react, any except Hades, who'd hesitated from the start, who knew what he was facing, who was gripped by fear. Shiv saw that. Even with the Harbinger so close to complete destruction, he saw the absolute, ice-cold terror that filled the Headmaster's empathetic core.

Shiv's battle madness parted from sheer disbelief. He had seen Valor intimidate the Stranger, had witnessed and himself taken the role of a Legend struggling against gods, and bleeding them. He had been able to survive a battle against an Ascendant, at least longer than a few seconds.

But the Challenger? He'd swept them all aside, like they were less than insects.

In the face of the God of Strife, the noble Starhawk was as helpless as Shiv.

And as Shiv returned to his own body, he found himself struggling not to tremble in fear.

He knew the Challenger was powerful, had always known, but he'd failed to conceptualize it.

Now he understood. No practitioner of violence could defy its very source. No more than light could rebel against a star.

But Shiv wasn’t light. And Shiv decidedly wasn’t smart right now. So rather than succumb to despair, he let out an animal growl and tried to headbutt the Challenger. He threw himself forward. The Challenger simply held him out further. Shiv struck nothing, and the orc god just chuckled. In the Challenger's other hand was Adam, his expression miserable, like he was trapped deep inside his subconsciousness, but still vaguely aware of what was happening.

Everyone else was disabled. Roland was still on one knee, trying to rise. The Starhawk, though still bleeding divine mana into the world, yet burned. Uva still resided within Adam, her tendrils drawn in tight, using his mind as a cover, waiting for an opportune time to strike the Challenger, or perhaps just trying not to draw his ire.

And that was the final thing that pulled Shiv back. Her. Adam. Everyone. And the Harbinger calling for him to calm and focus. Slowly, he regained control of himself, stopped kicking and straining against the inexorable incarnation of strife, and considered other options. “Challenger,” Shiv rasped through his suffering. “You wanna… wanna tell me what this shit is?”

The Challenger raised Shiv in front of his face and smiled genially.

“And you're gonna do that… because you're so generous?” Shiv scoffed, the haze of his rage fading as fast as it came. “Then what was the point of kicking all our asses? Was that the lesson? Don't touch what's yours?”

The Challenger didn't reply, at least not immediately. His head turned, and Shiv followed his dark gaze and found the orc god looking upon one of his finest sons. The Culturist lay dormant on the ground, aslumber in the middle of his Delve, and for the first time, Shiv felt genuine worry for the Legendary orc, where mostly he simply regarded the Culturist with hate for what he'd forced upon Adam.

the Challenger began. And his eyes snapped away from the Culturist as if he didn't matter at all.

Shiv snorted. “And you’d know something about that, huh?”

The Challenger held Adam high as a father would an infant in pride.

Roland’s roar of anger came as his answer. A chain of arrows struck the Challenger from behind. Each one bloomed, consuming him in a sphere of devastating mana. The orc god’s self-shaped Avatar didn’t even twitch. Instead, he grinned at Shiv as Roland continued unleashing arrows born of Animancy, Necromancy, Pyromancy, and all others, to no effect whatsoever.

The Challenger shifted Adam until the Paragon rested along the orc’s massive arm—like an actual infant. Then, amidst all the carnage, he whispered something to Adam:

The moment he spoke, imparting his divine will upon the Paragon, Uva struck. Her Psychomancy threads lashed out, and from her eldritch geometry speared forth a rush of fractured spiderlings.

She and her summons were promptly pinched in place as the Challenger clasped her with his divine field. Uva let out a hoarse yelp of pain as all her spiderlings were crushed into powder. Her body began cracking—somehow, the Challenger was putting enough pressure on her to clench the gaps that made up her being shut and seal away the Outside.

“Stop!” Shiv shouted. “You motherfucker! Stop!

But the Challenger ignored him now as well. Instead, he blinked and sighed with wonder as Uva’s corruptive influence spread across his divine mana like a plague.

And the violence was back on 4 Shiv. He saw Uva shaking and writhing, trying to free herself. The cracks that sounded from her came to the accompaniment of her biting back screams. But the Challenger’s grip slackened, and he let her breathe and cough and wheeze and recover.

Once more, the Challenger leaned in close to Adam.

And the weight of the Challenger’s words proved great, for Adam’s eyes snapped open in bloodshot alarm, and the first thing that left his lips was a wail of complete madness as his Awareness tore his mind apart.