Path of the Deathless

120 (I) Offer [II]

-The Challenger to Hero-Ranger Morgan Munny120 (I)

Offer [II]

For Shiv, the transition was instantaneous. One moment, he was in the gate, the next he was lying somewhere underground, packed tight within a mass of corpses. Writhing maggots and the feeling of festering flesh assailed him, and he found himself staring at the face of a dead elf. Her face was crushed and mangled on the right, but more intact on the left. Her pale, green left eye stared on through him, her mouth hanging open in eternal horror.

For a beat, Shiv just stared. Then the stench hit him, dear , the stench. It was like pure, distilled death. It crawled up his nostrils, and it nearly made him empty his stomach right then and there. With a flex of his gravitic field, a blast of force detonated off his body. The head that stared at him disintegrated, as did all the other corpses that were stacked over his person. A pocket opened around him. A pocket that misted with blood and decay. Spraying viscera and rotting patches of flesh rained down from above.

As he gathered his bearings, his heart spiked. Shiv spun on his heels, prepared for any adversary, any kind of fight. But as he did, he took in more of his surroundings, and his face contorted in a look of disgust.

"Yeah," Shiv muttered to himself, "of course you'd take me to a place like this."

He was in a cave. Its space was narrow and claustrophobic, but it wasn’t a cave made of stone and lined with soil on the ground. There were faces sticking out of the tunnel of flesh, stitched together and properly cured. Arms dangled down from the ceiling, and some of them had lanterns threaded through the decaying flesh. All around him were expressions of horror frozen in that final death rictus of their lives.

The Challenger's voice made the entire cavern shake, and Shiv heeded the god's words. He stared down along the path laid out by the lanterns, and they cast a trail that led toward a narrow crevice. The dancing radiance of candles slipped along the cleft of said crevice, and Shiv expected another area entirely to be waiting for him on the other side.

But though Shiv heard the orc's words, he didn't accept them. He had no intention of staying here or going along in this nightmarish hellpit, so he simply accelerated through a wall of bodies and kept going. As soon as he blasted through a section of the corpse-forged cave, the Challenger laughed, sounding like a grandfather beholding the antics of a small child.

Blood and ruined flesh peeled around Shiv, and he hit a brief stretch of open air before slamming into a hard surface. A sound of bending metal sang out to him, and Shiv felt himself dent what was a surface of reinforced titanium. The alloy beneath him caved some more until he finally pulled himself to a stop, pulsing his field a few more times to stabilize himself in the air.

As he looked down at what he'd just hit, he realized it was the ruined chassis of an automaton. Its body was twice the size of Shiv's, even in his current venom-enhanced form, but it was long dead and had a large hole on the side of its abdomen. A single cyclopean optic stared at Shiv. The reflections from nearby lights made it glisten with momentary brightness before that faded as well.

Behind Shiv, the small mound of bodies he'd emerged from collapsed.

Tearing his focus away from the automaton, he finally noticed that wind was flowing around him. The air was foul and thick with the smell of iron and rot, and as he let his gaze wander across the world, he found himself in a hellscape no better than the pit of death.

The sky was a dark, uncanny thing, overhung by an uninterrupted carpet of clouds that rolled across the horizon like spilled paint the colors of rust and burned corpses.

The landscape was nothing but a rolling expanse of bodies, of broken chassis, of smoldering ruins, and of tarnished treasures. Shiv blinked as he tried to process just where exactly he was. The place was the very embodiment of an apocalypse. There was no life he could see for leagues around, and only the faintest shimmer of vitality layered itself upon this place, an even fainter shimmer than that which painted Integrated Earth.

Bodies ran from horizon to horizon, and Shiv finally realized that he had seen this place once before, in a vision of the Pathbearer he despised the most.

As he remembered the sight of 811 being reborn, he saw that the corpses on the surface were also particularly wounded in a different way than the ones in the cave. Their torsos had been torn open from the inside.

Like something had hatched from them.

Immediately, Shiv turned his Biomancy on himself. He checked his organs. He made sure there was nothing in there with him, and only then did he relax slightly. Shiv wouldn't put it beyond the Challenger to implant a parasite in his body and call that good entertainment as it hatched.

the Challenger noted.

"Never call me yours again," Shiv spat. "It's only funny when Uva does it, it's creepy when you say it."

the Challenger said, voice high with provocation.

"I suppose I can blow out my ears and then tell you to go fuck yourself."

"No, asshole. I’d commit self-harm for . I just don't want to hear your flapping lips. And knock off the weird possessive shit. I know you’re listening in to my conversations and watching me live. Get your own joke."

A very human-like snort came from the Challenger, but he hummed.

Just then, there came a flash right above, and the deafening echo of a thunderclap thereafter. The sky rumbled, and through clouds of pitch blackness, stained red with misted blood, fell a deluge of shapes. The shapes were humanoid and robotic, but there were also broken ruins of once-great structures, of shattered weapons from different ages and places Shiv had never known.

But to Shiv's astonishment, some of the bodies were still moving, still glowing with vitality. And as they fell from the sky, plunging fast, they splashed into the rolling mounds of death and decay, as if raindrops feeding an ocean. Some of them came apart upon impact, turning into bursts of spraying gore.

But Shiv's Vitae highlighted the survivors. They still burned bright, like lingering patches of flame among cooling embers. Their voices sang out then, and Shiv heard the madness in their throats, the growls of bloodthirst, the shouts of a ravenous frenzy. Some of them struck at each other with spell and blade, even on the way down, attacking anything that was near them, unleashing waves of destruction upon the ruined world.

One of the falling shapes landed nearby. It was the body of an automaton. One of its three arms was broken, barely hanging on by wires, and its face was lined with cracked, pulsing optics.

Shiv drew back on his gravitic field, and he slowly glided away from the writhing automaton. The damaged bot reached out for him, lashing out with its remaining limbs. But its movements were too uncontrolled. It flung itself over and landed on its chest. And then Shiv sensed a lifeform within the automaton’s body. A life form slamming itself against the inner machinery of the bot as it tried to escape.

The automaton’s metal chassis dented outward, bending unnaturally and violently. And then it stopped. The automaton went still beside the shaking of its body. Sparks burst out from between its joints. But as its life sputtered out, something slammed itself against the insides of the bot again and again.

The dents grew larger, more severe, until finally, the metal comprising the automaton tore open, and large, gray fingers reached out from the inside. There came a deafening bellow, a roar of effort as a large creature hatched free from the automaton.

Its gray-skinned body was unblemished, smooth like that of a child, but its face was that of a cruel purpose, full of wonder and awe at the pain it knew it could inflict.

Its eyes were bright yellow, and as its head rose free from the broken automaton's body, its gaze fell upon Shiv. The orc’s face twitched for a moment, as if it wasn't sure how to control its muscles, but slowly, a wide, genial smile spread across its features. As the orc’s jowls tightened and his lips flared, Shiv could see all the pointed teeth gleaming inside the gray brute’s mouth. The orc was smaller than the others, fresher, less marred, but it was an orc still, and it was an orc in every single way.

Another rumble came from above. More bodies fell and struck the ground. Countless flickering beacons of vitality blinked out upon impact, but some endured. Some endured until they winked out too moments later, replaced by other flames emerging from within them.

More orcs rose across the horizon. They ripped free from the bodies and ruins, death serving as the cocoon to their metamorphosis. And they let out bellows, cries, bestial shouts, announcing their birth from the ruined husks of people that were.

the Challenger proclaimed.

Shiv grimaced as he flew across the sky, dodging falling corpses and debris. "This is what would have happened to me if I didn’t fuse Culinary Berserker?"

the Challenger said.

“Yeah, it sounds to me you’re just spitting bullshit to justify all of this.”

“And what fancy words are you going to use to explain just shoving me in a pit filled with corpses?”

“Fuck you.”

A loud chuckle came from the Challenger, and though unseen, the orc god’s breath was felt like a hurricane brushing across the world. The small orc near Shiv launched himself into the air, reaching for the Deathless, teeth bared to sample the large human’s flesh. But the winds unleashed by the Challenger grasped the newborn orc and flung him far into the distance. The sudden spike in acceleration snapped the orc’s arms and legs. Yet, rather than screaming out in pain, he laughed.

In the orc’s wide, yellow eyes, Shiv saw the beast's unparalleled pleasure in simply being alive, and an insatiable urge to strive and slay.

As Shiv watched the orc get carried away, the Challenger continued his speech. "

"So your orcs are just, what, parasites?" Shiv asked.

the Challenger echoed, sounding almost offended.

“My father didn’t offer me a Path,” Shiv said, clenching his teeth in confusion. He balled his fists as he looked up into the sky. “My father was a sick, twisted felling shit who murdered—”

the Challenger interrupted, sounding frustrated for the first time.

“Georges?” Shiv blinked. The anger in him broke, replaced by discomfort. “He… he isn’t my father.”

“I… Yeah, but—”

Shiv was silent by this point.

Shiv frowned at the shrinking form of the newborn orc, then shook his head to clear his wandering thoughts. “So. Your orcs hatch from these consumed Pathbearers… and they have the Pathbearer’s Paths?”

Shiv was getting tired of the Challenger’s constant prattling. “Right. Cool. Great. Glad you like to talk. Now, how about you tell me what this offer is so you can send me back before I see if I can tear a hole open in your realm with my Vitaemancy. I put a few holes in reality earlier. Didn’t like doing that back on Earth, but right here, right now, I don’t think I much give a shit.” Shiv let his Vitae streams swirl around his body for a moment, but the Challenger remained unimpressed.

the Challenger said casually. Orıginal content can be found at novel•fire.net

"Wouldn't call any of this shit nutritional," Shiv replied.

The Challenger picked his words carefully, and slowly Shiv stopped clenching his fists. Shiv knew the orc god was using some kind of Social Skill on him, but it didn’t feel overly invasive. It just made Shiv want to listen.

"I will," Shiv said. There wasn't any doubt in his voice at all. Someday… Someday, he was going to have it out with the Challenger. Someday, he was going to know how to kill a god.

the Challenger mused,

The Challenger's last words were so unexpected that they gave Shiv whiplash. "Excuse me? Did you just say that? Did I hear you right?"

the Challenger proclaimed.

And Shiv did see them.

He saw the maddened Pathbearers writhing on the ground, their limbs madly clawing out, their skills blasting chunks out of the land—chunks made of corpses of other fallen Pathbearers.