Path of the Deathless

87 (I) Companions [I]

-Captain Harry Irons, TacStrat 101, Phoenix Academy87 (I)

Companions [I]

Uva woke from the grip of a torturous nightmare with a cry of terror. She couldn’t remember what she was dreaming about. Her mind felt raw and ravaged. Her body felt loose and limp and—

It was then Uva realized she didn't just feel that way; her body flat and thin as a silken bedsheet. The Umbral Psychomancer’s mind reeled. Memories hammered back into her. Of the entity, of Shiv, and of the voice that whispered to her in their moment of absolute desperation. A voice that she could still hear murmuring inside her eyes, with its power nested within her very flesh. But there was another noise as well: ragged gasps. Someone was trying to stop sobbing. Adam!

Uva’s insides popped as she forced herself to For a beat, she didn’t know if she could, but her body responded to her, remembering the exact shape and dimensions she used to have. As she returned to her original state, Uva felt the uncanny changes brought upon her by her Master-Tier Physicality Skill Evolution. It felt like she had a strange level of control over every part of her body, and that she could twist and reshape herself at a whim. She tried doing that on instinct, and she managed to overinflate her head to an absurd degree. The damaged remnants of the armor around her neck felt tight, but it didn’t impede her breathing either.

Non-Euclidean Morphology > 101

With a brief effort, Uva returned to her original state and pinched her flesh. Her skin and body felt the same as before. Yet, with a flex of her new she managed to turn her head backward like an owl—even twist it and sink it into her body. The control she had over her shape now was uncanny. She could bend and deform in ways that would cripple or kill most other people without any difficulty.

Uva stared down at herself. Her arms and legs were exposed in places. Her chestplate was cracked, and her Arachnae Order uniform was exposed between the gaps. She looked around and found herself inside the teleportation anchor they used as their base of operations.

Uva thought with a grimace. She saw the Guardshead die. It was so sudden, brutal, and unnatural that none of them could have done anything. The thing that took over Confriga had killed her in an instant. And that filled her with a cold dread.

And then she heard him. Shiv was screaming. There was so much pain in his cries that she choked. Her body tensed with trauma and discomfort, but she clamped her emotions down using a mana strand before they could compromise her rational thinking. They couldn’t afford that right now—she didn’t have time to be traumatized, she needed to get back into the fight. They all needed to get back in the fight. Shiv was buying time for them. Now, they needed to make it worth it.

“Stop—, please, I can’t—just stop please…” Uva turned and found Adam clutching his head, whimpering to himself. He was openly sobbing, and his mind—Composer, his mind was in a wretched state. She cast one of her Psychomancy threads into him and let out a moan of sympathetic pain. If she was traumatized, Adam was near the point of insanity due to exposure to the entity. It had torn his mind to pieces. Uva had rescued slaves who endured unspeakable tortures at the hands of the First Blood, and most of them weren’t nearly as psychologically wounded as Adam.

A roar sounded from Shiv. Followed by a heavy impact. But the wretched screaming didn’t stop. Uva sealed away another portion of her mind. She didn’t want to know what the entity was doing to him—she refused to know. Uva would do everything she could to mend his mind after. If they won this fight.

Valor lay scattered across the ground beside Can Hu, the Legend’s ghostly silhouette gone. Both of them were unresponsive. Overhead, the Graven Cage containing the Animancy Core crackled quietly in the dim ambiance. The Aviary owl, meanwhile, was listening. She immediately made the spy go to sleep before doing anything else.

“Adam,” Uva said as she worked on his memories. The damage he'd sustained was severe, but the good thing was that she knew the source. She sealed away a good portion of his near-term memories—every glimpse and gaze he laid on the entity. It horrified her to realize that his Magical Resistance didn’t protect him at all, but then again, this entity wasn’t exactly magic. It was… .

something with Uva's own voice said, its presence lurking within her very sight.

Uva said, clenching her teeth. She used her Psychomancy to replace her utter terror with cold fury as best she could. “Why did you aid me? What do you want?”

If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Despite everything, Uva scoffed silently. “Love? I am unavailable. I am courting someone else right now, and have little interest in expanding my desires.”

“U-Uva?” Adam gasped as Uva quarantined the last of the malignant memories. She knelt down beside him, examining his face. “I thought—I thought you were…” He slammed into her, holding her in a desperate embrace as he shuddered.

Uva reciprocated and tightened her hold as another deafening bellow sounded from above.

She wouldn’t think about what the entity was doing to Shiv. She wouldn’t.

After a moment of comfort, she broke the hug, pushing Adam back and making him look at her. His expression remained wretched. Shame and self-loathing burned inside his mind, and he couldn’t meet her gaze.

Uva ignored the Dreamtaker as Adam whispered. “I… I ran. I left him. I left him behind with that… ”

“Adam,” Uva said, her voice firm but gentle. “I need you to focus. Shiv told us what he was planning. Now, we make use of the time he bought for us. We find a way to kill that thing and help Shiv.”

“Kill that thing?” Adam hissed. “Can it even be killed? It—I don’t even know what it did—how it did. There was nothing we could do! Nothing!” He clutched his throat and swallowed. “I still—I can still feel it pulling at my head. My bones—Shiv saved me… And I just left him with that thing.”

“Adam!” Uva snapped. She jolted his mind with a surge of Psychomancy and drew his focus to her. “I know. I know. The feelings you have are not wrong. But you are not wielding them right. I need you to focus. I need you to stand with me and come up with a strategy.”

“I don’t know—” Adam’s face contorted in pain. “I don’t… I don’t know if I can face it again. I don’t know. I’ll—I’ll need to use Seer of Horizons to study and…. I looked at it and my mind—”

“I can keep your mind together. I will.” Uva swallowed back her own discomfort. “It will be painful. But I will not let you go mad. Do you trust me?”

Adam hesitated, and he looked at her. For a long, hard moment, he just studied her. “Yes. More than I trust even myself right now.”

“And I feel the same,” Uva said. “I cannot do what you do. I cannot watch the entity from afar, and I don’t—I don’t know what to do either. But together, maybe—” At another guttural scream of anguish, Uva closed her eyes and forced herself not to think about the torture being inflicted on Shiv. “Together we can do this. We have to. Heneeds us. Please. I cannot save him alone.”

***

Uva’s eyes were a kaleidoscope of colors. Mesmerizing colors. Strange colors. Colors Adam couldn’t comprehend. But as a single tear rolled down her right eye, Adam fought his way through the terror that gripped him.

The entity… Even with its appearance and the things it did to him repressed by Uva, just thinking about it made Adam want to break down and run, to renounce ever being a Pathbearer and retreat into seclusion. How could such a thing exist? And how could he be so helpless, so hopeless against it? And how could he call himself a Pathbearer now that he had abandoned his ?

And through it all, the System was mocking him. It was mocking all of them. It made Shiv the only one capable of confronting the entity head-on by granting him Chronomancy. But he couldn’t beat it alone. It gave Uva—the only one among them with the psychological capacity to resist the entity’s aberrant nature—the ability to physically resist it, but she still couldn’t reach it or affect its Chronomancy-guarded mind. And Adam… He felt useless. He felt hopeless. And a searing rage boiled inside his gut as he finally regained enough coherence to look at his newest notifications.

Select a Skill to Evolve to Master-Tier

Bowslinger > 96

Wings of the Starhawk > 98

Seer of Horizons > 115

Veilpiercer > 109

Tactical Overseer > 81

Skill Gained: Divination 1 (Adept)

Skill Gained: Necromancy 1 (Adept)

He remembered when he got the skill. The skill he always wanted so badly. He was trying to get the thing to stop hitting Shiv. Adam strained his Awareness as hard as he could, guessing where the entity might be as he pulled at his bow over and over, his vambrace crackling like never before—but all of his arrows just vanished from existence. And then something was tearing him apart again. He remembered… He remembered the cold touch of death again. For a few moments, he drifted close to the edge. That place of no return.

Uva’s magic tightened around his mind and stopped him from collapsing into a panic attack, but Adam still dry heaved.

And now, every few seconds, the entity was hurting Shiv. Adam managed to control himself before he began another despair spiral.

The ancient Pathbearer’s skull was cracked and leaking some kind of magic. Can Hu’s body constantly whined from the damage it had sustained.

It was just him and Uva.

He stared at his skill notifications and drew in a long, ragged breath. “It’s just a bastard.”

“What?” Uva said.

“The System. Do you think it enjoys this? Enjoys our pain and misery?” She didn’t have an answer. Adam continued. “Divination. I got the Divination Skill. Right now. All my life, I wanted… It was something that my mother had. I wanted to have something like what she had. And now. It gives this to me now.” Adam laughed bitterly. “It’s like being skinned alive and then being handed the knife with the handle towards you. It’s sculpting us. Or hoping that we die. And the Necromancy. Why…”

But Adam knew why. The System rarely did something without reason. Everything was to facilitate more struggle, death, and toil. Slowly, he turned to regard the Graven Cage drifting above him, then gazed toward the distant center of the gate, where the portal to Vulketh swirled, and he remembered an alternative plan they had discussed.

There were risks to it, but it probably would have worked without fully destabilizing the gate, as the blast would be contained within another dimension. And with that thought, the beginnings of a desperate plan began to form in Adam’s mind. “The Animancy Core,” he gasped. He was still raw of mind and broken of spirit, but there was a direction now. A fragile strand of hope against the uncanny creature they were fighting. “If… We can kill it. Or at least make it a god's problem. We need to get the core across to Vulketh, then lure the entity through at the same time. And then we detonate it. I'll find a way to destabilize a cage. Somehow. I… the System, this is why it gave me Necromancy. So I can do this. So I can examine how to do this without Valor. I'm sure of it…”

Uva went quiet as she stared at the core. He could feel her plucking at his memories, studying his thoughts.

“I don’t know if it can work,” Adam admitted. “I don’t know if anything can kill this thing. I barely understand anything about the entity, but it is the only thing I can think of. Nothing we do has even affected it. Shiv is the only one that managed to hurt it, and now—”

Shiv howled out again, and the pain carried by his voice was even more severe than previously.

Adam clamped his hands against his ears as Shiv grew silent again, but Uva’s grimacing expression nearly sent him into another spiral. She was right. There was no more time for this self-loathing misery bullshit. They needed to come up with something and do it right now.

Maybe Shiv could endure the torture, but Adam wasn’t going to be able to stay sane if he kept hearing those screams.

“We—shit!” Adam snarled. “I had Shiv drop the obsidian tower on the third gateway. It’s blocked. We’ll need to get that opened again. I—we need to make sure the cage is in position. The other side is nothing but a sea of molten metal—aside from the extended elevator shaft. I’ll need to see if we can hide the cage there. But we need to get the entity there somehow. We still need Shiv. He is the only one that can pin it—who can physically contend with its strength and Chronomancy long enough. We need to save him from this bloody thing first, but… but how?”

And then, a voice sounded out from Uva—but she wasn’t speaking.