[System]
You are a skilled LitRPG progression fantasy author. Write chapters based on the story bible and instructions provided.

## Premise
Path of the Deathless — a LitRPG progression fantasy. Path

Noun

A Path is a System-born metaphysical archetype that represents a fundamental truth of existence. Obtaining a Path unlocks an individual's ability to gain empowerment through Path Skills, wield true Magic, receive Blessings, and achieve recognized Feats of power or renown. Paths are not inherent; they must be either earned by performing a truly great deed or bestowed upon an individual by a powerful entity (such as a deity, an ancient spirit, or a comparable power). Without a Path, one is barred from ascension and apotheosis, and bound to the limits of mortality (See: Pathless). Once a Path is accepted, it cannot be surrendered or rejected.

## Main Character
Name: Shiv | Gender: male (he/him)
Key supporting characters: Georges, Adam, Arrow

## World & Power System
level-based progression; skills (e.g. Deathless, 1/1, The Pendulum of Burdens, Starhawk Arrow Cuirass, Restricted, Skill Merge Portal Break, 0/0, The Scorn of Umetia)
System notification style: "System-born metaphysical archetype that represents a fundamental t"

## Writing Style
third-person limited narration, past tense. Narration-focused (0% dialogue). Fast-paced, short punchy sentences.

[User]
Write 110 (II) Surface [II]
Target length: ~2500 words
Key events: combat-heavy

[Assistant]
High above the Old Santabar mountain ranges, a Dimensional gateway activated at the center of a ring-shaped skyship. The Dimensionalists within directed its magical frequencies, connecting the rift to their front-most forward operating base nested near the top of the chasm. A pool of distorted shadows formed thereafter.

For a second, nothing happened.

Then, five golden titanic shapes exploded out from the Dimensional mana. The Dimensionalists held the portal gateway open for another second before they closed it immediately. Even then, they had to scramble and reshape the Dimensionality mana before someone captured and recorded their frequency.

As they did what they could to cover their tracks, ten mind-linked primal dragons of time were directed downward through the clouds. Their bodies were coated in an adamantine barding, and built into the barding was a rider’s capsule on their back. Within, the Psychomancer-Riders of Interceptor Squadron Gold-Primary prepared themselves to intercept and eliminate the enemy.

“Gold-01 to Gold-Primary. Prime Necro-Throwers.” And from above the capsules emerged a modular weapon that resembled a flamethrower, containing a corrosive crystal instead of fuel tanks or a Pyromancy enchantment.

“Primed!”

“Primed!

“Primed and ready!”

A series of nine other telepathic confirmations followed.

One of the gold-scaled time dragons let out a wild shriek as it nearly triggered its Chronomancy.

“Gold-05, keep that dragon leashed until you receive clearance.”

“Affirmative, Gold-01.”

They burst through a final layer of clouds just as the sun descended past the curve of the horizon. A last glittering of light danced off their scales, and Gold-01 and his squadron muttered a quick prayer to the Great One.

Through the Awareness-boosting Enchantments lining the insides of his capsule, Gold-01 saw the massive ball of destruction in the distance. An entire section of Old Santabar had been cracked to the foundations. The earth was shaking.

“Damn the Dawn, but SC-Central wasn’t bullshitting when she said we were dealing with a Hero,” Gold-03 breathed.

“We’ve killed Heroes before,” Gold-08 whispered. And it was true. They had. And they were going to do it again today.

The squadron fell silent as a cataclysmic avalanche of fire and force crashed over the land. It didn’t look so different from how the tidal waves of the Pacific hammered against the Tidewall. Ahead of the destruction was a mass of crawling darkness. Just looking at it filled Gold-01 with unease.

“Creeping Void,” Gold-01 said, recognizing the skill.

“What?” Gold-02 asked. “Isn’t that a skill common for krakens?”

“Yeah. Krakens. Shadow dragons. And Void-Dwellers.”

Just then, a narrow beam of Psychomancy splashed into Gold-01, and a snapshot of understanding was slotted into his mind. He shared the memory with the others in his squadron, and they recalled seeing a humanoid shape at the heart of the nigh-impenetrable darkness rather than a Kraken.

An uneasy feeling filled Gold-01. It wasn’t impossible for a human to develop certain skills common for monsters, but…

“Gold-Primary, stick close to each other. Watch each other’s backs. We stride in three.”

A series of confirmations greeted Gold-01. He pushed all doubt aside.

The first thing a Psychomancer learned was how to control themselves. Now he didn’t have time for fear. He had a Hero to kill.

***

“Godsddammit, Shiv, it’s been less than a minute,” Adam cursed as he climbed higher. He had been launched off his feet by a solid wall of kinetic force just as he emerged from the gate. Shiv’s Creeping Void ensured he couldn’t see anything, but the deafening sounds of distant explosions told the Gate Lord all he needed to know: Shiv had already made contact with the enemy and was in the process of getting to know them better.

Adam came to a stop as he slipped into a layer of clouds. He cast his senses out and winced as he beheld the damage Shiv left in his wake. A massive, five-kilometer-wide scar trailed across the land. Huge fissures parted the earth as well, and dozens of deep craters were imprinted on the ground.

No bloody wonder Gate Theborn got destroyed. He let out a quiet breath. The sheer destruction was unbelievable. But it was also useful. And where Shiv moved like a natural disaster, Adam spotted things like he was borderline omniscient.

He immediately zeroed in on a badly crushed bunker half-buried in the soil. The inhabitants were mostly dead, but only just so. One let out a hoarse whimper, and Adam bit back a grimace of pity. Then, his senses crawled further—shooting past Shiv’s current position, as indicated by his Creeping Void.

There, Adam took in what seemed like open terrain—and started picking out irregularities. He zoomed in on strange, reflective glints and followed them to discover hidden bunkers. No, wait. Observation posts. They were built into the mountains and even the ground. Within were groups of eight to ten Pathbearers. Most of them were armed with bows or some manner of ranged weaponry, and they wore armor that resembled Shiv’s. Yet theirs was sleeker, with narrower helmets that had lenses, while the composition of the armor itself was of a darker, colder metal.

Then, there came a shudder from high up in the air, and Adam turned his senses away—to discover ten golden dragons approaching the fray.

“Broken Moon,” Adam breathed. “Where the hells did they get ten primal dragons?” He pushed his senses past the ten golden dragons just then and found something in the air behind them. A flying vessel of some kind. One that had recently opened a Dimensional gateway, if the motes of darkness leaking from its core were any indication.

“Well, well,” Adam said, forming a Veilpiercer. His senses crashed against the ship but couldn’t get any further. It was warded. Warded a bit too well. His vambrace crackled to life. He would solve that problem in a moment. Take one of the people aboard prisoner if possible. Meanwhile… “Keep moving, Shiv… Keep kicking the hornet's nest. I think things are about to work out for us perfectly.”

***

The shape of Roland’s soul was his arrows. The length of Roland's reach ended at the length of his arrows. The depth of Roland's awareness was painted by the trajectory of his arrows. Everything he touched with his projectiles, he sensed, he saw, he killed. And Roland's arrow never missed their mark.

Beyond the reach of the atmosphere, Roland’s reserve arrows glistened in the void, far beyond the reach of the enemy. And there they remained, serving more as his eyes and ears than a weapon for him to use.

He studied the encirclement surrounding his town, watching as Sullain’s forces were driven back another kilometer from the south side as a swarm of three thousand arrows tore into and detonated within a pocket dimension they thought was hidden.

But there were more enemies to bring down. Many more.

Eighty kilometers away at the Santamon Mountains, some Necrotech Deathstalkers were dragging the remnants of their artillery platforms back. They made it three hundred meters before an arrow the size of Blackedge crashed down on the sky and shattered. Over the horizon, a flash of light rose into the sky. The Solar mana contained within the arrow scoured the land clean for fifty kilometers.

A mere two kilometers below Blackedge, another group of enemies attempted a mad rush. There was a Hero among them this time. A Heroic-Tier vampire whose speed grew with every person nearby. They zipped up toward Blackedge, intending on cracking the town’s wards—

And promptly burst apart into ashes as Roland redirected a few of his three thousand arrows to fly over the chasm. They fused together before they speared into the vampire’s back, and though getting pierced didn’t kill the vampire, getting incinerated by the power of dawn did.

Night was coming. Parts of the battered ruins of Lost Angeles rose as Sullain’s Geomancers tried to form their bunkers. A hail of arrows crashed down through the clouds and annihilated every piece of stone the Geomancers were trying to manipulate. A good few hundred slipped into the chasm, crashing against Sullain’s wards as well.

Sullain. The vicar hadn’t done anything for a while. Roland didn’t like that. You didn’t give mages time to plot or scheme. That was a critical rule in combat. But with Blackedge pressed from all sides, Roland didn’t have a choice but to hold and fight.

Hold and fight as he had been doing for weeks.

By the Starhawk, he was tired…

A warning from Starhawk’s Perch pulsed in Roland’s mind. Someone tried to halt time. Roland directed a special Chronomantic arrow into them from beyond the atmosphere.

Another time dragon dropped from the clouds in two pieces. And for the first time in years, Roland’s Respecification Unique Skill leveled. And his other Unique Skill leveled right after as he regained a Chronomantic arrow from the soul of the dragon he just killed.

Respecification 411 > 412

Quiver of the Slain 354 > 355

With each enemy slain, Roland felt new arrows fill his spiritual quiver. New arrows forged by the remains of his enemies—of their greatest skills. It was also the reason he'd remained at Master-Tier for so long—because a little careful redistribution of one’s levels went a long way to hiding just how high they were in total.

And that was the entire point of Roland’s existence. He wanted power, not prestige.

But he was starting to tire again. He needed to find a way to level some of his lesser skills some more so he could draw points over from them into his Physicality. At the thought of that, Roland started doing mental math again, pushing his already exhausted mind to its limit to get another few levels. But he couldn’t do it. Not alone.

“Chris,” Roland said, gritting his teeth. “I need another spike of focus.”

“Yes, Lord Arrow,”

Atop the apex of his castle, within a shroud of Divination and Solar mana, Roland Arrow released another shot. Another shot shaped from starstuff. Another shot fated to strike and kill an enemy. Another shot that turned into ten and then a hundred as it traveled through the air. Within Roland’s ruined nest were Biomancers, working to keep his body functional at all times, and Chris Evetine, his personal Psychomancer that did everything she could to guard his focus and stop his mind from slipping. There were also Diviners, generals, Slayers, and more here, but most of them were dead on their feet from exhaustion.

Everyone was on the brink after weeks of non-stop combat.

Below, Blackedge was being consumed by desperation, rot, biological plagues, and ones of Psychomantic madness.

Sullain was a dreadful adversary. The vicar was no warrior, and Roland had managed to repel the Abyssal Lord in a direct contest at first. But he was a mage. And the worst thing about a Legendary mage—one who possessed practically every Magical Skill known to Integrated Earth—was how they could strike mind, spirit, and body at once.

Before Roland drove Sullain back to the Abyss, forcing the wretch to retreat, the vicar managed to breach Blackedge's wards once. The spells Sullain left destroyed the agriculture, sickened the people, and withered the metal. It also created monsters that would spawn at night. Monsters that burst free from flesh or even concentrations of darkness.

Roland was his arrows, and his arrows patrolled the streets of Blackedge as well. They strained him to the very limit, and they revealed to him just how many people were dying. Another wail sounded from another house. Another cry was silenced. Another child let out a breath and didn't take another. With every passing second, Roland could feel his town dying.

He could feel this prison-turned-home crumble away. And Roland understood this was Sullain’s revenge. Roland had sacked Submission, and now Blackedge was to pay for his sins.

But what could the Town Lord do in the face of despair? What could he do? Kneel? Bend? Break? Beg?

No. Roland had been a Pathbearer from the moment he picked up the bow, from the moment he knew that fighting was a choice. So he fought on. So he killed. So he worked tirelessly, unleashing powers unheard of upon his adversaries, butchering them day after day, minute after minute, second by second. And through it all, he convened with the Starhawk. He plotted. He schemed. If they just had enough time, perhaps the Starhawk could integrate the other sacred phylacteries. If he managed that, the Starhawk could either find a way to create remembrances from his long-lost companions or even draw their power onto himself to better rally for the coming fight.

And despite all the strain Roland was under, this was merely the opening salvo in a coming fight.

I must endure, Roland thought to himself. I must hold. If I do fail... No, I cannot. The Republic... the Republic cannot stand much longer. The lies, deception, twisting of minds, the sapping of faith... The toll has become too great. The Republic won't be able to stand the avarice of the Ascendants any longer, nor survive the ritual they seek to perform…

It was a horrible, nightmarish thing. Something he refused to accept at first, even with the Starhawk showing him the truth. He knew the Ascendants weren’t perfect, but what they planned was beyond the pale—was something Roland couldn’t accept. And neither could the Starhawk, for that matter.

But now—

One of his arrows saw a massive explosion unfolding over Old Santabar. For a moment, Roland’s mind reeled.

Over four hundred kilometers away from Blackedge and Lost Angeles, a trail of building destruction cleaved a line near the coast—and drew the attention of what seemed like one of Sullain’s Interceptor Squadrons.

What is this?

A massive war horn sounded. A war cry followed thereafter. Things began to move and crawl within the Chasm. Roland couldn’t split his focus now. Another night was about to begin. But Old Santabar… If this was the Inquisition… His gut clenched. He needed to know. He needed to know to prepare himself. Because he couldn’t hold against them too.

And he would need to attempt a fighting retreat with Blackedge. Even if it was likely to end in his death and the town’s demise.

“ARROW! STARHAWK’S CHAMPION! I COME FORTH ONCE MORE!” Sullain sang in the darkness. “I COME BEARING GIFTS FROM THE OUTSIDE! I COME TO DELIVER YOUR END!”

Roland rolled his eyes. “Not the bloody eldritch bullshit again.” He let out a sigh and stared at his comrades. “It’s nightmares again, I’m afraid.”

“That’s alright, Lord Arrow,” Guard Captain Koswin Kranos said. “None of us are going to be doing any sleeping for a while. No nightmares that way.”

“No nightmares,” Roland echoed. He shaped another arrow in response—

But he directed just one arrow to see what was happening in Old Santabar, and thus, a gleaming needle of starstuff fell from the void above.

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[User]
Write 111 (I) Surface [III]
Target length: ~2800 words

[Assistant]
Get up, Adam. Get up. You're not done. You're not done until you beat me.

And look at me. You can do it. With your team. With the people by your side, you can do it. It doesn't matter that I'm a Master. You're an Adept. Look at me. Don't look away. Never look away from your enemy.

I am proud of you. I'm proud of you. I'm proud of everyone in this class.

But pride doesn't mean fucking shit.

This is the final exam. This is your final test. I'm not going to fail you if you lose, but I think you understand this isn't about passing or failing. Because when it comes to an actual fight, dying is failing.

But maybe not. Maybe you'll sell your life dearly. Maybe you'll delay your enemy long enough for someone on your own side to arrive. Someone who's also a Master. But you won't be there to see it. You won't be the one that gets to go home. They might sing your name in a story, but that's just all you'll be. A story for someone else. A lyric in someone else's song. Something to pad the purses of bards and be slapped on a poster for more young boys and girls like you to be recruited and get themselves killed.

Get up. Get up. Be more than a story. Make your own legend. Live to experience it.

You've got one final attempt left. One last try. Make it count. Make a plan. Make it good.

I've seen it before, on real battlefields. Ten Adepts bringing down one Master. It can be done. So. Show me one Adept and Nine Initiates finding a way to do the same.

-Captain Harry Irons, TacStrat 101, Phoenix Academy

111 (I)

Surface [III]

A crimson serpent emerged from within Shiv, drinking away his final wounds. It was practically half the size of his body now, and its interior glistened with crystallized injuries; ruptured organs, flayed skin, burst vessels, and too many lacerations to count. Such were the contents stored within the Woundeater, and it would be unleashed against the next viable target Shiv could find.

And he had a strong feeling he would be running into some viable targets very soon.

The air combusted around him, crowning him in a veil of force and fire. He sailed just a few meters above the ground, keeping his person concealed using Minor Illusion, Chameleon, and Creeping Void in tandem. He might have destroyed one observation post, but he was sure there were more, many more. And with how much noise he just made, Shiv was expecting trouble very, very soon.

When he flew over the ground, the kinetic energy he displaced cleaved deep into the earth, revealing the bones of things that were. Sometimes there were very literal bones, a sea of them, humans from the looks of it. And then there were the husks of old machines, massive automata. Shiv caught just a glimpse, but this place must have been something more than a wilderness a long time ago.

As he looked over the distant, rolling mountains, a mounting feeling that Shiv was heading into a storm built inside of him. And that feeling only grew as the last light of the sun faded, vanishing behind the towering shape of the distant Tidewall. Night fell immediately, but before the dark came, there was a glint of color from high above.

A glint of color that pierced through weary gray clouds. There were ten shapes approaching Shiv. They were golden, and they were moving fast. Perhaps not as fast as he, but they were closing fast enough that he could see the curving trail of force peeling around their forms.

More importantly, he thought he could feel them through his Chronomancy.

Great. Didn’t take long for me to run into the enemy Chronomancers. No easy fights for long, huh, System?

He saw four wings on each of the shapes. Two arms, two legs, long, sinuous necks, and a tail that ended in a spear-like tip. These were dragons. And for a moment, Shiv thought he was about to face another Lance of Dragon-Knights. But despite the adamantium barding they wore, there was something undisciplined in their movements, an animalistic taint. And somehow, he could instinctively tell he was facing beasts rather than true warriors.

Still, ten golden dragons didn't emerge from nowhere. If he had to guess, they were deployed for him specifically. And why not? Dragons probably didn't have an issue with the Light Curse. Maybe Sullain had them captured, or struck a pact with them somehow, or twisted their minds, or—

Before he could theorize further, each dragon pulsed with brilliant, gleaming mana.

Each of the dragons flashed. A shudder of power ran through them, and Shiv's Chronomancy trembled in return. His eyes widened. Their mana felt like it was operating on the exact same frequency as his. Then, each of their bodies flared a radiant gold, and they were promptly coated by a shell forged from the lore of time itself.

Shiv felt an aching pull in their direction as his Chronomancy rattled inside him, begging to be unleashed.

He reflexively activated Strider of the Unbending Path. Time stopped. The world ceased its movements; the wave of destruction following him went still. But the dragons were still moving, and they were coming right at him. Shiv clenched his fists and clutched his knife tighter. Not just dragons. Time dragons. The type the Recollector spoke about earlier.

How do they know I'm a Chronomancer? Shiv wondered. Do they already know? Or is this just—

A flash of color blinked atop one of the dragons. A jet of searing green curved from the approaching beast and came for the Deathless. It was pure instinct that saved Shiv again. He spiked himself downward, and the stream of corrosive energy lashed across the land and cleaved clean through the ground behind him. It left a gap in the world that promptly detonated upward, projecting a blade of Necromantic energy high into the air. Soon, the blade expanded into a sizzling screen of acid that chewed at the very fabric of the world.

Necromancy. Godsdamn it, why does everything they do involve Necro— oh right, I am fighting a rogue Necrotech outfit. Shiv grimaced, and he immediately plunged downward, drilling deep into the soil as he continued underground.

Not only did they have a counter to his Chronomancy, they also apparently could see through his Stealth Skills. That shot landed exactly where he was a moment prior. How did they see through The Creeping Void? How did they tell? And how could they also perceive him with both his Minor Illusion and Chameleon Enchantments active? What the hells?

***

"Gold-03, remain in position!" Gold-01 declared as he recalibrated his Necro-Thrower. It would take a few seconds for the crystal to stabilize, but that shot was dead on. The Divination Matrix enchanted into his rider capsule painted the most likely path of his adversary. At the last moment, they dodged. He missed. They were damn fast. In a scant second, they went from sailing forward to drilling through the ground itself, cracking the earth open and vanishing beneath the soil.

Who the hell is this guy? How in the deepest hells does he have Strider of the Unbending Path too? “Are you guys seeing this?”

"Stay focused, Gold-03," Gold-01 said. "Gold-02, Gold-10. Geomancy. Peel him out of the ground. Ten-kilometer de-solidification."

"Received, Gold-01," Gold-10 said. Gold-02 simply gave a grunt. They descended, plunging down toward the earth like falling spears. While the dragons glowed bright with Chronomancy, the rider capsules along their backs burst into animated fractals of twisting spells. Colors of rich soil came into shape as spell patterns were birthed from within the capsules. And then they rippled out, crashing over the land and alchemizing everything for approximately two kilometers.

What used to be earth turned into a rapidly evaporating slurry. It wasn't even mud. It was just liquefied dust and ash. Again and again, Gold-02 and Gold-10 channeled the spell, removing more sections from the earth and dissolving more substance. In seconds, vegetation, earth, soil, and stone faded. They continued concentrating on the spell, sweeping across the land as solid turned to gas.

And just then, Gold-01 caught sight of him. Immediately, his Divination Matrix pinpointed where he was based on the echolocation imprint they got from SC-Central earlier. Now, they had a trail—they just needed to solidify it.

Gold-01 issued another mental command, and Gold-08, their squadron scout, sent out a pulse of her own echolocation. Once more, they pinged the target, and the Divination imprint solidified.

Gold-01 had hunted Krakens before. They were creatures that took away their adversary's sight and muffled their hearing. Creeping Void was a treacherous skill to face, but ultimately, it didn't stop tactile movements, and sounds could still travel through it.

Absolute stealth was impossible. There were limitations to every skill, and understanding how they worked was the first part of overcoming them.

"Eyes on target," Gold-10 declared. But before Gold-10 and Gold-02 could pursue the enemy on their own, Gold-01 sent out another telepathic command. "Gold-10, Gold-02, rejoin squadron. Pursue in Kingfisher formation. Gold-04, descend. Gold-08, Gold-07, trail."

A few more acknowledgements came, and Gold-01 continued watching their adversary. The enemy was painted a bright violet now, the Divination signature glowing so bright that Gold-01 could see them even with his eyes closed. So why couldn't Gold-01 shake the feeling that something was about to go terribly wrong? He watched as members of his squadron shot down across the land.

Spells formed over their capsules, and their dragons let out primal roars. The first cracks spread across their temporal shells. Gold-01 prepared himself. Six seconds of halted time left. Let’s see how long you can keep time still, Pathbearer.

***

"What kind of Geomancy bullshit is this?" Shiv growled to himself. For a few moments, he was drilling through the earth. Then, suddenly, it practically dissolved around him, turning fluid one second and then to dust in the next. His temporal shell was cracking. If he had to guess, he only had maybe three seconds of halted time left.

He cast a quick glance upward and saw the dragons gliding down through the air. They were still slower than him—made even more so by his ever-building speed. Furthermore, he moved through halted time far more easily than they did. They were grinding against the temporal friction caused by their dense shells of Chronomancy, and so he confirmed they were a Tier below him in terms of Reflexes

However, their temporal shells weren't as damaged as his. That made them slightly superior Chronomancers.

Not a good matchup, Shiv realized. Even if he was so much faster than they, once his Chronomancy shattered, he would basically be frozen in place, giving them however long they had to attack him. Considering how fast and far their Necromancy could hit, Shiv needed to keep moving.

He clutched his knife tight as he came up with a desperate plan. With a loud shout, he threw his blade as far as he could. It exploded across the land, spearing through the base of a nearby mountain and punching clean through the stone. A puff of dust burst free but froze in the air. A crack formed but didn't develop any further.

The damage wouldn't fully progress until time resumed.

In the same second, Shiv cast himself four seconds back in time. He jolted out of place. His armor broke apart. Only a few pieces clung to his body. But just then, he triggered his spatial anchor. And for the second time, he blinked across the world. The first was done by reverting his position back to a temporal anchor. Now, he projected himself using his knife’s spatial Enchantment and materialized in a cramped space filled with jagged stone, falling soil, and creeping vines.

He found himself holding the blade again as he finished his spatial teleportation. But to his surprise, he found his Skysplitter embedded in something, halted by a wall of metal. The blade had pierced through, but the mountain had sapped enough kinetic energy from it that it didn't tear into the reinforced hook of metal entirely. And he quickly understood why.

Shiv couldn't help but laugh as the final fragments of his temporal armor broke off him. Time resumed. Three seconds passed as Shiv tore at what he believed to be an observation bunker.

He didn't do anything clever to find this place. He just got lucky. And judging from the muffled sounds thundering outside, the dragons might have lost track of him as well. With a final flex of force, Shiv tore into the observation post just in time to see eight skeletal armored figures turning, trying to get their crossbows, longbows, and blades up to protect themselves.

"Found you," Shiv growled. And then he spiked his Inertial Overdrive twenty times in quick succession before detonating his sheath.

Their armor crumpled first. Their flesh sprayed between the cracks. The bunker deformed and swelled like a steel balloon. As the observation post fell silent, Shiv observed the crushed bodies of the ones he'd just killed. They, too, wore the visages of death, but the metal of the armor seemed darker. They were definitely still organic, though, judging from the gore seeping out from them. Facing him was a firing port as well, overlooking a stretch of tumbling hills.

There were more mountains in the distance, but Shiv wasn’t exactly sure where he was anymore. He needed to figure out his position. But more importantly, he needed to shake these dragons—or kill them.

Then, a thought came to him. I am dressed like some of these guys. Maybe there’s something I can do with that. Maybe I can get the dragons to come to me…

***

"This is Gold-03 to Gold-01. We lost him. The matrix can't find him. We're trying to recalibrate."

But Gold-01 didn't say anything. Gold-01 was focusing, trying to figure out what just happened. The violet imprint of the target pulsed in and out of existence at several points, but they weren't there. And the Divination Matrix wasn't sure where he was either. Just then, their temporal shell came close to shattering, and Gold-01 gave his command. "Gold Primary, drop shells."

Time resumed. The wing regrouped at Gold-01's command. They rose higher into the air, trying to cover more ground, to take in more of the horizon. And Gold-07 spotted something there. Gold-07 pinged the rest of the group. They saw a massive series of cracks spreading along the sides of a nearby mountain just as a wave of displaced force slammed into it.

“One of the... Oh shit, I think that's where observation post 109 is,” Gold-07 called out.

Just as he finished speaking, the mountain exploded from within. In the same instant, they received a telepathic message from SC-Central. "Gold Primary, I just lost contact with 109."

A bitter feeling filled Gold-01’s gut. Was this Heroic adversary toying with them? How did he break contact? And how did he know exactly where 109 was? Through an eruption of stone, dust, and other debris, the mangled remains of 109's observation post sailed high through the air. It looked deformed. Swollen like a bomb had gone off inside. The metal was ballooned outward, and part of it was torn wide open.

"Great One’s missing cock!" Gold-04 cried out. "What the fuck? Target has at least Master-Tier Physicality or Geomancy."

"Physicality," Gold-01 replied. He narrowed his eyes. "If he had Geomancy, he would have tried countering our strategy earlier. Gold-03, approach and conduct Divination pulse. Everyone else, remain at an active distance. 500 meters! L formation. Let's pick up this bastard's trail."

Gold-03 acknowledged and flew close to the now falling observation post. A Divination spell formed over 03’s capsule, and a pulse of violet light splashed through the deformed bunker. Nine badly crushed bodies were highlighted through the walls of the destroyed observation—

Wait… One of them is still resonating with the Divination spell. And that body isn’t crushed, it’s—

Gold-01 felt his stomach drop. "Gold-03, Gold-03, pull back! Gold, pull back! Ambush! He’s still inside!”

But it was too late. Gold-03 tried to turn and fly away. But she was too slow.

A blur rammed into her, and her dragon went tumbling in circles through the air.

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[User]
Write 111 (II) Surface [III]
Target length: ~2900 words

[Assistant]
111 (II)

Surface [III]

As Shiv impacted the time dragon from the side, his Biomancy sensed something interesting. He wasn't just facing a dragon. There was also a rider attached to its back. And the rider had Adept-Tier Pyromancy as well. He could sense their mana field washing over him.

But more importantly, he could feel both the rider and the dragon’s Magical Resistances. To Shiv's surprise, he found the rider to be the one with the higher resistance. And so he brought his fist down against the dragon, slamming a Woundeater-empowered punch into the beast's skull.

A crimson explosion enveloped the 200-meter-long beast. Scales broke free from its exposed head, and Shiv seized it by the neck and suddenly spiked himself downward forty times. He gave himself a hernia at the sudden increase in speed and strain.

Parts of his bone armor snapped free, his arms nearly dislocated, but the dragon fared worse. He accelerated so fast that he denuded most of its neck. Its scales tore off in strips. The creature screamed. He felt it try to trigger its Chronomancy, and he saw a cracked temporal shell starting to form. Shiv slammed a knee into its head, stunning it. Its temporal shell vanished.

Then, Shiv drove the dragon head-first down into the earth—and he kept going. He drilled deeper using the dragon’s face as an excavator. At the same time, he formed another Woundeater, fed it, and slammed it into the dragon's body once more. He felt a crack in its Magical Resistance and spiked his gravity field another twenty times as he spun in place.

Previously, he thought it was a struggle to break a dragon's neck due to how far it could bend backward, how it was far more flexible than a human's neck. But he thought about that for a while and realized there was a different method he could use.

If one twisted the dragon’s neck more like a handle at extreme speeds, the outcome would be immediately grisly and quite fatal. It couldn’t rotate its head in place three hundred and sixty degrees, after all.

The dragon's ligaments tore free from the base of its neck, and even its impossibly strong muscles couldn't keep up with Inertial Overdrive. Though Shiv's body was coming apart, the dragon’s head was getting torn clean off.

He spiked his field five more times as he felt the dragon’s bones shatter and muscles tear. As all resistance vanished, he pulled back hard and ripped the dragon's head off at its base before detonating his inertial sheath.

Just then, he felt the rider die as well—splattering apart inside the capsule from the sheer concussive impact unleashed by Shiv’s detonation.

Shit! I wanted to take them alive. To figure out how they operated. Ah. Nothing for it.

Gravitic Wrestler 141 > 142

Shiv cried out as something in his spine fractured, but the dragon was launched aside. Its body resembled a rat that had been struck by a hammer. Parts of it were flattened. Its adamantine barding had bent but didn't break, and inside the capsule, its rider became as if a puddle of jam inside a tight, collapsing can.

Just then, the soil around him became fluid and dissolved thereafter. Shiv scoffed, and he triggered his spatial anchor. He teleported back inside the mountain, back to where he left his knife, and continued along his way underground now that he got a good look at where the Tidewall was.

I’ll keep moving for now. The rest of the bastards didn’t close in. But let’s see if I can lose them for good…

***

"Gold-03! Come in! Gold-03! Respond! Respond!" Gold-01 shouted telepathically, but in his heart, he knew Gold-03 was dead. Dead or mentally comatose. Even someone unconscious had a mind. You didn't just drop off from the world unless you went out of range, or you stopped being accessible.

Gold-02 and 10 cast their Geomancy spells again. As the ground turned to dust, Gold-01 saw the mangled remains of Gold-03's dragon. It looked crushed. Its head had been torn clean off, but the enemy was nowhere to be seen. A growl of absolute fury escaped Gold-01's throat. That monster was going to pay for this. They were—

Gold-01 received another telepathic missive from SC Central. A chain of images splashed into his head. An observation post noted a series of cracks spreading along the ground, traveling fast in the general direction of the Tidewall. The adversary was underground again and moving fast.

"Received, SC-Central." He shared the memory with the rest of his squadron, and they immediately moved. They soared through the air with hurt spreading between them, with things unsaid and anger building.

Gold-03 had been in the squadron for five years. Five years and 600 combat flights. And now, in an instant, she was dead.

You didn't get to make mistakes with a Heroic-Tier adversary. Especially not a cunning and vicious Pathbearer like the one they were hunting.

***

Broken Moon, I'm a fucking idiot, Shiv thought to himself. I think I’m already lost. I can’t remember which way I’m supposed to be going…

Right now, he was traveling vaguely in the direction of the Tidewall. The thing was, he couldn't really see where the Tidewall was anymore because he was underground. As he continued tearing through the foundations of the earth, causing minor earthquakes and cracking the surface wherever he went, he lost his sense of direction in seconds, and now he was considering what to do.

Shiv knew he needed to surface at some point to get his bearings, but if he surfaced, those dragons were likely going to be on him. There had to be observation posts everywhere in this place. There was no avoiding that, and even now, they were probably tracking him somehow. They managed to figure out how to get past his Creeping Void, didn’t they?

God damn it, if only I had some kind of subtler skill, Shiv thought to himself. And that was another benefit of having more Adept-Tier skills as well. If he had Adept-Tier Geomancy, maybe he could have navigated underground. If he had Adept-Tier Hydromancy, maybe he could have turned himself into water or something.

Being a powerful, overwhelming brute felt good, but it also made his actions very, very obvious. Shit, nothing for it. Once more, he pinned his blade in the parting soil, and he shot upward. If anything went wrong, he would jump back down to his knife and find a different direction to hit. It worked the last two times, so it might work a third as well. But Shiv didn't expect it to be a trick he could use over and over indefinitely.

He exploded out of the ground, casting stones everywhere. His Creeping Void was still active; he didn't deactivate just because no one had fired any arrows at him in a while. The dragons might be able to see him, but maybe the observation posts didn't have the same skills. Better to have additional layers of protection anyway.

He found himself sailing over a rocky meadow that became a series of rolling hills. Dense patches of vegetation became a series of bushes below. There were fewer mountains around him now, but there were more in the distance. He thought he caught a glimpse of something atop the Tidewall. Shiv spiked himself in its direction. He kept low to the ground as he did before and—

Nine beams of necromantic energy pierced the surrounding soil.

The Creeping Void 110 > 111

SHIT! Shiv screamed internally.

He teleported back to his knife and immediately started moving in a random direction. They missed! They weren't as accurate this time. But they still had his general position, and so he had to keep moving. He had to do as Adam suggested. How did he get a level? Did his Creeping Void fool them this time? Why didn’t it work before?

Wait… Do they have some kind of Divination like Adam does? That… that might make sense.

Shiv tried to remember which way he was heading, but he bit back a gasp as lacerations began to open across his body. He was going to need to detonate again soon, and once he did, they would definitely notice his position. Judging from where the shots came from, they were right above, high up in the air.

I wouldn't be surprised if they just stayed far away and kept shooting at me from... Wait a minute. What if… what if I can get closer? Can Hu… Can Hu was supposed to be my armor against Necromancy. What I need now is armor… Something that might let me take a few hits and get closer. Those dragons are pretty big. What if I can get inside one? Use it as a literal meat puppet while keeping it alive.

A terrible thought formed in Shiv’s mind. He considered doing something just a bit reckless. He clutched one of his decoy bodies inside his cape using his Biomancy. If Minor Illusion and his other Stealth Enchantments weren't working on their own, maybe he just needed to give them something solid to shoot at.

And maybe I need to give them more than one thing to worry about. Shiv continued barreling through the underground. He reached out, and his gravity field expanded around a massive chunk of earth.

"Alright then," Shiv said to himself, "let's give them a distraction.”

***

Gold-01 watched as the spreading cracks marking the path of their target suddenly stopped. A spider web expanded outward, and a fissure began to form in place, but the enemy wasn’t moving anymore.

Gold-01 did the same. He wasn't going anywhere near that monster. Whoever could tear the head off a dragon in little more than a second wasn't someone he intended to fight in close-quarters combat. They would grind him down using range, strategy, and Necromancy. That was why there was 500 meters of distance between each of the riders now, and why they remained two kilometers above the ground.

Every dragon was to cover their own sector, and every dragon was close enough to render the other aid should they come under attack.

"What is he doing?" Gold-10 asked. "It's like he's just..."

And then there came a massive shudder. The earth trembled. The fissures grew and became chasms. Gold-01 primed his Necro-Thrower for another cycle when he realized what the adversary was about to do. An entire parcel of uprooted landmass rose into the air—three hundred meters of stone and dirt shaped into a dense ball.

It accelerated fast, the soil peeling off, the stone staying together longer. It soared high like a missile the size of a small mountain, but it was still far too slow to hit any of the dragons, and it wouldn't reach the altitude they were at either.

“What is he trying to do?” Gold-06 asked. But just then, they saw the bone armored figure shoot out from below the earthen sphere.

01’s Divination Matrix painted the target into shape. A shroud of violet enveloped them. "It's him! Fire! Fire!" Gold-01 roared.

Nine streams of Necromantic energy immediately speared through the target's body. Nine streams intermingled, and a concentration of necromantic corrosion built and detonated outward, catching the large mound of soil and stone as well. In seconds, it vanished.

In the aftermath, all Gold-01 could hear was the fast pumping of his heart as the world fell silent.

"Did we get him?" Gold-02 asked. "Gold-01, do we have confirmation?"

"I think we hit him," Gold-10 said. "Wait, something just passed by..."

Gold-10’s thoughts promptly trailed off into a scream.

***

The hardest part of lifting an entire section of the earth was keeping it together rather than bearing its weight. Shiv was more than strong enough for the latter, but soil… Soil didn't stick together. Even stone broke apart after you accelerated it at a certain speed. It took all his gravitic control to keep it from unraveling right on top of him. As he rose higher and higher into the air, he kept his Chameleon Enchantment active as he prepared to launch his decoy body.

Five seconds passed as Shiv's insides tightened. He watched the skies, waiting for one of the dragons to fire. Then, his patience broke as he threw his decoy body out.

All the dragons promptly fired their Necromantic beams. Nine different streams came from nine different directions, and Shiv almost let out a miserable sigh. They're spread out. Why the hell did they have to be spread out? The worst thing about not fighting an idiot was that you had to use more strategy and planning every time you engaged them. These dragon riders learned from him just as he adapted to them as well.

But his plan wasn’t over. He needed to get to Part Two: Dragon Meat Armor as soon as possible.

Rearing his arm back, he threw his Skysplitter across the horizon at where one of the corrosive streams came from. In an instant, the sound barrier broke. His Skysplitter shrank and vanished. He doubted the dragon could spot something that small. Shiv hoped so, at least. As the blade traveled, a blast of corrosive energy swept down. Shiv's eyes widened. A muscle in his shoulder came apart as Inertial Overdrive wounded him once more. A wave of Necromancy crashed down on Shiv’s cover. His dirt mound disintegrated.

He teleported to his blade at the last second. A squeeze of pressure washed over him, and he found himself a mere four hundred-something meters away below a dragon.

Luck smiles on me again, Shiv thought. He detonated his inertial sheath, and a blast wave swept out from him. It broke both of his legs, but he didn't need legs to control his gravity field. Shiv stopped time—and the dragon, unaware of his presence, failed to trigger its own temporal shell in time. It stopped moving. Shiv fed his injuries to a Woundeater and crashed into its chest. A detonation followed as he crawled along its body, but as he came into contact with it, a flare of gold flickered in place as its temporal shell came alive. Shiv was almost taken by surprise, but he was still faster—especially with his Inertial Overdrive running hot.

Didn’t know it could—Wait, we have the same skill. I didn’t know it could just jump back in time and activate its temporal shell. Wait, that means I can do it too if someone tries to ambush me using Chronomancy…

The primal dragon bit at him. It moved like it was pushing its head through mud. Shiv caught it by the jaw and twisted it to the side. However, instead of killing it immediately, he drove a blade into its right eye and used that to launch himself along its neck to get at the capsule on its back.

A flash of green flared before Shiv. Sticking out behind the capsule was a strange weapon. It had a long barrel that was wide open, and a corrosive crystal was lodged in its backmost section. That must have been how they were firing the Necromantic beams at him.

Shiv extended his Skysplitter’s size and cut without thinking. His blade extended thirty meters in a single second. He split the Necromantic weapon on the back of the capsule into two pieces. Then, with the greatest threat eliminated, he studied where the rider resided for the first time.

The capsule was pod-shaped, with a series of faint glowing windows on all sides. Shiv laid eyes on the rider, and they laid eyes on him. They wore a helmet that had gleaming, purple visors, and their armor consisted of something that was only leather. Shiv snorted and sliced through the glass. The rider tried to get up—but then they froze still. With the capsule compromised, the rider was no longer spared from Chronomancy, and now they were at Shiv’s tender mercies.

Just then, the dragon twisted its head around to bite him once again. Shiv caught the monster’s jaw with his left hand and growled as he pitted his strength against its. With a snarl of effort, he shrugged its head off, and Frictionless Vector activated. It slid off against him violently, and Shiv found a new opening as he cut at the capsule several more times.

Most of its frame was adamantine, which meant Shiv couldn’t just brute-force his way in quickly. Thus, he changed his tactic to cutting at the bolts and seals around the capsule. Here, Deepest Edge proved its worth. It popped open just as the dragon came back around for another bite. Shiv’s temporal shell cracked. Three seconds of Chronomancy left. He ripped the rider out of their seat and prepared to face the dragon once more.

But then, a thought occurred to him.

I want to be inside this thing, right? I want to use it as a shield against Necromancy. To pilot its body with Biomancy. Well. It’s not easy to overpower this thing without Overdrive, and I can’t exactly just tear my way through the adamantine barding and its scales… The dragon’s jaw opened wide, and Shiv looked at the time-frozen rider before he shrugged. Well. Nothing ventured. No dragon meat shields gained.

And with his mind made up, Shiv spiked himself and the rider straight down the dragon’s throat.

[User]
Write 112 (I) Surface [IV]
Target length: ~2700 words
Key events: combat-heavy

[Assistant]
Teams and armies have a breaking point, just like individual Pathbearers. That breaking point is variable. It depends on a hell of a lot of things, such as how long a group has known each other, how dire the situation is, if any of them are already dead, and whatnot.

See, a good team of Pathbearers can keep itself standing and fighting even as things look hopeless.

Some group compositions can even claim to be unbreakable, but that's not a guarantee all the time, and that's not even a guarantee for that specific group when the right pressures are applied. See, with the right kind of damage inflicted, everyone collapses. Everyone. No one is immune to harm. No one is beyond the touch of trauma.

And there’s even a specific term for this thing.

Usually, armies collapse before their greatest Masters and Heroes do. This is called the “Adept Collapse Point,” mainly because generally, most of an organized fighting force is made up of Adepts. When they go down, when the core of your army gives, the rest will fall after. It doesn't matter if the Master wants to keep fighting; he's just one guy. He can do quite a bit of damage, but eventually, with the right approach, he’ll be brought down.

It doesn't even matter if a Hero wants to keep warring. A Hero is a dangerous threat—one that can deal a lot of damage and kill thousands of people. But if you got a good group of Masters with varied skills, you can kill a Hero like a pack of wolves can kill a bear.

Understand that you have to take care of your people. After a certain limit, they're not going to be combat-capable. And after a certain amount of trauma, if they start thinking about just dropping their weapons and going home, pull them out of there. They are more of a liability than an asset by that point. People, like equipment, need maintenance. Everyone's maintenance level is different. But it's there.

Ignore this truth at your peril. You might still want to keep brawling, if your guys are done, take them home, if you can.

War is not something you half-ass.

-Memoirs of a Master-Tier War Mage

112 (I)

Surface [IV]

Shiv accelerated down the dragon's throat with his new hostage in tow before the beast could close its jaws. The glistening inner flesh of the dragon proved to be a surprising lubricant. But as he went further, the space grew cramped, things got dark, and Shiv ripped through the dragon’s esophagus.

Just then, a trembling sensation pulsed out from the dragon. It flared with golden mana, and Shiv felt its Chronomancy start to shift.

It’s jumping back in time, he realized. Fine. Two can play at that. Shiv spiked himself at an angle. He pushed through squirming organs and ruptured countless blood vessels as he slammed a boot into what he guessed was the dragon’s kidney. The beast let out a skull-shattering bellow of pain. Shiv anchored this moment in time, losing another of his expendable seconds.

The dragon shifted across time thereafter. It vanished around him in a stream of traveling gold, and Shiv found himself hovering in the open air some three hundred meters away from the dragon with the rider still frozen in his grip. It reappeared where it was three seconds ago before he slammed into it. A flash of green slashed at him from the corner of his eyes. The other dragons were firing at him. His temporal shell was a second away from cracking.

Shiv snorted. His shell ignited with surging mana as he cast himself back inside the dragon, back to the point where he was stomping on the dragon’s kidney. The beast howled with renewed pain. Shiv’s temporal shell cracked apart.

Then, he lost a patch of time. Or rather, it was like a patch of time happened to him all at once. The dragon thrashed, the dragon tried to move, the dragon roared in pain—and then its Chronomancy broke apart as well. In the end, Shiv found himself still inside the writhing dragon. Rather than jumping back in time again, the beast had been incapacitated by pain.

And beside Shiv was a struggling, thrashing rider, who was utterly confused and utterly terrified about his current predicament.

Squirming tendons pressed against Shiv, and blood spilled over him. The bitter copper taste of the dragon's insides seeped into Shiv's armor and painted him with a foul-smelling stench. The rider wasn't doing much better. He was absolutely lost, kicking and struggling, slamming elbows and knees against the dragon’s massive organs. Shiv tightened his grip on the rider, and the latter went still.

With a flex from his gravitic field, Shiv tore the rider’s armor asunder, splitting it down the middle and exposing bare flesh. The rider let out a ragged cry and struggled to break free. A gleaming piece of metal appeared in the rider’s hand, but Shiv broke the fool’s arm and took the knife from him.

The rider’s agonized shriek reverberated in the dragon’s depths.

With the rider incapacitated and stripped of Magical Resistance, Shiv shifted his attention back to the stunned dragon. Time to fashion you into a suit of proper meat armor.

A Woundeater manifested upon the Deathless’s right hand, and its insides gleamed with crystallized lacerations. Shiv drove the spell into the dragon, and mana explosions rocked the beast from the inside. It took seven spells to finally shatter the dragon’s Magical Resistance, and as he did, Shiv immediately began reshaping the beast’s body.

It had an adamantine barding serving as chest armor, so opening a gap along its torso wouldn’t work. However, its arms were still bare of metal and guarded only by its natural scales. Shiv exploited that fact as he liquefied the dragon’s left arm all the way up to the shoulder and pushed out all the blood and viscera plugging the gap. He then wiggled his way between the dragon’s ribs and repositioned himself right in front of his new viewing port.

Dragon blood was flooding his armor and stinging his eyes. Both dragon and rider were caught in the throes of pain and suffering, unable to respond. Shiv positioned his head right where the dragon’s left shoulder used to be and peeked outside. The world was spinning around and around as the dragon plunged from the skies. But then it stopped as something caught it. Shiv saw a set of massive golden claws holding onto the dragon by the tail.

And that made him grin.

The enemy was confused again. They were trying to save their friend. And now they were close. Shiv focused his Biomancy and sensed four other dragons enter the vicinity of his mana field. Four riders came with them. That made a good chunk of the entire group. He killed a dragon and its rider earlier. He had this one down now. That left seven. And if he could handle those four, he would only be fighting three.

Should have been ten originally, and nine still alive now. I counted nine Necromantic streams. Gotta do this fast and strategically. Take them by surprise.

“He—he’s got me…” the rider whimpered. “We’re… we’re inside my dragon. He’s…”

“Who are you talking to there, buddy?” Shiv growled.

The poor rider promptly pissed himself. Shiv wondered if that had ever happened before—a rider getting kidnapped by someone else and then pulled inside their own mount.

Probably not, Shiv thought, proud of his achievement in a twisted way. I deserve a reward for this, System. This might just be the most unique act of intimidation I’ve ever performed.

The Challenger is roaring with laughter.

The Challenger is proud of you.

Shiv winced. That was the opposite of a reward. That filled Shiv with shame. Yeah… Maybe all this shit’s making me a bit too sadis—The hells, was that just a pulse of felling Psychomancy mana leaving his mind?

The translucent mana was so faint and sudden that he missed it, but when another ripple spread out from the rider’s mind, Shiv gritted his teeth.

Awareness 13 > 14

That was a pulse of Psychomancy. And the rider was communicating with someone. Shiv’s first thoughts were to knock the rider out or kill them if he had to, but he stopped himself. A thought came to him—one that might just allow him to affect all the other dragons and their riders at once.

Shiv directed his own Psychomancy into the mind of the rider, and he tasted the rider’s pain and terror. More importantly, Shiv felt how the rider was broadcasting wavelengths of Psychomancy across the world. Shiv wasn’t sure what kind of Skill Evolution this was, but it seemed to be focused on range and telecommunications. The rider’s mana was supple and soft—practically like gas compared to Uva’s solid threads, but it traveled far and fast, and as it came crashing back, Shiv received fragments of memory and flashes of insight from other minds.

And the opportunities for havoc just keep coming. Inspiration struck Shiv. He had more than one angle to hit the other riders now. Maybe all at the same time. The rider’s Psychomancy turned against Shiv. The poor bastard was trying to push him out. And he would have been able to do it too if Shiv didn’t snap the rider’s other arm by the elbow just then. Pain consumed the rider thereafter, and while he was busy wailing in pain, Shiv pushed deeper into his mind and prepared to do something unpleasant.

If the rider thought a few broken bones were bad, he was going to hate just how bad things were about to get.

Shiv activated his Icon of the Paindrinker and immediately started tearing himself apart. He bound his mind tighter to the rider’s, and while Shiv grunted in discomfort as his blood mingled with the dragon’s, the rider’s cries reached a fever pitch. Shiv telepathically urged the rider to focus, to push through some of the pain to contact his comrades.

“Only they can save you now,” Shiv told the rider. “Call out to them. Let them know what’s happening. Carry the hurt across for me.”

And trapped in the depths of his own anguish, the rider didn’t realize what Shiv was trying to do. So he cast out to his fellow riders, his Psychomantic broadcast lined not only with a plea for help, but an escalating flood of new and exotic suffering born of Shiv’s mind-linked self-mutilation.

***

“Gold-10! Gold-10! Respond!” Gold-01 watched as Gold-10’s dragon fell. It was tumbling tail over head, turning over and over as it failed to regain its bearings. The dragon was wailing, clawing at its own torso while its head whipped about in pain.

Gold-01 struggled to contain his own horror. He had never seen a dragon react like that. He’d seen them die in battle. Seen them get ripped apart by other dragons in mana storms, or reduced to bloody paste by Master Dynamancers. But to make a dragon make these kinds of torturous noises…

Gold-01 focused. He tried to get his Divination Matrix to zero in on the target. Three seconds ago, the target briefly reappeared as Gold-10’s dragon jumped back in time. But then the target Chrono-Jumped too, and now all Gold-01 had was a pulsing imprint of where the target used to be. In the interim, Gold-07, 08, 02, and 09 all moved in to assist Gold-10.

“Keep it still!” Gold-02 called out to the others. “Gold-07. Biomancy. Now. It’s missing an arm.”

The other riders commanded their own dragons to hold 10’s dragon in place, to keep it from falling further, so they could figure out what exactly was going on. But as they worked to save the dragon, a telepathic cry crashed over them. The pulse of mana was accompanied by a nightmarish howl—a scream coming from Gold-10.

“Fuck!” Gold-09 flinched. “You guys hearing this?”

“Yeah…” Gold-02 breathed. A building dread flooded the group’s shared Psychomancy field.

But then came something else. As Gold-10’s message fully sank into them, it came with an explosion of agony unlike anything any of them had ever known.

Gold-10’s screams proved contagious. His cries continued as the others in his squadron let out hisses and groans at first, before barking out shouts of pain. Then, a scream erupted from Gold-08. And things all fell apart from there.

Gold-01’s eyes rolled as he felt himself getting torn apart from the inside. At the same time, he learned what it was like for someone to peel the flesh off their back and detach every last one of their muscles from their bones. This pain was on another level. Words failed to capture the immense torture that consumed them. And it just kept building with each passing wave.

And with the squadron’s riders drowning in trauma, their dragons reacted with confusion and agitation. They flared their shells and skipped back in time, trying to avoid threats. They slowed time and searched for the unseen foe that was hurting their masters. The only good thing was how they went unaffected by Gold-10’s Psychomantic broadcast.

Human pain wasn’t the same as dragon pain.

Gold-01 did everything he could to push through the hurt and refocus. If he could reach 10, stop this at the source—

Then, another presence brushed his mind. Gold-01 shuddered. The new mind that pressed against him was human. Or so 01 thought. Yet, there was something off about its nature, off about its shape. Visions flashed through 01’s eyes. Memories cast by the strange mind into 10 before it was filtered over to the rest of the group.

In scenes that resembled feverish dreams, 01 saw himself staring down at Gold-10 in a dark place, a cavern of blood, fragmented bone, and shifting tendons. Light spilled in through a narrow gap, and it showed just how badly injured Gold-10 was. Both of his arms were broken, and he was screaming—screaming as he broadcast telepathic messages to the rest of the group, begging them to come save him. But his mind was also being filled with external sources of pain. By traumatic memories that didn’t belong to him.

And through the mist of pain and near-madness, 01’s perception skipped, and he found himself staring through Gold 10’s gaze. For the first time, 01 laid eyes on his enemy. He saw a pair of bright, white irises amidst pools of shadow and blood glaring back at him.

Then, the adversary spoke for the first time. “Get ready, riders. Because it’s my turn to be the monster. And your turn to be the prey.”

Ice-cold horror flooded Gold-01’s blood. His senses reeled back, and as he found himself inside his own capsule again, his racing mind realized a terrifying truth.

The enemy was hiding inside Gold-10’s dragon. And he had Gold-10 with him.

“Gold—” Gold-01 bit back a scream. “Gold-Primary! Pull back! Everyone pull—”

But it was too late. Far too late. A tremor of mana resonance passed through Gold-01’s dragon as a shroud of gold ignited inside Gold-10’s dragon. Gold-01’s dragon reacted, forming its own temporal shell, but without 01 directing specific commands, it rushed in for the kill, moving on bestial instinct rather than a rider’s intellect. And through the windows of his capsule, 01 could see the other dragons in his squadron reacting the same way.

They were closing in on the enemy—on an enemy that could physically tear a dragon apart.

“No—no!” Gold-01 cried, trying to fight through the building tidal waves of pain. “Stop!” He cast his thoughts at his own dragon. “STOP!” That telepathic message went across. His dragon halted. The other dragons in his squadron didn’t. They just kept closing on where 10 was. Where the Heroic-Tier enemy was.

Then—and for no obvious reason at all—Gold-10’s dragon slammed torso-first into Gold-08.

And that was when the slaughter started

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[User]
Write 112 (II) Surface [IV]
Target length: ~3000 words
Key events: combat-heavy

[Assistant]
112 (II)

Surface [IV]

Skill Gained: Deception 1 (Common)

Psychomancy 12 > 13

Dread Aura 89 > 91

Shiv triggered his Song of the Vigilant to focus through the pain. He ripped his Psychomancy out from the rider—Callsign Gold-10. Real name Dignity Huevero. Shiv groaned as he tried to shake off the memory spillover. Uva had warned him about stuff like this. It made him feel like he was himself and not at the same time. Good thing I got to practice believing I was a potato for a while earlier. Re-focusing my mind might have been a bit harder otherwise.

A Woundeater snaked across his body and consumed all his current injuries. At once, the bulk of Shiv’s pain faded, but Gold-10 kept screaming as the Paindrinker continued affecting him. Shiv stopped time. Gold-10’s screeching went silent. Pressing himself against the open chasm of mangled flesh he made of the dragon’s left arm, Shiv stared out from his personal “stabbing port” and tracked where the other enemies were with his Biomancy. Two more dragons got within two hundred meters of him. That left just one dragon outside that distance.

Good. I can work with that.

Shiv stopped time. As soon as his temporal shell fused over his body, the dragons triggered their Chronomancy as well. He felt their Strider of the Unbending Path Skills activate in tandem with his. A shuddering vibration passed through Shiv’s time-armor. 10 seconds—no, 9. I still have an anchor back at the Surface Gateway. Let’s see how many dragons and riders I can kill in 9 seconds.

He seized the dragon he was in and spiked it into its nearest counterpart. A massive collision shook the dragon’s insides, and Shiv let out a shout of exertion as he worked to get his stabbing port in line with the dragon he was trying to stab. The body of another dragon came into sight. It was still twenty meters away from Shiv.

Twenty meters was nothing when you could change the size of your knife.

He pushed his upper body out from the wound and slashed. The Skysplitter’s Size-Shifting Enchantment activated. It expanded from a thirty-five-centimeter dagger to a hundred-meter-long blade and crashed against the other dragon’s neck.

The beast’s scales shattered but held together. The softer tissues they were supposed to protect did not.

Shiv’s Deepest Edge carried the cut through veins, tendons, tissues, and more. Blood erupted from the dragon’s jaws. He cut it twice more for good measure. The bones in its neck parted then. The dragon’s head slumped over at an awkward angle as it fell from the sky, trailing blood from between its serried fangs.

Another dragon accelerated toward him. Shiv spiked his gravitic field twenty times. Gold-10 combusted and then turned to bloody mist beside him. Something inside Shiv cringed. Shit. Adept-Tier Toughness. Godsdammit, I wanted to keep him as a prisoner…

Shiv twisted the dragon he was in to face the dragon that was coming at him—and cursed as a stream of Necromancy exploded just a few meters under him. The dragon Shiv was inside of turned black inside and out. Its organs withered. Its scales darkened. A piece of its soul broke. Suddenly, its Chronomancy winked out, and it went still. Shiv realized what had happened in an instant. The thing that shattered inside it was a skill—its strongest skill. Chronomancy was lost to this dragon. It would never be able to stop the pace of time again.

A terrible feeling churned in Shiv’s gut as he extended his blade to two hundred meters and drove it into the chest of the dragon that had unleashed the beam. The tip of the Skysplitter sang out as adamantine greeted adamantine. But where he failed to pierce the dragon’s barding, its insides were punctured by his progressing stab. The golden-scaled behemoth reeled back, clutching its chest. But it didn’t die. Not until Shiv dragged his blade across its throat.

***

“GOLD-01! GOLD-01! MY DRAGON—MY DRAGON’S DEAD! I’M FALLING I’M FUCKING FALLING—”

“GOLD-8! NO!”

Screams exploded over and over in Gold-01’s mind as he watched the disaster unfold. A massive, gleaming blade had materialized and had burst free from Gold-10’s dragon—from the wound where its left arm used to be. Gold-02’s dragon fell. And now Gold-08 was going down too. An explosion of force deformed the insides of Gold-10’s dragon as it was unnaturally ripped out of position. The enemy Pathbearer was dragging it around from the inside.

Dynamancy, Gold-01 guessed.

An entire patch of the dragon came apart in spilling chunks of festering flesh. Gold-01’s heart screamed in pain. Gold-01 loved dragons. They were great and terrible creatures, and Gold-10’s dragon was as mortally wounded as any dragon could be. Its Magical Resistance had been broken at some point, and a subsequent beam of Necromancy carved deep into its soul.

Gold-01 couldn’t feel Gold-10’s mind either. Gold-01 tried not to think about that.

The squadron had been drawn out of position trying to save one of their own, and now they were paying the price. Two riders dead. Three dragons slain. They couldn’t afford these losses. Not with the siege of Blackedge still ongoing.

There will come a time, Henry. There will come a time when you must sever your arm to save your body. It will maim your heart forever. But you must do it. This is the darkest part of being a leader. This is where Pathbearers are broken. Master Irene’s voice surfaced in his mind.

He hadn’t thought about her in years. He hadn’t thought about her since the Stygia Raid… Since he shot her down over the skies of Vulketh. He tried not to think about her. Gold-01 thought she was his wound, his severed limb.

He was wrong. This was the moment he cut off his arm and mauled his heart. This was the time he sacrificed one to save the others.

“Gold-10… I’m sorry…” Gold-01 said. He didn’t realize when he started crying, or if Gold-10 could hear him, or if—

It didn’t matter. He cycled his Necro-Thrower and fired. He struck Gold-10’s dragon in the back. More corrosive foulness consumed the dragon’s golden scales. Gold-01 felt like he just tore out his own heart. “Gold-Primary. Break contact and fire on Gold-10!”

A flood of reluctance and trauma washed through Gold-01 from the other riders, but they listened. They were good riders. Good soldiers. They knew. They just refused to accept until he ordered it. They had fought together for years, starting as little more than wyvern riders. The dragons had been with them for a decade as well. Gold-Primary was a squadron of Master-Tier riders, and now, for the first time in years, they were going to need to train new riders to make up for their casualties.

The massive blade swaying back and forth through the air shrank until it vanished from sight. A half-second thereafter, a small shape exploded out from inside Gold-10’s dragon and slammed hard into Gold-06’s dragon. 10’s dragon came apart in a blossom of viscera and decaying flesh—but the pieces promptly combusted and dissolved as the small shape accelerated even faster. It tore clean through the neck of Gold-06’s dragon—beheading it before Gold-01 could react.

Only then did Gold-01’s Divination Matrix respond. It highlighted the target. They glowed a deep violet, and Gold-01 snarled as he tried to turn his Necro-Thrower on the target.

It’s him! Gold-01’s mind screamed. The enemy Hero—

He didn’t get to finish that thought, as everything around the target blasted outward in a cataclysmic explosion. A wall of flame and force crashed into Gold-01 just as he fired his Necro-Thrower. His dragon was launched backward. One of its wings dislocated from the sheer whiplash. The beam cut skyward and struck nothing, and that was the last thing Gold-01 saw as another three waves of crushing force smashed into his dragon and drove him headfirst into the ceiling of his capsule.

***

4 seconds ago…

Strider of the Unbending Path 123 > 124

Adamantine Adaption 156 > 157

Inertial Overdrive 106 > 107

It didn’t take long for the dragon to start rotting around Shiv. Necromancy was horrifying in the way that it made you less with each hit it inflicted. Gold tarnished and withered into flaking blackness. Organs shriveled. Blood dissolved. Bones crumbled away into ash. In seconds, Shiv’s meat shield started decomposing around him, coming apart in body and spirit. He'd expected them to hold back a little longer since he was effectively using one of their own as a shield, but once again, the other riders adapted.

And that was the biggest difference between these Pathbearers and the ones he'd fought before. They learned. Constantly. This entire exchange wasn’t a clash of force against force or strength on strength, but choice against choice. Shiv had his speed and surprise going for him. They had numbers, Chronomancy, and Necromancy.

Necromancy that was about to punch through the flesh of this dragon and set Shiv off like a mana bomb at any point.

Guess we all have to make ugly choices at some point, Shiv thought. Now. Time for me to make mine.

He cast his Skysplitter in the distance again. He didn’t care where it went, so long as it was away from here. The glow of Necromancy faded, but the dragon was still falling apart around Shiv. Time for a new plan: Shove myself down another dragon’s throat after stunning them with my inertial detonation. Yeah, this is gonna hurt…

Shiv spiked his gravitic field fifty times. He started breaking apart like the dragon he hid within. The air around him exploded with fire and displaced kinetic energy, and he burst out from the dragon’s body in a rush of speed. Blood gushed out from his eyes and ears as he sailed through the air toward the densest concentration of dragons. Darkness and crimson danced around the corners of his vision. Shiv groaned as he fought hard not to black out.

Five dragons reacted to his sudden appearance. He could see the Necromancy crystals on their backs brightening. But that was as far as they got. Shiv burst his inertial sheath. A solid wall of destruction surged out in a rippling wave. The sheer amount of force released also folded Shiv in half at the point of his lower spine.

The Deathless let out a ragged cry of pain—and then reverted time to a second ago and repeated the same action.

He detonated his sheath again. His body broke again. His temporal shell reached the breaking point. He cast himself back in time once more. Shiv shot forward and burst his sheath again. His Chronomancy broke, but before it came apart entirely, he activated his Outside Context Problem.

A rush of coldness passed through Shiv as he focused on his senses. Everything around him was on fire. His inertial detonation spread wider and wider, displacing clouds and dragging dragons along in its wake. Shiv himself barely looked human—felt more like a mangled bag of flesh containing shards of displaced bone. He was so badly injured that if his Song of the Vigilant wasn’t active, he wouldn’t have been able to finish the spell.

A Woundeater passed through him, swallowing injury after injury as his body snapped back into shape. Shiv let out a slight groan as he looked around. The time dragons had been ragdolled in different directions. Most of them seemed to have broken wings. A few weren’t responsive at all. It was a testament to just how tough they were that they didn’t die outright. Maybe the same couldn’t be said for the riders.

The warrior in Shiv called out to him, demanded that he keep pursuing them—that he finish off each and every one now that they were scattered and vulnerable. But he could hear Adam’s voice in the back of his head. Uva’s, too. The Necrotechs had responded fast, and if they could send out one team of dragons this quickly, they could unleash another.

Time to vanish, Shiv decided, triggering his Skysplitter’s Spatial Anchor. He teleported to the blade in a blast of displaced space and promptly smashed through a verdant hill. Grass and dirt exploded over Shiv, and he spiked his gravitic field up to right himself. As he sailed through the air, his helmet broke apart, and Shiv cursed.

Time to replace this suit of armor too. It’s done. The inertial detonations are hell on my Toughness, but damn if they aren’t powerful as all hell.

He triggered Chameleon and Silhouette as he decelerated to avoid environmental destruction and kept flying low, waiting to see if dragons would catch sight of him again.

Seconds passed. Everything was quiet. Shiv let out a breath and came to a stop. “Well. Guess I finally managed to lose them. Time to keep—”

Just then, he caught something in the corner of his vision. A star glowing brighter than most, just over the Tidewall.

He turned. The star grew even brighter. Shiv's eyebrows made it halfway up his forehead before what he'd assumed to be a star arrived right in front of his face, and then he found out how it felt for one's body to be reduced to its component atoms.

Revenant 41 > 42

Shiv blinked as he respawned.

The world was burning. A column of blinding fire drilled clean through the land and swelled out, scouring everything between the clouds and the earth to the edge of the horizon and beyond.

Everything in sight faded into the blinding dawn of an exploding sun.

Shiv's mind remained blank for a moment. Then the cold started getting to him. He needed to drain vitality, but—

What the fuck was that? What in the Broken Moon just killed me?

***

10 seconds ago…

Roland’s eyes narrowed as he watched the figure emerge victorious from their battle against the squadron of dragons. A massive shroud of destruction was birthed from their body every time they released all the kinetic energy they had built up. Roland wasn’t exactly sure what kind of Reflexes Skill that was, but he knew it was Heroic-Tier at the least, and that this Pathbearer wasn’t friendly to Sullain.

They were fighting the vicar’s patrols, tearing across the land and air like a fast-moving mana bomb. It was like they were deliberately drawing attention, trying to provoke notice.

They’re a distraction, Roland realized. I knew they couldn’t be operating alone. It wouldn’t make sense. Singleton Pathbearers are usually Shadows or Assassins. This one seems like a Heroic-Tier Vanguard…

The Pathbearer vanished from the sky just then. Roland thought they used their Chronomancy again, but the Town Lord noticed a pulse of spatial magic about four kilometers away. He sent one of his arrows on approach. Whoever this stranger was, he wanted a better look at them. If this was another one of the Inquisition’s special operatives, he wanted to know why—

Then, as the unknown Pathbearer launched themselves across the land with a pulse of force, their skull-shaped helmet broke apart.

Roland’s heart skipped a beat. His stomach rebelled. For a moment, he thought he was looking at Harlon—but no. Harlon was dead. This was his son. This was the Omenborn born from the ritual that killed Rose, that took from Roland his daughter.

This was Tanner Lowe. The boy who called himself Shiv.

He looked different. His irises were a brilliant white now, and he was practically twice as large as he used to be. He had skills. Skills meant a Path. And that meant the reports—his Biomancers claimed to have recovered multiple bodies that belonged to Shiv, but Roland had been occupied every second since the battle had begun—he had constantly—

Roland’s heart plunged into an abyss of cold terror. This couldn’t be happening. He refused to even entertain the idea.

Tanner was accelerating toward the Tidewall, clad in the vestiges of death. That meant—that could only mean one thing—

Necrotech. But how? Could he have been in league with the Necrotechs all this time? Another Abyssal Lord trying to undercut Sullain?

Roland gritted his teeth. He couldn’t allow this. He wouldn’t accept this.

The Starhawk’s light spilled out from Roland as his eyes began to glow. He had been a fool. Too soft. Too weak. Too—he just couldn’t do it. He couldn’t just murder a child. And now he was paying for his mercy. Now, the Omenborn was on his way home.

“No,” Roland growled.

“Lord Arrow?” his personal Psychomancer said, taken aback by the sudden spike of terror she sensed in the Town Lord.

Roland’s soul was his arrows. But they also contained the boundless power of the Starhawk. The promise of a dying star’s last glow. And in a fit of dread and fury, Roland primed 244 of these arrows and directed them down to Old Santabar.

And so they fell. Like shooting stars, traveling from the upper atmosphere to the earth in an instant. He felt three of the Solar arrows hit Tanner. He felt the Omenborn’s body break, burn—but also endure for a moment. Roland’s eyes widened.

Adamantine Adaption?

Then the other 241 arrows crashed into him.

In a flare of radiance likely visible all the way from the broken fragments of the moon, half of the Old Santabar region vanished beneath a blinding pillar of purifying flame.

Roland fell to his knees, more emotionally shaken than magically exhausted. As his personal guard and aides rushed to help him back up, he wasn’t focused on them. Rather, he stared down from the other arrows he left in the void, and he watched. Watched and made sure there was nothing left of the Omenborn. He watched.

And kept watching…

He has to be dead… He has to be… He has to be…

[User]
Write 113 (I) Block
Target length: ~3000 words

[Assistant]
Let me tell you something, Sijik. I hate Roland Arrow. I've hated him since the first time I laid eyes on him. I hated him when we were in the same class. I hated him every time he humiliated me during sparring. Every time he humiliated me during small group battles. Every time he humiliated me during the mock war engagements we waged over and over again.

You cannot conceive of the depths of my loathing. You cannot understand what it is like to hate someone so much that it builds up like sediment in your bones, like particulates in your blood.

You wake up hating this person. You sleep hating this person. You eat with the weight of this person on your tongue.

Hate, hate, hate is what I feel for Roland Arrow. But I also understand him. I respect his skill and the danger he poses as a Pathbearer. So no, we're not just going to walk up to Blackedge and simply demand that he drop the wards and let us in. We are not going to send 100,000 Pathbearers to their deaths against the single most dangerous man I've ever seen pick up a bow.

Do you know how brutally Roland Arrow humiliated our combat instructor? The man was a Master. The man was a legend in his time. A legend in his own mind. And he resigned. He resigned before the semester was over. Roland made a mockery of him.

You were not there at the Battle of the Eclipse. At the battle above the chasm. But I was. For all my hatred, for all Roland represents, for the one he serves, for his arrogance, his hubris, for leading my wife and my brother into a slaughter in the depths that they never came back from, for a war that should have never taken place, for an Ascendant that seeks to betray us all, I understand what he truly is. I understand the threat he poses. I understand that he is a Pathbearer without peers.

Never bring up this suggestion to me again, Inquisitor. You may not value the lives of these Pathbearers, but I do.

I come intending to inflict righteous retribution on Roland Arrow. And I will give anything to see it done. I will give anything to see my daughter retrieved. I will give anything, anything. I will sacrifice myself, not them. Not meaninglessly. They are good men. Good women. Good bots. And you will not waste their lives this way. We do this strategically. Carefully. Properly.

I will give Roland Arrow nothing for free. Not another second of my time. And not the lives of the lowliest mercenary.

-City Lord Havel Van Stormhalt to Inquisitor Sijik

113 (I)

Block

Gold-01 awoke with a scream. His flesh was frying, his legs felt like they were folded the wrong way, his tailbone felt like someone had been working on it all day with a chisel, and his insides—Great One—his insides felt like they were liquid. Searing pain flowed through his body, and he wished he were unconscious again. As his vision stopped spinning, he realized the inside of his capsule was glowing with heat. No wonder he was in so much pain; he was being cooked alive.

Veins of the Stormdiver 88 > 91

"Godsdamn it," Gold-01 growled. He drew upon his feeble Aeromancy, and he circulated a gust of wind around himself. It was moments like these that he wished he had Cryomancy; moments like these, he wished he'd also devoted more time to improving his Toughness. He tried to unbuckle himself from the capsule, only to let out another bark of pure agony as his broken ribs sank into a ruptured organ.

"Great One," Gold-01 whimpered. His words slurred into incoherence. His mind reeled. How did he end up here? What just... And then his memories returned to him. It was a massive blast that smashed into him and his dragon, that tore him across the world, that drove his head high against the ceiling of his capsule, knocking him out.

He ripped off his flight mask and felt at his head.

Blood trickled down Gold-01's skull, soaking his hair red. But that was how he knew he was still alive. Gritting his teeth, Gold-01 fought through the pain and reached into the emergency compartment within his capsule. It was badly dented. The capsule was practically curved in on itself. The left side of the entire compartment was folded inward.

Gold-01 simply stared in disbelief. He didn't know anything that could have done that to Adamantine. Frankly, he didn't believe it was possible. Adamantine was supposedly unbreakable for most Pathbearers. But he had been fighting a Hero. A Hero at the very least.

And then other memories returned to Gold-01. Torturous memories. Memories of his squadron being cut down. Of other dragons taking cuts along their neck, blood gushing out from their eyes and jaws as they fell. He remembered the dragons caught in the immediate vicinity of the blast. He was sure that he saw one vanish altogether, flayed out of existence by the blast. The others were flung across the world, cast like insects caught in the grip of a hurricane. And his comrades, his fellow riders… He didn't know what their condition was. He needed to find them.

But first… Gold-01 bit back a snarl as he finally managed to open the compartment. He pulled the dented cover off, but the sudden motion made him double over, and he puked all over himself. Blood mingled with half-digested chunks of this morning's breakfast. He was bleeding internally.

He needed the potion. He needed it now. He picked up the healing potion, and he found his hands were shaking too much. He controlled his movements. He bade his quivering fingers to slow. He remembered drinking potions before while badly injured during a prior mission, spilling half of them down his chin and chest, wasting precious resources. Gold-01 focused. Gold-01 carefully placed it against his lip and tipped it backward.

The potion was foul-tasting. It was like what one might think a slug would taste like if it had been ground up and laced with bitter acid. The healing potion crawled down his throat, making him choke for a moment just from how thick and viscous it was. But slowly, it worked through his body. It flowed through his veins, and his natural healing accelerated dramatically. That didn't do much for the pain, but he did feel parts of him knit back together inside.

Wounds closed, and there was a gradual itch that grew and grew, an itch he knew to be the mending of vessels and the regeneration of his bones. The broken pieces that still remained inside of him would need to be extracted by a Biomancer later, as that was to take place alongside a cancer examination. No matter how badly wounded he was, he gave it good odds that he would probably develop more than a few tumors.

He leaned back against his seat, then hissed as the heat returned. The moment without the Aeromancy circulating the air returned the temperature within his capsule to an unbearable level. He needed to get out. He wouldn't be able to rest inside here. So, Gold-01 reached down. He found the latch meant to pop the top part of his capsule. He pulled. The latch was stuck. Gold-01 let out a whimper. He didn't know if he had the strength.

But then he mustered himself. He mustered himself as he remembered what Master Irene said to him. If you don't have the strength, you will die. You will die alone. You will drown inside your capsule. You will be pulled under the water while riding in your harness. You will die, and you will fail your squadron. Remember this. If you do die, die making a difference. Do not let the Great Enemy take you freely. Don't let your death become an avalanche.

"It won't," Gold-01 said. He was replying to a woman long dead. A woman he'd killed. But he still had to tell someone. He still needed to talk to someone. Gods, he wished she were here. He drew in a deep breath. His lungs ached. The hyperheated air burned his lungs and boiled his stomach, but he needed the oxygen for one last burst of strength.

Gold-01 reached down with both hands. He pulled hard. The latch clicked, and then something inside it broke. But just as hopelessness threatened to overtake him, the top part of the capsule burst off. The bolts holding it in place shot into the air. But with how deformed it was, it snapped off to the side and clipped Gold-01 along the left temple, opening a gash, and it slammed him face-first against a piece of hyperheated metal. Gold-01 let out a shriek. He pulled his face back. But the damage was done. It seared clean through his flesh, parting skin, muscle, and touching bone. He let out another groan, a groan that almost became a sob until he mastered himself.

"Can't touch it," Gold-01 slurred. He slowly rose on shaking feet, and he clambered upon his seat as he stared out over the blasted horizon. Gold-01's eyes widened. "This… Am I in hell?" he whispered to himself, and it was a proper question, for the horizon of Old Santabar had been changed.

Where there were once rolling fields of green and mountains running across the land like frozen tidal waves, ranging for kilometers beyond, now Old Santabar resembled a desert of glass. Ash rained down from above. A shroud of smog blocked the sky and the fragments of the Great One's egg from Gold-01's gaze. Up to his right, he saw the landscape running downward in a gleaming slope, a slope that curved and rose again. He was in a crater.

A crater.

Gold-01's mind spun. The blast the Heroic-Tier Pathbearer unleashed earlier had been massive. But could it have been this massive? Could they have had this much power within them? If they did, then what was the point of the chase? What was the point of any of it? If they were that powerful, why didn’t he just finish them all instantly? Why bother with the chase at all? Just who the fuck was he?

Gold-01 felt sick. Did the enemy Hero do all that just to toy with him? Toy with the riders who fought alongside Gold-01? What was this? What kind of monster did the System make Gold-01 face?

Gold-01 looked out across the desolate wasteland, and he cast his Psychomancy mana outward, a pulsing ripple that spread far. "This is Gold-01," he stammered mentally. He watched as his translucent mana crawled across the land. It kept going, but he couldn't see anything for miles. He couldn't see.

And then he did see something. He saw something he didn't want to see—he didn't want to accept.

He saw the glistening golden scales of a dragon, but it was half-melted, half-fused to the ground. Its lower body was gone. Just gone. There were no remains. No blood. It just ended. Fused into the glassed ground, the dragon's eye sockets were hollow. There were small embers burning within, and smoke seeped out between its remaining scales as well.

Its ribs were showing, and on its back was a capsule, or what remained of one. It was little more than a melted funnel. Nothing but metal slag. If there had been anyone inside, there wasn't anymore.

"Hello?" Gold-01 called out. Psychomancy pulsed out from him. He strained his Master-Tier Psychomancy as hard as he could. "Hello? Anyone? Gold Primary? Anyone? Gold-02? Gold-7? Gold-03?"

He was calling out to dead comrades now. And Gold-01 felt himself on the verge of breaking. He prided himself on his focus and iron will. But the hell before him, the sudden isolation, it was getting to be too much, too much. And then as he turned, he saw something else, a jutting curve, a series of ribs folded over his capsule. And then Gold-01 remembered. He remembered that he had a dragon too.

His dragon was gone. His dragon was... He found himself staring at three broken ribs, three broken ribs that were burned, scorched clean. Suddenly Gold-01 looked away, sinking fully into shell shock, doing everything he could not to consider his own dragon's death. The dragon he had fought alongside for so long. His dragon’s name… His…

Gold-01 crushed that chain of thought with his Psychomancy. A trail of drool dribbled down his chin as he took his first shaky step out of his capsule. As his foot greeted the ground, a series of cracks sounded, traveling from his ankle up through his body. He could feel the broken bones left within him rattling. Gold-01 flinched at the sensation. He cast out another pulse of Psychomancy.

"Anyone, please, someone respond! Fucking someone, someone, somebody!" Gold-01 was screaming at the end. He wasn't just calling out with his mind. He was calling out with his voice, his hoarse, burned voice. "Central! Gold-02! Anyone! Anyone!"

He fell to his knees, and the glass was burning hot as well. It seared his flesh even through the enchanted leathers he was wearing. It was supposed to modulate his temperature to suit any environment. This was an environment that no one could survive in. Gold-01 held himself. He hugged himself as he swept his gaze across the land. He hugged himself as he strained his Awareness, trying—hoping that there was another survivor, as he looked, as he searched for any sign of life, any sign of life at all.

But there was nothing, nothing but him and a half-melted dragon four hundred meters away. Nothing. And it was all because of one Pathbearer, that Hero, that cruel monster that toyed with him and butchered his fellow riders.

Gold-01 slowly lifted his head. His sorrow was overwhelming, but deep in the waters of his misery came another emotion, came a dark and building sensation. Gold-01 didn't know hate before this moment. Gold-01 didn't know the urge to commit himself completely to a personal quest, to give everything he had to murder one other man, one other Pathbearer, one that took so much from him—

Gold-01 cried out as he felt his life force get ripped out of his body.

The world around him blurred and went gray, and the remnants of his strength whistled out of him like air from a balloon.

***

"Godsdamn, I got lucky," Shiv thought to himself as he drained the only surviving rider he could find. "And godsdamn, is this poor bastard unlucky." As the rider spasmed, Shiv genuinely felt bad for him.

Judging from the few dragon bones remaining nearby, this guy likely survived because his dragon crashed back-first into the ground, pinning his capsule in place, while the dragon took the brunt of the blast.

Adamantine Adaption 157 > 163

Woundeater 85 > 86

Strider of the Unbending Path 124 > 128

Inertial Overdrive 107 > 111

And what a hell of a damn blast that was. Shiv barely felt any pain when he died earlier. His Adamantine Adaption responded to the first few hits, but all the ones that followed were immediately too much. He had no chance of surviving that, not a single damn bit.

That was probably why he gained so much of a massive leap in terms of Adamantine Adaption. But why did he get a leap for Strider as well? For Inertial Overdrive?

Shiv's paranoia was at an all-time high as the rider groaned and began to seize. The Deathless kept his gaze high, staring at the skies above, waiting for another salvo to descend to obliterate the land once more.

If that attack came from Vicar Sullain or his Necrotechs, Shiv didn't know what to say. Their dragons were here, as were their observation posts. If they had that kind of firepower, why didn't they use it on Blackedge? Why were they wasting it on him? Was he that much of a threat? Did they really have that powerful and potent of an arsenal that they could just casually expend?

Parts of him wanted to say no, but after what he'd just experienced…

Shiv felt a shudder run through his body. The Abyss had been portrayed as a place of deep mystery, of nightmarish danger. Shiv believed that for most of his life, he never doubted the fact that few Pathbearers had managed to venture more than a few kilometers deep than the chasm.

But after less than ten minutes on the surface, he'd encountered an observation post, was ambushed by ten time-jumping dragons and their riders, and then was immediately killed as a series of arrows infused with what felt like the power of small stars. Arrows that turned his body from a matter of biology into a function of physics.

A shadowy cocoon formed over Shiv as the last trickles of vitality were siphoned out from the unfortunate rider.

Yeah, sorry about that, Shiv thought. The rider went limp. He crashed down against the glassed surface of the ground that used to be rolling hills, soil, dirt, nature, and all that. Now, now it was just a blasted wasteland. Shiv had made some decimated wastelands in his own time, but this was on another level.

If Inertial Overdrive is Heroic, then is this the power of a Legendary Pathbearer? Shiv thought to himself. The revelation was as terrifying as it was inspiring. If this was what lay ahead, well, he couldn't wait to be able to break things on this magnitude.

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[User]
Write 113 (II) Block
Target length: ~2900 words

[Assistant]
Shiv paused as he considered what his skills would be like when they became Legendary. Inertial Overdrive came with its own consequences. He became aware of one of those consequences when he overspiked himself right beside the rider he'd wanted to take hostage. Shiv just wanted to move faster, but the poor High Adept dissolved into nothing but bloody mist.

Should have shoved the felling bastard into my cape. Still, Shiv thought, this was an awesome display of destruction. I just hope I don't experience it myself again. I still need to get to the city. How the hell am I going to do that? He looked up at the sky and frowned. Maybe I should just keep traveling underground, just keep going slowly for a long while. Maybe…

And just then, a Veilpiercer slammed down on the ground next to him. A dimensional rift opened, and Adam zipped through. He came to a sudden halt immediately beside Shiv to see the Deathless fusing a new set of armor around himself.

"Adam," Shiv breathed. He gestured at the surrounding devastation and winced. "I didn’t get hit by Necromancy. I was trying to—"

"I know," Adam said. "That was Father."

Shiv's eyes widened. "What?"

"That was my father," Adam repeated, his heart pounding fast. "I saw the same skill recorded in the Educator’s tome. I saw..." Adam trailed off. “This was done by my father. I'm sure of it. I was—I barely managed to avoid it by dashing back into my rift. But this was—”

His eyes widened. He looked past Shiv, and then he turned as well. There came a flash of color from the dense blanket of ash and smog above them. There came a blinding pulse. Just then, a brilliant needle tore through the clouds. It was followed by a few hundred other needles. No, not needles, arrows. They zipped across space in a blinding instant. Shiv activated his temporal shell.

Time froze. Most of the arrows stopped. Some of them kept going.

The arrows that hunted him still were golden, and they tore across frozen time at twice the speed Shiv could move. He only managed ten spikes before they reappeared around him. The arrows collapsed around his person, and they came within a centimeter from striking—when they suddenly stopped.

Because they lost track of Shiv’s existence.

Outside Context Problem 60 > 61

“Fucking Roland,” Shiv snarled. “I knew he was planning to do this shit.”

“Roland…” Rose breathed. “Oh, my love.”

Shiv shot her an annoyed glare, but then noticed how one of the arrows turned and faced Adam.

***

Roland’s trance broke. He took a moment to focus—to truly observe the other Pathbearer and—

Roland gasped and stumbled back. His guard captain caught him before he could fall.

Adam? My son. I almost just killed my own son… Why is he there? How is he here? Why did I fire at him?

An ill feeling fell over Roland, but just then, a massive shape twisted over the sky, its mouth opening a thousand times over like an impossible fractal as it descended to swallow Blackedge whole. It crashed down against the town’s wards, and some of the spell patterns flickered out.

Roland saw some of the town’s Dynamancers collapse as they struggled against the eldritch beast’s weight. They stood on the borders of Blackedge, and they strained themselves to the limit and beyond. They needed him. He couldn’t afford to be distracted. Not now.

Roland hissed and took more levels out of his Toughness, Navigation, and Memory Skills, dedicating them to his Parallel Thinking.

Parallel Thinking 81 > 201 (Skill Evolution Imminent)

Skill Evolution: Parallel Thinking (Adept) > Stacked Consciousness (Heroic)

Suddenly, he could focus on multiple things at the same time. And he nearly dropped dead as his organs started failing from overstrain.

“Biomancers,” Roland gasped. “Attend me.”

***

Shiv let time resume as the arrows pulled away from him. Adam stared at them for a moment, and he swallowed.

“Father?” Adam said.

One of the arrows shivered in the air, and then it motioned a nod.

The Young Lord bit his lip. And Shiv started getting cold again. He immediately positioned himself behind Adam, drew in a steadying breath, and glared at Rose.

“If he shoots me and kills Adam, you'll be my witness.”

Rose frowned at him. “Roland would never harm our boy.”

“Yeah, well, I’m here right now, so we can see if he wants Adam alive more than he wants me dead.”

Shiv re-emerged into existence. The arrows around him flinched in a surprisingly human way.

“Shiv?” Adam breathed. He did a double-take just as he remembered Shiv’s existence. “What are you—”

***

“What?” Roland spat. He must’ve been going insane. A dying shriek came from the massive eldritch titan as a flood of brilliant arrows tore it apart from the inside. But while he handled the monster, the Omenborn… How did I lose track of the Omenborn?

For a second, it was like… like he didn’t exist at all…

***

Shiv stepped behind Adam with his hands high. “Don’t godsdamned shoot me, Roland. Or you might cook your precious boy too.”

Adam noticed Shiv maneuvering behind, and he scowled at the Deathless. "Really?" he breathed.

"Yeah, really," Shiv growled. As he looked at the many arrows, Shiv held up a finger, one in particular.

"Shiv," Adam hissed.

"What?" Shiv growled. "Your dad felling smote me from existence using the power of the sun. I'm allowed to be a little bit pissed off." One of the arrows drew a little closer to Shiv, and he immediately ducked behind Adam.

“Shiv, there’s no point to this—”

“If he wants to blow me up again, I'm going to have to rely on your Legendary armor of unbreakable nepotism. I’m not taking that shit to the face again.”

"I thought you enjoyed dying."

"Yeah, when I have someone to drain. Who was I going to drain if I didn't come upon that unlucky asshole over here?" Shiv said, gesturing at the dead rider.

"Me, you idiot," Adam breathed. Shiv paused. Adam folded his arms. And he looked slightly embarrassed. “I wouldn't have just let you vanish from existence. That’s the entire reason I came. I rushed over because I thought there weren’t any survivors.”

Shiv stared at Adam for a moment. Then he grunted awkwardly. "Yeah. Uh. Yeah, I guess. I guess that's right. So, uh, what the hells do we do now?"

"Now?" Adam stared at his father's arrows. "Now we..." And then the arrows receded. They shot back into the sky, moving so fast that Shiv could barely keep track of them. Barely. But as an experiment, he spiked his field more than a few times. Adam let out a cry as the force swept over him. Shiv went faster, faster. He spiked himself over sixty times.

His body was on the verge of breaking apart in an instant. His heart burst open, and Shiv cast himself back in time a second. He undid all his spikes of gravity. He returned to an unmoving state. His wounds were gone as well.

The arrows were still more than a little faster than he was while he was near death.

What the hell kind of monster are you, Roland? Shiv thought to himself. As he considered that question, he clenched his fists and his fingers tapped on his blade. Whatever kind of monster you are, though, I'm still coming for your ass.

One of the arrows slipped back through the clouds as if threatening Shiv, and he ducked behind Adam again. The arrow retreated once more.

“Yeah, that’s right, piss off, asshole,” Shiv growled.

"My father is not being an asshole," Adam snarled. His eyebrows were furrowed, small, patchy arcs of red hair climbing towards his forehead. "He clearly had a good reason to shoot at you, and… and…”

"And what kind of reason was that?" Shiv spat. "I was trying to get away from the dragon cavalry—I did manage to get away from the dragons. I avoided all those beams of Necromancy just for him to obliterate me and an entire section of the landscape. Actually, if he could do that, no wonder he's been holding off Sullain so long. No wonder he's been able to defend Blackedge for two weeks on his own. He doesn't need us! Let's go back to the gate. Let's close it and just wait for him to win on his own while we kick up our feet!"

Adam took a step toward Shiv, and his eyes simmered with unbridled rage at even the suggestion. "We are not doing that," the Gate Lord snarled.

Shiv frowned at Adam, but then he let out a sigh. "Godsdamn it, all right, fine. So, what now?"

"Now we keep going," Adam said. "The observation posts here are either completely destroyed or buried beneath a tide of glass. We have an opening." And Adam held out a hand. "I managed to capture one of their dimensional ships earlier.”

"Dimensional ships?" Shiv blinked. "Is that a thing?"

"I don't know exactly what it is. It's a ship that has a dimensional gate. I boarded it. I managed to capture the people aboard it. And then I piloted it back over to our gateway." Adam briefly looked at his current dimensional pathway. It was slowly closing. "What happened just now between you and my father might have been a misunderstanding. Were you wearing your armor?"

"I'm always wearing my armor," Shiv said.

"Were you wearing your helmet?"

"Yeah." Shiv paused. "Well, no, my helmet fell apart in the last fight."

"There we have it," Adam said. "He probably thought you were a Necrotech soldier. Why don't you just change the design of your armor, huh?"

"What do you mean, change the design of my armor?" Shiv folded his arms. "So I'm going to have to change my design just because they happened to copy my style."

"They looked like that first."

"Well, how was I supposed to know that?" Shiv replied.

"It doesn't matter anymore," Adam muttered, waving him off. "He knows now. It won’t happen again. Just get moving. We have an opening, and my father's watching us. And since he hasn't struck you again..."

"Yet," Shiv said.

"Yet," Adam begrudgingly agreed, "you can continue on. You can fly. You can reach Blackedge, and you can finish your scouting run. But the fact he can reach us this far is…” Adam narrowed his eyes. “Far beyond Master-Tier.”

“Yeah.” Shiv shook his head. “More like Legend. Your father’s a damned monster. And Adam. I’m still going to kick his ass down the line. For this and everything else. I’m stating it plainly for you. I’m not letting this shit go.”

The Gate Lord just stared. “Do you think you even can?”

“I’ll just have to keep dying and find out.”

Adam scoffed, but he clearly didn’t like what Shiv just said. “Go. Go, now. Finish the scouting run.”

Shiv let out a sigh. "Fine." But he briefly looked around him. "I'm going to probably take an alternative route instead of going straight over. I expect Sullain’s people to come investigating real soon.”

"Probably a good expectation," Adam said, nodding. "Alright. Well..." Adam awkwardly looked down and licked his lips, then his expression softened. He promptly patted Shiv on the shoulder. "Glad you're not dead for good."

Shiv chuckled. "Yeah, me too. Thanks for… coming to get me. I appreciate it.”

"I'll keep watching you," Adam said, smirking. Then he looked up as well. "More than just me will be watching you now, I think." Adam's expression, however, was wistful, hopeful, even joyful. That wasn't anything Shiv felt towards Roland Arrow.

They parted then. Adam vanished back into his dimensional pathway before it closed entirely, and Shiv launched himself into the air. He pulled his gravitic field, and he flung himself forward, sailing high into the sky.

Trailing particulates of ash washed over his body. But as he accelerated, they burst apart, and as he climbed his Inertial Overdrive, he thundered with energy. Soon, the horizon blurred towards Shiv, and his bones began to fracture. But he needed to get out of here. Anxiety built up inside him like a lump. It grew more and more painful, tighter with every second.

He waited for Roland to strike him down after all, now that Adam was gone. He waited for another of the arrows to descend from above. He waited, and Shiv prepared to spike himself more than ever. He tried to trigger one of the plagues he had stored in his body, but then he realized that piece was lodged in his old corpse.

Shit, Shiv thought to himself, I really need to figure out how to give myself diseases without using the Court Leviathan as a flesh donor..

And as he burst through a layer of blackened clouds, a cocoon of searing heat and breaking ash peeled away from him like surface tension. Once more, the naked night sky greeted him. The glistening shards of the moon danced above, and in the distance, brilliant gems flashed and dimmed. Perhaps they were true stars, perhaps they were more of Roland's arrows. With how many scintillating constellations there were blanketing the sky above, pockmarked with clouds, Shiv couldn't be sure.

"Hey, Roland," he cried out, "if you're listening to me right now, asshole, I'm not here to kill you or anything. The Omenborn Curse died the day I did on Blackedge. You're welcome for me dying to protect the town, by the way. You're also welcome for me helping your son out while you were sitting on your ass here for weeks. I guess you couldn't spare a few arrows for your own boy."

A part of Shiv knew he was being petulant, foolish, even, for taunting someone so powerful for no real reason. But he couldn’t let it go. The bastard just blew him to pieces. Shiv didn't even have a chance to defend himself.

Master Roland Arrow… Shiv sighed. He imagined himself having good odds in a fight against just about any Master-Tier Pathbearer right now. Shiv thought he was going to show Roland the what-for when he got his Momentum Core, but now…

Shiv couldn't help but laugh. He had been delusional, and Roland Arrow was bullshit. If he tried fighting Roland Arrow now, he would get killed in an instant.

But I'm still coming for your ass, Shiv thought to himself. I am going to punch you in the face, Roland. I am going to beat your ass someday. We’re going to have it out.

And then Shiv detonated his inertial sheath for the first time as he sped toward the Tidewall, toward Lost Angeles, toward a fast-approaching horizon.

***

Back at Blackedge, atop Starhawk's Perch, Roland Arrow was shaking. The bulk of his minds fought on. The bulk of his minds were still dedicated to defense, to bombarding the literal tide of eldritch entities Vicar Sullain had summoned today. They were new creatures on the field; strange, sinuous nightmares that consumed pockets of space.

And from those pockets leaked more of the Outside. More of the Outside that spontaneously died as Chronomancy arrows exploded into existence and lit up the night.

The System allowed the eldritch in right now for some reason. The System wanted the vicar to have this power. Most mages—even Heroic or Legendary Dimensionalists—couldn't reach the Outside so easily.

Something was happening. The world was scheming for a grander war. Just like it always was.

But a part of Roland, that very foundation of who he was, that small bit of him that was utterly human, knelt within his personal chamber, shaking. Knelt as his Psychomancer tried to hopelessly fix whatever was broken inside of him, as his Biomancers gave what little bit of magic they had left to keep his heart from stopping.

"It's not you," Roland whispered, "it's not you, it's not me, it's not..."

"My Lord, my Lord," Chris, his personal Psychomancer, breathed. "What's wrong? What's happened? What have you seen?"

He stared at her. His mouth opened and closed several times, but even as he stared at her, he wasn't staring at her. He was staring at another scene. He was staring at his son standing next to the Omenborn…

Harlon’s son… Vera’s son.

Tanner. Tanner was beside Adam. And they looked…

They looked just like Harlon and Roland so many years ago. The thought almost made him throw up. It was like a taunt inflicted across history.

And Roland couldn’t take it. He shouldn’t remember their faces. He shouldn’t remember—

"Chris," Roland whispered. “The memory blocks you put in me have broken. I remember his face again. I remember her face again… I remember…”

Chris paled. “My Lord, I—Forgive me, this—”

Roland clenched his jaw and let out a breath. "My son is coming home to aid us, and I think our doom might be coming with him." He closed his eyes and looked up. Starhawk, is this the aid you promised me? Why? Why him…

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