Everyone yearns to betray themselves in some way, Maria. It is a fundamental flaw of the individual. The monsters are to be envied in that they can live unto themselves. They exist without great significance, but have no great significance exerted upon them, because they don't need stories. They don't need to be told that they are special; they don't need embroidery or gilded baubles. With their name inscribed upon its base, they don't need tales and criers, bards and theaters to valorize everything they do.
Individuals and those capable of language and communication, those enslaved to the higher aspects of narrative sophistication, are contaminated and ultimately damned. It's from that point of damnation that we bury our teeth in. Before the blood of the body graces our palate, we claim the blood of the heart, the blood of the mind.
It is as Legend-Philosopher Melaia Kelhaus proclaimed: One must master and wield oneself rather than being mastered and wielded.
And so we are not animals, my dear. We are the only true nobles of this System by blood, and all the others are its cattle.
And I speak not of the First Blood: All beings outside of our Bloodline are cattle. Remember this.
—Grandmother Ophereus to Maria Corcusa
VIII-14
Animal
Six bullets, carrying six spells; adamantine tips; fired from a Heroic-Tier gun. First spell already taking effect: tumorification in progress, cancer spreading through my body, forcing my healing factor to fight it. Second and third spells are anchors, Dimensionality and Chronomancy, preventing me from escaping. Fourth spell is a tracker and an explosive filled with Dynamancy, meant to amplify effects. Can feel it pressing against my magical fields, capable of flaying me from the inside. Sixth spell: uncertain. Fifth spell: incomprehensible… Some kind of Necromancy. Doesn’t have a direct tether to my soul anyway.
An explosion of information cascaded through Maria’s mind, all the effects befalling her flesh. Attunements were inputs, and from them came outputs: tactical and strategic considerations, counter-measures, and possible means of escape. Time should have been at a standstill inside her skull per her My Mind Shaped by Total War Skill, but the damned orc moved like the flow of the waters of chronology had been equalized.
Because they have, she realized. The ropes threading through each metal pylon surrounding her were more than boundaries for this impromptu wrestling arena—it was also a subtle temporal-dimensional plane meant to contain and separate her from the outside.
Everyone trapped within the arena was banished into a demi-dimension where they faced the Breaker and no one else, where no one else could intercede on their behalf unless they broke through the protective barriers. Furthermore, her downed bodyguards were grayed out, a veil of golden static desynchronizing them from her both spatially and temporally. He didn't defeat my entire detachment in less than a second. He faced each of them individually, over and over again. What a monstrous, disgusting skill—he alone can inflict defeat in detail on an army. Numbers mean nothing to a Pathbearer like him.
Through it all, Maria feigned discomfort and exaggerated her injuries. She clutched her groin, trying to pull it back together, but a budding dollop of tumors spilled out, distending from her shattered pelvis and eating away at the bits of small intestine that were dragged along with it. “What in the hells was that?” she shouted. “That was no clothesline at all!”
The Breaker puckered his lips and spun his pistol, and the gun laughed on his behalf. The barrel widened, bellowing shots of noise into the air. She felt the mockery radiating from its tip. “Sorry, didn't realize we were supposed to be friends, sister—but since we are, a word of advice from the Jingoist: Sometimes, I’m full of that slimy malarkey! Now take my dive kick!”
He exploded high up into the air, and the stage resonated with his strength. Gravity spiked upward. Maria barely managed to counteract the effect, burying her spare dagger into the ground, trying to keep herself from being flung into the heavens.
Rather than dive-kicking her, he summoned a shape from high above. It seemed like a meteorite for a minute, a full kilometer in width and twice that again in length. It was a misshapen mass, and the foulness of its smell struck her before its mass ever did. She beheld it with a look of utter dismay. It was rubbish, excrement, waste, trash. Every single word for useless debris was made into a descending meteor, trailing a smog of foulest flavor in its wake, and it was coming right at her. The only thing that made it capable of being called a dive kick was the simple fact that it was shaped like a leg and had the words "dive kick" crudely spray-painted across a series of recycled billboards bolted together on its underside.
The Breaker uses confusion and absurdity as his greatest ally. He shouts his attacks to distract and disturb; offensive theatricality. Maria considered dodging, going ethereal—or even retaliating with her flesh magic.
She decided to take the hit instead. More information required.
“You—” Her poorly-acted scream of outrage was drowned out as the trash meteor slammed into her with the might of a small sun going nova. One moment, it was kilometers away, coming down through the fetid clouds and dragging their filth in its wake like a piranha swimming through oily waters. Then the Breaker wiggled a finger, and it accelerated, zooming through an unseen border of time and space to impact seconds before it was meant to actually arrive.
Maria felt her tangible body smear beneath the weight. Her bones turned to powder, and her senses gave out. Her organs and muscles splattered, and her nerves sang a symphony of pain, screaming of compaction, of pulverization, and then nothing at all.
The trash meteor unleashed enough force to disintegrate a city and obliterate a Pathbearer with Heroic-Tier Toughness. Then the core of the meteorite detonated, unleashing waves of corrosive mana that deformed the fabric of existence like flame would an old page. Even for a vampire of great power, regenerating from complete physical destruction still required an intact lineage core, and with all the power unleashed upon her, there was nothing left to return from. Ashes were not biological. Physics was a function unto itself. Biomancy required biomass, and so in the aftermath, silence followed.
Silence and additional information.
The Breaker is capable of attacking beyond this impromptu ring. Good to know. And there is a time dilation between what is happening inside and what is happening outside. Yes, I see it now. The pace of time within is flowing far, far faster. It is an accelerated dimension of time.
“By the Challenger, she's broken into bits! The Breaker's gone too far! She's broken into bits! Someone call the police! Trash Meteor, it's a homicide!”
An explosive broadcast of sounds swept over the world as a tsunami of vibrating particles. From horizon to horizon, it carried a blow-by-blow of everything happening within the Ring, and in the aftermath, a chorus of cheers rose as the orcs and something beyond them cried the Breaker's new title:
“Jingoist! Jingoist! Jingoist!”
And above the arena, projected forth from an unseen threshold as a plume of meticulously controlled Pyromancy, moving images mirroring everything happening in the ring replayed highlights from the brief fight. Maria watched herself get flattened beneath the trash maul, over and over again, as air horns blew and the Breaker began to flex while hovering in the air. He was even larger than before, his biceps, abs, pecs, glutes, and more swelling so much his new armor tore in places. His barrel chest was exposed, and an exaggerated orc face tattooed on it opened its mouth as if giving a silent battle cry of victory.
The leftover remnants of the trash meteor dissolved in inverted waterfalls. Sprinkles of festering blackness rose back up into the sky and disappeared behind the clouds, and Maria suspected the meteor was being rebuilt in orbit where it could be called down once more.
“Can I get a challenger? Huh, brothers? Can I get a challenger? Nah? Bah! Go gray, or get graved—yeah!” Standing in the sky as if on solid ground, the Breaker began air-thrusting, pumping his hips at the sky, and without warning, a length of metal erupted out from his groin in a shower of sparks. Jagged teeth revolved around the flat bar half the length of his body, speeding up and slowing down corresponding to the roar of an engine being revved with every thrust of the Breaker’s hips.
It took Maria a few full seconds to fully internalize what she was seeing. The Breaker had some manner of chainsaw exo-genitalia.
I am beginning to grow uncertain about this alliance.
“Now, we know this was gonna be a domination, because what match with the Breaker doesn't end in domination, hah? But dominating too hard can bring its own problems! The Challenger said to keep her alive and whole…. didn’t he?”
The Breaker's chainsaw penis jammed mid-thrust, and he let out a pained cry of alarm.
“Oh no, brother!” the voices of orcs cried from all across the world.
“Oh no!”
“The Jingoist got carried away!”
“Yeah, Breaker, you might have overdominated it this time. Sometimes winning this hard can loop back around and get you killed. Let's turn our eyes skyward and see the Challenger deliver his verdict! Are we going to see a DQ, or is this going to be a total obliteration victory?”
The uncanny atmosphere of the Tutorial made itself known once more. A coordinated silence fell as all orcs across the dimension ceased their personal struggles and waited to witness what was to befall the victorious Breaker.
Or so they thought. Maria, too, waited and watched. She wanted to see if the Challenger was so easily fooled. Part of her doubted it. He was the Red Rider, after all. A High God. His personal interjection moments ago hinted at his casual cruelty, but also an interest in gauging her measure as a warrior.
And when the Challenger finally spoke, he held to that interest, revealing a fact that the Breaker and all the orcs across the lands missed: “This is no victory at all, oh beast sculpted in my image. No victory at all. She still lives. You've murdered a molted husk, but the spider itself scuttles beyond your notice. In fact, you disappoint me, Breaker, for failing to realize that she slipped out of your grasp before this fight ever began. Legend-Assassin, if you would kindly step out from that patch of shadowed time in which you've hidden your core.”
Shadow Across Time 557 > 558
Maria obliged and internalized twin epiphanies. The first was that the Breaker had a crippling weakness; however high his Awareness Skill was, there was no chance whatsoever that it was Legendary-Tier. The second was that the Challenger saw all but was more than reasonable and lived up to the beasts mentioned in myths. He was a cruel god, a God of War, but a reasonable god nonetheless. She'd come to entreat of such a god, and she was on track to do so as she continued heaping glory upon herself.
And thus the Breaker was to become her vessel of humiliation, for the dichotomy of one's greatness could only be contrasted by the nadirs of another's shame.
Without preamble, Maria stepped back into the spotlight. Her flesh was unblemished, her armor unmarred. The twin blades she wielded were back in her hands, gone from where they lay after the trash meteor smote her from existence. She strode forth, willfully entering the threshold of the Breaker's ring once more, feeling a rippling presence pass through her now active mana fields, rather than the lingering imbuements and illusory transmutations projected through her enchanted blades.
Unbeknownst to the Breaker, she too was fighting a fellow practitioner of deception, but while he was the performer, she was the shadow. Where he was all too willing to give away his own secrets and ostentatious displays of power, she watched, she studied, and now she would reap her harvest.
She paid no heed to the bodies of her downed fellows. They'd served their purpose well. Without them, she would have underestimated the sheer potency of the Breaker's Chronomancy and thus would have sent her actual core in rather than a high-density Biomancy construct made to replicate her actual heart.
In two minutes, the rest of her skills and mana fields would follow, displaced back across time after her lineage core; in a way, her heart and body were desynchronized, much like how the world within the ring and the other defeated adversaries of the Breaker were out of tune with the rest of the world.
“You asked what kind of animal I was,” Maria began, barely able to keep the disgust out of her voice. “Now, I come to oblige. Show me your neck, orc. Receive these fangs.”
Compared to his confident levitation moments prior, the Breaker now bounced up and down in the air like he was attached to a cord. A second later, the unseen rope unceremoniously snapped, and he roared as he made his long descent, before finally striking the ground with a resounding impact. Though he landed on a mound of uneven corpses, they were displaced from the ring in space and time, and so a resonating thud sent a rush of vibrations up Maria's leg. She suddenly realized what the floor felt like: foam padding further covered by canvas.
This place was meant to cushion blows for wrestlers while trying to pin one another.
The Breaker sneered as he exploded back to his feet in a blur. His chainsaw was retracted, but his orc-styled armor had reformed, and his spirit was high again. Clenching his rear, he walked toward her with his chest pushed forward, sauntering like an arrogant crab, rolling his shoulders and waving his arms the way a gorilla might while his head bobbed up and down. There were three meters between them when he stopped to make his play. His eyes flared with the power of temporal magic, and two microphones were lowered from the clouds above: one in front of the Breaker, the other before Maria.
More peacocking before our next battle. He must have some kind of Social-Martial Skill Fusion. In fact, I dare say his legend is fundamentally built more toward the social than the martial.
“So you think you got one over on the Jingoist, don't you, sister? Well, you better think again. That was a cute trick, but I was dominating your shadow like it was nothing, and I'll dominate the truth of you like you're just a cardboard cutout regardless! I don't care what you can do with time, because every time, across all of time, it's my boot up your ass! It's my fist up your ass! It's my chainsaw up your ass! Can I get a Challenger, yeah!”
The unseen crowd obliged: “Challenger, yeah!”
Maria found pride in how she refused to cringe or roll her eyes.
Even so, the Breaker sensed her judgment. His shining eyes narrowed. “You doubt the Jingoist. You doubt my clothesline. My trash meteor. My assortment of devastating, dominating, obliterating, annihilating attacks!”
“Yes,” Maria replied. “I do. But more than that, I doubt you can survive the weakest of my reprisals.”
The orc's ever-building hype stuttered as his eyes widened. Pride was the most vulnerable of sins. If you challenged the arrogant in public, they had to face you—for to reject a challenge invited doubt and humiliation, and for a narcissist, humiliation was worse than any wound of the flesh.
And as she did with all narcissists of her time, she poured salt into the Breaker's wounds. “I already let you take two free shots at me. Two free shots and then some. Six bullets. A trash meteor. All that force and magic, for nothing at all. Now, I simply ask you to survive my blade. Two hits for two hits. Mere slashes and stabs on my part. Dare you lift my gauntlet?”
A near-snarl tore its way across the Breaker's features. He clearly didn't enjoy sharing the spotlight in terms of bravado. His snarl became a visible scowl as the distant orcs oohed and aahed, and the broadcaster muttered about how the vampire lady had all kinds of unseen chutzpah, and they needed to see how things would play out. The final nail in the Breaker's proverbial coffin came when the Challenger himself let out a brief chuckle of approval.
“Oh, you're gonna regret this, sister!” the Breaker thundered. “Oh, you're getting your stabs, not because I like vampires or I feel bad for you and your malnourished little body and your beady little eyes, and that terrible, tasteless armor you're wearing. Where'd you buy that from? Or is it a corpse that you changed into a dress? Did a blind person make that for you? Huh?”
The Breaker spat, exaggerating the disgust he felt toward her choice of apparel. “The reason why we're going easy, right, is because you make me feel bad, sister. If those two knives are your proverbial fangs, then I proverbially find you literally pathetic! Those two toothpicks look like they'd break against the skull of an ant! Those two toothpicks are so thin I can't even use them as chopsticks! These toothpicks are something I might lose in the cracks of my floor! If you're going to use toothpicks on me, the orc of orcs, you better dig in deep and thrust hard, because those two toothpicks aren't gonna do the deed that needs doing!”
With those blows aside, the Breaker held his arms out by his side, leaving himself open to attack. “Take your best shot, sister, and make sure you hit me good, 'cause after those two hits, I'm gonna be coming for you with the full might of the Challenger! The full might of what it means to be an orc! I'm gonna be kicking eight different kinds of shit out of your ass, and you're gonna be thanking me at the end, because this ass-kicking is gonna be the finest of your existence! It's gonna be a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and you're not gonna get one afterwards because I'm better than you and I deserve more than you! My foot is of a higher realm than your ass!”
“So you say.” Maria nodded. “But I say: Nocturne; Belmonte, tear him apart.”
At that, Maria revealed another layer to her deception, as both her blades burst asunder. On the surface, they were lengths of steel, one red, one black, defined only by the intensity of their mana. One painted the world in darkness—allowing her to stride between the scars she left upon nearby shadows. The other was an instrument of time, blood that chimed constantly, amplifying her Biomancy and Chronomancy in tandem. Beyond that, they were simple daggers. Except not.
Maria was only an Adept when it came to Knife Proficiency. She didn't possess any kind of Sword Proficiency at all. In terms of her Grappling and Striking, even if she put them together, she was scarcely more than an Initiate. Where she was skilled, however, was in Summoning, Bargaining, Whip Proficiency, and Tactics. Years of combat had revealed not only her strengths but also exposed her greatest weaknesses. She'd sunk deep into those weaknesses, considering how to counteract them. The conclusion she came to was simple: she would never be a true talent of martial prowess. Up close, she was too easily overwhelmed. She thought too much, overconsidered, hesitated. In a duel, hesitation was death.
Hence, she outsourced the menial labor of murder to someone else.
And in this case, the someone in question was her two blades, now unraveled to become twin demonic summons, both Legendary in their own right, both bound to Maria by oaths of soul, debts of blood, and enthrallment of mind.
From her blade of shadows emerged Nocturne, a three-meter-tall, armored canis—who bore a long-standing grudge against the orcs for what they'd done to his world. Surrounding shadows coalesced over Nocturne, forming gambeson, chainmail, then slats of plated armor. Then, through the pitch-black clouds and between fingers of fractured lightning, there shone a blade of light, a crescent fragment of a falling moon that cleaved across existence and split into the confines of the ring. A gap formed in the Breaker's private domain, and Nocturne lifted his hand to seize a greatsword three times his already massive body. It glowed blindingly bright even to Maria’s eyes, and shone with the purity of the shattered moon that loomed over Integrated Earth and so many other worlds besides, broken with the Great One’s fall.
A piece of said moon now resided in the hands of Nocturne, and he used it to carve his vengeance upon the body of the Breaker.
The orc tried to draw his revolver, but Nocturne was faster by far, and everything bathed in his light was severed down the middle. Maria suffered the blow as much as anyone else, yet her lineage core, displaced, allowed her to heal at present, just enough to survive the impact.
As the slash graced the Breaker, he was launched off his feet as his armor was cut clean through, but rather than being allowed to simply fall, claws of groping darkness erupted from Nocturne, seizing the Breaker as he ripped into him with fang and fury, blade and shadow.
“What's this?” the announcer cried. “The Breaker’s down! The Breaker’s down! Ref, do something! The vampire lady’s cheating! She's smuggled in two hitters!”
While Nocturne wailed on the Breaker, Belmonte emerged as a mirage over Maria. His visible body was long and sinuous, and rather than arms, he bore twin whips, one of time, one of blood, both meant to lash. Those whips coursed through the air, cracking and striking around Nocturne as the Breaker was overwhelmed. And what Belmonte struck, he kept striking. For once a single blow landed, every subsequent hit was drawn to that cancer-infested point of time.
More than merely bleeding in the physical, the Breaker began to suffer a metaphysical wound. Clumps of densely clustered gold grew over his body, weighing him down, dragging him, slowing him in absolute terms. It mattered little what tier his Reflexes were. It mattered even less how great his Chronomancy was, for now he was bearing a weight unlike any other, a debt of time that only grew, made him slower and slower. He lost half the speed he possessed before and again as much with every subsequent whip strike, the temporal cancers metastasizing beyond control.
Maria herself, meanwhile, was nowhere to be seen. She vanished within Belmonte. He became more than her mirage; he became her armor, for he'd been grown out from her flesh for that purpose. She had cultured the beast from a Descenders Union vampire hunter, sparing him from death while mutating his flesh and altering his soul until he was misshapen enough to serve as a weapon and stored within a fragile blade as a surprise super-weapon against the overly bold or unassuming—with the Breaker suited to both those categories.
Belmonte glided and danced, and in the litheness of his whip-like form, a shimmering illusion projected by displaced time matched the trueness of his immensity, the full bulk of his mass and strength. Belmonte was more than a few tethered ropes tasseled together. He was a dragon lurking within the waters of chronology, only surfacing to strike when need be. He struck out with whiskers and nothing more, for it seemed Nocturne was already dominating the battle.
And so the match accelerated towards an inexorable end as blow after blow forced mouthfuls of blood from the Breaker’s lips.
“Sweet Challenger, they're beating him like a sack of puppies! He's really getting it! Fight back, Breaker! Fight back! They're killing you out there, brother!”
The Breaker tried, but it wasn't enough. Though he was a Legend himself, he faced two adversaries on the same Tier, and Nocturne was faster, stronger, and more vicious than any orc could have ever imagined one of his kind to be. Furthermore, the wolf-man was a thing of shadow, and unless the Breaker could channel a beam of pure sunlight to dissolve the dark that served as clay for Nocturne’s flesh, there was little he could do.
Or so it seemed.
Too much passivity. He's still playing. I can see it. He loves attention. We surprised him, but not enough to kill him. Maria's certitude grew with every splashing spark bursting off the Breaker’s armor. Despite Nocturne's frenzied blows, each one capable of shearing through baseline orichalcum as if it were wet tissue, the orc's skin remained unblemished where his armor rent and broke. It seemed like he was being hit by a baseball bat rather than a blade, and Maria suspected that to be either another effect of this ring or a strange Toughness skill.
It was about at this point that she began to wonder if he truly possessed a Narrative Skill, or perhaps simply a truly colossal Skill Fusion of some kind. For too many of his abilities were interlinked together: his Social Skills fed into his Martial ones, which then fed into his attacks and how he behaved in general.
Caution quelled Maria's illusory sense of victory. She prepared to pull back, and her blades began to reassemble themselves. At any moment, she could seal her prime summons within their lengths and reunite her equipment with her newly regrown body—cast into a masked instant in the future.
And in a span of mere seconds, she realized her caution was well-served. A ringing gong sounded through the world as the last fragments of the Breaker's armor broke away under her summons’ blows. The orc coughed and wheezed, his body battered and bruised. Yet it shouldn't be so. Contusions, slight cuts, and swelling were his injuries, but where were the gaping gaps in his flesh? Where were the parted bones? Nocturne's moonlit blade was capable of beheading ten of the greatest of Heroic-Tier Pathbearers standing in a row with a single stroke, yet the orc continued playing along, wincing, wheezing, but still taunting.
“Is that… all you got? Yeah?” He spoke in an incomprehensible garble, but his golden eyes burned bright even through swollen masses of flesh. He was all but covered by temporal cancers. His movements were akin to a snail trapped in molasses. But then came the second gong, and the gold of his eyes vanished, only to be replaced by the crackling shine of sickening green.
“Oh, what is this? The Jingoist is breaking apart! The Jingoist is about to—”
A third gong struck, and the hidden narrator began to scream bloody murder. After a few seconds, however, his voice trailed off into a cackling laugh. A band of unseen guitarists and heavy drummers began playing away, rising in intensity with every passing moment. It sounded like thunder copulating with metal being run through a shredder, and the resulting vibrations pulsed not only through the unseen stage but across all layers of existence, across reality itself. Even time began to tremble as the Breaker cracked beneath every blow he continued to suffer.
But he wasn't shattering; instead, every impact chipped away bits of his exterior. As the Jingoist was peeled, as the moonlit blade carved, a new sculpture emerged. A sculpture forged of purest Necromancy.
Like an omen of death, an orc crackling with vivid, corrosive energies slithered free from his material husk.
“Deadmannnnnnnn!” a chorus sang.
The Jingoist Era has ended! Long live the Deadman!
With the crimson text manifesting in Maria's eyes, the ring itself began to change. It went from a series of pylons to something taller, to something like a cage. The upraised lengths of rusted metal connected together and formed a great cell that was further wrapped in a field of hissing Necromancy that commanded you to remain within it, demanding you burn.
All that energy spilled into the Breaker. He spoke no more. He adopted an utterly serious facade, and his eyes went blank as well, conveying only a single emotion: wrath unbridled.
The Breaker’s bones cracked, and his skin went from gray to emerald, while the shadow he cast upon the world imprinted itself against the clouds above and frayed the substance of the skies themselves.
“Oh, you've done it now, sucker!” the announcer screamed. “You woke the Deadman! You woke the Deadman inside the Jingoist! He was holding it back; he was protecting us all from what lives within! Now we're all going to pay! Now every blow, every toss, every pinch, every moment of humiliation is going to be turned back upon you, ten-thousand-fold! Hello, my Challenger! It's the cell! The Hellcell! He's made the Hellcell! My Challenger, WE'RE GOING TO SEE A HOMICIDE TODAY!”
“No,” the Challenger interrupted with a sigh. And impressive though this new form of the Breaker was, he was but a spark beneath the sun that was his maker.
The Breaker’s grim expression cracked; exasperation took hold, and his voice lost its boom once again. “What? But she was doing so good! She broke my Jingoist era and everything! We’re going full Deadman! Hellcell! It’s been three years since I got to do the last Hellcell! We NEED to do this!”
“Breaker—”
“It’s bullshit!” the Breaker shouted, folding his arms like a petulant child. “You’d let the Culturist do this if he asked. I know you would!”
“Breaker…”
The orc bit his trembling lower lip. “You always liked him the most! Because he never agreed with you! Is that what you want for me too? I’m your biggest star, but you just don’t care—”
“Breaker, you can still do the Hellcell with our potential new Vaketh-Insul if she is willing to indulge you. But no skill damage. She is far too precious for that.”
“I’m just really tired of being disrespected as your top tal—oh, hell yeah, I can work with that! What about you, sister? Can you work with that?”
Maria and her two Legendaries were mid-transposition when the Challenger intervened. Shards of metal halted midair around Nocturne and Belmonte. “Vaketh-Insul?” she breathed.
“I mean, yeah, I can see it.” The Breaker shrugged. “Willing to play along; nasty tricks in your knives; plenty of bite to go with no bark.” A grin spread across his crackling green face, and his emotions shifted with the violence of a crashing pendulum. “I think we’re going to get along like two shivs up an ass, sister.”
“I… do not follow the metaphor,” Maria admitted, her present self and prime summons smearing into dull, golden gloss.
“Agh, forget that, sister—we got a Hellcell fight to finish soon. Figure it out then. But before that… You came here looking for an actual army, didn’t you? An actual force capable of taking it to the Favored Three and their Gate? Well. I was wondering if any of our ‘fellow Pathbearers’ were going to be serious enough about this war thing to come and see us. I leaned toward no, but considering how fun you’re turning out to be, I’m pretty glad I turned out to be wrong.”
Maria reforged inside the hiding spot and emerged once more. When she did, the hill of bodies the Breaker stood upon was missing, and her comrades were released from their entrapped states—allowed to rise once more. Striding past them was the Breaker in his Deadman state—a towering beast of crackling Necromancy and muscle that withered the ground, air, and objects, yet somehow spared the vampires and even their blood horrors.
“Now, seriously this time: Welcome to the Tutorial!” the Breaker declared, holding out his arms. “Challenger was expecting you. The rest of us, well… We like pleasant surprises. And you’re pretty pleasant of a surprise for a sucker, sister. Let’s talk terms. And after that, let’s see us finish pummeling the hell out of each other.” He winked at her. “I’ll be face this time; you can have this match. But I want the second, and we run it down to the wire for the third. How’s that sound?”
Absurd, Maria wanted to say, because the Breaker went from being one of the most ridiculous creatures she had ever met to a casual, calm presence with an easy charm that conflicted with the Necromancy seeping out from his every pore. “Divine,” she answered instead, because her discomfort mattered little when it came to getting what she wanted.
So what if the Breaker was odd and the orcs were monsters? Perhaps it was this eccentricity that would be her edge against Gatepiety. If they could throw her off this much, what then might they be able to help her do against the Favored Three?
An image appeared in her mind then of the Breaker and Deathless locked in an enduring struggle, both occupying the fullness of each other’s efforts. That possibility alone made this alliance all too enticing.
“Absolutely divine,” she said with a smile, her words utterly genuine this time.
Above, the Challenger laughed softly. “I do so love it when talent comes to my doorstep.”