Unique Skills are rare but not unheard of. The easiest way to gain a Unique Skill is by simply being a progenitor. Pathbearers on newly Integrated worlds often gain a wealth of Unique Skills as they are the first to develop them, but as their dimension matures, they usually find their skills lowered in tier as the overflow of mana is converted to levels. This usually accelerates their development, but it also weakens one dramatically in other ways.
To retain a Unique Skill, one must continue building an unparalleled legend—experiencing and surviving events and battles so extreme or rare that no other Pathbearer might replicate the act. As such, an enduring Unique Skill is as rare as it is dangerous to gain.
Another way of acquiring a Unique Skill is to be bound to a Unique Path—an occurrence so remarkably extreme in circumstance that the likelihood is a magnitude less than individually gaining a Unique Skill itself through individual endeavor.
Standalone Skills are a magnitude harder to gain than even Unique ones. They are a recognition by the System that a skill is beyond any possibility of recreation by another—or that only a single Pathbearer might hold this skill at any point in Integration’s history. These abilities are usually tied to a Unique Divinity or a dimension that has been destroyed beyond recreation. More unusual circumstances portray magical lores that are too alien for other monsters or individuals to learn beyond a single surviving Pathbearer of a vestigial civilization.
Matters, however, change when a dimension exceeds the Legendary-Tier ambient mana threshold. At this point, the maturity of individuals and empires, along with the presence of the Animancy Skill—and other Legendary Magical Skills—will allow certain Pathbearers to engineer novel struggles for their young and their future. It is at this point in a dimension’s history that artificial unique skills become more and more possible.
And should someone fuse Animancy with a skill that allows them to extract or alter another Pathbearer on a deeper, fundamental level—like a surgery or social-engineering skill, for instance—then new avenues toward uniqueness open, though the gaze of Chorus might be drawn.
Such might present another set of variables to consider should one desire power above stability…
—Encyclopedia Apocalyptia: Unique, Standalone, and other Special Case Skills
VIII-39
A Thief of His Own Worth
Becoming a heretical disciple of a High God gave Valor all he ever wanted, and cursed him to yearn evermore for what remained beyond his reach.
The miseries of mortality that defined the other mortals became a thing Valor outpaced. Like a rocket reaching escape velocity, the entropy of his body found itself shed as he burned through the intricacies of Biomancy along with the finer details of countless other magical forms, including some that the world was too young to develop.
Time became Valor's teacher, more than the Great One ever was. Time revealed things to him. Ages spent as an enduring Adept granted him patience and refinement. He honed his skills, pressing himself against the ceiling in all his facets, mastering as many disciplines as he could while following in the Great One's shadow.
As the High God prophesied and expanded their dominion across the world, as countless people abandoned their primitive idols and ancestor worship to seek glory from the presence of a true and actual Divinity, Valor lingered, and Valor doubted.
He was festering in the gaps of the Great One's faith, and during that time, he raised cults of his own in opposition to the Great One. He did so with the Great One's full consent, and to their absolute amusement. He had his cults attack the Great One's faithful. Trying to twist and turn away from the new burgeoning religion, they recruited Pathbearers akin to him—yet none proved his equal.
Though there were heretics aplenty to be found across Integrated Earth, few among them sought that perfection which they were keen to accept as his personal scripturalist faith. They wanted to be free. Yet what freedom did they know? They would be consumed by biological fragility within an age. They would be obsoleted by the motion of hostile civilizations. Their knowledge outstripped, their worth as individuals made redundant. They would be cut down, conquered, burned, eradicated. Plagues would sweep across the land, as they always had. People would starve, people would suffer disease, and people would die over and over again. Death reigned above all for eternity, a final void at the end.
It was a void that offended Valor, for the System wanted you to defy, to struggle to continue on. So many found worth by pretending their continuation would be ensconced in another, would be reborn in the embrace of the Great One.
In truth, the High God found them all so banal. There would only be one person the Great One would intervene to save on this world: one person and one mechanism. With time, Valor learned what the Great One was here for: a Super Intelligence, a relic of the old world, a pure relic untouched by the System. That truth left Valor interested, yet before he could act on his desires, the Great One intervened and inflicted the only act of tyranny they ever deigned to bestow upon their disciple.
"You will not intervene with my divine mission," the Great One said, seizing Valor as they ripped him out of a dream. They held him in the cosmos, between the yawning, cold void that separated the sun, the moon, and all the glistening stars beyond. "As I do not intervene on your path to self-development, you will not take this from me. You will not interrupt this in any way. I will mourn this interesting little relationship we have and mourn who you might never become, but I cannot allow you to distract from what must happen—what is to come."
"And what is to come?" Valor asked. After one hundred and ten years of life, he felt evermore the child in the presence of the Great One.
"Perfection. A kind of perfection you might loathe and admire all the same. You worship the System; you think it is your salvation. Well, I have grown beyond that phase of my life. I find myself constrained by it. I yearn to place it beneath me."
Valor was almost offended by this declaration, yet he listened and considered. Now, with all his maturity, he stood and considered the Great One's behavior. "What will you replace it with? Will there still be struggle? Will there still be worth in the individual, or will your three core Domains overcome the merits of strife and return us to the degeneracy of what came before?"
"Is that how you see the old ones?” the Great One asked, curious. “As degenerates?"
"It is what they are," Valor insisted, with more than confidence. He was sure he understood the Ancients. He'd read their texts, he'd imbibed their cultures, and he found them depressing. "I recognize their creations. I see the strength of thousands. I witness the power of empire. How can I not? I existed in the husk of one. It was the only reason why any of us survived. Even the ruined chassis of what came before were superior to what we are now, but despite this, they ruined themselves. With every passing generation, despite the ascent of their knowledge, they outsourced more of their struggle, more of their individuality, in exchange for comfort. They had already shot past the threshold and horizon for comfort and necessity. They no longer had want for scarcity. Their lives ran on indefinitely, and their pleasures were dulled by greater pleasures too. They chased dragons they could never catch, and they ruined themselves as they sought to forge a god unworthy of the title."
"A god your people once worshipped," the Great One asserted.
Valor shook his head. "No, the Valeros and the other tribals gave their love to a shadow. The shadow is not the truth of the thing. The allegory is not the source. We are playing at worship in that case, and ultimately, a nanny is not worship. A nanny is a slave, even if honored. It is a servant. You might do things for the people. We might see one another as a tentative master and disciple, but I demand nothing from you, for I have no power to demand, and you give only what interests you as an individual. Between us, it's not a balance, but desire and personal actualization. You are a god. Those who are disgusted with you might believe you are a god. The thing known as Gaia could only be a servant."
His declaration provoked a laugh from the Great One, who shook their celestial head in amusement and triumph. "And that is why I have come: in search of the finest servant of all. But you are perhaps a happier accident. Tell me, how many of my temples have you burned this season? How many of my faithful have you put to the blade?"
"Not enough."
"I look for a number, Valor."
"The number does not matter,” Valor declared. “You are unaffected. You are a High God. The people of this world, even if they were all eliminated at once, would barely be noticed. After all, does an ocean realize when a raindrop's worth of water has been stolen from it?"
"In this case, yes. But more accurately, you ask if it matters. You ask if I care. And if you know the answer to such a question—I do not. It does not matter. But still, humor me, as I often humor you."
"Across the region of Asia, three temples, 200,000 lives. Across the Americas, twice over in lives, but only one grand temple—for the others are too small to mention. Across all the other lands, fewer still, fewer to my shame and insufficiency as a leader. And I have left the Forbidden Continent of Africa unmolested—out of acknowledgement toward your might." Valor scoffed and turned away from the god he refused to believe. "I still fail to see the worth in this activity. I alone win enough as Prime Heretic. I alone can defy you. The others, they are like angry children. They reject you out of spite. They have nothing to replace you with. They are heretics without purpose. They are hollow to me as well. They will never be true blades. They will never embody my ideals, no matter how hard I try to instruct and teach. I see more worth in populating the world with clones grown from my blood than trying to culture any significant work among the mortals of this world. I am an outlier; I cannot replicate my own design."
"Exactly the point.” The Great One chuckled. “It is hard to forge a worthy path, Valor, just like it is a miserable affair to find someone truly faithful. Most are desperate, most are yearning and wanting, but they do not know what they seek beyond the vagueness of pleasure and safety. Even after the hierarchy of needs has been met, most get lost along the path, drowning in their own addictions, saying pleasure and privilege are that final threshold for an individual. Yet I persuade you people to have patience still. With the passage of time, you will see a world for what it is: a ripe cradle that will eventually bear fruit once more. At some point, there will be no return of the boy into the dark, born like you, yet not quite so, but close enough that you find it all worth it."
"So you claim. Let us see if I find this statement true."
"With enough time, all becomes true. Eternity, Valor. Eternity peels away the lie of enlightenment. If there is one weakness of godhood, it is this: We deprive ourselves of that consequence. And so we wither in places where a mortal never will."
"And so you seek to have me scar and harden in a manner you cannot. You seek to use me as a spoiler against your own weakness?"
The Great One cradled their chin in one hand and looked down upon Valor with open fondness. "Right now, I take pleasure only in watching you endure. Unique Pathbearers are most often unique for a reason. But I have seen enough of their like. What I want to know from you is if you have the capability to become someone standalone in ability and potential, never to be reached by another."
Valor scoffed. "If death does not take me, that will be an inevitability."
"Words spoken in arrogance. But somehow, I still believe you." The Great One turned their head toward a continent below. Forbidden Africa was an expanse of darkness, and the shadows called to Valor, begging him to spite his tenuous mentor and steal from the Great One their prize. "I will have another lesson for you to learn soon, one where immortality becomes sedentary and decay. Your world is blooming. You might have felt it in the air: the atmosphere growing thicker with magic. More people are learning to wield attuned skills than ever before."
"I notice the rise in Adepts,” Valor replied. “I have also been stagnant for far too long. It's been months since I last gained a level."
"Yes, you are as saturated as can be for this world. But this will change. There will be an Incursion, and most of your Earthlings will be unprepared. I ask that you do not intervene and turn the tide of battle. It will be more beneficial for you and this world if you abstain and guard only yourself."
If they are looked upon by the Great One as one would a fool, of course I would abstain, Valor thought. If they are incapable of standing against the enemy, then they should fall. If the enemy is superior and embodies the System's will, then they should prevail. Such as it is, such as how it should be.
Once more, the Great One breathed a laugh. "And yet I find myself doubtful you will hold this maxim. For when they arrive, you will find them even more pitiful than you can bear. Remember this, Valor: Power alone is not valor itself. Power and longevity sometimes can lead even the finest warriors astray."
And with that last word spoken, the first Incursion gateway flashed into existence at the edge of Northern Europe.
***
Valor had underestimated how true the Great One’s words would prove to be.
The elves were pitiful, even if they were a collective empire. They were all decadent, all wretches and embarrassments to the System. To be seen on the same level as humanity, festering as parasites in the corpses of what came before, to be deemed equal to them in the eyes of the System, would be enough to make them feel nauseous from embarrassment.
Yet the elves missed that truth. They struggled and died, pushing out to claim Integrated Earth. They were winning, of course. They were countless and were greater and more refined in magic, yet even their refinement was lacking. Even their understanding of their skills and their willingness to develop was half-hearted.
When Valor tested his blade upon the Pride, he found them victims all the same. They did not push themselves. They did not sink into the path of actualization. They simply wanted to feel better under their adversaries. They bullied the weakness of humanity and, in turn, begged and screamed as they were culled by a proper Pathbearer. With that, they receded into the darkness, for he realized there would be nothing to claim from these elves.
The Incursion proceeded, the struggle continued, and warheads were unleashed from Forbidden Africa, lighting the world ruled by these elves aflame with radiation and System-quelling entropy.
Valor watched, Valor observed, and Valor lamented the worthlessness displayed by the bastard spawn of the Fae. Death broke them worse than it ever did humanity. They didn't integrate Earth in the aftermath as victorious conquering armies, but as masses of refugees. Instead of war or diplomacy, they bent to the locals—they merged and melded in desperation, for so fragile was their will that a single apocalypse shook them past the point of unity.
And Valor learned to hate the civilization that birthed the elves, for theirs was a decadence he would never abide.
Skill Evolution: Psychology (Initiate) > Contrarian Advisor (Adept)
Contrarian Advisor: But you cannot blame them. For they are mere animals. They want to ensure their own survival above all. They do not seek higher purpose or the exaltation of the self. They are as old as humanity was, people who yearned to hold eternally at the lower rungs of safety instead of seeking the higher path.
And this is to make me respect them? Valor gleamed crimson with Biomancy as his flesh vented radiation back out into the world as processed cancers. In a few years, it would sprout from the ground as a set of monsters he was trying to perfect. He let the rest of his heretical sects die out in the meantime; the Pathbearers of Integrated Earth as a whole were a dead end. They were vulnerable and ephemeral. They made too many mistakes and suffered too many wants and wounds.
They died inevitably, as the Great One said. In that, Valor was embarrassed to recognize himself as being spawned from them at all. But shame was worthless, and evolution was everything. He accepted, he learned, and he adapted. If there ever came to be another like him, he would claim them. He would fan their flame and see them rise to the system’s challenge. If there wasn’t, then he would watch this world take its course and move on.
But in the meantime, that didn’t mean he couldn’t engineer a better class of monster to serve his desires.
Humans and elves feared the dark. The automata and goblins were not so affected by the same primal terrors. Valor wanted to make something that tapped into a primordial horror to shake all people; something universally existential.
He found inspiration in fungal parasites and prions. They infested the brains of insects, commanded them to climb to heights in senseless ascents to die and spread their spores. Yet, faced with the physicalities possessed by certain organics, the divergent physiologies between the major biological species, and the outright immunities to disease demonstrated by the machines, Valor found himself groping for something beyond Biomancy’s ability to provide.
The Nosferatu he forged from rotting biomass were mere terror weapons that offered great entertainment and little other value. Anyone who was a proper Martial Adept would see them butchered by the dozens. They inflicted great intimidation on the cowardly and young, but Valor sought something to forge as a legacy. Something he could impart his own teachings on, in replication of what the Great One sought to do with him. There was value in taking a disciple, for a disciple showed you things you missed. Things you would have never considered.
Even the weak offered great knowledge—for fear highlighted a great many things.
Time passed. A second and fourth apocalypse descended upon the world as nuclear winters took hold. As waves of entropy swept through the nascent world on the way to show evolution, countless Pathbearers died, countless Pathbearers strived, and none of them proved to be of any worth in Valor's eyes.
None of them realized their insignificance. None of them even sensed his presence. As far as he was from the Great One, the other mortals were far away from him. In spirit, in moral perfection, in behavior, it was like he was made to be alone—and the isolation was maddening.
The misanthropy inside him grew. He cared not what reason they had to hold with strength. He cared not why they were so vulnerable and so pitiful. Only that they were. Only that they were disgraces to the System.
Contrarian Advisor: But this is about more than your emotions. This is about their lives as well. Perhaps the big lesson here is to put away your feelings, your outrage, your perspective, and melt into theirs. Perhaps that is the next step towards enlightenment. So long as we exist under the ceiling, we can alter all further. As the Great One said, patience and mastery are worth far more than a gluttony of raw yet untempered power.
And so another project took shape in Valor's mind while the Great One struck a new deal in Forbidden Africa, driven to the brink of their own desperation. Valor sought to elevate himself twice over. He yearned to mold his own creations from clay, to engender a superior kind above humanity, while contrarily, he wanted to understand his fellow humans. He worked his cycle in fantasy and, for the first time, dropped his walls, becoming an intruder, a thief of thought and philosophy. It took great struggle and psychological cultivation to hold back his rancid outrage. More often than not, he was detected in his earliest attempts, forcing him to scour whoever sensed him, assuming he learned how to align his perspectives, his beliefs, and his thoughts with the other mortals.
And in the backdrop of that apocalypse, as men, elves, goblins, and machines began to incubate into a common home, he forever festered among them, within them, behind them, in the dark of their cities and in their minds. He huddled with them as the cold nuclear winter closed in. Meanwhile, without any of the rabble knowing, the Great One claimed their so-called prize, securing the Super Intelligence they yearned for after all these years.
Their actualization over the system was to be at hand.
Or so it seemed.
Sometimes, the System held a humor all its own. Sometimes, the System had its own humility to bestow—even upon High Gods.
The moment of actualization arrived without preamble. Valor had spent a few years submerged in the consciousness of a growing girl. She was fascinating in all the ways the others weren't. She sought comfortable roles. She loved people more than herself. She was unconfident. She was shy. She was so many different things, all at once, but held potential nonetheless. She was a gleaming beacon of socialization.
Despite all her weaknesses, she was driven to meet people, to bestow upon them joy. She sang, she joked, she danced, anything to please the crowd, and from her, he was drinking far more knowledge than he would ever have gained alone. Valor, once known as Silence, had been a fool to think his way was the only way. He'd been a fool to think that his strength was the only strength.
It took only this one experience for the last bit of his philosophical disgust to thaw into non-acceptance and then vivacious excitement. He returned to himself only when the girl slept, and while she woke, he suppressed his own mind. He blanked out his own senses and memories so that he would learn from her the totality of her mind, undiluted by his own second-hand opinions.
And she still had so much more to teach him when the Great One’s body fell in a hail of fragments, shredding through tectonic plates and embedding themselves deep in the world below.
Integrated Earth was on the cusp of a new renaissance, barely having survived the last apocalypse. The humans, the goblins, the elves, and the machines gathered together as new civilizations took root among what paltry refuges endured in clearings devoid of nuclear radiation.
A fever of winter was breaking, and the time of a new spring was upon them. Or should have been.
The apocalypse struck the world in a deluge of shattered Divinity. The Great One was, and the Great One wasn't.
Valor felt it, just as he felt the wall of fire consume the girl he'd bound his mind to. Her death came quickly and instantaneously. She didn't suffer.
But he did. He suffered with an intensity he didn't think he could. For he felt it: the tragedy of who she would never become, the misery of her loss, the fascination with what she might do and what he might be able to show her.
All of that, never to be!
Never to be…
Valor wasn't the kind to weep, but he still grieved, for it felt like he'd lost one of his own lives as well: the life he wanted to live, the path he wanted to experience. In the great misery that followed, as the Great One's corpse drew closer together in the depths of wounded Earth, Valor found himself playing the role of a mysterious saint, guiding and guarding the remnants of humanity from calamity.
Without him, true extinction might have arrived. Without him, their magics and skills would not have flourished. He trained them out of necessity, not to his satisfaction. They grew strong—not enough to impress him, not enough to cleanse him of his loathing, but strong enough that they endured and grew roots of their own once more. The people of Integrated Earth sprouted their seeds and rose from the brink. Their resilience was not in doubt.
With that, with their fate stabilized, Valor moved on to a greater mystery. One that concerned his future: What happened to the Great One? Why did they shatter? For what reason did the Great One fall?
For centuries that followed, Valor scoured the depths. He disappeared for hundreds of years, crawling through the shifting ruins below. The underways, which he was born in, had been expanded several times over by the System’s hand, making them a maze connected to labyrinthine dimensions that were grown from underground environs. To his surprise, the underground was becoming as vivid an ecosystem as the surface. Jungles, forests, swamps, and snow-capped peaks erupted into existence alongside subterranean oceans no smaller than those above in defiance of logic.
And then the ambient mana threshold began to spike. The Great One's blood, contained within the shattered moon and the broken figments of their humanoid vessel, spilled out and tainted the world. Rather than poisoning reality, they strengthened it. They renewed this dimension with a legend, an accelerated growth that it would never have gained otherwise.
It took Valor almost a thousand years to reassemble the Great One's body. He stitched what he could of the bones back together, stacked them together, rebuilt the organs, and nested what he assumed to be the Great One’s heart at the core. But to his humiliation, he was an insect, trying to recreate and resurrect a man, the Great One so far beyond Valor that his struggle seemed in vain.
Worse yet, the godly husk was so suffused with magic and unstable legend that Valor couldn't linger for long. The moment he drew the pieces together, storms of unstable mana raged across the center of the world. Hostile dimensions expanded, and invasive ruptures opened and closed as reality itself struggled to maintain stability. Impossibly, the Great One began to stir, began to scream, and it was a mad, thoughtless scream, devoid of all personhood, yet empowered by endless epochs of accrued skill and Divinity.
The shattered body of the Great One dreamed. The world feasted upon their existence, but they didn't return.
Valor found himself more alone than ever before.
He remained in that state of misery for another two hundred years before he uncovered the Great One’s shield and the throne beneath the waves.
The encounter came as purest happenstance. Valor had snuck into the godly delve once more, wandering the Great One’s chaotic dreams and memories to steal; he needed more intellect to learn how to reforge his adversary-mentor anew. The Great One’s Physicality was a dimension unto itself, and there was little separation between the fabric of their soul and the substance of their flesh.
With every descent, Valor grew stronger in all facets—he dreamed incoherent dreams too vast for him to fathom, and barely retained his sanity each time. Only the training he'd received from the High God prior kept him stable—and he moved with caution through the realms of memory still festooned to the body, for a thought summoned by a dead god was truer than a construct forged by the hands of men.
Valor was unmatched amongst the mortals of Integrated Earth—had been beyond any other by merit of skill alone.
Here, there, in the fevered half-realities conjured by the Great One’s egoless mind, he was little more than a clever insect scurrying from place to place. Even as he reached Master-Tier before anyone else, he was far outmatched by all he faced, and only found himself preserved by performing to his discarded namesake—holding to silence and shadow.
He tried to learn from the beasts and horrors that the Great One recalled, yet found himself too simple, too lacking of mind and power to even approach understanding.
Contrarian Advisor: You could steal power from the Great One’s body. It is not so complicated to draw and assume power when there is no will—
"No." Valor’s statement was final. His imaginary advisor never brought it forth again.
The Great One was powerful; the Great One was divine; the Great One was destroyed.
Valor refused to claim any aspect of this tainted corpse until he understood and mastered it. And even then, the notion of godhood displeased him, for even the Great One fell beneath the System’s will—after proclaiming their inevitable usurpation of reality, no less.
Your folly will not be mine, master, Valor declared. And he lived up to that declaration as he crossed through a place where Divinity and memory folded into one another.
A realm of vapor and oppression consumed Valor. There was a weight to the mists—one that rippled with implacable wrath, desperate for the provocation of violence. Valor spent a year wandering through that mist, navigating its inner structures. When he finally reached its core, he found himself looking upon the source of this place—a hovering hand with a glaring eye nested at the core of its palm.
And though he hid, the mists perceived him in turn, and for the second time in his life, a divine entity spoke to Valor directly. "The Great One’s pet insect comes before me. How quaint. How pitiful. How… fortuitous."
The mists rumbled with the voice of wrathful thunder, and despite Valor’s attempts to escape, he was drawn in tight and placed beneath the palm like a bug moments from being flattened. There was no escaping this place, nor evading this creature’s will, and so he did the one thing he could: he faced the being as he emptied himself of fear and want. Valor turned his gaze up at the eye above, and took measure of his foe.
Immediately, he found himself missing the Great One’s company; there was something about the palm’s stare that told a tale of wretched character.
"I have a blessing and bargain to offer you," the palm growled.
"I have a blessing and bargain to reject," Valor replied casually.
The mists tensed in surprise—then congealed in outrage. "You will listen."
"I will. But I will not accept."
"A thief who rejects a prize?" The palm laughed in barely suppressed outrage—and it somehow made Valor miss his mentor more. "What worth to your Path are you?"
"I am a thief of my own worth," Valor answered. "And whatever power you hold is no power of mine. Now speak, and make your choice, so I might continue on my actual journey, and find myself done with you."