Note from the Editor:
There may be further late upload times and potentially a missed upload day in the coming week. Mammal is traveling between countries for work-related business, and the creation of a larger chapter backlog was not an option due to increasingly harsh work conditions in the past weeks, that being the cause of recent delays that you may have noticed. If there will be a day without a chapter we will make a note in the chapter the day prior.
We aplogize for the inconvenience - Dath
Hey, kid, question for you, and weird one at that: Uh, how do you wanna die? I don’t mean just a random death; I mean, if you had to die for good, and you would never come back, and there would be nothing after—no gods or paradise or even hell—how would you want to die?
And what would you die for?
—The Giantsbane to the Deathless
VIII-43
Soul Surgeon (I)
Continuity Error 413 > 414
Three days of effort.
10,823 deaths.
One measly level.
Shiv died beneath Valor's blades. He died at the hands of the Republic Animancers. He was obliterated by Cripples' all-annihilating fist. He was severed and split from within by the intrusive shadows of Harlock. He was gouged open and butchered by Daughter over and over as she vented her trauma upon the altar of his flesh. Shiv's body dissolved after he drank a particular concoction offered by Maiden the Genius. His bones came alive, screaming with sapience as they pressed out from his flesh while the rest of his skin slithered away, a living amoeba of blinking eyes. He died over and over at the hands of every Ascendant, at the hands of everyone present.
And all that granted him was one level.
“I'm godsdamn bottlenecked. Again!” Shiv's growl ran deep, but his frustration was only half-hearted. Around his 112th death, he realized that Avalon was truly unmatched in power. The mana that the Heaven attacked him with in that first strike that he barely dodged was greater than the collective power possessed by every individual and god on Integrated Earth combined. The Ascendants alone were paltry droplets trying to match a world-drowning downpour.
Even now, Shiv's Backstage burned with vitality, with life force untrammeled. It would take thousands of years, perhaps, before it was all spent. Thousands of years or a significant act on Shiv's part, should he try to affect all that existed in context while looming beyond its borders.
“How curious,” Maiden declared, manifesting behind Shiv as she worked on a new project. She loomed over him, a mature woman behind a workbench, her hands filled with machinery, hammering and soldering as incandescent sparks filled the room. She was trying to construct something, a new weapon, a new death to bestow upon the Deathless. “Perhaps you are right, Hound. Perhaps we are bottlenecked by the effect of mana insufficiency.”
“It's more than just mana insufficiency,” Shiv said. “It's a Heaven, something that has absolute power. Supposedly something that has even more power than a High God. It's the entire reason why the Great One was trying to make the sword. It's supposed to be something that brings a final paradise. When it tried to Excaliburize me, it lit my Backstage with enough mana to last me millennia. If you need a comparison for your number crunching, I dodged something from Longinus as well, and even that wasn't even close to a single percentile of this.”
“So you claim. We will test this hypothesis, but even if it is true, we have more means of straining your skill than the banality of brutal power. If all else fails, we can devote more time to isolating and targeting your Unique skill itself.” Between sparking flashes, her imprinted visage splayed against the walls and ceiling stared down at Shiv, his form reflected in her brilliant, protective lenses with every intermittent flicker.
“A wasteful endeavor,” Valor rebuffed. “As observed, Shiv’s Unique Skill is melted into his soul. Our best theory is that it is blended into his Vitae itself, but our understanding of the substance is not sufficient to isolate or extract any of his Unique Skills. If we are to stress his Continuity Error Skill, we must find another way, for surprise will only see Shiv dead and might is not our ally.” He stood a few steps away, examining Shiv with another analysis spell, while a crew of Heroic Janitors scrubbed away at a pitch-black smear partially fused into the wall beside him.
Nihilist: Harlem’s fire is real sticky for some reason. The Ascendant of Truth clings. What a surprise. It is strange how his Domain and magic are so adhesive, but fitting in a sense. Too bad the furniture has to pay a price.
“You succumb too easily, Legend Valor,” Maiden insisted. “If we see the Deathless given to one of my labs, I'm certain that I will be able to decipher and wield the mysteries of his Unique soul-stuff, given time, of course.”
Shiv eyed Maiden's empathic core with caution. There was still a hint of loathing there, though distant and buried beneath the writhing nest of other thoughts. Indeed, Maiden's mind was like a den of snakes. Each strand of consciousness was going in one direction while the adjacent one went in another, sometimes crisscrossing, sometimes running counter and clockwise with each other, every single one always in motion. But there were few strands dedicated toward him, and they found themselves connected to pitch-black fires of deepest disregard.
She was distracted, always, but not distracted enough to forget what he had done to her beloved daughter. Her beloved daughter who seethed and glared at Shiv from the corner of Veronica's office yet didn't approach him aside from when it came time to carve him up.
Which might be now, by the looks of things. Once more, Daughter craned her neck to stare at her mother. Her disfigured, nightmarish body was twisting and snapping while the child hidden within struggled and drowned, but was never allowed to expire. It was a strange thing, looking upon her time and again. Daughter was at once juvenile but also monstrous, a fitting visual for the Yellowstone Republic as a whole, in his eyes. Just because they were evermore his allies in this desperate struggle for autonomy and survival didn't mean they were by any measure virtuous. No, they were simply the lesser devils, made bedfellows by greater titans on the horizon.
“Just say it, Mother. Say it, and I will make it.” Daughter's words came as a faux whisper, hissed under her breath so loudly that the entire room could hear. She still feared Shiv, but she responded to fear like a cornered animal yearning to go feral.
Yet, before Maiden or any other Ascendant could cast forth their decision, the only true adult in the Yellowstone Republic made her decision. “No.” Veronica stared her gods down and forced them to silence through raw charisma alone. Maiden briefly regarded the Councilwoman, yet the god’s mind shuddered, and the many strands went another way, turning from her desired course of action—not in fear, but rather out of an absolute reluctance to defy Veronica’s will.
“That seems almost Pavlovian,” the Harbinger muttered. “Whatever hold the Councilwoman had over Longinus, it's been conditioned into all the Ascendants over the years. Wait, no, not Veronica. Kathereine before her. She must have exploited Maiden's scattered mind and made her emotionally or psychologically dependent on Veronica. Yes, that makes more sense…”
Daughter, meanwhile, pouted and whimpered, her neck twisting in loops as a series of sickening cracks rattled through the room. Veronica narrowed her eyes, and Daughter wilted, though her empathic core screamed with rebellion. She desired to attack Shiv just once anyway—a childish action that would undoubtedly come with a light punishment but also the delicious reward in the immediate result of the action itself, or so she thought for a few seconds. When she made the mistake of meeting Veronica's gaze, Daughter's willpower decayed, and she folded in on herself like a willful child behaving herself to impress a stern but beloved aunt.
“Fine,” Daughter grumbled. “I'm tired of cutting the stupid meanie anyway.”
Veronica drew in a long breath and looked Shiv up and down. “Just one level?” she asked, as if it wasn't already confirmed.
“Just one. Continuity Error isn't easy to level. Avalon's nasty little ambush might have just knocked it out of everyone’s weight class.” Shiv paused. “Almost everyone's weight class. Challenger’s still around.”
That, and we’re still trying to talk Produveral into hitting us with something, Shiv added in the privacy of his mind. The true clone he'd left with the Farwalkers was contained in a stasis spell for the sake of protection and preservation on the way to Chorus. After the near Excaliburization, Produveral had Shiv moved ahead of time, and was now doing anything he could to squeeze Shiv into cooperating with the “extraction” of Adam and Uva.
Shiv had delayed as long as he could, but that was another hemorrhoid that needed popping; the godsdamned Farwalkers would be useful allies if they didn’t all collapse into logical loops when the Faceless Queen or Avalon got mentioned.
At present, going to Chorus seemed like making himself an easy target for Avalon when it returned.
“But he’s no fool,” Veronica said, her words reeling Shiv’s attention back in, “and if you expose yourself to him repeatedly, he will leave you broken—or worse, caged and trapped.”
“Probably,” Shiv admitted. “But if we need someone to land a hard enough hit, it’s going to be him, or we’re going to need to find something else to simulate something unique for me to absorb.”
Valor hummed. “Maiden, a suggestion: We create a small-yield Animancy Bomb.”
The soldering stopped. The Genius pulled her protective lenses up and looked over her desk at Valor. “I see your vision: You will test its effects on one of his golems first. Then we move on to a true clone after ensuring he will not be seared from existence.”
“Indeed. This will take time to prepare, and you must forgive me for loathing to part with the knowledge of such a weapon even in present circumstances.”
“There is no loathing,” Maiden replied with an airy quality to her voice. “I understand. Just as you must understand that I already have several advanced prototypes stored across my laboratories. They are, however, unstable, but I suspect that I will be able to remedy that deficiency with repetition and time. No need to bargain, Great Undying; I am no leech of little worth who seeks another’s aid. My own labors will see a bomb made by my hand, in my time, from my genius alone. To accept anyone else’s influence will be an admission of inadequacy.” At that, Maiden almost scowled. “And I am always enough.”
Nihilist: She’ll crack if you give her a reason to doubt herself.
The Harbinger concurred. “Indeed. But to reach the point of her doubt will require significant proof, or something beyond her expertise to ever furnish. Her weakness is not arrogance or the accuracy of her science, but the worth of her choices. I see the affection she holds for her daughter, scattered as it is. She cannot think that the fate she inflicted upon her child is a righteous thing. A desperate choice, perhaps, but not righteous or genius. If it is to be destruction, we use Daughter against her.”
“Commendable,” Valor said, though his tone lacked all warmth or confidence. “If so, I would request some materials from you—a loan of one of these prototypes, perhaps.”
“Maiden,” Veronica said, cutting the Genius off before she could argue. “See it done.” Once more, Maiden succumbed to Veronica’s will without question. “We work on that bottleneck in the meantime. For now, we move on to our next zones of focus: The Severed Shadow and the Harbinger. Legend Valor, you have the lead again. Animancers, move to assist.”
***
As so many times before, Shiv shredded his soul and flesh using his own Severed Shadow, tearing his true clones apart over and over again as he tried to weave his skills together. Despite his suffering, the outcome could only be considered mixed at best. His Severed Shadow cleaved through matter like it wasn't there at all. Even his Onus of the Scarforged Unbreakable wasn't beyond the touch of his cutting aura. Though he remained indestructible for a short period, the platinum scar he marred upon himself went deep and heavy. With less than three cuts, he found himself rooted in place. When he tried to detonate his injuries and cast them upon the world, he suffered a sudden demise as his invincibility was shed. The wound still sank all the way through. With his Severed Shadow, the injuries he delivered upon himself were merely delayed, rather than distributed.
Such proved to be the case each time, every time, without fail. Odder still was how Shiv's Onus didn't gain any levels from these deaths. It was like the cuts weren't registered as physical attacks. Yet they caused his shell to manifest all the same, his outer husk scabbing with the silvery glow of narrativium.
But while Shiv gleaned only confusion through self-mutilation, Valor gained a higher epiphany that led him down a new track of possibility.
“The cuts you inflict on yourself are absolute. The only thing that rebuffs them is magical resistance and magic itself. Attunement. Belief. That presses against your cut. Not something's literal durability. At the same time, it cannot cleave through your scarforged shell with ease… because while your Severed Shadow cuts all the way down to the soul, it must still abide by the legend of a soul, and so it cannot circumvent the capabilities of a skill entirely. This is my first theory.”
“You have more than one theory?” Shiv asked.
Valor let out a near-silent laugh. “Quite so. My second one is far simpler. Your Onus of the Scarforged Unbreakable is both Legendary and Unique, which means it is blended in with your Vitae. This means that the Severed Shadow might be, in effect, attempting to cut through itself. How can something that has absolute cutting aura cut through itself, I wonder? How can it inflict surgery on something that is shaped of its own substance?”
“A blade can still cut a blade, Legend Valor,” Anthony suggested.
“Indeed, Councilman, indeed, but we are operating on the terms of an analogy, aren't we?” Valor tilted his head and examined Anthony as if expecting more from him. “This is not the blade that she wields. It functions to some extent like a blade, but it is not a blade unto itself. It is something far more. You have lived long enough to know that sometimes analogy is merely a distraction. We must seek the root of the thing: true gnosis, to find how it expresses itself and how it functions in actuality.”
Anthony considered Valor’s words but said nothing.
***
The tests continued.
The first major breakthrough arose six hours later when Shiv went from butchering himself to including a few new unfortunate victims in this endeavor.
At Anthony’s suggestion, the Republic brought in a few “Hollowed” Pathbearers, kept alive through advanced Biomancy, yet beyond salvation by means of Psychomancy or Animancy. The devastation inflicted upon their egos and minds was disturbing. Shiv saw only a faint outline, noting that they once had an empathic core, but the enkindled flames, along with all the other emotions that existed there, were barren and void. It was like staring down into a pit of nothing, purest nothing, not even black. The absence of any thought was a far lesser concern by comparison.
Ignorance was a mercy when a wound goes beyond the existential.
The Hollowed Ones numbered five. Each had been wheeled into the room, contained within a layer of cocoon-like stasis spells, not so unlike the one Produveral had placed on Shiv. As the magic unwove and revealed the naked bodies within, Shiv found himself alarmed by how hairless and preserved they seemed to be. Their skin was pale, almost grey. Their eyes were wide and open, the organs long since dried, yet they still blinked from time to time. Their mouths were wide and gaping, as if there was a final cry they had to utter, something caught and died in their throat.
Shiv cleaved into them using his cutting aura and found their souls ever robust. It was like trying to hack through stone. Their skills were formidable, their legend significant. Three among the five had been Heroes in their time, and True Heroes at that. The other two were High Masters bordering on a major evolution that would see them to the next threshold. All of them, however, were wrong. Wrong in a way that he couldn't describe at first, but as Shiv chipped and carved, examining the nature of their being, he found his blade bouncing and grinding with stuttering motion as he approached their strongest skills.
“Feels like I'm trying to chisel through ice using a spoon,” he declared.
He found the eyes of the Ascendants, and Veronica in particular, boring down upon him.
“That's an apt way to describe their state,” Veronica said, with fascination. "They were members of the Inquisition, mind-hunters, tasked with securing and pacifying individuals who have been deemed a risk to the Republic.”
Suddenly, tearing through the Hollowed didn't feel so bad. “Well, why didn't you start with that? I would have put more effort into carving through them if I knew these guys were mind-hunters.”
The Councilwoman brushed off the disregard he held toward her secret police. “They encountered a threat—a Legendary one.”
“Anyone I might know?”
“Unlikely. The perpetrator was an outer-dimensional assassin. She's likely somewhere in the Chernobyl Nexus Gate now. Beyond our reach, but also no longer a direct danger.” Despite that last detail, Veronica didn't sound pleased with the situation at all.
“Because she wanted to see this enemy captured and put to her use,” the Harbinger guessed.
Veronica cleared her throat. “Regardless, she possesses a Unique Skill, a Psychomancy-Animancy Fusion that we suspect has been further imbued by a Narrative Skill she procured during her time in the Fairwoods. It seems that her magic petrifies legend and advancement. The skills you are struggling to carve through have been described as utterly indestructible by our Animancers.”
Shiv continued to chip away in the meantime, peeling piece after piece away from the hardened skills, until suddenly he found his aura slicing all the way through. The midsection of a man came apart, yet blood did not spill out from inside. Rather, a pale blue substance poured out into the world, as it seemed like his body architecture was partially fused with reality as well. Strands of faint blue and deep violet formed an architectural kaleidoscope within the gap of the injury. Staring at the injury made Shiv's mind reel, but the disorientation lasted a mere second. As his nausea subsided, his Severed Shadow gained a level, and then another. It seemed like he'd removed something, like he'd cracked through a blockade nested inside the Hollowed man.
And just as that thaw greeted him, the Hollowed man drew in a violent breath, and suddenly the shifting colors within his gaping wound turned to the warm yet languid flow of gushing blood. He blinked, he gagged, but he remained partially petrified. However, Shiv saw his heart. Still, in a few places, he saw bits of his mind return. He wasn't just fused with reality and shattered of consciousness. Now there was something else there as well.
Shiv turned to Veronica and spoke with absolute certitude. "Yeah, I think your intelligence missed another part of this assassin’s skill: She probably has some Cryomancy in the mix as well.”
But rather than looking overawed at his feat, Veronica gestured for Shiv to return his attention to the man he'd supposedly saved. Then, over the course of the next five seconds, Shiv's triumph turned to disbelief, and then a sense of fleeting futility. The man rasped a final breath as his blood was inverted, drawn back into his body as if it wasn't meant to spill out, and returned to that strange mix of dark violet and faint blue. The Animancy reasserted itself over his soul. His heart emptied. His mind dissipated like a passing fog, and he was brought back to a state of miserable silence, trapped in a purgatory without dreams, without notions, without any possibility of evolution. Trapped inside his soul, more object than a corpse could ever be.
“What?” Shiv muttered.
“What indeed?” Veronica hummed. “We've managed to revitalize a few of the Inquisitors as well, but…” She stopped talking as she realized Shiv wasn't listening any longer, and instead was actively carving through the man again. This time, however, he didn't stop. He continued chiseling and chipping, slicing against the hardest edges of the man's soul, within the man's soul.
Intuition guided Shiv. Instead of going against the hardness and trying to break through, he cut along its contours like someone using a pair of scissors to carve out a specific shape. The struggle became a set of guidelines Shiv found himself slicing bit by bit, through a stable slab of a skill, and when he finally cut through the last bit, instead of gouging the man open once more, Shiv felt himself brush against an inner warmth. A part of the man's soul had been detached from the rest of his being. That part plunged over into Shiv as his vitae instinctively grasped that which he amputated.
Foreign memories blossomed within Shiv, each one expanding as he relived deep, distant battles and moments amidst the storm. He remembered being a child and striking a wooden dummy over and over again, driven to do so by a cruel master who cared nothing for when he succeeded and despised him for every failure and inadequacy. With time, he remembered smashing through the wooden dummy, only to be rewarded with the pillar of iron that was now meant to serve as an adversary undaunted. He continued until he grasped the mysteries of air. From there, he incorporated both Aeromancy and martial arts in tandem, as every single blow he inflicted was amplified by the breath of the world. He carried with him the weight and force of a hurricane, but the lightness of a feather. All that became his pride above pride, a pride that swelled into absolution and self-actualization as he beat down his sadistic mentor and claimed agency over himself for the first time in his life.
Yet Shiv felt a portion of himself come inflamed. There were strands of vitae connecting him to the Hollowed, and the transference came to an end. The skill that once found itself, that was once nested inside the Hollowed, had been absorbed by Shiv, and now burned within him like an alien entity, something carrying the potential for spiritual infection.
A notification appeared, and Shiv found himself stunned.
Skill Harvested: Hand of Halting Hurricanes (Heroic)
Unable to transplant skill — Insufficient mana parity.
“Shiv,” Valor asked, "what did you take from him?”
“An entire skill,” Shiv said.
“An infusion?”
“No. The whole damn thing. I extracted all of it, his entire skill, not just the brief imprint of it.” Shiv clawed at the core of his Severed Shadow. He could feel the skill burning inside of him, yearning to break free. More than yearning, it was coming loose. It was slowly gliding out of him because the legend contained was not one of his own, and as such, his vitae sought to reject this hostile element. He couldn't bind it to himself. It wasn't the same as the Red Rider's Hand or some other skill bequeathed upon him through special circumstance. This was outright stolen, and he placed it inside of himself on the measure of a whim.
Now he felt the full weight of the whim crashing down, because though he could steal the skill, that didn't mean he could transplant it inside himself.
“It says that I can't transplant the skill because I have an insufficient mana parity. Does anyone have any idea what that means? Anyone?” As Shiv looked around the room, he found Veronica with her arms folded while Valor regarded him with newfound excitement.
“It might mean several things. My best guess is that you do not have adequate skill or level to match what you have taken.”
“Yeah, it seems to be some kind of striking proficiency and Aeromancy skill fusion. Heroic tier. Going by that, I'm not just missing mana levels. I also don't have the right skill fusion for this.”
“Did it say that you are lacking the correct Skill Fusion?” Valor asked.
“No,” Shiv replied.
“Then I suspect the System is not lying. It is the level that is the obstacle that serves as your blockade. Try this. Carve into one of them again and see if you can find a skill that is of or beneath the level of a similar skill you have. In the meantime—”
Valor's words were interrupted as a crystallized chunk of Vitae slammed down upon the ground. It was a dense hunk of magic impacting the floor with a resounding thud. Shiv looked down, and all other eyes in the room followed his. It was such a grotesque-looking thing, resembling a tumor of bright and shifting red. It was so suffused with life force that it had left the rest of the room dim. The structure it exuded was something harder than reality itself, and thus a wave of pressure washed over everyone as it pried at them, as it tugged upon their existential stability. It was at once a vitality planetoid and a calcified container for skill. More importantly, it remained in existence. It boiled and burned and endured, and Shiv felt the skill still bound within it, even though it had fallen out of his body, even though it remained detached from its original Pathbearer.
“Uh,” Shiv coughed. “This usually doesn’t happen to me in public.”
Anthony blinked, but his Ascendant spoke first. “What is that?”
“A skill,” Shiv said. “A skill I took from our friend over here… and ended up pushing out of my soul.”
“You… can do that?”
“Apparently so,” Shiv said. “And going by the notification, I might be able to transplant them into myself as well.” He turned his gaze upon the four other Hollowed ones. “Okay… okay. Let’s start small. Let’s start with a skill almost everyone should have. A skill that’s close to mine. Let’s see about Reflexes.”
But like everything Shiv did, there was always another layer to the surprises.
It didn't take long to carve a Heroic-Tier Reflexes skill out from one of the Hallowed. Then he went for another and another and another, until he had three different Reflexes skills stacked together. They were all pure, none of them Fusions, all as closely aligned to Shiv's own Reflexes Skill conditions as possible.
This time, a different set of notifications appeared.
Skill Harvested: Fleeter Than First Light (Heroic)
Skill Harvested: Momentum Superconductor (Heroic)
Skill Harvested: Strider of Falling Fire (Heroic)
Mana Parity Sufficient: Inertial Overdrive (Heroic)
Skill Transplantations Available: Strider of Falling Fire (Heroic) / Momentum Superconductor (Heroic)
Skill Transplantation Unavailable: Fleeter Than First Light (Heroic) — Incompatible Legend
This Severed Shadow of Blood and Bladed Soul 393 > 401