156 (III)

Orichalcum

In that moment, as he studied the world around himself, he realized that the shroud of Orichalcum radiance was pillar-shaped as well. It was a long column that extended high up into the sky and deep down, with Shiv at its center. And with every passing second that Shiv focused on enhancing his own Toughness, the tower only grew brighter, only grew larger, only grew denser.

"Break!" Sullain cried again. The Tarrasque swung another slash at Shiv, but this time the force rebounded entirely. A deep crack opened across the Tarrasque's crystalline shell, and that finally broke Sullain from his stupor.

"What? What is this? How? How have you…" The Tarrasque's eyes widened, and through them, Sullain regarded Shiv, studying his new glow. "How? How are you manifesting the colors of Orichalcum? This is a Tarrasque skill as well. It should be fundamentally incompatible with…" The Vicar trailed off, and then his beast's eyes widened. "Udraal, what have you done? What have you infused within this misshapen parody of a child?"

Shiv continued trying to move in the meantime. Every bit of force he spent was in vain. He spiked himself over and over using his gravitic field, but despite making his inertial sheath more turbulent than ever before, he didn't move at all.

His Gravitic Wrestler was simply a Master-Tier skill. He didn't have the strength to push through and move an ever-hardening Orichalcum pillar. But Shiv's mind turned away from thoughts of escape as he noticed another thing. His inertial sheath was growing more turbulent. He immediately began spiking himself faster, quicker.

Violent ripples of force spread up and along the final string that comprised his existence. Shiv counted how many times he spiked his field.

Thirty.

Fifty.

One hundred.

Two hundred.

His Reflexes hit new heights, and for the first time, he felt the slightest hint of discomfort spread through his body. But then the discomfort faded entirely as Shiv focused more on his Toughness rather than spiking his gravitic field.

There was an internal arms race happening, a balancing act between his ever-climbing hardness and his ever-accelerating speed. At that moment, Shiv realized what the true meaning of being a Hero was. Growth. Constant growth. Every single Heroic-Tier skill he had was about amassing more of itself. Inertial Overdrive gave him more speed, until it tore him apart. Pillar of Orichalcum gave him more resilience, but beyond his strength to move or affect.

Aegis of Assimilation, then, must have been far more powerful than how he had been using it thus far as well. He could draw more biomass into himself than ever before, and he realized something. When he released the biomass, his mana strain faded, short of his field being destroyed.

A crashing avalanche of force and fire swept through Shiv. It plunged down past him, and it impacted the land. An entire section of the landscape was scoured clean, and the devastation continued on, blasting through mountains, ruins, and carving a deep groove into the earth itself. Furthermore, it rolled in lapping tides as it crested the horizon and continued onward, spilling over the Tidewall to the side.

And through it all, Shiv remained unharmed. At the end, his Inertial Overdrive resembled a small storm building around himself. A storm that he stopped feeding for a moment to let his Toughness outpace his Reflexes.

The Tarrasque clenched its teeth. It held out a hand, and a singularity formed between its fingers. For the first time, Shiv felt a force he couldn't fully resist. Yet, that didn't mean it affected him immediately. He was dragged centimeter by centimeter through the air. And as his Toughness grew still, the centimeters became halved, even as bands of light were drawn into that swirling mass around the Tarrasque's open hand.

"It is truly Orichalcum," Sullain breathed with utter disbelief. "The alloy of unbreaking will…"

Shiv didn't give him a proper reply. Instead, he spiked himself quickly. He hit 300, then 350, before he felt the first shudders breach through his Orichalcum come aglow. And then he let his Toughness climb a bit higher before he finally discharged.

The world turned white. A shockwave like few others was birthed from Shiv. It impacted the Tarrasque, and though it didn't launch the great beast back, it forced it to respond. It held out a hand and redirected the cascading waves of gravity, holding it high in the air. Shiv's blast parted before the Tarrasque, yet he still noticed how parts of its shell were breaking away.

The Tarrasque regenerated instantly, but Shiv was doing damage. Small chips of damage, barely enough to count as scratches. But the Tarrasque was harmed, and if he could crack it, then maybe, just maybe, he could eventually beat it in a fight of pure attrition.

As the blast swept free from him, Shiv watched as the ground beneath him turned to glass, then expanded as a depression that stretched out for kilometers and kilometers still. It was by far the largest discharge he'd ever released, and a good portion of Lost Angeles was rendered into something less than rubble, merely dust to the forsaken winds. And while the Tarrasque was dealing with his discharge, Shiv realized something else.

Even if he couldn't move, that didn't mean he couldn't drain life force from reality.

He began to sup from that thin sheen of vitality, stretching across everything. He drained it fast, and his sliver of existence turned into a coiling rope and became an expanding net, and finally grew into a sprawling mass once more. At the same time, a series of anomalies burst free from the spreading rupture caused by him.

A chaotic mana storm crashed over the Tarrasque's body. Lightning cleaved down against its form. Fire detonated in a brutal downpour, hammering the Tarrasque's face and coating it in a clinging inferno. Then came a wave of water laced with Dimensionality, and as it crashed against the Tarrasque, it was briefly displaced, but it discharged its Magical Resistance once more. But as it did, the rupture before Shiv only grew, and the other anomalies only got more chaotic rather than being dispelled.

The mana storm ballooned into a burst of Dynamancy. It rebounded from place to place, becoming as if a conical structure, and it finally crashed against the Tarrasque, smashing it from the sky, pinning it to the ground, and dragging it along the glass crater.

Shiv's eyes widened. The rupture before him unzipped more of reality, rising higher and higher and higher still, until it was stretching past the atmosphere. Oh shit. Not sure if that was a great idea, he thought with a tinge of worry.

And just then, he resurrected. His body came back into existence, knitted together by sinews of vitae. Still, the glowing Pillar of Orichalcum was manifested around him. He spiked himself. His inertial overdrive growled excitedly, thundering with building inertia.

But he himself still couldn't move. He was rooted in place. And he learned the other aspect of being a Hero. To constantly grow, yet to suffer the limitations of growth. He could get faster without a hard limit, but it came at a cost to his body and the world around him. He could get ever tougher, but as he compelled himself to be unmovable, impenetrable by any force, that included his own as well as the world's.

A force splashed over him from behind, and he heard Sullain crying out with displeasure, throwing what amounted to a tantrum as that strange cone of Dynamancy was now coiled around the Tarrasque's body. Meanwhile, more glowing storm stuff was leaking out from the grand rupture.

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"I should probably get the fuck out of here," Shiv muttered, but he wasn't going to be able to move until he dispelled his tower.

So Shiv did the opposite of what he had been doing so far. He focused on becoming more brittle, more pliable, and all of a sudden, the Orichalcum glow began to fade as well. Its red-golden shine diminished rapidly, but it still took time for the manifestation of the tower to vanish entirely. As it did, Shiv found himself shaking in midair. He was finally moving, but barely, yet his Toughness began to drop precipitously.

It felt like it shot past a certain point of no return. He gritted his teeth and commanded himself to stay just as tough as he was, but something about the skill didn't work that way. He continued getting more and more brittle, more and more brittle still, until he could freely move, yet every little movement caused some damage to him.

His muscles tore, his skin, now reddish gold, cracked and bled. A feeling of overwhelming weakness swelled through Shiv, and he went from being nigh invincible to being more vulnerable than he'd ever been.

He focused on getting tougher again, begging his own skill to hurry up, and slowly the brightness of his Orichalcum was rekindled. The brittleness left him. He stopped suffering wounds with every single movement. But even so, it cost time, time he didn't have. A jet stream of water impacted him. Shiv cried out as it took a chunk out of his back, but didn't pierce all the way through. Broken bits of biomass were peeled away, both from his flesh and from the remaining chunks of his new armor. Shiv hardened himself, but the coiling sinew of Hydromancy stung him once more.

Pillar of Orichalcum 211 > 212

And just then, the Tarrasque came back into view. It hovered before him, and the hundreds of tentacles it had all came aglow, their eyes glaring at him. The magic infused within glowing bright. Burning bright.

Oh, fuck.

And then the Tarrasque ripped every droplet of water out of Shiv's body. He shriveled and died immediately, unable to do anything to save himself.

Hydromancy 6 > 12

Inertial Overdrive 122 > 125

Vitality Drain 61 > 70

Vitaemancy 76 > 84

Outside Context Problem 66 > 71

And so, a second lesson was taught to the Deathless about his new skill. He could become a bulwark of ever-ascending physical durability. But it came at a brutal cost. And that cost him any magical defense he could muster whatsoever. And I can't move my arms when I turn to Orichalcum, either. Shit. Not nearly as invincible as I thought I was.

And the Vicar echoed his sentiments, chuckling. "Not nearly so invincible as you imagined, are you, Hero?"

He drew closer to Shiv and extended a single tendril toward him. A tendril infused with a translucent torrent of mana. "I must confess, you are proving to be more of a curiosity and a splendid specimen than a hateful wretch. For that, I think I will spare you. Before, I wanted to finish you, to punish you for all that you have done." A sigh escaped from the Tarrasque. "And I see now that you are simply a blind child. I forgive you. But I must change you first."

And Shiv's mind went blank with dread. Oh no. Oh shit.

The Tarrasque grinned, and it projected a wave of Psychomancy out from the tentacle.

***

Atop the battlements of Fortress-City Houston, beside an ever-roaring series of artillery emplacements, Hero-Ranger Morgan Munny watched as hundreds of thousands of orcs burst out from their underground holds as they fled back to one of their great gates.

This had been a weird summer, a summer that left him unnerved. For months leading up to this point, ranger scouts and military intelligence had warned of a grand invasion, one like never before. Rationing began nearly a year in advance. Munition productions were accelerated. Children as young as eight were drafted into the city guard.

But when the time came, what Morgan faced wasn't an overwhelming horde of greyskins, but rather a paltry trickle. It seemed like the core of their force was elsewhere, and the others, well, they were only doing things half-heartedly. They seemed distracted, and the ones that were captured—or allowed themselves to be captured—spoke of something that burdened the Ranger.

They spoke of a new Vaketh-Insul, a Nemesis-Commander. Someone on Earth had accepted the Challenger's favor, and Morgan knew what that entailed. He had rejected the Challenger when he presented him with the same offer.

"What the hell is happening?" Morgan's second said. The two-meter-tall automaton lowered their ballistae repeater as their single red eye winked at the orcs. "Why are they running away? They never run away. Not like that."

"No," Morgan agreed. "Not like that."

And just then, a notification appeared before their eyes, and they had their answer. All around them, the artillery emplacements stopped firing as well, the Artillerists within likely equally stunned at what they were seeing.

World Quest Gained: Slay the Undying Tarrasque. (At Blackedge, Lost Angeles, The Yellowstone Republic)

Success: Evolve 3 [Existing Skills] to Master-Tier; Evolve 2 [Existing Skills] to Heroic-Tier (Only 100 Pathbearers may receive this reward); Gain 15 Levels for a Selected Skill; Gain a Legendary-Tier [Equipment]

Failure: Integrated Earth is destroyed and the Undying Tarrasque evolves after absorbing the vitality of the planet.

"Tarrasque," Morgan whispered. "There's a fucking Tarrasque in the Yellowstone Republic."

***

In the far north of frigid Torontus, where the Jotun chiefs sit atop their frozen thrones, sneering down at a kingdom built by the frost-bitten hands of uncountable slaves, the greatest among them frowned as a notification appeared before their eyes.

The High Jotun was king, queen, and child, all at the same time, three heads stacked atop one another.

"A grave threat has come to this world," the mother, the crone, rasped.

"Oh, Tarrasque," the father, the warrior, snarled. "And in the Ascendants' lands, no less."

And the child, the prophet, laughed. "Then we should wait. Wait until the accursed Ascendants bleed themselves dry. Wait until the Republic's armies are battered."

And then the High Jotun held out a fist, and a raven as white as snow tore down from the sky, landing on their wrist. "Soon, we march once more. It is time to spread the winter eternal."

***

The Wolf of No Suns looked down from atop its ziggurat, where leylines fueled by blood and sacrifice formed a grand geometric shape around his throne of power. Despite the wondrous display, its mana was paltry compared to that possessed by its brothers, its sisters, its parents, and even its descendants.

The Wolf of No Moons was weak now, lost of power, lost of sacrifice, and lost of flavor; consequences of its failed patricide.

The blood glided up the steps, rushing toward the wolf's many wounds. Its moonlit fur shook as its flesh began to knit back together, and a small army of slaves was offered into its open maw, each of them giving themselves unto the wolf willingly. It bit down, but it did not chew, did not swallow the slaves. Rather, it invited them into its being.

For the wolf was not a ravenous creature, but a lonely one, and each slave walked with purpose and conviction into the maze hidden inside the wolf's throat, seeking the riddle at its heart. They would nourish its feeling of loneliness for a time, but someday, someday someone would truly solve the riddle, and it would free the suns trapped within the wolf.

When that time came, its life would finally end, and the lives of its many unborn children would begin. And then the reign of the Feathered Serpent would see its conclusion.

Yet, before that point came, there would be more tribulations. As if a reminder, a notification appeared before the wolf's eyes, and it let out a breath. "Tarrasque!"

The rivers of blood surrounding its ziggurats began to quiver. A massive shape of fire and radiant wings swept overhead. The wolf's siblings had caught the scent as well. They were bound for the Republic. It wasn't just the wolf that was bleeding and wounded, trying to recover.

Soon, a nation might find itself consumed as well.

Gods made for good sacrifices. Even false ones.

***

Upon a throne in a faraway land, where people surrendered their true faces and adopted masks as their truth, a false-child whose face resembled that of a reflection giggled atop her throne. It was far too large for her, comprised of shifting gears and broken fractals. From within came an ever-present note, the faintest symphony of a scream, a unified howl of the trapped, of those who came before the girl.

"Oh," the girl said, clapping her hands together. "A beast in the Yellowstone Republic. The game is afoot, then, Udraal. When will you return? I hope it will be soon. I have been waiting for your promised incursion for so very long."

***

All across Integrated Earth, rulers, slaves, and everything in between, Pathless to Legend, received a notification of the World Quest.

And yet, even as they laid eyes on the rewards and what was at stake, few acted.

A Tarrasque was a grave threat, but Legendary Pathbearers were nothing if not sure of themselves.

And ultimately, the prize would be far higher if a certain Republic broke itself while slaying a great beast. For everyone knew the Yellowstone Republic guarded one of the few major entrances to the realm within a realm, the realm below, the realm where a god beyond gods lay dead and dreaming.

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