156 (IV)

Orichalcum

Shiv felt an overwhelming wave of force tear at his mind. He cried out, and then his voice veered off into a desperate howl. He could feel his sense of self being pried free, could feel his memories crack and bend. The Tarrasque didn't seem as powerful magically as it was physically, but its Psychomancy was still far superior to his.

And with Vicar Sullain guiding its power, not even Uva would have been able to spare Shiv of mental slavery and madness if she were here.

But someone else could.

A loud roar shook the world. The Tarrasque turned and received a heavy strike across its face for its action. Sullain snarled. The Tarrasque swept out a hand. The small gray dot pressed against it vanished in a burst of Dimensionality, then reappeared atop the Tarrasque.

"Sullain!" the orc roared out once more. He slammed his club down, and it shattered into pieces. It didn't matter. The orc teleported again.

At the same time, a massive missile of translucent mana crashed against the Tarrasque. Its body flashed with Magical Resistance, and it blasted outward, sweeping the land clean. Yet it did nothing to dissuade the orcs. Another series of spells hammered against it. They were bombing it from afar. Shiv's vision cleared as he saw trails of magic curving over the horizon from all directions.

The orcs were beginning to use artillery tactics on the Tarrasque. And the mana types infused in the falling spells weren't of a single variety as well. Missiles of Dynamancy slammed into the Tarrasque's hindquarters, with bear-traps of gravity clinging to its legs. Beams of fire containing jagged outlines of Psychomancy splashed across its body, and Shiv could see the shuddering imprint of the Tarrasque's Magical Resistance emerge.

Once more, Bonk roared with laughter. He reappeared under the Tarrasque and hit it a third time. Now the Tarrasque shook. It sustained no damage, but Shiv knew how Bonk's skill worked. And with the new insight gained regarding Heroic-Tier skills, hope swelled inside Shiv. Bonk's skill was about ever-escalating damage. The Tarrasque was trembling. Part of that was from Bonk's resonant strikes, the other from Sullain's outrage.

"Damnable orc, away from me! How many times must I kill you? How many!"

It shot beams of magic from all its tentacles. It swept its body left and right. The air turned to plasma. Blasts tore across the sky, crashing through the landscape. Mountains worth of earth were flung high into the clouds. But through the mess, Shiv still caught sight of a small figure, a single dot defying the devastation, diving through the flames.

Awareness 44 > 46

"Sullain!" Bonk cried out again. He struck the Tarrasque twice this time, just as a flood of lightning speared into the grand beast's glowing eyes. A tentacle swept up. It slashed against Bonk's leg as he stood atop the Tarrasque's head, and blood painted the air, but the orc vanished without ever losing the limb.

At the same time, as the blood landed upon the Tarrasque, a massive detonation followed. The backside of the behemoth ignited as if a firestorm had been summoned into existence. And then Bonk appeared at the base of the Tarrasque's leg. He struck again. More spells landed.

Then a clench of pressure appeared beside Shiv as he felt a flood of vitality enter him. An orc hovered there, his eyes bright red, the color of life force. He smiled at Shiv, a shard of violet matter jutting free from his forehead, making him seem like an orcish unicorn. "Looking out for you, Insul."

A second later, the orc teleported away, just as Shiv resurrected. The Deathless left context and stopped time. He glared at the Tarrasque, watching it scour the land using its tentacles, pumping out so much magic that it was deforming existence itself. But then he noticed something else. Its mouth was open. Its mouth that was wide enough to swallow a good portion of a town.

And a terrible idea took shape inside Shiv.

Well, jumping inside a giant monster and ripping it apart from within is practically tradition for me by this point. Let's give this shit another go.

And he spiked himself forward. He launched himself past the building-sized teeth of the monster and gagged as he inhaled the Tarrasque's fetid breath. As he progressed further, he found himself gliding down the creature's throat before he found what looked to be a soft pad of tissue he could land on. Shiv slammed hard down the beast's inner flesh and found it just as durable within as it was outside. "Kind of figured," Shiv muttered to himself. But he wasn't expecting the Tarrasque to be an easy kill anyway.

Nor was he potentially expecting the Tarrasque to be his kill directly.

No. This was something one did with an army.

How many Heroes does it take to kill a Legendary monster? Shiv mused. Let's find out.

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Shiv activated Pillar of Orichalcum once more. He planted his hands against the Tarrasque, and a glowing column of red and gold shot out from him. His skin brightened with a radiant flare. He focused everything on Toughness and nothing else. He heard the Tarrasque gag, and Sullain cried out: "What are you doing? What are you doing, you vile, insolent, feckless insect of a bastard—"

And Bonk interrupted him once more. "Sullain! Eyes on me, Bakal!"

A blow struck the Tarrasque once more, and a shaking impact rattled the creature's body. Shiv heard Sullain cry out with genuine alarm. What followed thereafter was a series of heavy impacts that shook the creature further. But despite the Tarrasque twitching and shaking, it couldn't move far at all, for a pillar had been formed within its skull.

A pillar of Orichalcum.

"Sullain!" Bonk roared with laughter as he hit the Tarrasque once more.

This time, Shiv heard something break. A splash of light entered the insides of the Tarrasque's mouth, and a massive, building-sized tooth impacted him. He could feel the Tarrasque shaking now. He could feel the resonance building, becoming more and more intense.

Even though the Tarrasque's regeneration was still in full swing, and thus had barely been harmed, the Vicar himself was sounding more rattled by the beatdown with every passing moment, and Shiv decided to continue his strategy from earlier.

"Hey, Sullain," Shiv called out, not sure if the Vicar could even hear him. "You ever wonder what your people might feel? I mean the people of Submission and all the Necrotechs who died fighting for you. You think they're shaking their heads at you from within the Great One's embrace?"

Psychology 45 > 48

Another impact shook the Tarrasque. It slammed against him. Shiv felt himself move, but he only shifted about a meter. More Toughness, come on.

"Silent, be silent!" Sullain cried. And that brought a massive grin to Shiv's face.

But then the Deathless felt a crushing pressure grip him. The Tarrasque's insides came aglow with swelling mana. An ocean of static blackness spilled in from all sides, and Shiv realized it was trying to teleport.

For the first time, Shiv directly felt the Dimensionality mana, but he realized it didn't move quite like other fields. Parts of it filtered away, like debris passing through a strainer. Shiv watched as the Tarrasque started projecting its own body afar—and then it tried moving him as well.

The Deathless snarled as he tried to hold in place—only for agony to rip through him as his Portomancy mana was shredded apart in an instant.

Portomancy 1 > 5

But then the blackness broke as something struck it. A spell that dispelled Dimensionality, perhaps.

Challenger, I love your orcs, Shiv thought, delirious from pain.

The Challenger wants you to kill this thing and make the Vicar cry.

"STOP! YOU—STOP!" Sullain shrieked.

"Sullain!" Bonk shouted once again, adding a dramatically loud yawn to his words. He hit the Tarrasque once more, and Shiv felt the massive beast bounce off the ground with this hit. The Heroic orc's blows were adding up.

Bonk, I fucking love you, Shiv thought. It was something he would never tell the orc, but right then, he did feel true romantic love, and he knew that there was no other army mad enough to come to his aid against a threat so severe.

"Enough! Enough!" Sullain screamed.

Shiv continued where he left off. "Because if there is an afterlife, and if I were from your city, if I was one of your martyred Necrotechs, I would pray for non-existence because of how badly you're failing right now." Shiv forced out a dishonest laugh. But the Vicar was too far gone to tell the difference. "You thought you were going to kill Roland Arrow. You couldn't even kill me with a Tarrasque. I was barely a Hero, and all you did was make me stronger. All you did was feed me. And now you're gonna lose. You're gonna lose because you couldn't handle someone with a Heroic-Tier Toughness Evolution and a couple of orcs."

And as Shiv's sloppy psychological attack hit a critical threshold, he heard a genuine sob come from Sullain. "You… are right."

The admission ground Shiv's mind to a halt. "What?"

"You are right," Sullain repeated, sniffling. "I… I do not have the heart for this. I am no warrior. I know this. I am but a scholar. And I should not have stayed here. I just wanted to feel his death. I wanted to feel satisfaction. It was selfish of me. And you are right. I cannot stop you. For I have no taste for violence." A pause followed, and Shiv felt a terrible foreboding once again. "Thus, I unchain the beast from my mind entirely. I let you free, my Tarrasque. Run wild. Kill Roland Arrow, and destroy all he holds dear. Break this world if you must…"

And then something went missing. Shiv felt a presence he hadn't been aware of before go absent.

The Tarrasque stopped thrashing.

And from the depths of its throat came an utterly bestial growl.

"Ah, shit," Shiv muttered.

Even as more spells impacted it, as another blow from Bonk shook its body, the Tarrasque didn't respond. Instead, it let out a deep snarl, and then it suddenly tore its own flesh open with an explosion of Biomancy.

The titanic creature ripped itself in half and broke free from Shiv's Pillar of Orichalcum. The Deathless blinked.

The unchained Tarrasque eyed him with predatory interest for but a moment, and then it vanished from sight.

A world-shaking detonation of plasma, fire, and force washed over Shiv, and when the chaos cleared, he saw a blurry shape through the air with a belt of debris shifting around its body—headed for a flying cathedral and two warring armies.

"No," Shiv breathed. "Fuck!" He began reducing his Toughness, and his pillar started to dissolve.

But just as he did, something flashed above him. For a moment, Shiv thought it was the sun. But then, a greenish glow splashed over the world, and the Deathless's eyes widened as a Necromantic dawn descended through the clouds, followed by a coiling serpent of shining bone. "...WHILE I FINISH THE VERMIN HERE."

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