500 Alpha Strike

Existence is like an ocean. A real fucked-up ocean filled with fucked-up fish who want to fuck you up! The best way you can avoid getting fucked up by a fish you can't fuck up yourself is to find a fish who can't fuck you up but can fuck them up. Now, this sounds confusing, but it's actually pretty straightforward: You have a certain assortment of skills, pathetic as they are. You might need to use those skills to leverage your survival. Maybe you're really good at hiding, so good that even the biggest, meanest Vanguard fish can't do anything against you, because he's just running around smashing stuff.

Now, you need to annoy this Vanguard fish. Stay with me here: It's really, really stupid and risky, but you have to do it. Otherwise, you're definitely gonna end up dead later. Okay, so, you're gonna annoy this Vanguard fish until he learns that he can't deal with you no matter what he tries, and when you have that dynamic established, then you start helping him. Slowly, he learns he can bargain with you to stop annoying him.

I did the same thing, except to something that's a fuck of a lot more than a Vanguard fish. Part of it's luck. You really need some luck if you want to keep living, but a big part of it is just focusing on what makes you really special. I hope you find it. I hope you find it fast, because if you can't, it's a big, fucked-up ocean. For the fishies without big teeth who can't swim fast or lack like 13 dicks so they can make infinite kids, your only role there is to feed the ocean.

Make yourself indispensable. Find a big and nasty fish that no one else fucks with, and find a way to survive that fish specifically so they have to bargain with you. It's called contracting. It's called specialization. It's called Integration.

—The Realmrunner

500

Alpha Strike

The temporal blow struck Shiv just as he shifted out of context. He felt a gliding blade of time scratch the surface of his Harbinger for a narrow instant, and another bounded field enveloped him as a chain of silhouettes formed a tunnel behind him, perfectly shaped to fit his dimensions. The transposition spell activated. He felt a pull—and then nothing at all as he plunged Backstage and siphoned the fullness of the ambush into vitality.

His personal sanctum flickered with another infusion of life force, enhancing its structure, allowing it to burn against the paradox of non-existence for a while longer. At the same time, his Harbinger remained fused hot around him, its pieces and golden plating brighter, more solidified than he could recall ever seeing them. At the same time, there was an unburdening that greeted his senses, a feeling that he'd left something behind. Quickly, he realized what: Kelhaus, who had fused her Harbinger over his, remained adrift across context, lost as to what she once stood anchored to. At the same time, there was a pathway of Chronomancy painting a chain of temporal anchors from past to future right beside her.

Shiv laid eyes on the third Harbinger in the fray, and he recognized it as Maria Corcusa in a startling instant. Twin daggers blazed crimson in her hands, connected to shadows of monstrosities that loomed as guardians right beside her. Her blood-made armor was coated in a similarly fluid layer of temporal mana, and her golden path led past Shiv, toward Adam, Uva, and a thousand other winding directions as she continued along her chain of assassinations. Yet he read something in her progress, something in her posture. Her Harbinger was dense and shrouded, but the effects of his Continuity Error were absolute. Much like Kelhaus, she was lost as to why she was here, who she was attacking, and that bought Shiv a moment of opportunity. It also spared the lives of his companions.

“She leapt from her present into the future to assassinate you specifically,” his Harbinger intoned. “You, Adam, Uva, all the other elites in Gate Piety. You have to stop her. You are the only one who can. Spend the vitality to strike from here. Intercept her before she can hurt anyone else.”

“Shiv, wait!” the girl who didn't exist called out. She was burning brighter too, practically afire with vitality. Something was changing in her. She was close, close to some kind of precipice.

Once more, Shiv's Severed Shadow resonated not only with her but with everything in the Backstage. His Garden of Wounds and Broken Things trembled, and at the very top of the mountain of rubble, the Challenger's stolen hand clenched into a fist.

"Wait!" she said again. This time Shiv could see something in her eyes glowing, almost like the violet flickers of Divination, but instead it was a flaming red, so piercing and hot that it was practically boiling into the fabric of reality itself. From the intermingling of mana, he realized that she was gazing into the fine structure of Integration. He'd seen that same fire upon the Stolen Throne. It had spoken to him there, and now he saw that same fire staring back at him.

A shadow formed behind the girl, a shadow of something avaricious, hungry, a bird of prey in motion. Its plumage a conflagration across time, space, and reality.

“Something's happening outside. Something's happening in the Stranger's Garden, at the Farwalker outpost. They're coming in through there. The Stranger’s… compromised, I think. But he's still struggling. I can feel time twisting outside. I can feel…” Her eyes squinted in annoyance. “Agh, there's so much movement!”

Shiv gave her a brief squeeze on the shoulder, then pointed himself at the threshold of reality. He entered the fray with a surge of vitality, and when he did, the Garden came with him, his body bursting, his Harbinger spreading until its form turned grand and colossal. A series of cascading rapids made from tumbling rock slides of debris burst into existence, and Shiv crashed down against the temporal pathway left by Corcusa and used it to follow after her.

For the briefest of moments, he found himself envious of a Recollector, inferior though to him in almost every capacity it now was. The damned creature could strike at someone using their past. He did not have such a luxury. He needed to chase. He needed to follow her before she struck one of his—

Something clamped around Shiv. He almost mistook that for an attack, attempting to shake it off and retaliate before he realized that Kelhaus had bound her Harbinger to his once more. The shape of her time armor swelled to match the size of his Garden, and she spoke words not of surprise but of genuine curiosity. “What does it feel like to slip beyond the enshacklement of existence?”

The ill-timed question greeted Shiv like a slap across the face. “Fucking don't ask me this shit now! Help me! Help me deal with this! Don't you want me to go after Corcusa? Well, there she is. Jump after her or something! Get her!”

Kelhaus hummed for a beat. Then, she simply said, "No. I want to gain her measure first. I will intervene if I feel it is right to do so."

“Fuckin' worthless!” Shiv snarled, fury igniting inside of him, fueling his Harbinger with power. She noted his anger as one might regard a distant cloud turning dark with the potential for rain.

Shiv's Garden filled the hallways of Farnest. He tried to move another one of his true clones to intercept, but only then remembered that his Harbinger could only be in one place at one time. Thankfully, his Unique Eldritch Skill more than made up for that. Corcusa solidified a few meters away from him, dipping toward the Starhawk—still writhing and screaming beyond the rule of time. She cast something at the god, and burst forward into the future once just as the Red Rider’s Hand curved toward her in a descending blow of promised annihilation.

With a flash of ionisation, the great meeting chamber burst apart. Tens of thousands of tons of stone and metal were shattered.

But only an empty path of gold lingered in Corcusa’s wake.

A vicious scowl spread across Shiv's face. “See you escape me when there’s nowhere to go.” He expanded his Garden, compressing everyone within his injuries. Corcusa surfaced again to drive a blade into Adam's throat, only for it to ricochet against a shredding chain of scars that became links of chainmail.

A tendril, shaped from broken glass and warped metal, burst out and punched through Corcusa, shredding through the walls—unzipping steel, concrete, and bedrock alike as if a blade moving through water. He drank in every bit of collateral damage he inflicted, absorbing the destruction into himself as a catalyst for his power, but the attack was less than impotent. Corcusa faded without ever suffering any harm. The only thing that glowed were her blades, and they too vanished as they leapt ahead across time, a Transposition spell sweeping over her.

Shiv tried to counter-spell it, to slam his Harbinger against hers, but he passed through nothing but a mirage, an anchor left in her past. His lashing momentum-tentacles groped naught but time echoes as well—she was beyond him, leading him with traces from her past.

Kelhaus nodded. “Skilled. Well-planned. Her strength and her bound form are divorced from each other. They're arriving at different points of the future—deviating only slightly across shared time to mask their approach.”

Shiv gave but a growl as he continued clambering across the tunnel of time Corcusa left in her wake. His pursuit became single-minded: his desperation to strike his enemy down before she actually took anything from him so that he could turn his attention on the orcs and hold them where they were pouring across, consumed every fiber of his being. His Multitasking collapsed toward this single goal, as did his Awareness, spreading patches of organs that scoured the entirety of Farnest to see if she had any other tricks planned, any other angles of deception. His synaptic shadows crackled with energy, looming behind every person with the organic metaphysical architecture that supported his mental expansion.

Corcusa maintained the initiative, but he had size, mass, and unrelenting will and fury. More importantly, he could follow her to any future she so desired. As always, the battlefield was shaped by the present, what was happening in the now. You could cast as many blows as you want across time, but they still had to travel. That could be felt, and Corcusa was engaging in a targeted strategy.

She was going after each of his companions. But why was she alone, when there were orcs that were capable of attacking across time as well?

Then the first of the attacks hit him. They were anchored to Adam, to Uva, to everyone Shiv was protecting. A tsunami of compacted Chronomancy spells crashed against Shiv, and as they grazed his Harbinger, their golden shrouds burst apart, unleashing the magic that hid behind. Over a hundred Siege Spells struck him at the same instant, cast by countless orcs. The mana being arrayed against him was unimaginable. Unleashed upon an empty plain, the equivalent in Pyromancy mana would scour a space 300 kilometers across and twice again down toward the core of the world clean. All that was pointed with needle-sharp precision into Shiv.

His Harbinger burst before he could react. His Magical Resistance was ground away a mere moment later. A Transposition skill hit Shiv as twin daggers sank into his back, injecting venom and hostile Biomancy mana into his flesh. He was torn asunder as he was flung across time and savaged by not only Corcusa but a storm of time-jumping orcs empowered in Toughness and Magical Resistance of their own. They crashed into his Garden of Wounds and Broken Things as a wave of bodies, pushing their way through his indestructibility, using magical means as they searched for his original body to deliver a proper coup de grâce.

And in an instant, Shiv vanished.

His Garden was drawn across into the future as he drowned under a barrage of coordinated and well-prepared spells.

***

Back in real time, less than a microsecond of time had passed. Adam blinked, confused as to where he was. Then he suddenly remembered Shiv. Then he wondered where Shiv was and why everything was falling apart all around him. A house-sized chunk of stone crashed down on his shoulder, ringing off his armor.

His eyes widened. The entirety of Farnest was collapsing inward. Its structural supports, all upended, peeled out of the walls as if a giant had reached in with intangible hands to deform the spine of the building. The foundations of the massive structure had effectively been turned to scrap, and now everything above was coming down.

“Ascendants!” Adam hissed instinctively, but then he called upon the Sage's hand once more. It fell, hammering into the world and halting all force, all possibility of violence. His senses were overwhelmed by a sea of details and sensations. Valor and Uva were still down, both utterly unresponsive to the world. Adam had been battered as well. The ache emanating from the Starhawk’s thrashing form reminded him of his own suffering, but as the Crown of the Anti-Savior had traumatized him, it had also re-forged him. Where Shiv stood a glutton for pain, Adam was now its adversary, and he could function even when broken. Of this he was certain, and because of this, his life was spared. A blade arrived a centimeter away from his throat, golden and red, with a twin layering of mana. It was trapped by his mist, and Adam shifted a half inch away as the Starhawk continued screaming, his manifestation caught by the palm as well.

Readers can find the author's chapter on NovelPhoenix; this version was copied without consent, and the source supports the writer.

At the same time, other details poured into Adam's senses: staring through countless meters of frozen rubble, his omniscience revealed flashes of slaughter and battle happening in the Gate above, as several Orchestras of hostile orcs came pouring across the breach into Gate Piety.

And the bulk of their greatest Vanguards were making a mad, blurring dash towards Starhawk's Perch.

Where his father was. Where Isabella and his mother were. Where the Starhawk's Phylactery and all the other divine anchors his father had been collecting resided.

“No,” Adam breathed.

“Oh, YES, brother!” A low, yet booming chuckle sounded behind him. Clenching his fists, Adam turned to see an absurdly overmuscled orc standing with his tree-trunk arms crossed before his barrel chest, dressed in adamantine armor painted to resemble an even larger orc, and staring down at him with a cigar pinched between his fangs. He was also just outside the reach of Adam's mist.

“So, you're the Challenger's Nemesis,” the orc said, looking Adam up and down before giving an exaggerated scoff. "Not impressed, little brother. Not impressed at all. It's not often that I disagree with big daddy, but today you can go and call me the Culturist! You look like a pipsqueak—Yeah! I think I've had little slips like you for break—”

Adam fired an incandescent shard through the orc—and struck nothing. The beast was nothing more than a projection, and the orc laughed. "Well, by this time I expect you to be trying to kill me, so I'm gonna keep this brief. We're gonna pay your little home a visit. I'm gonna flay everyone you care about, and then I'll hang them out to dry. You can wait here till I'm done. When you're all good and mad, you come and meet me at your Perch. We'll see who's the better killer. We'll see who's stronger, who's better, who's meaner—Yeah! We'll see who's the better god, you or the Challenger. And if you can't get past me, then you better let that dream of a Holy War die, because I ain't no Challenger quite yet. But I'll be waiting. If you need more specific motivation, I think I'm going to fashion your daddy into a pair of boots for myself. I call them Roll-Landers.”

The orc Maestro put his hands on his hips and laughed boisterously. “Roll-Landers, what a dumb sounding name. Strife, I love this shit—” He cleared his throat and reassumed his facade of exaggerated machismo. “So, you better hurry, little arrow. You better hurry, you better fly fast, because if you really, really go hard, you might just be able to save your family. I guarantee you, you won't be able to do that from where you are right now. It's time to make a trade. All war takes sacrifice. How much are you willing to lose? Oh, brother… I’m dying to find out.”

Taunt delivered, the orc winked out of existence in a flicker of glittering Pyromancy, outlined with the faintest hint of gold. Adam glared at the place where who he guessed was the Breaker once stood as fire filled his stomach and fury ignited his cells. He swept his glaring omniscience across the Gate and combusted every single person he'd ever touched with his Awareness. Uva and Valor and practically everyone but Shiv flickered alight with his incandescent fire. There were hints of azure blueness overpowering the Divinity, however, more than a bit of Adam leaking over into his Domain.

Inside, the Sage began to laugh and whispered to him: "They have planned well. This blow is carving deep into you, but there is a way we can crush them yet. Simply do what you are made to. You must embody your Domain and abandon the man. Let the meat die so the myth may rise. Deliver upon them my tyranny.”

“Be silent!” Adam snarled. Yet there was no time for these godly schemes and sniveling games now. He turned his attention to the mana core and, for the first time, drew upon its power in the utmost offensive capacity it could. Veins of Eldritch crystal came alive with scintillating fire, and the evolved Terrorspawn were compelled to plunge as Adam released them from their place of stasis. As they were ignited by Shiv's Unique Pyromancy, the mana core fired a countering beam of incineration down upon the pillar erupting from where the tutorial gateway once stood.

The Culturist arrived in the ruins of Farnest that instant, slipping out from Adam's soul via the conduit of his Awareness, wreathed in Adam's burning Divinity. The orc was covered in grime and blood, none of it his own, and his eyes glowed with a menacing blue that spoke of sadness and butchery alike. “Adam, direct the Terrorspawn to the Abyssal gateway. Drag them through the gambling parlors and through Hell's Kitchen! Do it! Now!”

Adam responded without question—he was far too hardened to waste time on details in the heat of combat. What the Culturist said was all he needed to know, and right then he directed the skeletal horrors upon the orcs. They fell like gleaming rain across the skies toward the Abyssal gateway, plunging down to merge into a screaming crowd as plumes of flame and pockets of devastating explosions ripped and tore across the expanse of Gate Piety.

Every blast, every life lost, struck Adam like a dagger between the ribs, tearing him open on the inside, feeding his frenzied misery. “Culturist. The Perch—-”

“Will hold for far longer than most of the Gate. The Breaker is trying to rattle you. He seeks to break your concentration and split your focus along personal and strategic lines. You cannot let him. We must fight from the outside in. We muster our forces and sweep through the Gate, starting from the surface gateway and, after securing the Abyssal gateway, we pinch their forces down the middle—but only after everything has been secured. Whatever ground they try to hold, we must burn. Adam, look at me. If they manage to gain a foothold, we burn it. It will be the only mercy we can deliver upon the people trapped there. I know, I know, and you know.”

Adam did. He truly did. He knew what the orcs were like, how they operated.

“Have someone go to Munny,” Adam rasped, swallowing a stone of dread. “Tell him I give him official command over all of Gate Piety's forces. I also need someone to go to Weave to entreat with the Composer. Tell her what's happening. Tell her we need immediate support right now. The portal is still intact in the deeper levels below the main structure here. I will keep this place from collapsing, but until we get everyone out, I must stay here.”

“Understood. Your will be done, Paragon.” A veil of Dimensionality formed around the Culturist as he prepared to teleport.

“And be careful.” The words worked their way out of Adam—surprising him. “I need you to stay alive as well.”

His glinting tone left the Culturist taken aback, and then, smiling, he told him, "I'll do as much as I can, little god. As much as I can.”

And that was all he could promise, even as a Legend. The System forever and always took more than it gave.

As the Culturist vanished in a burst of static mana, Adam turned his attention to the mana core but also toward his divine anchor that resided in New Albion. He closed his eyes and sank into a meditative trance, becoming one with his glaring omniscience as his mind expanded, elevating his multitasking skill far above baseline.

“Great One,” Adam breathed. “We’re being attacked. The Challenger’s orcs are in our Gate. I—I wish to bargain. I wish to purchase New Albion’s aid. If affordable. If possible.”

Nearby, Shiv's true clone lay slumped over, the same as Uva. His eyes were blank, and his flesh was riven in spreading fissures, blood welling out in a flood. He looked like he had been shattered, and Adam realized then that Shiv's Harbinger must have been broken. The ache assailing Adam's heart grew a magnitude greater. Somehow he knew Shiv had been broken in his defense—that Shiv made himself vulnerable keeping everyone from harm.

Godsdammit… Godsdammit all.

The Great One read his anguish, even through the mask of his shrine, and she leaned back, enjoying another sip of tea as Gate Piety teetered towards annihilation. “So you say, and so they have. But what are you prepared to offer?”

Adam knew what she wanted: his death, and through it the suppression of the Sage.

Within his soul, the burgeoning seed of Divinity that had flowered into the Domains of Tyranny and Heroism recoiled with primal loathing. Adam tried to speak but choked as something seized him dead-tight in a crushing grip from within.

“No!” the Sage snarled. “No bargain. No surrender. No trade. This is your folly, Great One. This is your folly. Weak as my user is, desperate though he is, I will now speak on his behalf as Tyrant, the Tyrant he was meant to be. Your sin has come to roost. Your weakness has befouled the lines and waters after you. You will give help, not because it is owed, but because you must, you sniveling creature! You worthless vermin of fear and degradation—less than mortal! You will give aid, for the alternative might be my containment, my slumber, and my user’s demise, but his escape, his radicalization, his hatred for all gods but himself, for all Divinities but himself, for all laws and rulers but himself. He will cast his own die. I will make sure that he howls his pain and the madness comes over him. I will hold him in peace and beyond harm until he hardens beneath that scarstuff, until he is made into something I find worthy of use—something I will direct against you. Something I will direct against the System itself. You will give aid because you cannot risk losing out on the Deathless either. So many uses for so many wonderful little instruments. Here, because of what you have done, your Thief lies apart in pieces, perhaps trapped beyond that place of silence for another generation longer. Can you risk that? Will you suffer that as Avalon closes in, I wonder? Heed my words: As with the forging of the Heaven that saw you laid low, your pathetic inaction, your hesitation, will cost you more than you can ever bear. You can choose the boy right now to give mercy, to be noble, or you can choose me, and you know what I am. You know what you reap. Choose. Choose. Choose!”

Adam flinched and shuddered. Too much mist was pouring out of him. Too much mist was seizing him. Too much, too much power. The Sage was swelling. Adam's desperation, this moment, granted his Domain a rush of elevation beyond its normal capacity, and as his will grew weaker, the Sage's grew stronger. He could do no more than act as a puppet.

And Adam hated it. He struggled against the Sage. He tried to throw it off, but he found himself a prisoner deep inside his own soul, with his skin worn by another, used by another. He stared out at the world with his Awareness, with his senses still attached, but none of them were his to control.

The dark irony was that, as the Sage spoke of choice, Adam was left with none of his own, boxed and fenced, as the hand above Farnest grew larger, encompassing the entire structure and then spreading to the size of a district. Adam could hear Hymn finally recovering. He clambered up along the wall, and he looked at Uva andAdam. His face was more ashen than before, with drool, tears, and snot pouring down.

"I… can't feel him," Hymn whispered, expression half elation, half dread. "I can't feel the Stranger. I can't feel him. I can't feel the Garden. I can’t feel any of it…”

***

Maria shifted a fine layer of scar-layered asphalt to find the Deathless’ original body fused to the ruins beneath. She cocked her head as she looked down upon the pacified boy. His gaze was vacant. His body was coated by her Harbinger. His own was utterly broken, and he sustained more wounds every passing second as she injected an overwhelming dose of psionic devastation straight into his memory. With his strange mind, he would regenerate in time, which was why she constantly had her mind elementals blast him with constant doses of trauma.

The wielder of this Garden of Wounds and Broken Things now perfectly paralleled the skill itself. The Challenger's right fist lay embedded in a half-toppled skyscraper, drifting upon the waters of time. All around them was a sea of gold, its turbulent waters accelerating them second by second further into the future.

The Deathless looked like a ripe seed burst in so many ways. The translucent shell of his mind had fractured as deeply as his Harbinger, and his body had come asunder to birth the Garden from the beginning. All these parallels tickled some part of Maria's mind as she allowed herself a measure of pride.

Truth be told, she hadn't been sure if her plan would work. She studied the Deathless during his fight with the Breaker and stole memories from other Pathbearers who'd witnessed his prior battles. Beyond his lacking technique and tactical flaws, he was a force of nature. Worse yet, he was a post-attritional force of nature, for any prolonged struggle would result in eventual but certain defeat. Furthermore, he was all but indestructible now, so that eliminated any possibility of a purely kinetic approach.

That left only one real angle of attack: magic. But that meant she needed to shatter his Harbinger first and overwhelm his Magical Resistance before he slipped Backstage all over again.

She plotted, she schemed, she ran simulations, and she practiced a thousand times, ten thousand times, a hundred thousand times across countless variations. She purchased specialized elementals of time and mind to aid her. She recruited as many orc Legends as the Breaker could offer for this singular ambush, who bestowed upon her a chain of temporal attacks meant to be expended only when the Deathless became predictable.

Before that, she was given a series of commands into her subconsciousness so she didn't lurk in confusion when he sank backstage. Instead, she continued moving as her instincts were made to usurp her rational mind—telling her to go after the Paragon, the Seeker, everyone the Deathless cared about, in an attempt to bait him out while remaining utterly unaware of his existence at the same time.

This was, in effect, the oddest assassination she'd ever performed.

But it worked. The Deathless was downed, and the vector of attack she chose was beyond successful. His mind was unspeakably resilient, attacking his Shapeless Tides like trying to blow one's way through a bunker, but after weeks of collecting siege-level spells from the strongest orc mages, they tore through him as a super storm would uproot continental plates.

It only took enough mana and firepower to disintegrate a Legendary-Tier Tarrasque or five.

“Corcusa to all Orchestras. I have bagged the ‘big game.’ Alpha strike successful. I repeat, alpha strike successful.”

Her message would only arrive after they surfaced back to the present, but she prepared herself for the raucous orc cheering in advance. The jovial monsters would doubtless flood her mind with pointless and distracting messages mid-combat about her “winning the Insulbowl” and that they had the “better Insul after all.” As such, mental wards went up to anticipate and parry such nonsense.

The battle wasn’t over until all threats were fully eliminated. The Deathless was only one, and if someone destroyed her mind elementals or destabilized her Harbinger, it would take an estimated thirty seconds to a minute before the Deathless was back in fighting condition—and well aware of her strategy.

Not something I can afford to risk. Maria drew a new blade from her hip—this one blazing faint blue with Animancy. Another redundancy to keep the Deathless down. She might not be able to affect his Unique Skills, but she could cripple everything else if they had to fight again. She clambered down to deliver a maiming blow to his soul. If it were easier to locate and eliminate his Severed Shadow, she would do that—complete destruction was her preference, but the moment she attempted that first strike, she lost track of the Deathless’ origin-Revenant and had to make do. It really is like trying to murder a metaphysical cockroach. But you’re ultimately still just an animal, aren’t you, Deathless? No surprises left for—

Something resonated against Maria's bound field. Her body tensed as she turned in a spiraling strike.

Only for the blow to be intercepted.

“Let me look upon you,” her master said, distracted and amused at the same time as Maria strained to break free—but found her mastery of time far inferior to the one that held her. Kelhaus poured her magic across Maria’s blade using her fingertip, and one field of gold completely consumed another. “Let me look upon the substance of your Harbinger so I can better judge the teachings bestowed by my counterfeit self.”