155 (III)

Tarrasque

Roland's expression froze. He stopped moving entirely, and as the seconds dragged on, a look of severe concern came over his Psychomancer.

Rose clutched an open gash on her temple as she swallowed. "Yeah," she breathed, meeting her husband's eyes. A choked laugh escaped her. "I ask myself the same thing when I wake up every fucking morning. But it's…" She looked at the people around her. They were openly gawking. A few made gestures, invoking the Ascendants as they took steps away from her. "It's me. I think. It's me."

Roland suddenly tried to rise from his chair, but his legs gave out under him, and his assistants had to catch with gasps of surprise. Shiv noticed then just how thin the Town Lord was. No wonder the Biomancers were here; they were doing everything they could just to keep him alive. The Psychomancer too. His assistants looked just as haggard as he was, and they were spent beyond measure. Everyone in the room looked ready to collapse aside from Shiv, Adam, and Valor.

A quiet moment followed. Gasps and whispers were traded by the people in the room as Rose staggered toward Roland. Adam bit his lip, and Roland's gaze swiveled to him, searching for answers.

"I—It's a complicated story," Adam said. He glanced at Shiv. "One that I don't know how to tell. But—"

"Fuck! Roland! Incoming!" Rose suddenly cried out. The calm broke. Everyone snapped back into action. The Gate Lord turned away from his resurrected wife and returned son to glare through the walls around him, glass traced with glowing spell patterns of Divination. Violet mana painted a shape beyond the atmosphere, and the spells came with a series of trickling numbers, numbers that decreased with every passing second.

Shiv thought he saw kilometers at the end of the spell patterns. Along with a 16.2 seconds to estimated impact indicator.

A trail was painted. Several interception points were calculated. Roland groaned as he lifted his sun-forged bow high and shaped another brilliant arrow. Valor let out a gasp of pain as Roland's arrow ignited his soul. He threw himself back into Shiv's cape and groaned. "Damnable starlight!"

At the same time, Adam's Righteous Dawn flared. Roland nearly doubled over as he drew his string back—but then an infusion of azure blue energy straightened his back. He gave his son a surprised look, but Adam just clenched his teeth. "Together, father!"

Can Hu stared at the graphs and numbers on the room's glowing walls and wordlessly fled back into Shiv's cape after a second. The Deathless didn't blame it. He kind of wanted to hide in his own cape right now too.

But ultimately there was nowhere to run; the Tarrasque was coming, and Shiv had doubts whether the Yellowstone Republic would survive its impact, let alone Blackedge.

His apprehension was interrupted as Roland called out a name. "Thaen!" he bellowed. Flames erupted from the Town Lord's body as wings spread free from his back, glistening with incandescent power. A massive, translucent figure suddenly loomed over Roland, their form but a shadow, yet one Shiv recognized in an instant.

The Ascendant bore a greatbow in two hands, and a grand spear with another set of arms. The armored figure spread his own wings as well, and he reached down, pressing the tip of his spear against Roland's back. Shiv watched as a surge of pure, unimaginable power passed over from the Starhawk into his favored champion.

"Starhawk!" Roland cried out, his body straining beyond its limits, yet fueled by Adam's Unique Skill. "Grant me your fire! Grant me all that you may offer!"

"You have done more than anyone could have asked of you. But we are out of options." The Starhawk's voice was sonorous but solemn. "Roland. We need to leave. You must prepare to depart with the Perch and—"

But as Roland's gaze passed over Blackedge, he interrupted the god with only a single word. "Please."

The Starhawk's body language screamed tension and indecision. But then the enshadowed god slumped. "There is a reason I chose you," he intoned with a wistful tone. "There is a reason I favor you. And now it might break us both."

A dark shape emerged in the skies above, scattering the clouds in its wake.

It was like a continent descending on Blackedge, and it was moving so fast the air above was turning to plasma. A wave of apocalyptic destruction trailed behind it. The lands grew black beneath the Tarrasque's shadow, like the final curtain to a play's act being drawn over the sky.

A pulse of power left the Starhawk. The world outside stilled. The Tarrasque halted in midair, perhaps seconds away from impact. A colossal arrow formed over Roland's existing projectile. It grew brighter, brighter than anything Shiv had ever beheld before, and the room swirled with so much mana that even the Deathless started choking from the sheer pressure it exuded.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

But this wasn't any kind of mana Shiv knew. No, it felt higher in nature, more significant in a way he couldn't describe. There was a weight to this mana that wasn't possessed by any other kind of magic, and he dared, in that moment, he dared think he would call it divine.

Blood began to spill from Roland's every pore. His body tremored, and a waterfall of sweat poured down Adam's face as well. He was giving all he had to his father, and his father was overchanneling a god's power, preparing to unleash an arrow above all other arrows.

The sheer amount of fire pouring from the Starhawk's silhouette into Roland was having a deleterious effect on the chamber as well. While the people within the room were spared of the most debilitating consequences, the glass was beginning to melt, and the ground beneath him actually ignited. Parts of Roland's flesh simmered and burned.

"Fire!" Rose called out to him. "Fire now! You're overdrawing! Roland, stop!"

But he didn't see her. He couldn't see anything but the arrow he was about to unleash. He drew back on the bow, and Shiv found himself worried about the Town Lord for once, worried that the man wouldn't have the strength to pull the bow all the way back.

Yet, despite his weakened, withered state, he managed. Roland Arrow was nothing if not the epitome of what it meant to be a Pathbearer. He would fire this shot, even if it killed him, and he would see the Tarrasque struck down in return.

Then Shiv frowned. There were windows all around them. The glass hadn't melted yet. How was Roland going to—

The Town Lord unleashed his shot. It phased through the glass, through the divination spells, through the magical barrier surrounding Blackedge. Time began to move as the arrow did, and it surged up into the sky, casting a trail of spreading fire that spilled over Blackedge. Whatever the flame touched was magnified. Shiv watched as the magical patterns coating the protective barrier came to light once more. The barrier itself then came ablaze with power, and its spell patterns burned as well.

Just then, two things happened at once.

The first was Roland Arrow's sudden collapse. He toppled as hissing steam rose from his body. One of his Biomancers cried out as he channeled his power into the Town Lord. "His heart stopped! He's undergoing total organ failure. Keep him alive. We need to keep him alive!"

And at the same time, as both Adam and Rose rushed to Roland's side, his arrow curved high in the air, moving faster than Shiv could perceive. As it met the descending Tarrasque, the sky was cleaved in two. From the bottom, a brush of spreading fire colored the horizon bright with the colors of a star's light as it split the world from below. Columns of devastation and annihilation plumed out behind the Tarrasque, fracturing the atmosphere on high.

A clash followed.

The world faded into nothing but color. White and red mana were kissed by a building supernova. And then Blackedge began to rattle violently from the explosion. A blast followed. A blast that expanded horizontally, twisting space and existence as if a collapsing fold had twisted over reality. As it spread out far, the clouds were atomised for countless leagues across. The heavens shook.

As the arrow's cataclysmic detonation finally faded, the Tarrasque continued to fall. It fell in parts and pieces, with most of its upper half and its legs missing. Shiv's heart leapt, but the Tarrasque was still falling toward them. And a third of a titan was still more than enough to flatten a small town.

"Shit," Shiv cursed.

He cast a final look at the Town Lord and everyone else, and realized Roland wasn't going to be able to save them now. Frankly, Roland might not even be able to save himself in this instant.

"Adam," Shiv called out. The Gate Lord was on his knees, pouring as much power as he could into the unmoving body of his father as his mother cradled Roland's head in her lap. "Go find an orc Biomancer—put an arrow near Helix. He might be able to do something. I'm going to make sure the bastard up there's dead."

"Shiv, wait—" Adam called out.

The Deathless didn't. He activated Outside Context Problem and blasted up from the perch. He spiked himself up into the air, passing through the magical barrier as he went faster and faster. His inertial sheath thundered with building force, and he accelerated towards the falling Tarrasque.

Yet what he'd hoped to be a corpse quickly began to twitch and move. Shiv felt his heart stop. No, he thought to himself. Fuck's sake, no, just stay dead. But the System was determined to spite him. The Tarrasque's flesh melded back together in knitting streams of biomass. Its torso came into shape in less than a second, and it took less than two seconds for it to regenerate completely. And by the time Shiv struck it, it was already whole, and it hadn't even spent any vitae to come back to life this time.

FUCKING COME ON! The Deathless roared internally. THIS IS ABSOLUTE BULLSHIT!

Absolute hopelessness consumed Shiv, but he drove a fist against the Tarrasque regardless. He drained its vitality. He swatted at it, using his ruptured Biomancy, ignoring the pain. He activated his Strider of the Unbending Path. Time stopped. The Tarrasque didn't. It moved as well, a golden shell shrouding its body. Shiv spiked down preemptively. His dodge was pure fortune—and still not good enough. The Tarrasque's right hand missed him. The massive limb bearing a crystalline blade missed Shiv by twenty meters.

But one of its tentacles punched clean through his chest.

Dodge 15 > 17

The Deathless triggered his Outside Context Problem again and shot forward. He slammed into the Tarrasque once more and discharged against the creature, futility be damned. It immediately shredded his body with a forest of thin tentacles. Each one ran through his limbs, and they pulled him taut once more. Shiv snarled as he tried to activate Outside Context Problem for the third time, but then the Tarrasque channeled a beam of Chronomancy into him, and his temporal shell shattered.

He lost track of time, and when he returned, pain erupted across his body as the Tarrasque slammed into the magical barriers protecting Blackedge, using Shiv's comparatively ant-like form as a blunt instrument to batter its surface. Shiv crashed hard against the magical spells. Patterns faded beneath him. He sank a good meter before the remaining wards responded. The Starhawk's fire fueled the flagging spells for now, but Shiv didn't think it would last much longer. The divine mana was seeping away like embers to the wind.

"Here," Sullain's voice sounded. His tone was kindly and gentle, but there was a hidden edge of cruelty there as well. "Let me be generous."

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