The upgraded skill isn’t the only source of power coursing through me. Relentless has returned, though it provides me embers where once it was a raging wildfire. Does it give me diminished returns if it comes into play too soon after the last time it was used? The trait description doesn’t give me enough to go off of.
A flurry of sharpened stone sails towards me, so numerous that there’s no way I can dodge them all, so I use my new skill for the first time.
Bloodpath takes more out of me than Bloodstep did. I notice that much immediately. A familiar red tint descends on the world around me as I melt into blood, and I almost fall out of the form as it draws blood and magic strength alike, draining power to fuel itself.
I’m fresh up on lifeblood thanks to my recent Devours, and the combination of Siphon and Relentless fuels me with enough magic strength that I can keep this going for some time.
It’s more malleable than Bloodstep, I think, or maybe I’ve just gotten used to propelling myself in this form. I dissolve out of my humanoid shape near-instantly as the stone spears fly straight through me. Every single one of them draws blood—it’s impossible for them not to. In this form, though, drawing blood is utterly meaningless.
Shape Blood assists me, my proficiency in controlling blood apparently transferring over to this formless body. I fall, my senses scattering as further spheres start breaking my blood-body apart, and I pull myself back together.
Locate Person is still active, burning Noren’s position into my mind’s eye. He hides behind a layer of roiling earth and stone excavated from the ruins below, but that doesn’t block him from my skill’s second sight.
Nothing short of wraithfire can stop me in this form, but it grows increasingly taxing as I fall. Reassembling my blood after he tears it apart costs magic and blood volume to do, and even my magic-boosting skills aren’t enough to keep this going forever.
It’ll last long enough.
His impromptu shield wall is constantly shifting, blocking any physical attack from penetrating through, but it’s not airtight.
I splatter against the earth, blood soaking into dirt and dripping off stone, but parts of me find the tiny gaps between pieces, slipping through the cracks of his skill, and I continue onwards.
Noren stands ten feet off the ground, a mound of detritus carrying him as the earth beneath him rises to complete his shield. The people he was with earlier are no longer present. Fighting demons or Adrian, probably. I didn’t think it was possible to be less concerned about the Warrior’s safety, but now that he’s revealed that he also possesses powerful water magic, I worry even less.
I rematerialize less than thirty feet above Noren. His eyes widen, and he thrusts a hand upward. The land rises to meet me, and the Earth Mage moves out of the way.
Wraithfire explodes out of my hands, incinerating his grasping attack, and I continue falling. In less than half a second, I’m on him. The collision is sudden, surprising him more than it surprises me, and I recover quickly enough to grip him in a deadly hug.
My special skill streams forth from each finger, burning into him… and then he crumbles away under me. His facial features distort, and his body turns grey.
A stone statue of my opponent ignites, wraithfire dancing over it.
Fifty feet away, a human-shaped chunk of baked earth shatters, and Noren walks out of it.
I return to the Bloodpath immediately, burning away more power to avoid the damage of hitting the ground, and I pursue.
Above me, Noren’s floating shield starts to fall apart. It does so slowly at first, blue light shining through growing cracks, and then it fails all at once. A hundred tons of ground and chopped-up buildings start to fall on us as the magic supporting them stops working, and I pour more power into my Bloodpath, dashing towards the Earth Mage.
As the first pieces of his shield hit the ground, drowning out the regular thumps of demon-seeds falling and hatching, I meet Noren. Once again, I rematerialize right in front of him, my knife already mid-swing.
He flinches, but a wall rises from the ground to block my strike. It’s a literal wall—it resembles the brick of the inn that we’re staying at.
As I casually step around his defense, I wonder if the inn is still standing. I’m pretty sure Sierra has a lot of equipment there. It’d be a shame to lose it.
Noren’s earth-barrier slams into the ground, sending dirt and debris geysering upwards under the weight, and the sheer force nearly knocks me off my feet.
My opponent takes advantage of that, freezing flying earth in midair, and he sends them towards me.
I’m growing tired of this. I’m also running out of time and magic. Wraithfire can’t have more than twenty minutes on it now, and I need it to fight.
I allow Relentless energy to flood me, and I explode.
At least, that’s what it’ll look like to anyone watching. Wraithfire practically detonates out of every pore in my body, creating an aura of flame that ignites anything in its path. Since it’s my skill, it barely affects me, and I walk straight through it.
Flame consumes the earth, devours the air, and scorches any remaining corpses to cinders.
I step forward, Locate Person guiding me towards my target.
When I emerge from my own flames, Noren is bound by translucent blue tendrils.
Sierra hasn’t been inactive. Noren must have been focused entirely on me.
His face twists in anger as he sees me, and I feel the ground under me rumble.
His magic stops working under the direct application of Wraithfire. I’m leaking power like a sieve, I know, but my newest trait will help with that.
An hour wasn’t long enough to restore all my magic, and the amount I’ve used it since we exited the Time Dilation means that I’m down to just over a tenth of my full capacity. That means that I’m about to meet the conditions for Merciless.
How fitting.
“You monster,” Noren spits. For the first time, he sounds scared. Whatever Sierra’s done to him, he either can’t break out or is too magically exhausted to do so. I look up to where Locate Person tells me the Blue Mage is, giving her my silent thanks.
“That’s me,” I allow. I must paint a terrifying picture right now, burning red eyes framed by dark wraithfire. “You did, in fairness, start this.”
“Demon,” he snarls. I wince at the epithet, and he smiles. His teeth are stained with his own blood. “If you strike me down, you will never be able to rest again. You will be hunted until the end of the world and back.”
He sounds arrogant, but I detect the fear underneath his facade, the pleading. He’s looking for a way out.
I draw on Acting, irritated enough with him to choose a persona that’ll drive in just how useless his efforts were.
“Thirty-six years of service, and you can’t understand when to take a fight,” I say, shaking my head. “If I allow you to survive, it will be you that hunts me.”
Which I don’t terribly mind. My skills have leveled up quite nicely today.
“Should you kill me,” he says, nervously licking his lips, “The retribution will be like nothing you’ve ever experienced. You can’t do this.”
“Actually,” I say, stamping out another attempt to suck me into the ground underneath me, “I can.”
I draw one of my knives, untouched by my wraithfire by virtue of being on my body, and I cut one of his hands off.
To his credit, Noren doesn’t even scream. He winces deeply and grunts, breathing heavily, but he does not cry out.
“You...“ He pauses, hissing in pain as the tendrils binding him tighten. “You must understand, I was just following—“
I laugh, throwing my head back. “Not a very good liar, are you?”
I bite his other hand off.
This time, he screams.
“Have you no heart?” he begs, his eyes beginning to glaze over. “No mercy? Do you have nothing?”
“We left mercy behind a while ago,” I tell him. “You did, at least.”
“I would never raise arms against you, I swear,” he says. “You would have free reign. I promise on my soul.”
I have no quest to kill him. With the amount of monsters around, I could very well just level up using them instead. Having a level 37 ally could actually prove useful.
Rather than answer him, I look around us.
No demon has attacked us while we speak, and it isn’t hard to see why. Sierra’s flitting around above us, dashing from one place to another, her staff glowing bright with power. As I watch, she creates a corpse out of another demon, preventing it from getting to us.
Further away, a watery cyclone barrages the tree, and one of its smaller branches snaps off entirely. Adrian’s work.
I turn back to Noren and consider him. I think back to the joy he took in feeding me to the whale, the casual cruelty with which he chose to expend my life.
I can respect his actions, but I cannot work with them. My amalgam-memories whisper to me, and I listen.
“No,” I say, and I set him ablaze.
He accused of having nothing. In a twisted way, he’s almost right. My last three traits, after all, have described attributes I lack.
If retribution comes, hunting me until the edge of the world, I will hunt them back until they are dead or I am, for I am Relentless.
Allyship was an option, but he appealed to the wrong parts of me. Though he might’ve thought he could appeal to my humanity, strike at my soul by offering me his, I am Soulless.
And ever since the beginning, I have chosen the path of blood, Merciless.
Noren dies screaming for mercy that he will never recieve.
I Devour him before the flames or the demon blood can do so first.
Devour granted +1572 XP!
Temporary skill unlocked: Terrakinesis
You have dominated the will of the earth with yours. Manipulate any of it within 5000 feet of you.
XP: 2442/1000
XP threshold met. Level threshold met. Action threshold met.
You may choose to evolve your class or advance to level 11.
What? This early? Conventional wisdom tells me that class evolutions shouldn’t even begin to occur until level 10, and now the system is offering me a second one?
This doesn’t feel right, but the core principle of my soul amalgam remains the same. Advance, no matter the cost.
I accept.
All stats increased by 1.
You have gained 3 stat points.
Soul damage detected.
Soul damage under maximum threshold.
Triggering class evolution.
When I open my eyes again, I see nothing at all. Rather than the lab where I was spawned, rather than a vision like I had last time, an infinite void greets me.
Is this supposed to be happening?
The darkness stretches and stretches and stretches, and I exist.
Time passes, but I know it’s not the same here as it is outside. I can wait.
Time passes.
After a short eternity, a single star winks into existence, and I focus onto it. Nothing happens.
Time passes.
I start counting on a whim. I have an excellent sense of time in the outside world, but in here, I have no references. I can only guess.
Time passes.
I’m somewhere around forty-five thousand when the second star appears. I reset my count to zero.
Time passes.
Thirty-three thousand when the third star shows up. They’re getting faster. I think.
Time passes.
One hundred ninety-seven thousand, and the fourth star ignites, no brighter than the others. They are not, in fact, increasing in frequency.
Time passes.
Seven hundred fifty-six thousand.
Time passes.
Slowly, ever so slowly, I realize that the stars are not actually stars. They’re pieces of an image, infinitesimally small portions of it.
Time passes.
After the nine hundred ninety-ninth piece appears, they start to move, forming lines and colors. My memory is perfect enough to tell me how many seconds I’ve counted all told. Put together, I’ve counted five hundred and eighty-six million, three hundred forty-two thousand, six hundred fifty-five.
Something is wrong.
I blink, and suddenly the void takes shape. I am standing on a featureless white floor inside a featureless white cube.
The world is still blank but for the image the stars have traced out.
My duplicate. She hasn’t changed in form, but somehow the not-Evelyn feels more dangerous now.
When she speaks, she speaks with a thousand fractured voices.
You have been waiting, a discordant symphony utters, sounding nothing like they did the last time. Now, advance.
This is not how it’s supposed to be.
But I have no other choice.
The fake Evelyn offers me her hand.
I accept, and everything goes wrong.
The moment she clasps her hand in mine, I sink into the ground, the cube dissolving around me. Darkness encircles me, sucking me deep down into the depths of this space.
I use Bloodpath, tinting the pitch-black surroundings a dark red as I try to return, and my mirror uses it with me.
She grasps my hand and drags the two of us back down. I try to bat her away, to attack, to fight in any way I can, and this time, I draw blood.
And then she opens her mouth and screams, and every fiber in my body tells me to stop.
She smiles at me, then speaks. This time, it’s a single grating voice, not the symphony it was last time. Thank you for the body.
I sink into the darkness.
The upgraded skill isn’t the only source of power coursing through me. Relentless has returned, though it provides me embers where once it was a raging wildfire. Does it give me diminished returns if it comes into play too soon after the last time it was used? The trait description doesn’t give me enough to go off of.
A flurry of sharpened stone sails towards me, so numerous that there’s no way I can dodge them all, so I use my new skill for the first time.
Bloodpath takes more out of me than Bloodstep did. I notice that much immediately. A familiar red tint descends on the world around me as I melt into blood, and I almost fall out of the form as it draws blood and magic strength alike, draining power to fuel itself.
I’m fresh up on lifeblood thanks to my recent Devours, and the combination of Siphon and Relentless fuels me with enough magic strength that I can keep this going for some time.
It’s more malleable than Bloodstep, I think, or maybe I’ve just gotten used to propelling myself in this form. I dissolve out of my humanoid shape near-instantly as the stone spears fly straight through me. Every single one of them draws blood—it’s impossible for them not to. In this form, though, drawing blood is utterly meaningless.
Shape Blood assists me, my proficiency in controlling blood apparently transferring over to this formless body. I fall, my senses scattering as further spheres start breaking my blood-body apart, and I pull myself back together.
Locate Person is still active, burning Noren’s position into my mind’s eye. He hides behind a layer of roiling earth and stone excavated from the ruins below, but that doesn’t block him from my skill’s second sight.
Nothing short of wraithfire can stop me in this form, but it grows increasingly taxing as I fall. Reassembling my blood after he tears it apart costs magic and blood volume to do, and even my magic-boosting skills aren’t enough to keep this going forever.
It’ll last long enough.
His impromptu shield wall is constantly shifting, blocking any physical attack from penetrating through, but it’s not airtight.
I splatter against the earth, blood soaking into dirt and dripping off stone, but parts of me find the tiny gaps between pieces, slipping through the cracks of his skill, and I continue onwards.
Noren stands ten feet off the ground, a mound of detritus carrying him as the earth beneath him rises to complete his shield. The people he was with earlier are no longer present. Fighting demons or Adrian, probably. I didn’t think it was possible to be less concerned about the Warrior’s safety, but now that he’s revealed that he also possesses powerful water magic, I worry even less.
I rematerialize less than thirty feet above Noren. His eyes widen, and he thrusts a hand upward. The land rises to meet me, and the Earth Mage moves out of the way.
Wraithfire explodes out of my hands, incinerating his grasping attack, and I continue falling. In less than half a second, I’m on him. The collision is sudden, surprising him more than it surprises me, and I recover quickly enough to grip him in a deadly hug.
My special skill streams forth from each finger, burning into him… and then he crumbles away under me. His facial features distort, and his body turns grey.
A stone statue of my opponent ignites, wraithfire dancing over it.
Fifty feet away, a human-shaped chunk of baked earth shatters, and Noren walks out of it.
I return to the Bloodpath immediately, burning away more power to avoid the damage of hitting the ground, and I pursue.
Above me, Noren’s floating shield starts to fall apart. It does so slowly at first, blue light shining through growing cracks, and then it fails all at once. A hundred tons of ground and chopped-up buildings start to fall on us as the magic supporting them stops working, and I pour more power into my Bloodpath, dashing towards the Earth Mage.
As the first pieces of his shield hit the ground, drowning out the regular thumps of demon-seeds falling and hatching, I meet Noren. Once again, I rematerialize right in front of him, my knife already mid-swing.
He flinches, but a wall rises from the ground to block my strike. It’s a literal wall—it resembles the brick of the inn that we’re staying at.
As I casually step around his defense, I wonder if the inn is still standing. I’m pretty sure Sierra has a lot of equipment there. It’d be a shame to lose it.
Noren’s earth-barrier slams into the ground, sending dirt and debris geysering upwards under the weight, and the sheer force nearly knocks me off my feet.
My opponent takes advantage of that, freezing flying earth in midair, and he sends them towards me.
I’m growing tired of this. I’m also running out of time and magic. Wraithfire can’t have more than twenty minutes on it now, and I need it to fight.
I allow Relentless energy to flood me, and I explode.
At least, that’s what it’ll look like to anyone watching. Wraithfire practically detonates out of every pore in my body, creating an aura of flame that ignites anything in its path. Since it’s my skill, it barely affects me, and I walk straight through it.
Flame consumes the earth, devours the air, and scorches any remaining corpses to cinders.
I step forward, Locate Person guiding me towards my target.
When I emerge from my own flames, Noren is bound by translucent blue tendrils.
Sierra hasn’t been inactive. Noren must have been focused entirely on me.
His face twists in anger as he sees me, and I feel the ground under me rumble.
His magic stops working under the direct application of Wraithfire. I’m leaking power like a sieve, I know, but my newest trait will help with that.
An hour wasn’t long enough to restore all my magic, and the amount I’ve used it since we exited the Time Dilation means that I’m down to just over a tenth of my full capacity. That means that I’m about to meet the conditions for Merciless.
How fitting.
“You monster,” Noren spits. For the first time, he sounds scared. Whatever Sierra’s done to him, he either can’t break out or is too magically exhausted to do so. I look up to where Locate Person tells me the Blue Mage is, giving her my silent thanks.
“That’s me,” I allow. I must paint a terrifying picture right now, burning red eyes framed by dark wraithfire. “You did, in fairness, start this.”
“Demon,” he snarls. I wince at the epithet, and he smiles. His teeth are stained with his own blood. “If you strike me down, you will never be able to rest again. You will be hunted until the end of the world and back.”
He sounds arrogant, but I detect the fear underneath his facade, the pleading. He’s looking for a way out.
I draw on Acting, irritated enough with him to choose a persona that’ll drive in just how useless his efforts were.
“Thirty-six years of service, and you can’t understand when to take a fight,” I say, shaking my head. “If I allow you to survive, it will be you that hunts me.”
Which I don’t terribly mind. My skills have leveled up quite nicely today.
“Should you kill me,” he says, nervously licking his lips, “The retribution will be like nothing you’ve ever experienced. You can’t do this.”
“Actually,” I say, stamping out another attempt to suck me into the ground underneath me, “I can.”
I draw one of my knives, untouched by my wraithfire by virtue of being on my body, and I cut one of his hands off.
To his credit, Noren doesn’t even scream. He winces deeply and grunts, breathing heavily, but he does not cry out.
“You...“ He pauses, hissing in pain as the tendrils binding him tighten. “You must understand, I was just following—“
I laugh, throwing my head back. “Not a very good liar, are you?”
I bite his other hand off.
This time, he screams.
“Have you no heart?” he begs, his eyes beginning to glaze over. “No mercy? Do you have nothing?”
“We left mercy behind a while ago,” I tell him. “You did, at least.”
“I would never raise arms against you, I swear,” he says. “You would have free reign. I promise on my soul.”
I have no quest to kill him. With the amount of monsters around, I could very well just level up using them instead. Having a level 37 ally could actually prove useful.
Rather than answer him, I look around us.
No demon has attacked us while we speak, and it isn’t hard to see why. Sierra’s flitting around above us, dashing from one place to another, her staff glowing bright with power. As I watch, she creates a corpse out of another demon, preventing it from getting to us.
Further away, a watery cyclone barrages the tree, and one of its smaller branches snaps off entirely. Adrian’s work.
I turn back to Noren and consider him. I think back to the joy he took in feeding me to the whale, the casual cruelty with which he chose to expend my life.
I can respect his actions, but I cannot work with them. My amalgam-memories whisper to me, and I listen.
“No,” I say, and I set him ablaze.
He accused of having nothing. In a twisted way, he’s almost right. My last three traits, after all, have described attributes I lack.
If retribution comes, hunting me until the edge of the world, I will hunt them back until they are dead or I am, for I am Relentless.
Allyship was an option, but he appealed to the wrong parts of me. Though he might’ve thought he could appeal to my humanity, strike at my soul by offering me his, I am Soulless.
And ever since the beginning, I have chosen the path of blood, Merciless.
Noren dies screaming for mercy that he will never recieve.
I Devour him before the flames or the demon blood can do so first.
Devour granted +1572 XP!
Temporary skill unlocked: Terrakinesis
You have dominated the will of the earth with yours. Manipulate any of it within 5000 feet of you.
XP: 2442/1000
XP threshold met. Level threshold met. Action threshold met.
You may choose to evolve your class or advance to level 11.
What? This early? Conventional wisdom tells me that class evolutions shouldn’t even begin to occur until level 10, and now the system is offering me a second one?
This doesn’t feel right, but the core principle of my soul amalgam remains the same. Advance, no matter the cost.
I accept.
All stats increased by 1.
You have gained 3 stat points.
Soul damage detected.
Soul damage under maximum threshold.
Triggering class evolution.
When I open my eyes again, I see nothing at all. Rather than the lab where I was spawned, rather than a vision like I had last time, an infinite void greets me.
Is this supposed to be happening?
The darkness stretches and stretches and stretches, and I exist.
Time passes, but I know it’s not the same here as it is outside. I can wait.
Time passes.
After a short eternity, a single star winks into existence, and I focus onto it. Nothing happens.
Time passes.
I start counting on a whim. I have an excellent sense of time in the outside world, but in here, I have no references. I can only guess.
Time passes.
I’m somewhere around forty-five thousand when the second star appears. I reset my count to zero.
Time passes.
Thirty-three thousand when the third star shows up. They’re getting faster. I think.
Time passes.
One hundred ninety-seven thousand, and the fourth star ignites, no brighter than the others. They are not, in fact, increasing in frequency.
Time passes.
Seven hundred fifty-six thousand.
Time passes.
Slowly, ever so slowly, I realize that the stars are not actually stars. They’re pieces of an image, infinitesimally small portions of it.
Time passes.
After the nine hundred ninety-ninth piece appears, they start to move, forming lines and colors. My memory is perfect enough to tell me how many seconds I’ve counted all told. Put together, I’ve counted five hundred and eighty-six million, three hundred forty-two thousand, six hundred fifty-five.
Something is wrong.
I blink, and suddenly the void takes shape. I am standing on a featureless white floor inside a featureless white cube.
The world is still blank but for the image the stars have traced out.
My duplicate. She hasn’t changed in form, but somehow the not-Evelyn feels more dangerous now.
When she speaks, she speaks with a thousand fractured voices.
You have been waiting, a discordant symphony utters, sounding nothing like they did the last time. Now, advance.
This is not how it’s supposed to be.
But I have no other choice.
The fake Evelyn offers me her hand.
I accept, and everything goes wrong.
The moment she clasps her hand in mine, I sink into the ground, the cube dissolving around me. Darkness encircles me, sucking me deep down into the depths of this space.
I use Bloodpath, tinting the pitch-black surroundings a dark red as I try to return, and my mirror uses it with me.
She grasps my hand and drags the two of us back down. I try to bat her away, to attack, to fight in any way I can, and this time, I draw blood.
And then she opens her mouth and screams, and every fiber in my body tells me to stop.
She smiles at me, then speaks. This time, it’s a single grating voice, not the symphony it was last time. Thank you for the body.
I sink into the darkness.
