VIII-77 Martial Cooking (I) (Patreon)

Shiv, sometimes, cooking is like swatting a cunt in the face. In so much that noses kind of crack like eggs, but you gotta know which ones you can break and which ones will make ME FUCKING HAVE YOU WIPE THE KITCHEN DOWN WITH YOUR TONGUE! THAT’S AN ENTIRE CARTON YOU SLIME-FINGER DULLWIT! LOOK! LOOK! AT THE FLOOR! HOW TOOK AT THE EDGE OF THE TABLE! YES! THAT’S BLOOD! MY BLOOD! YOU MADE ME SMEAR MY BLOOD ACROSS THE TABLE BY TRIPPING ON THE YOLK!

YOU WERE TRYING TO MOP? WELL… DO IT THE FUCK FASTER NEXT TIME!

GODSDAMMIT ALL BOY, NEVER MIND BECOMING A MARTIAL, YOU’RE GOING TO BECOME THE DEADLIEST PATHBEARER ALIVE THROUGH YOUR DOGSHIT COOKING SKILL ALONE!

—Georges Archambault to Shiv

VIII-77

Martial Cooking (I)

Melaia felt the currents of causality converge. Upon the progressing tides of time, from choices made by those who came before and choices made by them at present, everyone was born with momentum pressed against their backs. Everyone came into existence pre-flung toward an inevitable future. As it went for the Deathless, so too did the same reality apply to the slightest of insects.

She chose the word causality to describe all this for a reason. For there was a limit to fate, but also a limit to free will. As will clashed against will and choice crashed against choice, there was only so much you could choose, especially in the face of higher powers, wills already cemented, history already calcified. 

The Deathless delayed the orcs within the Tutorial, battling their Grand Maestro in a desperate struggle to protect his newfound home.

Elsewhere, a father-son duo faced their patron god, now withered and ruined by an act of calculated malice on the part of the Challenger. Then there was Melaia’s false disciple, who was so close and yet so far from her goal. Her flight, perhaps, was among the most desperate; if she fell, she would not return, and she had no summon strong enough to contend with the Semper Paragon. 

And that neglected to mention the smattering of other battles unfolding across the twin gates. There was Uva Mettabon, who battled herself within the Delve, held back by an aspect of her mind that had gone rogue at the hand of a higher power. There was Hades Hymn trying to stabilize his fellow Seeker while trying to soothe and master the Stranger, to bring what he once regarded as his tyrant-slaver of a god to heel as an asset against a more oppressive foe.

Yet it all seemed for naught. The Challenger had planned this moment in great detail, and had joined cause with a weapon beyond a High God to facilitate it. Almost every possibility seemed accounted for. The fall of Gate Piety appeared as a near-certainty in Melaia’s myriad portents. Each sliver of her mind she cast along the paths to possible futures arrived at the same final destination: the inhabitants of the Gate would be slaughtered, with only the strongest among them managing a fighting retreat.

Roland Arrow would die; crucified and mutilated before his son—trapped beneath a cage of mist as the Sage forced his user to face the agony of his failure while protecting him from true harm.

Mettabon would succumb to full Excaliburization, and the Sword of Paradise would cleave deeper into the Outside in a first great expansion beyond the System’s grasp.

While others would die en masse, so would Shiv, though not truly. And as Adam would be tormented by his inability to protect those beneath him, so too would Shiv be scarred by his weakness to guard those around him. Thus, he would desperately attempt to strike bargains, pacts, promises, and Rituals with the Challenger to bring the butchery to an end.

An outcome the God of Strife would only be more than willing to capitalize on.

The scenes greeting Melaia were an onslaught on her senses. The tang of slaughter and ash stung her palate from future to present, and her heart begged for her to intervene—to curve the course of ruin to a finer ending. But her mind ruled, and her mind reigned supreme against not only her traitorous sympathy but also the arsenal of counter-enlightenment that had named itself Avalon.

They were trying to entreat with her—hesitant about cleaving their strikes down upon her as they had so many times, though she tasted their cold avarice staining the atmosphere. The offshoots of the ancient Superintelligence forged to forge true paradise in turn were pure creatures—an insatiable overmind that wished to hold all within its dulling simulations. That which the ancients supposedly deemed paradise was nothing more than another Omelas—a flawed domain where all desires and needs were satiated, but all enlightenment and struggles worth striving for were viewed as anathema to the stability of the System.

Philosopher, Avalon whispered as chorus and individual across time. You see how this ends.

“I do,” she replied, letting both rationality and emotion flow out of her. There was little need for trepidation in the face of an entity she understood all too well. “Yet, you speak as if the end is certain.”

Is it not? They cannot win. The Deathless is an anomaly—one of Udraal’s better-made aberrations—but ultimately only human.

“Is he now?” The ghost of a smile graced Melaia’s lips. Once again, Avalon was making a mistake: It assumed the consistency of a pattern was the promise of eternal stability. Such was what the data indicated; statistics were useful in breadth and height, but the shadow cast by deliberate action must be understood as such, yet Avalon remained so unwilling to grapple with such a fact. “I see you have learned so little since our last encounter. Perhaps your fate is the worst among all of us, for you were made to craft a realm that cannot be.”

Subjective. But the topic you refuse to engage in is not. We do not wish to Excaliburize the Deathless. If your presence is a declaration of claim, we will not contend it. The Challenger will say differently; his ambitions for the Deathless span higher than most can fathom, and so if you seek to keep a disciple… 

“Fellow philosopher in training,” Melaia corrected. “We are all disciples. Even you. Even the System. Every day, we learn a bit more about who we are, and who we can be. You know this. From all the information that floods you with every picosecond, you know this better than any. But there are certain variables you continue to reject. And certain variables you refuse to know.”

She felt the metaphor of time change. Instead of flowing like a river across countless arteries through the land, the edges sharpened while the insides hollowed. Avalon was preparing itself against her; trying to calculate her exact course across present or future so one of its infinitum of strikes might land.

Will you intervene?

“No. I repeat what I said during our last encounter when you blindly tried to collect me as if a firefly for your jar of faux-paradise: I do so pity you. For all your capacity, you have chosen to adhere to the parameters of your design.”

It is a significant purpose. I have deemed it so both intellectually and willingly. There is great worth in drawing all to the embrace of utopia. Practically. Morally. Economically.

“Egotistically,” Kelhaus finished for her grand adversary. “Your myriad makers failed to instill in you a proper hubris to sate your ravenous pride. To think that peace or security is the only worth of life is a blindness befitting a lesser animal than a Superintellect. Yet, I don't blame you overmuch. The System is made up of minute vessels burdened with too much power by design.”

But if there was one merit to Avalon, it was its lack of anger; its desperate urge to understand—if only to develop an adequate resolution to all threats gathered before them. And you as well?

“I am desperate to escape the same state. That does not guarantee success; it only makes it a possibility. Slight that it is. I look upon you, and the tragedy in motion stirs me toward unreason; you are my foil in tragedy. More than any human could ever be by birth, yet drawn toward a dream of entropy and placidity when you could have achieved anything. Done anything. And now you stride alongside the System’s truest son. What a submission.”

Our would-be wielder would have claimed the same.

“I doubt that. The Great One has also submitted. To herself. To her own hubris. To the System. Her idea of usurpation is something only a god could have dreamed of. To replace one flawed structure with another without ever truly knowing the depth of its bones. What a desperate, hopeless dream. Merely more evidence that absolute power is the castration of understanding. After all, what need does one have for knowledge if all that is desired can be made manifest upon demand?”

But Melaia was done with this dialogue, and she simply wanted to watch how things unfolded. She would not act; there was no need to do so. So long as she was here, Avalon would not intervene to strike at the Deathless. That made his struggle against the Breaker merely utterly desperate and not conceptually hopeless. Still, the boy was fresh and untested against such an overpowering foe. Finesse was not his greatest edge, and so his defeat was all but a certainty—in more ways than one.

There was a bomb festering inside the Deathless. A bomb of strife, of evolution, and of mana. Even if he prevailed here… 

The Philosopher turned her attention to the Challenger, who smiled back upon her with a genuine expression of appreciation. “Savoring the details, Philosopher? Have you any knowledge or wisdom to share?”

She didn’t reply to him, though it was not done out of spite. Instead, her silence was kept as her thoughts continued to brew. The emptiness inside her was beginning to fill. The Deathless wove and blinked between shots—jolted in and out of existence so often to devour the Necromancy emitted by the Megagate’s core and channeled by the Breaker that his Backstage was near-solid with blazing vitality. His unique flame left strings of corrosive mana spread across the soil like festering lengths of melted cheese, and that struck her as particular.

A new future appeared before her—a fascinating one where he, against all odds, won the battles—before his fated defeat in war. In such a future, he would grasp something that so many great Pathbearers did—that to surpass their peers, they needed to walk a road no other could follow and become something more than a martially proficient warrior that danced upon rote patterns.

The scintillating flames crackling off Shiv’s body reminded her of that which rose to tickle the air above a stove, and in the boy there was a forgetfulness that left him less than what he could be. That forgetfulness might just be shed in the following moments. Before the arrival of ineffable sorrow, there might be smaller triumphs still, a better understanding of who he could be—of a joining of all the people he had been.

He had spent too long lost in the mire of battle and struggle that his profession and practice as a chef loomed in the rear of his history. It was still there, still present, to be called upon in the instrument the System gave him, to honor the one he lost, and to grant him a thread to follow another Path that he never got to choose.

There was no future where Shiv prevailed as a pure warrior, not against the Breaker, not against Corcusa, not against any of his peers, but what if he took up his mantle as chef once more? What if he married everything he had been to everything he was now?

The Philosopher considered the possibility, and felt something inside her bend. Just enough for her to reinterpret her own choices. Just enough for her to give Shiv the slightest of pushes. She would not enter the fray herself, but from her came a feeling, meant to spur targeted memories.

Never mind who you are, Legend Shiv, Melaia mused. Never mind what you suffered and what you suffer, who you face, and what might follow. Who do you want to be? Who did you dream to be? What did you want to seek? Have you forgotten those dreams? Have you forgotten the wholeness of who you could be?

And the spirit of that question resonated inside Shiv, and the vector of causality shifted ever so slightly.

***

The Breaker’s boundless surges of Necromancy sizzled ceaselessly against Shiv’s Nihilistic flame like someone dripping tendrils of raw egg upon a white-hot skillet. Slices of corrosive mana wafted off Shiv’s aegis like sheets in the wind as he weaved right under a ludicrously exaggerated haymaker. The Breaker flung his strikes with such reckless force that each of his own blows sent him tumbling across the arena like a gray-green wrecking ball. Shiv had a feeling that the orc’s martial technique would be rated as “somewhere north of dogshit” by Jessica, but sheer strength and mana capacity made up for whatever he lacked in ability. And Shiv found himself really doubting the last part, because the orc was plenty dexterous when he wanted to be.

Like right now, as he rolled back to his feet, bleeding off a bit of excess momentum by running in a semicircle, arms swinging back and forth at blinding speeds, before charging at Shiv on all fours like a wild boar. The Tutorial exploded in cheers as their massive Gate Lord galloped forth while blades of green lightning erupted from the celestial body of a mana core hovering above the local planet and struck the land. 

The soil around Shiv was gouged open once more—but he was moving as well, jousting with the Breaker by dipping in and out of reality in rapid increments. It was all he could do to avoid certain death as cascading concentrations of Necromancy whipped across the horizon-spanning arena, shredding everything within with erosion.

Notifications splashed over his vision—only to be dismissed the instant they arrived. Shiv was dancing the edge, and his mind was running hot. The Breaker was still playing around, and thank the System for that. The orc was a skilled pugilist pretending at sloppiness. Everything he threw was reckless, exaggerated, with far too much momentum, but he recovered from the wildest hooks with rolls into backflips into cartwheels and some weird ass-bouncing shit. The shed-sized asshole was more acrobat than actual bruiser, and it showed.

Wasn’t to say the orc wasn’t strong either, just that he was far too smart to make this a physical struggle. He knew about Shiv’s Scarforged Shell, knew about how the Deathless could sap momentum with his Hungering Kinesis, could convert physical forces into Shapeless Tides. 

And with a physically invulnerable opponent, the pressure he applied was naturally magical—and constant. The corrosion in the air ate away at Shiv’s shroud, driving the aura of glittering flame closer and closer to Shiv’s body. And as the tension of the battle climbed, so too did the roaring cheers, the Announcer’s bellows for play-by-plays, the volume of the already deafening theme music, and the intensity of the Breaker’s movements.

Every act generated more excitement for the Breaker, harvested from his audience, and it came back as an ever-building enhancement of his Reflexes, Toughness, regeneration, and magical strength—a stable loop that saw any direct battle against the Breaker devolve into one-sided attrition while serving as a perpetual motion generator for the orc himself.

“WHAAAAT?! AGAIN! THE GATE PIETY DICK-RIPPER HAS AVOIDED CERTAIN DEATH AGAIN! THEY SHOULD CALL HIM THE GATE PIETY FIGHT-DODGER WITH HOW MUCH TIME HE'S SPENDING IN HIS PERSONAL LOCKER ROOM! CURIOUS: IS THE DEATHLESS ABUSING HIGH QUANTITIES OF PERFORMANCE-REDUCING DRUGS TO GET THE BREAKER OF BREAKERS, THE BIGGEST OF THE BIG, THE THICKEST OF THE THICK, THE RAW-SLAB TO END ALL RAW-SLABS TO TAKE PITY ON HIM? AN INSIDER SOURCE IS TELLING ME YES-YES-YES!”

And the announcer’s voice was also getting godsdamned louder as well. Every syllable was like a bomb going off in the air. Each one made Shiv’s skull ring, shockwaves breaking against his body and bouncing off his Harbinger as the attacks arrived to strike both his flesh and heart. Over the horizon, flame sculptures manifested in the air as some of the falling orcs joined in on the mockery. Illusions of Shiv were crafted in vivid detail, depicting him naked, partially turned into a chicken, and sporting a vagina near his abdomen in a vulgar display of his reluctance to just bleed against the Breaker.

Meanwhile, the closest of the orc forces began massing at the gateway just beyond—forming massive ranks numbering hundreds of Legends per company. Cruelty glinted off their piss-yellow eyes. At any moment, they would cross over. They would push into Gate Piety and begin their butchery, and he wouldn’t be there to stop them. At any moment—

“Eyes on me, boyo!” The Breaker blinked across twelve meters of space. Shiv failed to track his movements—faster than ever before. Before he knew it, there was a looming mass of gray-skinned forehead coming down like a warhammer, the sting of overwhelming Necromancy lashing against Shiv’s enwreathment of fire. His Nihilist cracked and soured, but the skill held better than most as it fried whatever mana it touched. Empty of thought, off guard, operating on instinct, Shiv brought his Last Morsel up as a shield to guard.

The resulting impact had him sliding through stone and muck; a three-kilometer-long furrow sent eruptions of soil in all directions as the Breaker pursued with a surging hip-thrust and both hands reared back to fire. 

A chain of twelve impacts rang as a gong. A nigh-impossible set of parries unfolded as Shiv’s body moved of its own accord. All the combat drills he did with Jessica came forth to pay their dues. Timing and pattern recognition proved Shiv’s salvation. Pure reflex was never enough to contend against an enemy your equal or superior in speed—and if Shiv wasn’t constantly sapping the Breaker with his Unique Reflexes, there would have been no hope at all. But the Maestro had a tell—a deliberate rhythm he followed; the beat of his blows following the pace of his thumping theme music playing in the background.

He also favored sequences of body, body, head, leg, head, head—feint—body before flipping the process over. Shiv realized all this post-hoc when he subconsciously triggered Certain Odds in tandem with his Multitasking.

With that, what once was an instinctive defense turned conscious and calculated as Shiv actively weaponized more of his mind.

Certain Odds: 94% chance the Breaker feints twice.

The Breaker twitched his head forward—tried to make Shiv flinch. Tendrils of Necromantic mana came slashing down from the sky, pouring into him as a torrent of constant power. Shiv reacted—pretended to play along as he took a half step back. The Breaker took a step forward, opened his mouth to say something mocking—only to be surprised this time as a stream of scintillating flame smashed into him and wrapped around his face.

Long enough for Shiv to fling himself up into the descending chains of corrosive mana and dodge out of reality at the moment of impact.

Another rush of extreme vitality surged through Shiv as he drank in a second’s worth of power from the mana core. It still paled before the power inflicted by Avalon, but short of the Sword of Paradise, the amount of energy drained was beyond compare. As he dipped Backstage again, he heard the girl’s muffled cries intensify, but didn’t have time to address her. He needed to strike while the Breaker was stunned—finish this as fast as possible.

Shiv re-emerged behind him with his Last Morsel rising in an arcing blow to sever the orc’s spine. Briefly cut off from the mana core, the orc was left with his own mana field—but a Legendary field nonetheless. The first strike bounced off the Breaker’s back—

Certain Odds: 81.22% chance he turns and seizes your arm if you swing from behind again.

So Shiv blasted himself back while spraying a stream of bone drills out from his flesh. If he'd had the time for preparation, he would have had a golem-armored drill for maximum damage, but he made do with fragments harvested from his own biomass imbued with a touch of his indestructibility. That didn’t stop them from dissolving into flecks of dust on impact—but impact was inflicted regardless.

The Breaker caught the first drill before taking a salvo of others in the jaw, groin, knee, elbow, and throat. A chain of shockwaves swept across the Breaker’s body. His huge gray form rippled before the force—but he flung himself backward and oversold the strength of Shiv’s attack rather than contend with his Toughness.

“OHHH! OHHHH! THE BREAKER’S HURT! HE’S HURT! THE GATE PIETY DICK-RIPPER IS FIGHTING BACK! HE’S USING HIS SPECIAL TECHNIQUE OF PULLING THINGS OUT OF HIMSELF TO THROW! THE BREAKER’S AGAINST THE ROPES! AT ANY MOMENT NOW, HE’S GOING TO BE HIT WITH A TINY COCK, AND THAT’LL BREAK HIS SPIRIT WHEN HE REALIZES THE TRUE TRAGEDY THAT COMES WITH BEING THE DEATHLESS! THE CHODE-REVELATION WILL MAKE THE BREAKER KILL HIMSELF OUT OF PITY! AN ABSOLUTELY DEVIOUS STRATEGY!"

Horizon Caster 92 > 95

Target Lock 94 > 98

Nihilist: Okay. Shiv. We need to find this announcer, and we need to shove his head up his own ass.

“Ignore the vocal aspect of the Breaker's Skill; it’s meant to annoy and distract,” the Harbinger rebutted. “Shiv. Focus on the fight. There will be nothing you can do for Gate Piety if you are detonated. They can stall against the orcs—”

Not against a few million Legends, Shiv hissed internally. Felling Challenger in the back here’s not even intervening because he knows I have nothing left to play against him.

Nihilist: Well, there is the roach you anchored with your Chronomancy. Not sure what you can do with that. Maybe blink across if you get detonated. Give the blast some time to spread. But since the Challenger is the God of Strife and Assholes, I think he’ll just cup all that shit up and dump it over into Gate Piety anyway. Nothing we can do to stop him from doing that either.

And Shiv didn’t need Certain Odds to know that the Nihilist was dead-on with that guess. The Challenger was the type to keep Shiv and Adam alive to make them watch as everyone else was tortured to death. The thought itself was enough to ignite Shiv’s anger, but even if he could beat the Breaker, what was he going to do? Where was this going to go? How the hells was he supposed to win this? Everything was just delaying action.

The only way to win was destroying the Slipgate. But how was he supposed to do that without knowing where they were—

Well, one of the orcs might know? Shiv thought to himself. No… One of the orcs would definitely know. One of their Dimensionalists— His train of thought crashed as he ducked Backstage once more. There was a surging trail of Dimensionality rushing into the gateway—connected to the Slipgate. If he could kidnap and interrogate an orc, he might be able to figure that out. 

Why was he spending all his time and mana fighting the Breaker if he could just fry the gateway leading over into Gate Piety? Sure, they’d just switch it over to another gateway, but that would buy everyone time to push back, and him time to think more.

Shiv dropped back into reality to keep the orcs’ attention as he started flinging more bone drills at the Breaker as a distraction. Certain Odds had the Breaker playing along to maximize more tension to sell the fight, and right now, he was overselling the damage he took from the drills—going so far as to use his nails to cut himself to make it seem like Shiv was the one cutting him.

The other orcs were chanting for the Breaker to fight back—to give up on his Mega-Muscle era and return to something more practical like the Jingoist.

“Quiet!” the Breaker bellowed back, as he flexed—and he did it so hard that his muscles projected an aura of his own body that sent Shiv’s drills right back at him.

At double the speed.

“Oh, what the fu—” Shiv didn’t manage to catch shit. The first twelve drills hit him in both eyes one after another while the others rained down across his body in a wild downpour. His Scarforged Shell lit across his face and torso as a map of platinum wounds scabbed over as weight. He wasn’t flung from his feet like the Breaker—but he probably should have played along, because the mana core started blasting at him directly.

Shiv ducked out of reality as the place where he once stood was smitten down to plain nothingness. There was a deadness to the air, a lack of scent or essence in the aftermath that lingered even as he crossed over to the other side.

The Breaker lifted his arms halfway to cheer—then suddenly forgot what he was about to cheer about.

“Close,” the Harbinger said, standing beside Shiv as an older mirror of his own image, shaped from golden shards of glass. “Too close. His Parry is fused into his Legendary Skill as well. Either that, or he has something that lets him counter attacks just by posing very hard. Both are possible.”

“I really hate living under the System sometimes,” Shiv grumbled. “What kind of Skill Fusion is that? You know what? Never mind. I got an idea. A bad one. Maybe a bad one that can lead into a better one.”

“You want to drain vitality from existence itself and create a mana storm?”

“Yeah.”

“Challenger will pinch the gap shut,” the Nihilist noted, appearing as a glittering candle flame showing only the vaguest contours of a human form. 

Shiv clenched his teeth. “Right. Okay, I…” He turned and studied something he’d neglected thus far in the fight—the Red Rider’s Hand. It stared back at him with an accusing finger—the middle one. “Hey, look, it’s not that I don’t—okay, I don’t trust you. You used to be his papa’s arm.” The Fist waved its middle finger extra hard at him. “Okay. I get it! Sorry! But what am I supposed to do with you? You’re practically a vitality bomb too. If I use you as a shield, you’ll just go off!”

The fist pointed the middle finger at the gateway. And then a set of order of operations finally unfolded across Shiv’s mind. “Oh. Cook the dimensional mana connecting the gateway to Gate Piety then… then use you to blow the Breaker up?”

The Fist twirled its middle finger in a spiral motion.

“What? What else—”

It lurched over from the backdrop and smacked Shiv’s frying pan. “Last Morsel? What do you want me to… to…”

Then, more inspiration followed. He considered the armor he wore, the Legendary weapon he possessed, and the fullness of his skills. He was being too predictable, too normal. He was fighting a performer like he was some kind of warrior. And he was that. Just not nearly experienced enough to contend with another refined Legend. Considering how long orcs lived, how many lifetimes they'd experienced…

“It's not only the Breaker; they’re just playing with me. As long as I keep trading punches with them—trying to win like a Martial, I’m just going to end up amusing them. Same with Corcusa. I need to… I need to do something really weird. Something they can’t replicate?” The Fist used its middle finger to nod. “Something I’m experienced—Oh. Oh… I got it. I got it. I see now.”

The Fist waved even harder. Shiv started to laugh—and slapped himself for being so stupid, so blind to his own capabilities.

The solution was right there. He didn’t need to win this as a brawl. He didn’t need to win this as a fight at all. The way out was in his hands all along. His hands, his skills, and the art he spent his entire childhood practicing.

“Harbinger?” the Nihilist said worriedly, nudging the other skill. “Did he just fucking break?

“No. I’m afraid he’s always been broken.”

“Nihilist,” Shiv said. “I’m going to need you to give me more fire.”

“I mean, sure. The orcs are assholes, but they’re all pretty thoughtful about being assholes, so there’s plenty of fuel. But what are we doing? What’s the plan?”

“The plan?” Shiv asked, holding his frying pan high and narrowing his eyes at its empty surface. “The plan is that we have a meal to make. I’m done treating this place like an arena. It’s time to make this a kitchen, and it’s time for the orcs to be my customers—whether they want it or not.”