The Deathless let out a grunt as he remembered that he was part of a hidden Quest, one which provided ample rewards to anyone that killed him. There was another reason why he was going to need to develop even worse trust issues. "So, Sonar," the wolf-man began. Shiv cut him off. "No, actually, tell Rebis here to hang back,” he said. He didn't know if Rebis was even a name, but he felt that if he asked him, the amalgam might react badly. “Let me see if I can do this quietly and quickly. Maybe we can make this neat.” Five gave Shiv a look. "I know you are quite strong, my mysterious friend, but an entire team of Pathbearers is a considerable challenge, especially with most of the wardens here being High Masters or Low Heroes." "Nah," Shiv replied with a smirk. "That just makes them interesting." He tested his new blade then, pointing his wand-knife at the wall and channeling Beamcast. A narrow needle of flame splashed against the wall, and a building swell of Dimensionality expanded out from its center. A moment later, Shiv found himself injected across the space and emerging from the inside of the Dimensional threshold. “Alright,” Shiv said. “That’s interesting.” He placed a hand against the Orichalcum walls and prepared to breach. Thıs content belongs to 𝓷𝓸𝓿𝓮𝓵•𝓯𝓲𝓻𝓮•𝓷𝓮𝓽 But he didn't tell the wolf-man the other reason why he wanted to deal with them alone. It was Rebis. He had killed quite a few wardens in savage fashion, and though some might have deserved it, Shiv really didn't feel like making a larger body count than he needed to. Since his return from the Delve, he felt a burgeoning sense of responsibility that came with the power. Perhaps not even responsibility. It was simply an urge not to break things when he could avoid it. In between my Unique Skills, Chronomancy, and Shapeless Tides, I should be able to put most of these Pathbearers to sleep. He considered how he was going to insert himself into the guard cube. He knew that the Orichalcum would take him a while to breach, and if he stayed here too long, he might be due for a rendezvous with Cripple, whether he wanted to face the Ascendant or not. But Shiv's Legendary skill gave him new options as well. Options that allowed him to use his Chronomancy to the fullest extent. Five and Rebis looked on as Shiv froze time, and to his surprise, a faint sheen of gold lit up over the wolf-man's eyes. More than just his eyes, the automaton heads lodged upon his spine were glowing with Chronomancy as well. Yet the wolf-man himself was frozen. A second surprise came in the form of Rebis. The automaton half of the tortured experiment vanished, and the human portion of Rebis came alive with brilliant gold. He ceased being so humanoid and turned into a dense sphere of calcified time. Shiv could feel the radiating pressure pulsing out from Rebis. Rather than being able to move across time, he seemed to be purely shielded from it, encased in a barrier preventing Chronomancers from affecting him using their magic. I guess everyone has to develop some defenses against Chronomancy if they live long enough, Shiv mused. The realization was why only a begrudging sigh escaped him as he noticed a series of Chronomantic auras lighting up the teleportation anchor through the Orichalcum wall. In response, Shiv took things a step further. While time was a weapon that many people in this prison shared, no one could leave the context of this world like he could. As soon as he did, he noticed how the Chronomantic shroud around Rebis dimmed, how the wolf-man's eyes flickered. Confusion stuck to them as Shiv concentrated his force vectors along a single finger. He gathered eight full ripples and waited for a ninth before he drove his index finger through the Orichalcum wall. A hole was punched through. The metal screamed. Red and white essence exploded out of Shiv's body. Seizing the moment of surprise, he jammed his blade through the opening and began channeling the Beamcast enchantment. A surge of fire splashed into the teleportation anchor. However, instead of spreading out like a plume to swallow all those present, it impacted the far wall as a needle-thin beam. As it did, the center of the flames ballooned outward, and while the outer layer of the magic was condensed by a rolling inferno, its core grew pregnant with the power of Dimensionality. Dimensionality that Shiv found himself being injected across. In a sudden instant, he was teleported through the gap, just as a temporal warding ripple smashed into him. He anticipated this and drove his elbow up against the falling tide. A resounding crash followed, and Shiv twisted the crushing counter-magic aside. The wardens weren't expecting Shiv's sudden appearance. They were doubly not expecting him to shrug off the temporal warding. Shiv found himself astonished that they were unaffected by the warding. The golden wave of time magic passed through them without damaging their Chronomancy fields at all. Shiv wondered if that had something to do with the magical frequencies. He could faintly feel these Chronomancers as well, though they were basically flickering in and out of place, as if throwing themselves across seconds of time. The temporal wards slipped off Shiv and crashed through the rest of the structure at an angle. Frictionless Vector 76 > 77 Before any of the enemy Pathbearers could react, he was upon them, wrapping dense cords of Vitaemancy around their necks. He tightened his cords and hardened his Orichalcum, building his Toughness while circulating vectors along the red-white tendrils of mana. The wardens struggled, slashing and wrestling against Shiv's projected power, yet it was in vain. One of them fired a bolt of radiant mana at him—mana infused with fire and gravity. Shiv activated his Nightswim Enchantment and splashed down into a puddle of shadows. The attacks missed, and he coiled more Vitae strands around them. With every passing pulse of force that built inside Shiv, his grip grew tighter, and he cracked their Magical Resistances, allowing his Biomancy to be brought into the fray. A mana-hydra reared back and bit down on the wardens. Once more, he pinched their arteries, preventing the flow of blood, and consciousness soon left them. With them done, he directed more streams of vitae outward, choking the others in the room unconscious thereafter. The final Pathbearer was the hardest to deal with, though they were already injured. That was because they were an automaton. However, after years of living among automata at Blackedge, Shiv understood enough about their bodies to achieve a similar effect. Humans, elves, and goblins could all be disabled in a relatively similar fashion, though elves were a little bit harder since they needed to be strangled longer. There was something about elves having twice the amount of veins as humans, and also a lack of need for prolonged sleep. Their unconsciousness usually didn't last that long, either, so it was better to keep an elf bound in the aftermath. An automaton ran on power, and severing the cords of their power would usually prove fatal, same as a human. However, if one tightened the cords together and turned it into a knot, thus causing power flow inefficiency… Shiv did just that as he peeled the automaton's armor away with a wrench of force. "Sorry about this," he whispered. "Probably not gonna be comfortable, or, if you're a piece of shit, I hope it feels really bad. Don't know which, don't have time to figure it out." He clenched the wiring and began tightening it into a bundle. When he was done, he broke a piece off the automaton's armor and lodged it through the messy knot. Soon, he could see sparks slamming into the underside of the knot where the electrical wiring ran from the reactor core at the automaton's heart to their head, where their processing unit worked. With that done, he gathered the bodies together and released his Chronomancy field. Time resumed, and there came a rush of screaming wind that whistled its way into the anchor. Shiv looked to his right and then pointed his head down immediately as he found Rebis standing right next to him. "You made them go to sleep?" Rebis asked. "Yeah," Shiv replied. He turned the Pathbearers over, sweeping them using his Aegis of Assimilation to make sure none of them were dead yet. After that, he examined their armor. Most of them wore that standard prismatic plate. It was hard enough, Shiv supposed, but it wasn't harder than his personal Toughness Skill, and he had to break the magic powering the armor just so that he could choke the guards unconscious. Besides, he already had a set. He was wearing it more to protect his modesty than to gain an additional layer of defense. As such, he looked around and finally settled on breaking the armor off the Pathbearer's bodies before deforming the pieces and turning them into mangled adamantine bands that held the wardens’ arms, legs, and heads. It would be an uncomfortable experience when they woke up to see nothing, since their helmets were now effectively collapsed over their faces, but Shiv left the organics with air holes and the automaton with their back pointing up, so whoever entered would notice the issue. He directed a quick glance at the teleportation anchor's entrance. A dense set of Orichalcum doors revealed a sealed, vertical slit to Shiv. He began gathering new vectors of force, but Five strode past him. Once more, one of the automaton heads on his back flashed, and this time, instead of materializing a new cybernetic skull, the wolf-man's arm changed. A swirling mass of Dimensionality turned around his limb, and his fingers elongated, with every claw becoming as if a fork, as trailing strands of static extended forth from his fingers. He traced the spell patterns dancing over the doors, and he began to turn his hand left and right. Soon, the spell patterns inside the teleportation anchor revolved, twisting clockwise and then counter over and over again. Shiv observed what Five was doing and noticed how some spells were crashing into each other, patterns collapsing together, displacing mana into the air. Finally, a few chains of flickering mana were extracted from the others, and they flowed over the door, sliding along the slit, whereupon they flashed. A second later, the door let out a loud hiss as it opened. The wolf-man took a step to his right and hid along the sides of the door. Shiv did the same and hissed as he realized Rebis was just standing there. “Rebis, get out of the way, you’re going to be—” But then Rebis was gone, blasting forward in a cloud of crackling static. This time, Shiv barely caught his movement, and he was fast. The Deathless barely tracked an indistinct blur as it left the room. The blur cut out to the right, vanishing along the hallway, and a second later, Shiv heard the unmistakable sound of flesh being shredded and steel being sheared. "Huh, what's this—ahhghghghghhh!” This tale has been unlawfully lifted from NovelHub; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. And then another ripping noise followed. A crunch punctuated the final gag, and the silence thereafter spoke of an ominous death. Shiv grimaced. He shot the Pathbearers he'd disabled non-lethally a brief look. "You bastards were lucky," he muttered under his breath. "And he does not share your kindness," Five said. He regarded Shiv with a faint hint of appreciation. "Though I do like a neat operator. So much strength yet not so much urge to kill. How curious. But respectable.” "I have slaughtered people before," Shiv admitted. "I just don't think I want to get in the habit of killing people weaker than me or the ones who might not have it coming." Five shot the captured pile of Pathbearers a brief look and simply shrugged. "Who am I to say? Some of them treated me quite well, proving to be my only subjects of conversation across these many years. Others were cruel bullies, but then again, I have done worse." The wolf-man was proving an exceptionally hard individual to read. Even with Psycho-Cartography, Shiv had a hard time guessing the wolf-man's true ethical nature and the broader dimensions of his personality. A second later, a human head peeked out over the entrance and promptly dropped on the ground. It rolled to Shiv's feet, and Rebis suddenly materialized beside him. "I killed the others," Rebis said quickly. "None of them saw me I didn't let them see me." The horrific mess of a merged Pathbearer twitched violently, and tears dripped down from his human eye. Rebis, comparatively, was easier to understand, albeit in a psychotic kind of way. He was clearly unwell, constantly battling to control his own mind, and with a pathological need to go unnoticed. However, Five could look upon Rebis just fine, even touch him without any penalty. Shiv had a feeling he was building a sort of rapport with Rebis as well, but he wouldn't bet his life on staring the amalgamated Pathbearer directly in the face. "Hey, Rebis," Shiv said, "I get you hate what most of these bastards did to you, but you know these are just wardens, right? Might just be a job to them. Maybe some of them don’t have it coming.” Rebis's human side reacted negatively, his eye twitching. "They watched. They all watched me. They watched as I was cut away, as the rest of me was cut away. They watched. They watched. They did nothing. They knew and they did nothing and they watched.” Shiv pressed his lips together. What Rebis had was a grievance, one that he could somewhat understand. "Yeah, I know, I'd be pissed too, but…" Shiv trailed off as Rebis stomped on the head he'd just dropped. The skull cracked apart, and blood and brain matter spilled all over Shiv's ankles. "You hate them too, you told me," Rebis breathed. “You said it earlier.” Shiv looked at the mangled puddle beneath the amalgamated Pathbearer's bare feet. Poor bastard, Shiv thought. The warden probably didn't even know what killed them. "Yeah," Shiv replied, offering a slight lie. "I hate them too. But I want to get out. You want to get out of here, Rebis? You want to feel better?" Rebis just stared at him for a long moment, and his automaton side briefly flickered with a faint glow. "Escape, I need to escape. We need to escape." He reached out for Five, grabbing him by the shoulder, clutching them more like a child would hold a security blanket rather than a Pathbearer would clasp the hand of an ally. "Yes, yes, Rebis," Five said, patting the tortured Pathbearer on the hand. "Escape, that's what we all want, and that's what we're all going to get. So long as we stick together and try not to leave so much of a mess." The wolf-man offered Shiv a brief smirk, and the Deathless took advantage of that opening. "I don't blame you for killing some of these people, but the bigger the mess we leave behind, the more they will keep coming after us." Shiv followed his Psycho-Cartography and used its guidance to formulate his following words. He knew one thing above all others about Rebis: the Pathbearer hated being stared at. And there was more than good odds that if he killed enough people, there would be warden after warden glaring at him as they tried to put him down. "The more you kill, the more noise we make, the more people they'll send after us. They'll all be pointing their eyes at you, Rebis, pointing their eyes, just staring over and over.” "No, no," Rebis whimpered, shaking his head. He clutched his skull, rubbing at the automaton side with his human fingers and scratching bloody gashes into his human face with his metallic claws. In a second, his human face healed, while his mercury-textured automaton skull was lined with oily fingerprints. “Yeah, so we do this carefully, Rebis. You don't need to worry about doing it on your own, because I'm gonna help you. I'll make sure no one looks at you at all. But you need to listen to me and Five. Or things will get hard.” Silver Tongue 33 > 34 Rebis paused, and a flash of childlike innocence slipped through his twitching features. "You can do that?" "Sure I can," Shiv said. "I can fuse their eyes shut, I can cast you in a blanket of shadow, I can keep their eyes on me while you slip away. You don't need to be doing all this on your own anymore. You're among friends." "Yes," Five said, coordinating with Shiv to further calm Rebis, "among friends." The unnatural Pathbearer shook a few moments longer before his shoulders finally sagged. His anxiety attack died down, and he stepped aside, revealing the doorway. As they quickly swept the Guard Cube, Shiv took the opportunity to assimilate the biomass of the wardens Rebis had butchered. There had been 12 more Pathbearers within the cube, most of them trying to recover in the infirmary upstairs. There had been one Biomancer tending to their wounds. Said Biomancer had died when Rebis burst through the door and cleaved through their head at a 45-degree angle. Rebis then stabbed them well over a few hundred times, so Shiv couldn't make out the details of the body. He didn't know what race or gender the Pathbearer was. The only thing he knew was that they were the team's Biomancer because they wore a diagnostic helmet. Shiv would have really liked having that piece of broken equipment. Apparently, the helmet’s enchanted visor allowed someone to gaze directly into an organic body to examine the organs, blood vessels, and cells on the inside. Shiv decided to keep that helmet with him for now. When he found Can Hu again at some point, maybe it could be reforged with something else. That’d be useful for his own Biomancy. With the upper level secured and all the bodies fed to his Aegis, Shiv came down to the primary living quarters of the cube. The layout of the place was economical. There were four rooms slotted in the corner of the cube, each with four double-deck beds. A total of 16 Pathbearers were intended to live inside this guard cube, and Shiv guessed there were probably a great many guard cubes sliding around this entire prison complex, especially considering how many guards he'd seen earlier. Connected to every other room and the upstairs by a long ladder was the primary living quarters. It was a space that ran 40 meters by 40 meters, and there was a kitchenette here with a small pantry stocked with useful ingredients. They immediately began glowing in shiv's eyes, and he felt the call of his Chef Unwavering skill demand he cook, demand he cook for months and months and simply not stop because he'd gone through so much bloodshed and conflict, and he hadn't had a chance to decompress all this time. His hands were shaking as he stared at the ingredients in the pantry. He knew he didn't have time to linger; he knew that he needed to break out as soon as possible, but pulling himself away from the kitchen took more willpower than he thought he had. Looking to his right, there were smears of blood painting the ground. A few Pathbearers had been debriefing at some of the living quarter benches when Rebis got to them. Their deaths had been quick, and Shiv had cleaned up their bodies quite well, but he guessed he'd missed a spot earlier. And then finally, there was the central mana control. A large mithril pillar was lodged in the center of the room, and a concentric series of spell patterns swirled outward, forming something that anyone could manipulate. Five stood before these controls, and with a swipe of his claw, the ambiance of the cube changed, the light going from bright to a soft dimness. Rebis let out a shuddering gasp as the room grew darker. He appreciated that, and he offered a stuttered thanks to Five over and over again. The wolf-man continued digging through the spell patterns. He moved different functions around and finally expanded on what looked to be a complex model of interlocking cubes. Shiv's eyes widened as he walked over immediately. "Is that the Well?" Shiv asked. "Indeed it is," Five replied. The structure of the Rubix Well comprised thousands of cubes. Their current cube was highlighted near the very bottom, and it blinked bright yellow at the edge of all the other cubes. It had been caught out of position when shiv broke the Zenith Cube, and so it had been uniquely vulnerable to their intrusion. At the same time, there were strings of spellstuff extending out from other cubes as Shiv looked upon them. Online reports detailing casualties and requests for aid flickered and faded before his sight at rapid speed. This prison was far more complex than he'd assumed. It was by far the most complex facility he'd ever been in, surpassing even the vast, sprawling structure that was Passage in Weave. Just the informational detail provided by a single guard station was more than anything possessed by Confriga's operation back at Gate Theborn. Shiv took a few minutes to familiarize himself with the rest of the Rubix Well. The section of the prison he, Five, and Rebis were in was described as the Nadir. This was where they kept Legendary-Tier threats to the Republic, along with Zenith-tier prisoners, which included Shiv. “What's the difference between Zenith-tier and the rest of the Legendaries?” Shiv asked. “That's not a Skill-Tier.” Five blinked at him. "Zenith is a special circumstance. There is a substantial overlap between being Zenith and Legendary, but Zeniths usually also have Unique Skills or otherwise unique circumstances. They are for the Ascendants’ personal attention, and thus our interactions with the Zenith prisoners are kept to a minimum." The wolf-man sighed. "And what a pity at that. So many of you are so very interesting. I would have rather been in the Zenith Cube, to be honest. You made for a lot better conversation in your brief time here than most of my associates." "That bad, huh?" Shiv asked. "Worse than you can possibly imagine." Five let out a sad whimper. "I'm not particularly social for my kind, but still, I do like company. And when most of your company consists of hardened killers that yearn to butcher and maim but possess little else in the way of hobbies or culture, things can get rather droll." Shiv couldn't imagine being cooped up in this prison for that long, and it only made him want to escape faster. But before he fled, he needed to find Bonk and his equipment, and that was going to be quite the challenge, considering how many cubes he had to sift through. Furthermore, as he studied the Nadir, he found the Chronomantic loop that Five had spoken about earlier fused around it. The Nadir was connected to the rest of the well-shaped prison by a long, central spine. The structure extended through a brief empty space that was covered by an arcing wave of golden mana, until finally it threaded through the rest of the prison's architecture. The levels above had larger cubes, but they, too, were surrounded by many smaller ones. Those were listed as guard stations from what Shiv could read, which meant that the lower-Tier prisoners were allowed to mingle together more with far wider spaces rather than these narrow valleys. "Hey," Shiv asked, "you know if the prison up top is also made of Orichalcum?" Five paused. "Parts of it I would assume yes, but for all of it to be made of Orichalcum…" He let out a chuff of doubt. "Orichalcum is a very rare metal, my Deathless friend. It's rare for any world, even ones with a higher ambient mana threshold than yours. The fact that they spent so much Orichalcum to create this place reveals the staggering depth of your Republic's wealth." "Alright, so there's a chance I could just punch straight through once I get to the top. It's just getting through that time loop that might be a bit of a challenge," Shiv said. He folded his arms as he considered his Legendary skill. He was strong, but a mana core was likely supplying the power to that time loop, and he knew that mana cores outputted more magic than any individual Pathbearer on average. “I suspect that we might need to do something a bit risky,” the wolf-man hummed. He pointed to a central cube and scattered the other cubes around it with a wave. “This should be the station that stores the mana core. We disable that, and it should be enough to halt the loop for a while. But it will be quite well-defended. We need a strategy…” But Shiv wasn't just a Legend, he had Outside Context Problem, so he might not need to struggle through that either. He could just slip across. "Wait, we're on the edge," Shiv said as he regarded their guard cube once more. There looked like nothing to the left of his cube aside from the curving time-loop keeping them walled in. “What’s out there?” "I am not certain," Five admitted. "My knowledge of the prison has been put together by information that I overheard from the guards and gossip I gathered from other prisoners. If you're asking for my suspicions, I think we might be in a pocket dimension of some kind, but then again, maybe not. The amount of magic flowing through this place is substantial, and it taxes a core to sustain. If it were me, I might put this prison at the bottom of an ocean, or potentially even anchor it in the void somewhere in the local solar system, making sure that there's no way to reach civilization even if one were to break out of the facility." Shiv nodded. It made sense to him too. He wanted to find out what kind of inhospitable place they were in before attempting to bust through. "Can you do me a favor, Five?" Shiv asked. "Can you find someone or something for me through this magical thing?" "Spell Cortex," the wolf-man provided. "Yeah, that. There's a certain big someone I want to locate, and the guards here took my stuff as well. I want my gear back.”