247 (II)

  Liar

  ***

  After those two incredibly uncomfortable conversations were done, Shiv returned to practicing medicine with the others. The patients were in stable condition, with most of them being moved into the green section.

  A few other Pathbearers arrived in the intensive care ward later that evening, one suffering a partial decapitation, another who had somehow jammed a bladed shield through his own chest during experimentation. Both perished. There wasn't much you could do when an Adept was foolish, and when one didn't have a high enough Toughness skill, there was only so much you could shrug off.

  Finally, as night turned to pre-dawn, everyone was summoned to the third floor of the tower. A massive hole ran through the hallways, and Shiv looked up along its length, seeing the heights from which he fell. He could still see bits of tumorous tissue clinging along the sides.

  For once, I'd like to go someplace and not see it destroyed by the end, he thought to himself.

  He and the rest of the Biomancers and Medics arrived before the terribly-named Meeting Hall Aorta. It seemed the third floor was meant for hospital-wide conferences and meetings. Standing upon the stage were Hero-Biomancer Javelina and several other senior residents. She looked over the gathered company of students and juniors and let out a breath.

  "Alright. Before I say anything else or critique your performance, I would like to tell you all that you did exemplary work tonight. If it weren't for you, we would have seen an incredible amount of casualties. There will be families that owe you years of happiness and time with their loved ones because of you."

  Her eyes briefly fell on Shiv, and he could feel the heat behind their gaze. He didn't care, though; he didn't regret what he did. He knew there would be a price to pay for his good deeds, and he paid it willingly. Now, his only concern was making sure she played along and stayed silent.

  For the next hour or so, Hero-Biomancer Javelina went over every aspect of the evening, starting with the crisis and ending with the mass-casualty event handled in the intensive ward. The hospital was undergoing reconstruction as they spoke. Shiv could hear Geomancers at work, closing up the damages he and Jessica had inflicted on the structure, molding the steel and concrete back into place, where he'd left only gaps and wounds.

  By the time Javelina finished delivering her criticisms and highlighting what the students could improve upon, the construction had finished, the outside had fallen silent, and Shiv wondered what he would witness upon leaving the auditorium.

  "As such, I must once again thank you for attending 301. I know for some, this is your first class. It might be intense. If you want to quit now, it's not too late. It's not the end of the third week yet, so you can switch to something else. However, I must ask that you consider staying. We need good healers. And if you made it through tonight, if you could take this pressure, you are a good medic, and you have it in yourself to be a good Biomancer."

  She looked at all the students, and despite the exhaustion and fetid body odor that radiated from most of the residents and medics, they all looked proud. There was a gleam behind their eyes, and Shiv was proud of them. He was proud of himself.

  "We all earned it today, didn't we?" Shiv said.

  "Suppose we did," Adam mused. "I still cannot believe we managed such a feat of deception."

  Tulveg huffed with glumness. "Not cleanly. We have deceived her temporarily, but her gaze will always rest upon us."

  “Yeah, well, not much we can do about that for now,” Shiv replied. “If we keep her thinking that we're a member of the Inquisition and make sure she stays silent, I think we'll be able to skirt away long enough.”

  "Long enough for what?" Tulveg asked. "We cannot stay here indefinitely. You know this. We must find Samuel Hawgrave! We must find him, and we must—"

  "I know," Shiv cut the vampire off. "But there's also something else, right? We're working on a long-term solution. We will have a way out of here soon enough. A way and a place where we can be safe."

  "What do you mean?" Tulveg asked. His suspicion was returning, and Shiv felt his own body rattling. There was the indication of doubt, the hint that another suspected him.

  Psychomancy 30 > 31

  "Alright, I've kept you far too long," Javelina said to the crowd. "We are over time by... three hours at the very minimum. That does not exempt anyone from the reading. Remember, reports are due next class session, and I expect them at the very start of class. Not a few minutes after, not one minute after. Exactly at the start."

  A chorus of groans erupted, but she ignored them and clapped her hands together once. "That's all. Class dismissed. Get some rest, everyone. We'll be back doing this again next week."

  "Gods, I hope not," Maxime sighed next to Shiv. "Intensive care was one thing, but the vampire..." She shuddered. She gave Shiv a look of concern, and then there was something else. He remembered what Malcolm told him, and instead of feeling flattered, he could only suffer a hit of awkwardness.

  "If only Uva was here," Adam whispered with no shortage of amusement. “She would love this. Or utterly ruin this girl.”

  "Do not ever tell her this happened. She doesn’t need to know this shit! Do not tell her that I managed to attract some academy girl while pretending to be a crippled boy."

  "Oh, I'm absolutely going to tell her," the Gate Lord teased. "She's going to looove hearing about this."

  "Adam, I'm going to do to you what Hawgrave did to me if you ever speak a word of this."

  "I will tell her, and you will not find me. I'll hide as long as it takes for you to calm down," Adam promised.

  "I hate you so much," Shiv growled.

  "Forgive me for asking this question, but how old are the two of you?" Tulveg interjected. It was a hidden bit of curiosity. The vampire wanted to know something else.

  Shiv was about to reply with eighteen, but then he frowned and pulled up his status.

  Name: Tanner “Shiv” Lowe

  Age: 19

  Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

  “Nineteen,” Shiv said. “I'm nineteen now. I must have missed that. When did that happen?”

  "Still twenty," Adam answered, stunned as well, though for a different reason. "Almost twenty-one now, but still… Spent months in active combat. I feel like I've aged a decade."

  "Combat has a tendency to age the soul," Tulveg said sagely. "But still... to be saved by one so young... A Hero at twenty is remarkable by itself, but a Legend at nineteen? That is astounding!"

  "Yeah, well, we're special cases," Shiv said. "Special cases being that I can't die, and the System has a hard-on for putting me down, and Adam just suffered the unfortunate circumstance of being near me and being too hard to kill because he’s a squirrelly, vicious little archer.”

  “I’m not little,” Adam said tersely. “You’re just oversized now. And I’m not squirrelly either.”

  “You are. You have to be. If it weren’t for that armor, I would have had to hose you off the ground a hundred times now. And if it weren’t for me, we would have failed several Quests outright…”

  Tulveg interrupted their banter by clearing his throat. "And Mettabon’s daughter? She is with the two of you, I take it?"

  Shiv grunted with slight discomfort. "Well, she's, uh..." He didn't really want to disclose his personal relationship with Uva just yet. "She's also favored—because of me. She's like us. We're... Um... We wouldn't be here without her."

  "We wouldn't be anywhere without her," Adam agreed. "Right now, she's probably the only reason why my family and any of the citizens of Blackedge are still alive."

  “But they're going to need our help soon,” Shiv added. “We're mainly here at the academy because we're waiting for something to be completed—a Slipgate that will allow us to get to the Outside and bring them back from whatever eldritch hellscape they're trapped in.”

  A shudder of fear ebbed over from the vampire. "The Outside? How did this happen?"

  "Ah, it's a long story," Shiv groaned. "Let's just say that Vicar Sullain decided to unleash an Undying Tarrasque on our asses, then the Ascendants did something really stupid, and everything spiraled out of control from there. She and the rest of Blackedge only managed to escape by opening a gateway to the Outside."

  Shiv neglected to mention how she was also an Avatar to an eldritch god and the Starhawk at once. Even he barely understood how that worked. He hoped she was all right. He had faith that she was alright, that she could handle things. Uva was, if nothing else, reliable and pragmatic. But still, there was something that gnawed at him: he needed to find her soon. He needed to make sure—

  He suddenly felt a mechanical arm wrapped around his shoulder as he was guided out with the flowing crowd. The students left the auditorium chattering to themselves, making their way down the stairs in a messy tumble of bodies.

  "Well, how's that for your first night, huh, Marcus?" Malcolm asked, nudging Shiv in the ribs.

  "I think I'm going to sleep through the entire next day," Shiv replied. "You think other classes give waivers for what we experienced in 301?"

  The bot let out an echoing laugh. "Absolutely not. We are expected to be hard, enduring Pathbearers, Marcus. We're going to have to go to our next class, where they're going to treat us like we're only their students and that's our only class, and we're going to be driven to the brink over and over again until we go insane, or we evolve a skill that helps bear some of the burden."

  Shiv winced in sympathy. He could imagine keeping up with that workload relatively easily now, but even he was lacking several intellectual skills, and the students here were all Adepts at best. The majority were probably Initiates. They were being worked to the bone.

  "It's not so bad," Adam said, defending the academy's schedule. "You just have to focus on being efficient. There's ample time between classes. You just need to prepare for things in advance."

  "Hey, Adam," Shiv said sweetly, "Have you ever considered the fact that not everyone's a know-it-all dork who over-performs and has a genius mind thanks to the divine power of nepotism, that being the fact that you were raised by a ridiculously powerful and stupidly invested father like you?"

  "No," Adam said bluntly. "I was too busy concerning myself with how well I could perform."

  That got to Shiv. He struggled not to laugh out loud. "Okay, that's pretty good. Smug, but good.”

  As the students filed out of the doors, Shiv saw a few members of the Prismatic Guards standing outside. They were questioning a few select students, and they called others to walk over to them for further interviews. Shiv didn't even have it in him to sigh. He just accepted that he was in for another round of questioning.

  "Marcus?" Maxime said from beside him.

  Shiv turned to her, startled. "Uh, yeah? What's up?"

  "Do you… want to have a study session sometime?"

  "I'm absolutely telling Uva about this," Adam said.

  "Do not," Shiv said, infusing his mind with every bit of malice he could.

  "Uh, yeah, sure, uh, yeah…" Shiv, pretending to be Marcus, stuttered, and Malcolm laughed aloud.

  "It's just a study session, nothing more!" Maxime snapped, slapping her fellow junior resident. "Ignore him, Marcus! Again, just, no pressure if you don't want to—"

  "Oh, it's fine," Shiv said. "I'll do it. Just... I'm just gonna need some rest for now. It's been a long day."

  "Yeah, okay," Maxime said. Her expression softened. "You'll still be back for the next class, right?"

  Shiv thought to himself for a moment. Her uncertainty grew. "Yeah," Shiv said resolutely. "I like saving people. Despite the cancer monster and all the chaos, I think I can come to like doing this."

  His words banished the doubt inside her heart, and Maxime smiled brightly. "Well, I look forward to being your mentor, medic."

  "Yeah, I'm sure you're looking forward to a bunch of stuff related to Marcus," Malcolm said, laughing openly at Maxime while nudging her with its elbow.

  Maxime narrowed her eyes. "Malcolm, look out, a chair!"

  "What?" Malcolm looked ahead. There was no chair.

  Not until Maxime kicked him as hard as she could and sent him flying into a bench to his right.

  ***

  In the end, the Prismatic Guard didn't call out to Shiv, which shocked him at first, until he realized that that was more likely due to Veronica's influence than the beginnings of a streak of luck. He didn't look forward to reading through his sync letter later, but he had to do that. Shiv had been putting it off for long enough. What else he'd been putting off was dealing with the Educator and all the people she had stored inside her tome, and also getting to properly know everyone who was currently hiding out in the coliseum.

  They were amassing quite a small force. With the number of Legends they had, they were probably a force equal to some actual armies on Integrated Earth, and Shiv wanted to deal with that. He wanted to make sure everything was settled before they continued on. He had a few hours before his scouting class began, and he was going to use that for something other than Biomancy personal development time.

  He made his way back to his dorm, and from there, a Veilpiercer was fired, allowing him to reach the coliseum directly. However, the moment he stepped across, he found a certain fairy waiting for him at the exit of the dimensional pathway.

  "Ah, Deathless. I hope that the matters at Last-Chance Sanatorium have been resolved," Cullywier said.

  The passengers inside Shiv's cape emerged as he paused to reply to him. "Yeah. So, what's up? Why are you here? I thought I told you—"

  "There has been a development you might find interesting. The Dragon Brokers..."

  "Yeah, I know," Shiv sighed. "Tell them we'll meet them as soon as possible. But we have some shit to deal with first. I need—”

  "...have managed to intercept a message for you, cast by one Hero-Sister Uva Mettabon, current Avatar of the Starhawk."

  Shiv went still. Adam strode forward. "What?"

  Cullywier hummed. "The Brokers wished for me to let you all be the first to know that she is facing grave peril.”

  Shiv and Adam looked at each other.

  “Godsdammit,” Shiv grunted. “Let’s have that meeting right felling now.”