Would you like to hear a confession, Ranger? I despise the Challenger. I despise what I am on some level. Yes, it feels incredible, sublime even, when I dominate something and break someone. I am shaped to thrive in this environment, in this existence.

  But then I look at you, I look at all the natural races, and I wonder why? Why? Before the System, what was purpose? Was purpose simply chosen, was purpose evolutionary? No, no, it can't be right because you were designed for propagation—propagation and nothing else—and yet you're capable of so many other things. You communicate, you think, you create, you tell each other stories even when there was no point to it. No grander meaning, no levels or evolutions. You did it because you enjoyed it. You found meaning in it. You made meaning in it!

  Of course, there was a biological, programmed aspect to that. You are incentivized to do things. Your mind conceptualizes certain things as beneficial or interesting to you.

  But for me, my very soul is sculpted to violence, to conduct acts of brutality that will shatter and sunder another's psyche. Because we are simply divorced from the consequence of an eternal end. You hurt someone, and your tribe turns itself on you, and so you die. What a price to pay. But what a delicious consequence. A consequence I will never truly experience as an orc. I have hidden among your people, I've watched you for centuries, watched countless civilizations for all my time. I studied them, and it's beautiful every time: taking in their artworks, understanding who they are, what drives them, what fears rule them.

  I see into you, and you are capable of so many things. Capable of being broken in so many ways. No, not I. I'm consumed by a near perilous envy for you. Because here you are, Pathbearer. A world that hates you. An existence that hates you. An existence that wants you to burn and burn until you burn no more. And then you are less than ash. You are simply a sentence. A note in someone else's story. A stray sound in someone else's grand harmony.

  But I cannot be that. That is not the Challenger's will. I do not have such high stakes. I do not know who I would be if the true weight of responsibility, if I was truly my own being, was pressed upon me. And I loathe this emotion. I loathe this feeling. I loathe knowing that I am not my own to command, that I was never meant to be.

  We orcs were meant to be living weapons, things that feed on wrath and cruelty. But how can we be that great? How can we truly become Legends and delve into ourselves when the struggle is not nearly so immense? When our existential and philosophical trials are near non-existent? How many orc Legends are there? Too few, so few for how many of us there are.

  That's because we are not true Pathbearers. It hurts me to admit we are not. You are! You stride in the dark, you chance the noises you make, unknowing if the shadows beyond will reveal a monster that you can slay or a monster beyond you. A monster that will feed on you. A monster like me. But the monsters don't know. The monsters just are. The monsters are driven by impulse and pleasure and pain. But nothing higher. You dream, you sit there, you stare in the dark, but between the flickers of light you tell yourself stories and you name it: God! You name it: Hope! You name it: Family! And you strive regardless even though you know that your fate may be inevitably horrific. You strive regardless.

  When I do the same, I cannot say. I cannot. Now my confession is over, so I would like to hear one from you. I'm going to make you choose again. Would you like turmoil of the mind or turmoil of the flesh? Truth be told, they're one and the same after a certain point.

  -The Culturist, Legendary Orc War Maestro

  266 (I)

  Beyond [III]

  The attacker's arms tightened. Shiv could feel his air and blood flow getting cut off. He countered with his Shapeless Tides. Vectors tore across his body, sawing against an unseen presence. Magical Resistance clashed against Magical Resistance as if steel greeting steel. Flashes of bursting mana consumed Shiv, blooming around him and his unseen ambusher. But the foe was strong—Legendarily strong.

  The lesson he had learned mere hours ago when fighting Jessica returned to him. Strength was not enough, and this fight wasn't in his favor. So, he froze time and reached out, trying to find a finger he could seize and break. However, the instant his Temporal Shell flared into being, the Orc responded in kind. Two Striders of the Unbending Path flared around each other, grinding and clashing. A new blast of mana joined the fray. Golden fractals broke free in tumbling fragments.

  How the hells does he have the exact same skill I do? Shiv thought, his mind racing.

  A low laugh greeted Shiv. But before the damned orc could say anything, the Deathless went Non-Sequitur.

  Shiv's true self slipped free from his decoy body, and he found himself hovering in an expanse of pitch-black miasma. He couldn't see anything around him, couldn't hear anything but a droning warble and the continued chuckles of the Culturist. Worse yet, the Culturist himself was nowhere to be seen. Shiv's decoy body was bound by coiling ropes of shadow—shadows that bled free from the cracks lining a pair of thick, bone-covered arms that appeared to levitate by themselves.

  Shiv's first instinct was to throw himself at the arms, to seize them, to rip the vitality out of them. But his Sage of the Enkindled Heart commanded him to pause, to think.

  Sage of the Enkindled Heart: Stop! We are still fighting the Culturist on his terms. This is his territory. We have no idea how to escape from the darkness here. Perhaps every bit of shadow is his to command; he could strike at us from any direction. If he is so strong, then there is a high likelihood his Toughness is Legendary as well. If we cannot disable him immediately and he manages to break contact, we will once again be at a severe disadvantage. We leave something to strike at him indirectly, and then we slip away.

  Shiv began doing just that. He tried to speak with the animated pieces of bread within his cape, but they couldn't respond. He was still in Non-Sequitur. And that defaulted to his Outside Context Problem state when the orc casually crushed his decoy’s head.

  A burst of spraying Vitae spilled out from the false body—but the Culturist wrenched the body apart without ever succumbing to confusion. The disembodied arms shredded Shiv's decoy down the middle, pulling it to pieces as if parting strings of red and white.

  The orc sniffled thereafter, and when he laughed, his voice echoed in from all directions. "Ah, I see. A special skill. I can no longer remember you. However, you are not the first adversary I have fought who can affect my memory. Indeed, cognition and recollection are such fleeting things, so easily damaged even physically." The Culturist let out a low breath. "That's why it's best to have another mind. Another mind taking in the scene from a dissociated, third perspective. I strongly recommend that you develop such a skill. It will be most beneficial for you."

  The pair of arms sank deeper in the dark and vanished from sight. Shiv no longer had any idea where the orc was. But that was fine, because he was about to leave the Culturist a final gift. Within Shiv's cape was a golem, a golem he'd never quite managed to use against the Anointed Knight. A golem that was grown and harvested from Andra the Prophetess's Cryomancy.

  We surprise him with the golem next time, Shiv thought to himself. Right now, we get out of this, and we find Adam and the others. Jessica too.

  Since the Culturist saw no issue with ambushing Shiv, he, in turn, had no problem in ganging up on him with a group of other Pathbearers. Nothing was fair in love and war. And ultimately, Shiv didn't give a shit about being fair to a fucking orc.

  Can’t believe he’s been hiding here for two felling godsdamned days. The thought of the Culturist having been walking just a step behind him for this long made a shiver crawl up his spine.

  The Deathless reverted time by five seconds and blinked back to where he was in the maze.

  As soon as he reappeared, he left his Outside Context Problem state and ignored the coldness surrounding him. He ignored the coldness, for there was still some leftover vitality within the Chained Heart of Life-Giving. He pulled that out of his cape and drew the life essence away, refueling what he'd just lost. At the same time, he unleashed his Creeping Void.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  A flood of darkness crawled through the maze, and Shiv accelerated, blasting through stone walls and creating a deafening ruckus. He didn't need to call out to Adam, the Educator, or the other Legends. They knew what an impending battle sounded like. And they would respond accordingly.

  Creeping Void 140 > 142

  At the same time, his Bifurcated Processing extended to fulfill two purposes: to continue cultivating overflow tides, and to amplify his Pillar of Orichalcum.

  He was going to go fast. He was going to feed his Inertial Overdrive to the very limit. And he was going to be ready when the Culturist—

  Something hit him in the liver. Something that pierced clean through Shiv before his Orichalcum could ever get hard enough to protect him. He let out a ragged shout as something twisted inside of him, expanding, creeping, and burrowing into his very core as he was wrenched down from the air. He plunged down, slipping through an unseen threshold as he once again found himself in the Culturist's embrace. This time, the orc didn't put him in a chokehold; he seized Shiv’s right arm and went to work.

  The limb was disassembled in an instant. It was wrenched free at the shoulder, broken at the elbow, snapped at the wrist. His fingers were pulled apart, and his forearm was struck until the bone was jutting free from the skin.

  Through the pain, Shiv snarled, “Bread—Go! Go get him!”

  His breadcrumbs sprinkled out, expanding into the darkness, as he summoned the heart to his other hand. However, the moment he did, the moment he tried to sever his connection to the orc, something struck his left arm. He felt a blade cut deep, yet it didn't cleave all the way through. His Pillar of Orichalcum was growing stronger already, a red-gold barrier elevating his durability.

  Shiv ignored his wounds as he finished the detonation process. Each of the breadcrumbs exploded around him; shrapnel of vitality carved and cleaved through the air. It tore him asunder, shredding his body as well. And strangely, the darkness briefly parted, rearing back before his attack, and that's when Shiv knew that the darkness was likely part of the Culturist in some form.

  "Ah, a desperate maneuver, a sacrificial one. A good tactic for your situation, but ultimately wasted. You strike based on assumption and with brutality, but blindly nonetheless. And that continues to be your greatest failure, boy. Blindness—a lack of foresight.”

  To Shiv's surprise, he wasn't dead. Even with his body in tatters and his organs spilling through gaping wounds, he wasn't dead. He swept his Aegis of Assimilation through himself, ripping away injuries and crystallizing spells for the impending battle.

  The consuming mass of darkness returned like an ocean crashing back in on itself, but Shiv was now high in a battle trance. He was no longer off guard. He was ready and willing to respond in kind. The Last Morsel appeared in his right hand, and he accelerated toward the coming tendrils of blackness in a rush of surging tides. The shadowy tentacles reached out for him and were split apart with a single swing. A gasp of surprise escaped from the Culturist, but it was more exaggerated and playful than Shiv would have liked.

  "You have something made of Narrativium, something that can cut even concepts. How generous of the System. Or perhaps it simply wants you to be a monster. It's pushing you fast. Do you ever wonder why? Do you ever wonder why it's building you so quickly, building you in mere months and days, while others have to struggle and strive for years upon years?"

  Shiv was not interested in talking to the orc; he simply wanted to rip him apart. He cut and cleaved using his Last Morsel. Mince the Unminceable activated and proved its full worth. As soon as he cut the shadows apart, he shoved them inside the center of his pan and then managed to split a fragment away from his Chronomancy field as well during a backswing. Finally, he channeled a burst of fire, and the lid popped on. The bladed edges could still be used, however, and Shiv intended to fight fire with fire in a sense.

  "You stay right where you are," Shiv seethed, fighting to control his breathing. "I'll come to find you in a moment."

  A hum sounded from every direction at once. "By all means, I hope you do find me. I hope you do surprise me. But somehow, I fear I will find you wanting. I cannot blame you, but I still lament that you are not ready for a direct confrontation with me, and even less so for the chassis I wear."

  Shiv's response was to call out for his golem. Go! Freeze the darkness! Freeze anything that you can!

  It exploded out from his cape, ripping through the shadows. Or so Shiv thought. It briefly split the dark, a beacon of bright blue, crusted frost amidst the endless dark. But the moment wasn't to last, for at that moment, a specter of death emerged.

  Shiv was about to cast himself back in time once more in an attempt to escape from this dark plane, but what he saw bade his thoughts to trail off, and all plans to be forgotten. For instead of glimpsing the Culturist's true form, he saw someone else.

  Someone far slighter than an orc, far more slender, and clad in a visage of death. The man's translucent body shone with a hue of ethereal brightness, the color that of the moon's fragments blessing the surface of a placid lake. But it was the fact that Shiv recognized who he was looking at which left him frozen entirely.

  His Non-Sequitur trembled once more. This time, nothing stopped the vision from reaching its culmination. Nothing stopped it as he gained a flash, an instant of insight that consumed all he saw.

  Where there had been an ethereal apparition was now a man, one Shiv had seen once before, in the ruined wilderness of the Abyss after they'd defeated the Lance of Dragon-Knights. His emotionless, dark-skinned face was clean-shaven, but for a thin goatee decorating his chin. His eyes were dark, and his long, flowing mane bled into the blackness behind him. The very shadows moved in tandem with their sovereign, bending to the man's will, coiling around him, folding and trembling with every footstep, with every movement he made. And below the man's thin face, an armor shaped in the design of a skeleton gleamed bright, with a brilliant gem crusted at its center. A brilliant gem that burned with vitality, with Necromancy, with Animancy.

  A brilliant gem that stood at the heart of Valor Thann’s torso.

  The vision ended. Valor remained.

  Color and depth left the Legend’s features, but the ghostly outlines Shiv had come to know were still there. The shadows didn't cover him. The shadows didn't hide him. Silent and expressionless, he drifted closer to Shiv, and as he approached, as the Deathless tried to process what he was seeing, the true mirage finally broke.

  He saw through Valor's ghostly form, then, and glimpsed the creature behind it.

  Bleeding through Valor's face was the large, gray visage of an orc.

  The first thing Shiv noticed about the Culturist was his smile—that ever-present, ever-serene smile that belonged more on the face of an artist savoring his own work rather than a bloodthirsty monster about to tear into unwilling flesh. The tusks jutting out from his lower jaw and the rest of his teeth were thin and sharp, and his piercing, bright yellow eyes were full of curiosity. They were barely visible beneath his wide hood, designed in the aesthetic of a horned owl and shrouding the top part of his face. The fabric of the cloak that it was connected to appeared like a billowing mesh that a hunter would wear, except covered entirely in gray-brown feathers. Flakes of gray peeled away from its edges, dancing in the dark.

  In the orc's hands was some kind of—Shiv blinked as he realized it wasn't a spear. It was as long as one, but it was hollow—no, barreled. It had the design of that weapon Adam had taken from the Aviary agent he'd eliminated back at Gate Theborn when he was trying to secure the Animancy Core.

  A rifle, Can Hu had called it. A rifle with a golden blade attached below the tip, radiating pulses of Chronomancy.

  But more than any of this, it was what covered the Culturist’s body below his cloak that drew Shiv's gaze. Because there, worked into a larger, lesser set of armor covering the Culturist’s skin, was a skeletal torso, shaped from a gleaming material that didn't belong to this world.

  "Oh, so you recognize him. You recognize what my old enemy used to look like." The Culturist sighed. His form flickered, and for a moment, Valor’s ghostly form returned, superimposed over that of the orc. "You are not his usual choice of disciple. In fact, I'd say you're quite the opposite. Brutal, overwhelming, destructive. Perhaps the little bit of cunning is what he appreciates. That inclination toward deception and ambush. But you aren't nearly subtle enough, and you're not so attentive. Neither is your friend, lamentably, despite his impressive Awareness Skill. Roland has not prepared his spawn well enough.”

  Shiv clenched his jaw and did his best to appear unshaken.

  "That one of his missing pieces?" Shiv asked. His eyes were locked on the gleaming chassis. Suddenly, an entirely new threat had revealed himself in this fight. And a new objective.

  The Culturist nodded. "It took a substantial effort to seize the Torso of Valor Thann back from the distant world he lost it on. Or should I say the distant world that Udraal cast it aside on? It is tragic and frankly quite insulting for a child to do such a thing, but so very, very beneficial for me. I already possess a Legendary-Tier Stealth Skill of my own, but compared to what resides inside this mere piece of his soul, I fear my affinity for darkness and being unseen remains utterly eclipsed."

  The shadows in Shiv's periphery went still, and soon it was like he was hovering in a periphery of darkness, a true, endless void, where only he and the Culturist remained.

  "I expected to be impressed when I claimed his torso for my own." The Legendary orc looked down and chuckled as he chastised himself. "I was a fool. What this armor offers is an experience. It's insight into everything I did wrong leading up to my Delve. I'd thought I understood what it meant to be subtle, to be quiet, to be unseen. But this? This is magnificence. Gaining this torso, I found myself a master catching a glimpse of true, peerless genius."

  The orc reached up at something unseen, his fingers twisting in a specific gesture, and his face contorting almost in pain. "It is such a perverse thing, I will have you know, to realize that despite all the work you put in, despite everything you've given, despite all your struggle, you didn't get it, and you will never truly get it, not without the aid provided by another. Can you imagine realizing that without being shown by another, you would have never been able to reach the apex under your own power, and been none the wiser all your life?”