"Val, watch your six, he's spawning behind you!"
Val nodded, tapping his keyboard at a mad pace, quickly refreshing his rapid buffs, his Hammer Guardian raising its shield just as the lich spawning behind him released its Doomclaw attack.
Val froze as the screen flashed a brilliant rainbow of colors, oddly certain he had done this before.
"Val, what the hell?" John cursed as the Lich walloped Val, sending him cartwheeling off his chair, crashing into the bedroom wall.
A flash of excruciating pain and blackness as he drowned in the screams of six thousand souls roaring into him, each and every one of them desperate for one last gasp of life.
Howling in their final moments to claim their killer as themselves.
Val crying out as he found himself drowning in blackness once more.
"Val, watch your six, he's spawning behind you!"
Val nodded, tapping his keyboard at a mad pace, quickly refreshing his rapid buffs, his Hammer Guardian raising its shield just as the lich spawning behind him released its Doomclaw attack.
The screen flashed a rainbow of colors as he took massive damage to stamina and health, spitting blood, refusing even to look at the awful rent spurting gore from his chest as he tapped his primal potion, gasping with relief as his lungs and ribs sowed themselves up once more. It was team play, not solo, and he had two healers buffing his stats and wards as fast as they could tap their boards. Their dps specialist was blasting the massive boss trapped with them in the depths of the crypt with fire magics for all she was worth.
Val frowned even as the dark corridors flashed with crimson magics. The Lich Guardian's health bar was full. Julia wasn't making a dent.
"Oh shit, Val, it's powering up! I'm casting my primal now."
"Don't waste it, or it's pointless!" Val shouted into his headset.
"He's right, Julia," Finn's sigh came through crystal clear, despite being stationed overseas. "You were its slave for over a year, remember? There's no way that damned lich can't read you like a book. He owns you, body and soul."
"Did you have to say it?" Julia sobbed. "Why the hell did you have to say that, Finn? You don't know what he did to me. You don't know!"
"We all know what he did," said John, the fourth member of their band. "It's written all over your character sheet. Freed class one drone slave. You have a permanent minus two to your scholarship, but your psyche potential is fully awakened. You also have the Major Withdrawal disadvantage, and are highly prone to secondary addictions. But on the plus side, psychic and cybernetic classes are now open to you, and you have a base 75 in Psyche. That's pretty good. Right Val?"
Val was speechless, heart hammering, looking, really looking at the monitor that seemed to take up the whole back wall of his room. Graphics so lifelike it was beyond belief, that corridor of chrome, steel, and sourceless pink light looked just as real as his bedroom with its never made bed, bottles of discarded pills he didn't think he needed any more, or the half-eaten egg sandwich Val was oddly certain had sat there for days.
He could even smell the odd bite to the sterile, recirculated air in the heart of the dreadnought as the screen began to jostle forward, as if captured by a vidcam held in the hands of a panicked reporter or soldier racing down the corridors, and Val could somehow even sense the constant low-pitched hum reverberating through the structure as a whole, the cameraman stopping before a strangely ornate entrance in this spartan vessel, manned by several troopers wearing jet black armor and a jaded looking man in a blue uniform just now staring up from his monitor.
The gaunt looking man smirked, and Val could only guess that his pallor came from the meaty stump of his wrist spraying blood even now.
"Why the hell doesn't he bandage that?" Val heard himself whisper.
The Darklord suddenly looked up, locking gazes with Val. His smile was that of a corpse, a thousand silent screams bubbling out of his soul.
"No point," Finn explained over the headset. "You already killed him. When you blew up the dreadnought. Even the Overlord, remember?"
"So many lives," Julia sobbed. "My mind was open and raw and even when I was sailing in hideous waves of pleasure, I could somehow taste all their minds. My master's sweet caresses sucked me dry but even so, he was gentle, at first, teaching me even as he used me, allowing my Psyche to blossom and grow. And I felt them, Val. So many lives! Young men and women finding love and purpose in their military life, having grown up in the cities of Jordia or Phoebe, all of them taught that their way was right! Harsh, imperfect, but doing far more good than harm. Like, well, like our own military back home." She sobbed a laugh. "Half the world hates our armed forces, Val, even as we try to play peacekeepers for the world."
Val shuddered and tried to look away but couldn't as Estof's (that was his name) smile turned to a rictus, his flesh slowly melting away as the corridor filled with impossibly brilliant light. As if the core of a white-hot sun had suddenly burst to life in the center of that ship.
And Val could hear it as well. The panicked final moments of disbelief and horror felt by six thousand souls, so many more of them innocent than Val could have imagined, far more like young privates he had once known and come to the aid of than he could possibly have imagined.
And how they shrieked, long after death, long after their bodies were flash fried to oblivion, their very souls pulled into a hideous vortex that seemed to cross entire realities, pouring into a hideous singularity that would devour even those final echoes of all they had ever been.
Val shrieked with the agony of it, even as his massive monitor blazed with the blinding intensity of a fusion bomb, leaving nothing in its wake.
Only the memory of Val, somehow alive still, even as every fiber of his being screamed with the agony of six thousand souls pouring into him, all their endless potential now his own.
Congratulations, you have reached level 9!
Hidden questline: Free Jordia unlocked! - You have destroyed your first dreadnought, home to the Jordian High Council and Overlord Tytus himself! Actions that will no doubt send all of Jordia into political turmoil as Highlords and administrators try to consolidate their positions, prevent the southern continent from rebelling, and prepare themselves for whoever will fill that power vacuum! Do you have what it takes to free to entirety of Jordia from Dominion rule? Do you really want to?
And the pain did not stop. It only grew. Each and every soldier on that ship, flickering thoughts of loved ones the last awareness that would ever be their own as they drowned in the dark abyssal seas at the heart of Val's psyche. Feeding off them. Growing stronger. All their hopes and dreams, all their hidden potential, all that they could have been or hoped to be, somehow claimed as Val's own.
Hidden questline: Primal Lord Rising unlocked! - You have destroyed your first dreadnought and brought all your foes low. It's true you harnessed pure matter-energy conversion, the highest form of explosives completely outlawed within Dominion space. But war is an unruly beast, and those who try to tame it with conventions are merely tilting the board in their own favor! Any smart tyrant rewrites history as he sees fit, and in the dark calculus of warfare, victory in battle justifies any means!
The original Highlords cared nothing for convention, oaths formally sworn to the only treaties that mattered. As you gave no oath, your survival is its own justification! - It is conceivable that one with your unique background and ruthlessness could find a pretext to seize the mantle of power! All you need now is a Dreadnought of your own, and you're well on your way to claiming Jordia for yourself!
Just remember to avoid any Highlord's gaze, Val, lest your poor brain get insta-fried. For we both know how fragile you are without your Shadowmind. Ever the dagger, never the shield.
Have fun trying to seize a world's worth of power!
Even as guilt tore through him, it was nothing compared to the horrific, searing pain. For no soul would go quietly into that final goodnight, each and every one clawing frantically at Val's mind, a primal desperation, to rise awareness above drowning depths and breath deep upon the life-raft of Val's body, claiming his awareness for their own.
How desperately they all fought as if Val rode stormy seas that were drowning men, each and every one struggling just to exist, and how cold and ruthless Val became, icy fury alone ripping through the sobbing faces of so many fragile souls, pleading for one last breath of life.
Please! - so visceral, so lifelike, Val couldn't help but strike them as if they were real sentient beings, and somehow it helped, as if the flash and fury of his Psiblade was their final abjuration, the cold sentence passed, desperate souls unable to face the presence of that blade.
Save for one.
Overlord Tytus himself.
Hidden questline: Child of Oblivion revealed! - For you have become Death, the destroyer of worlds! A single starship is but the first step, Avatar of Oblivion! - Seeing how hideously efficient internalized Valorium matter energy-conversions are, what are the consequences, do you think, to unleash one in say... Jordia's very core? One can only imagine how many tons of hyper-pressurized ore are squeezed to plasma-like consistency in the heart of that planet. How easy it would be with your True Artifice skill to catalyze chain-reactions heretofore unthinkable.
To unleash a shockwave of destruction as brilliant as any supernova, instantly converting Jordia to superheated ash and plasma, unleashing exothermic cascades that will obliterate life on Phoebe as well before causing their sun to destabilize in a hideous cacophony of destruction a billion years earlier than once predicted!
Imagine the inconceivable amount of potential potency unleashed, Val. The destinies of entire civilizations, the fates of entire worlds.
Claimed and quantized by you. And you alone.
Just like the massive black holes at the core of each and every galaxy, you too will grow in ways hideous and profound, should you choose Oblivion's Path.
Entropy is always waiting for new disciples, dear Val, and we have opened wide the gates of Oblivion.
For you have indeed come home.
Val stumbled back as his final opponent roared, the pair of them on choppy seas no longer, but the sleek and beautiful dreadnought that had been Overlord Tytus's hard-fought and fiercely loved home. So many dreams he had had, fierce dreams of conquest and dominion played out by a brilliant mind able to unlock every moment of glory, every lesson learned in a pristine mental palace of perfection, in some ways so hyper aware and alert that to compare his intellect to a lesser man was to compare a human to an ape.
And Val had committed such a hideous, unthinkable act of betrayal against every fundament of their people that Tytus had not even the moments to conceive a brilliant means of survival before the hideous energies released sent them all to oblivion.
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"You fool." Tytus's cold words froze Val where he stood, the Overlord of nightmare proportions, glaring down upon Val. "You destroyed everything! You thought to save lives?" His mocking laughter cut like a blow. "All of Jordia will suffer for your vile act! Instability will rock both continents." He shook his head. "Even in those final moments, had you averted disaster, I would have made you as rich and potent as any ancient king. I know you could sense my plea, even when you had cleaved Solena in twain! You could have had everything you ever wanted, and now all is ash and ruins, and all you will get for your crime is death!"
With that, the giant roared and charged.
Far more real than any soul ever to have fought against inevitable extinction before.
And in that terrifying moment, Val realized there was a very real possibility Tytus would win.
The giant's eyes blazed with crimson fury as his Psiblade crackled against Val's own.
"I will claim you, worm! I will live through you! I will rise once more and claim this world and Jordia both! We will be one, you and I, and then there will be only me! For even in the depths of despair I see before me the true path to immortality!"
And their blades hissed as furious flurries turned to cautious exchanges, each testing the other for weakness, and what an edge Tytus's shield turned out to be, Val cursing, his legs weakened by numerous darting thrusts. Not crippled, but his legs were alive once more with a cripple's agony, the flesh remembering being burned so very very well. Val coughed bloody phlegm as Tytus judged his moment, Val's guard too high.
The desperate beeping of critical care equipment sensing cardiac arrest as Tytus's blade at last slipped under Val's guard, neatly piercing his heart.
Unspeakable agony, as Val charged up the blade. A hideous gamble.
Tytus blinked in surprised startlement, eyes widening in crimson horror as he began to topple over.
For Val had taken his head.
Even then the desperate spirit screamed and wailed.
And Val smiled even as he began to die in the world above, knowing every Highlord fought blade and shield. And for all that they might cleave apart lesser men, all of them trained to take on other Highlords as if they held rapiers, useful slaves they then became.
So he let his foe thrust as he charged forward for one final strike.
And Tytus was the last soul for him to claim.
Save one.
Solena, beautiful eyes leaking tears of blood. Naked flesh exquisite perfection, save where he had cleaved her in twain.
"I would have loved you, Val. You could have tamed my darkness," she sobbed. "My last thoughts, before you killed me, were of our family. The children we could have had." She lowered her gaze. "You will never know the woman I could have become, if only you had given me a chance!"
Val forced himself to swallow, knowing he was running out of time.
"I'm sorry, Solena." So much he might have wanted to say, if she were really there, anything but the memory of a beautiful smiling girl laughing so freely, once upon a time, before being found and claimed by Tytus himself, the most hideous of torments forging that girl into the ruthless monster she had become. Some of her acts had been unforgivable. But if she hadn't lost herself to gleeful madness, she would have died like the other sobbing children too broken to go on.
Ruthlessly exterminated.
Those final moments also burned into Val's eyes.
And Solena had been the one forced to cut them down.
And even after those childhood horrors, she had found the strength to go on, delighting at last in the conquest she had hoped to make of him. A wondrous perfect life with a man strong, deadly, who could protect her.
So that little girl inside her heart could at last be free. A wife and mother safe and protected from the nightmare life she had had no choice but to embrace until her dark knight had at last found her worthy of rescue.
And she had found her man.
And he had killed her without a second thought.
And when Val gathered up the memory of Solena, kissing her sobbing brow as she faded away, he found his heart pierced more savagely than it had been with Tytus's final killing blow.
Then Val alone stood before a sea of shimmering darkness, sensing death just heartbeats away.
Wake up, Val! You have no time!
Elise's voice, her fist slamming down upon his desk. Jolting him out of his afternoon doze.
A panicked Val blinked, gazing at a young frizzy-haired Gregor who sneered and shook his head even as Sten sighed and tilted back his chair. "We're all dead anyway, Val, no matter what you do."
Val's eyes widened at that, even as a palm cracked against his desk.
Elise's panicked eyes boring into his own.
"You need to learn this Val, and learn it now! No time to pick another path. If you would live, if any of us would live, you need to do this now!"
Val gasped, confused, so much he wanted to ask, but he could see Sten's ship, engines damaged, crashing into Jordia, horrified at the thought that perhaps his friends were naught but ghosts even now.
"Val!"
His eyes snapped to the board, beholding a complex matrix of interconnected principals and meanings both inconceivably complex and exquisitely self-contained. "The Personal Resonance Mastery chart. Do you finally understand it?"
And feeling a curious rush of awe and wonder, he found that he did.
Level 6 Personal Resonance Mastery Achieved!
The desperate look in Elise's eyes turned to a relieved smile, and in a breathtaking display of speed and coordination, Elise drew a chart even more complex than the last. Her gaze implored Val to study it as if his life depended upon it.
Maybe it did.
The interconnected meshwork of symbols, variables, proofs, and constants roared through his mind. Far too much to take in at once, yet somehow, as if hundreds of hours of study could be compressed into mere seconds as the insights and understandings of countless people poured into his own, the hideously complex chart revealed itself to be nothing more than the most exquisite of keys to a puzzle of meaning Val at last understood, sensing the ebb and flow of his own internal magics and how best to channel them more precisely than he ever had before in his life.
Level 7 Personal Resonance Mastery Achieved!
Never had he felt as sharp and hyper-aware as he did at that moment.
Yet this remarkable achievement earned Val nothing more than a desperate nod as Elise presented yet another chart, dazzlingly complex, the chart before the equivalent of a single variable in the heart of a tremendous whole. And when at last he understood that indescribably elegant framework of reference and understanding, the rush of awe he felt was indescribable.
Level 8 Personal Resonance Mastery Achieved!
And when panicked eyes showed the tiniest glimmer of hope, that was all he needed to accept the herculean task now before him, the entire back of the classroom now displaying a chart of such complexity Val wanted to sob as he faced the most herculean of mazes, and he just a tiny speck expected to map it out in its entirety.
And in endless moments that might have been months that Val was lying comatose in a critical care unit, a John Doe who nonetheless looked so hauntingly familiar to a father who had been forced to accept his son's untimely death near a year and a half ago such that all bills were paid unstintingly, the best doctors in the world brought in by a man who could not get over how very much this patient looked like his long lost son, no matter that this boy was too young to be his own and the genetic tests showed the youth possessing hundreds of genes that had no corollary in any database on Earth... it all clicked together on the eve of his appointed death.
Level 9 Personal Resonance Mastery Achieved!
In exhausted euphoria Val roared his triumph, not giving a damn what challenges still awaited, knowing his feat had been profound beyond words to describe. He could all but taste it with each breath, feeling his potential to affect change, both Psion and Arcane, expanding just as did his understanding of the very secrets of nature itself, magic but one part of a great, glorious whole. A profound understanding that left him feeling on the cusp of something truly mystical. A power, a potency he could almost taste, almost grasp, affecting and infusing every cell of his being.
He then looked inward, awed anew at how the odd forces and fields flowing between realities somehow allowed for the quantization of all one could do or be. And how reminiscent it was of the games he had loved so well before his life had taken such dark turns, or perhaps it was simply that those beloved games hinted at deeper truths still. Either way, he felt a momentary flash of amazement at how far he had come, for all that it had been at terrible cost.
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Valor Hunter Level 14
Strength 13
Vitality 13
Finesse 13
Quickness 17
Perception 18
Scholarship 13
Willpower 17
Charisma 13
Luck ?? +2
Health 10xVit+Str+IC= 148
Survival (Health+(10xLevel)+Luck) = 288+?
Stamina 10xVit+Str+IC= 153
Mana 343 (337Accessible: 251 kg Elementium Stored)
Psion 343 (337 Accessible: 200.9 L Silbion Stored)
Insight 17
Base Appearance 10. +1 (13 charisma) +1 (athletic) = +2 (+5 when you let your potency show.)
Dark Points 3 (+3 to reaction rolls and influence when you let your intensity shine. -1 if you try to hide the darkness in your soul. +30% potency increase when you embrace your wrath!)
Skills of Significance
Shadowmind Rank 5 (Adept) / Psi-Sense (Shadowmind Dependant) Rank 4 / Psionic Perception Rank 3 / Arcane Perception Rank 3 (can sense hostile aftertaste of malicious poisoning) / Arcane Artificer Rank 2 / Psion Artificer Rank 2 / Cypher Rank 2 / Meditation Rank 3 / Rift Mastery Rank 2 / Psionic Oathbinding Rank 1 / Stealth Rank 3 / Sword and Shield Rank 3 / Magesight Rank 1 / Mageward Rank 1 / Basic Literacy Achieved! (Limited to texts of Arcane or Psionic nature) / Deception Rank 2 / Inquisition Rank 2 / Intimidation Rank 3
Small Arms Rank 3 / Laser Carbine Rank 3 + Feat: Adept Use crouched, w/shield, odd positions no added penalty)/Grappling Rank 3/Sword and Shield Rank 4 / Longsword Rank 4 / Psiblade Rank 4
Intense Conditioning - 1 hour/4days or 1hour hard sparring/3 days to maintain exercise gains: +1STR/+10stamina/+5 Health&Survival.
Potion Formulas Learned / Basic Restoration (Jordia)
Greater Skills Learned
Greater Alchemy Rank 3 (Specialization: Elemental Infusions)
Meta-Magic Feats: Stabilization Rank 2 / Spellboost Rank 1 (150% for triple cost) / Psiboost Rank 1 (125% for double cost)
Personal Resonance Mastery Rank 9
Greater Oathbinding Rank 1
True Artificer Rank 2
Jordian Magical Arts Learned
Creation - Rank 2
Destruction - Rank 1
Manipulation - Rank 2
Transformation - Rank 1
Fire - Rank 2
Water - Rank 1
Earth - Rank 2
Herbam - Rank 1
Jordian Spells Learned
Firestream Level 20 C/F - Cost 5 Mana
Explosive Retribution Level 30 C/F Must save against Oblivion when casting. - Cost 35 mana.
Condensation Collection. Level 5 M/W - Cost 0 mana.
Stoneflow. Level 1 M/E - Cost 0 mana.
Dwarven Catalyzation Level 20 C+M+T/E - Cost 20 mana.
Automative Folly Level 20 D+M+T/E - Cost 20 mana.
Plentiful Bounty (Greater Ritual) Level 40 C+M+T / E+H - Cost 150 mana. (20%+ Critical failure risk: This spell is far beyond your abilities!)
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Val coughed, focusing on the classroom once more.
And then Elise, exhausted, dehydrated, looking on the verge of collapse, drew with trembling hands a chart so hideously complex it was on par with the 3-D matrices the dwarves used to store their own bodies of knowledge.
An order of complexity that felt a magnitude beyond what Val had forced himself to endure up til now.
Val turned around, somehow hoping Halvar could help, tell Elise to back down with her training, as he had offered to do once or twice as a fellow brother in arms what now seemed a lifetime ago.
But Halvar was no longer there.
The classroom was empty.
And that's when he felt the horrible pressure around his neck.
Val! Wake up! You have to wake up now!