Chapter 116 - Fatebreaker

[Gideon]

Gideon was frustrated, as he often was in the moments leading up to his death. Aside from Rodeo turning into the demon that would kill him, nothing else had matched up to the dreams he had been having, which meant either he had misinterpreted his dreams or fate had changed so radically that the dream itself was no longer relevant or even accurate. He replayed the vision in his mind's eye on repeat, hoping to uncover some detail, a clue, anything he had missed.

He recalled Jack with an unhealed injury begging him to carry a mortally wounded Sarah to safety. How she felt in his arms, her veins black with corruption and her pulse rapidly fading.

He recalled running away, Jack promising to buy him time.

He recalled the pain he felt when Rodeo stabbed his claws through his chest…

…He recalled dropping Sarah…

…He recalled dying….

All of those were recollections yet to come.

Gideon had been hard pressed to believe there was anything on this floor that could overpower him, that could beat him, that could scare him even. Rodeo’s insanity had done all three. Over his long life he had seen well-laid plans come to fruition and more betrayals than he could recount. None of this should have been shocking to him, but Rodeo had taken the cake. True corruption takes time, the Tower guiding those inclined to evil as they clear through floors and climb its levels, slowly corroding minds and morals to provide challenges to those seeking heroic feats. Rodeo, however, had pulled off something truly impressive, if not truly evil.

And now Gideon was no longer the strongest one here.

He felt a cold, unfamiliar sweat run down his back as everyone looked to him for a plan. He honestly didn’t have much of one aside from getting the hell out of here. He would have left after his first clash with Xinnolath if he thought it would have done any good. More than once he had to push down the urge to simply grab Sarah and run.

That was the one thing he couldn’t do. If at any point he found himself picking up Sarah to leave then that all but assured his vision was coming true. Instead, he tried to provide what little hope he could.

“Everyone get ready. I’ll need you all to buy me some time.” He glanced around at the soldiers, counting up the ones who had sworn oaths to Rodeo, at least forty remained.

There wouldn’t be enough time, not for what he was planning at least.

“If he gets through half the people who have sworn an oath to him before I’m done, I’ll need you to buy me some time.” He exchanged a glance with Jack and Hannah, their morally gray backgrounds allowing them to interpret the real meaning of that statement and then put everyone out of his mind as he looked inward.

Radiant flames of gold danced in his core, but that wasn’t what he was looking towards. He instead focused a smaller portion of his core he had partitioned off. A small drop of mana burning brightly inside of himself.

He couldn’t help but grin as Jack complained, calling him a copycat. He was wrong though. Yes, he had tried to puzzle out just how it was that Jack’s core was capable of condensing mana in such a fashion, but he had been unsuccessful in solving that particular mystery.

Instead, he had devised a sort of workaround. He was purifying his mana.

It’s commonly known that mana becomes stronger, more pure the higher you climb. This was the reason that items and abilities can only reach a certain level of power on particular floors.

You could, however, purify the mana yourself. The techniques involved were a royal pain in the ass, as the process was long, arduous, and rarely worth the time and effort it took to pull off such a feat.

From the moment Gideon had set foot on the first floor, however, he dedicated a portion of his core to purifying his mana. Running it through filter after filter. Even after all that time, all he had to show was a singular drop of mana about the size of a coin. That drop, however, he estimated to have a potency of something beyond the fifteenth floor. It was stronger than anything he was accustomed to using, and in his weakened state here on the first floor, it was exceptionally difficult for him to control.

He doubted there existed anything on the first few floors that could survive coming into contact with this new power. He was banking on it, in fact.

He took one last glance at Rodeo powering up from another broken soul oath, and then fell into a deep trance as he began to pull the drop of mana from his core.

He had to move slowly, shape the mana carefully. It was just as likely to destroy him in his weakened state as it was anyone else. With slow, deliberate breaths he pulled the flames from his core and bore down on them. A small, slow trickle teamed out and he forced it into shape in his hand. A simple, if unassuming fireball that would obliterate anything it came into contact with. He wasn’t going to kill Rodeo. He was going to erase his existence entirely.

He would defy his death once more.

Gideon watched in delighted concentration as the orb began to form, drowning out the world around him as the power of the fireball grew and demanded more of his willpower to keep under control. He slowly shaped the ball of power, pulling everything from the tiny drop.

He breathed deeply as he had reached the halfway point, the fireball roughly the size of a fist. The heat it produced started to become unbearable, even for him.

That was when Rodeo took notice.

He tried to pull more, faster, but another fear took hold of his heart as Rodeo spoke.

“Oh. While the determination is admirable, I can’t let you hit me with whatever that is Gideon.” Rodeo’s gravelly, now discordant and demonic voice grated on his concentration, and he tried to ignore the man, sinking deeper into concentration as he pulled harder on the mana, letting it scorch his insides as he threw caution to the wind and abandoned his careful extraction of the drop opting instead for expedited completion.

Gideon felt several panicked emotions at the edges of his concentration despite attempts to block them out.. He looked up. Somehow, Sam was pinned to the ground by several black bars of iron, not a sound coming from him.

“KILL. THE. DRAGON,” Rodeo screamed in bloodlust as he slammed Hannah’s head into the ground. Gideon quickly found Jack.

The man’s back was facing him, and then he slowly turned around. Jack’s eyes weren’t hard. They weren’t angry. They weren’t scared. They were simply defeated. They were the eyes of the abused, the eyes of a man used to losing against their abuser. All willpower fled.

Rodeo had won out over the man.

Gideon’s mind began to race. Now he had Jack and Rodeo to contend with.

Jack had shown an uncharacteristic amount of careful restraint thus far, and Gideon knew he had several drops of mana primed and ready to go, all waiting for the perfect moment to launch his assault. He couldn’t waste this fireball on Jack. Then he would have nothing to deal with Rodeo.

He also knew that a fight with Jack was another wild card.

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In theory, he simply needed to neutralize his abilities, get him to use his mana drops, and then he could win.

In practice it wouldn’t be so simple. The man’s speed was unrivaled on the first floor. In addition to that, he fought like a storm. There were no patterns to follow, no forms, no techniques, just the violent, unrelenting strikes, like lightning, uncaring for what it destroyed.

If Jack attacked him, he would have no choice but to kill the man.

It was at that moment Sarah stood in his line of sight, her staff held at the ready to fend off Jack. She seemed to know he would attack.

Gideon stared at her back for what felt like an unending moment. She had chosen Jack. Gideon knew, even if she didn’t herself. He hadn’t been lying to her when he said he would wait, but that all seemed so foolish now. Break his curse by finding his soul mate? The Tower was no place for fairy tales. He couldn’t help but chuckle at the ridiculousness of it all.

“You could kill her,” Kaleidoscopes, the goddess of chaos whispered in his ear.

He felt his heart go cold as an unbidden memory suddenly resurfaced.

“Kill your soulmate, break your curse, and you will gain precognition, the power of the gods.”

He had abandoned that line of thinking the second he met Sarah. It was a trick. It had to be.

But she made you swear a soul oath, offering her an undisclosed favor. She wouldn’t make you do that only to lead you astray a moment later.

Of course she would! She’s the god of chaos!

She needs something from you. She wouldn’t doom you just like that.

Voices rang out in his head as the same circular argument played out in his head over and over again. That’s why he had buried it deep down. Whether it was, true or not, that argument in of itself was meant to cause chaos in his heart.

Jack fell into stance, and Gideon’s heart began to beat faster. Here it comes.

His mind went into overdrive trying to figure out how this moment would end up resulting in his vision.

“This whole fucking thing is my fault,” Jack had told him in the dream.

He lived the dream over and over again, carrying Sarah out of here. Rodeo stabbing him through the chest. Sarah falling to the ground.

Dying.

“You could kill her,” Kaleidoscope whispered again, her melodic voice branding the words onto his soul.

Gideon wasn’t sure if she was here watching, messing with him, or if he was just imagining things.

Was Sarah fated to die with him? That was a question he had never asked himself.

Even if he let his vision play out, how was he supposed to overcome his death, fend off Rodeo, AND rescue a clearly dying Sarah.

He stared at her back in consideration

Jack took a step forward.

And Gideon buried the fireball into her back.

It would be a quick, painless death. The flames consumed her and turned her to ash in less then a second. She likely never even processed what happened.

It was painless. It was painless. It was painless.

Gideon stared down at the pile of ashes that fell to the ground. He felt nothing.

No, that isn’t quite right. He felt something, but the something he felt was nothing. It was like a part of him had disappeared, and now all that remained was an empty void. It was a small part of his soul. Before this moment he would have sworn it to be an inconsequential part. However, he now felt incomplete without it.

He knew instantly he had made a mistake.

[You have broken The Curse of the Fatebreaker]

[You have received the ability of Precognition]

Precognition - Ability

[Celestial][Rare]

Grants the ability to see into the future.

*****

Eyes that pierce the veils of time, the gods wield precognition as their divine compass, navigating the currents of fate with unmatched grace.

In the depths of his despair, a smile began to form. The ability had been downgraded in rarity while he remained on the first floor, but it should still work.

Before Gideon could inspect the ability further, Jack was on top of him in a flash of power like a man possessed, his daggers lashed out viscously, one strike after the other. Gideon knew the man’s rage, knew the man’s fury. Yet he couldn’t hide his smile.

Jack moved like lightning, but Gideon could predict every single strike.

It wasn’t like Jack was moving in slow motion. He was moving faster than he had ever seen him, but Gideon knew where his daggers would land. With an almost comical simplicity, Gideon batted the strikes away one after the other. Gideon felt a scholarly excitement give rise as he tested the limits of his new ability. If the power was this strong on the first floor, he could only imagine how much stronger it would become once he mastered it fully.

Jack stopped his assault almost immediately, realizing he hadn’t landed a single strike. Gideon watched as the man took in a deep inhale, every ounce of tension bleeding out of his body.

Then Jack screamed.

It was a scream of such pure rage and utter despair that Gideon couldn’t help but shiver under the pressure. Jack’s speed had doubled as he launched his second assault. Gideon tried to meet the man's eye but his face was contorted into a remorseless, demonic fury. His eyes had rolled into the back of his head revealing only the whites. Gideon wasn’t even sure if he was conscious in his state of rage.

Jack's assault continued. When his frontal assault didn’t work, he moved to outflank Gideon, attacking from awkward angles both above and below. Gideon felt blood start to trickle from his eyes as he overtaxed his newly gained ability. To his surprise, he was only barely keeping up with Jack now. Even with precognition, he was having trouble with the man’s speed. He had been swept up in Jack's furious storm. He needed to end it quickly.

Jack launched a dagger at his skull, and Gideon read it perfectly. He moved his hand to knock the dagger out of his way. From there he would step in and deliver a blast to Jack’s chest and begin his own counteroffensive.

As Gideon moved to intercept the attack, he missed completely, and Jack’s dagger blew straight past his defenses.

Gideon saw the attack coming at him from the future. He read it with perfect precision. He knew where to place his hand, how to deflect the attack, but as he moved to defend, Jack seemed to push his speed even further. His daggers moving outside the bounds of the linear progression of time. Gideon had almost no time to react and managed only a slight tilt of his head. The tip of Jack’s dagger caught him on the cheek and ripped straight through the side of his face cutting his ear in half.

Gideon’s heart was pounding furiously at what his precognition saw next. Jack would land another blow. And then another. And then another. After he had cut Gideon to shreds, only then would he start using his drops of mana, lashing out with the bite of a furious black centipede.

Gideon watched these events unfold before him like a play on a stage. Somehow, even with the power to see into the future, he was going to die. He could see it clear as day.

Who…no… What is this man?

[The conditions of your first-floor access have been met. The Fatebreaker curse has been broken. Access to the first floor of humanity revoked.]

[You have been banished from the first floor of humanity.]

One second, he was facing his impending, undeniable death. The next he felt his feet touch the snowy peaks of the fifteenth floor.

He fell to his knees, his heart beating rapidly with the unknown fear of true death. He felt a maddening smile crawl onto his face.

He had defied his death once more.

Gideon felt at the side of his face where Jack had slashed his cheek. The deep cut burned with ferocity , but his body quickly began to reknit itself. He brought the healing to a halt, cradling the side of his face in his hand as his blood trickled through his fingers.

He took a deep breath in, pulling in the mana of the fifteenth floor. He slowly felt his stats rising, his body growing stronger. With each deep breath more of his power returned. He filled his ever-growing core with glorious golden flames. He clenched his teeth as the cut across his face cried out, desperate to be healed, yet he wouldn’t allow his body to patch it over. The scar would remain. A reminder that even the gods and their precognition aren’t invincible. Even he wasn’t invincible.

As his power grew, his muscles bulged, tearing at his skin. Golden scales climbed up his body and his bones broke and reshaped. A furious roar escaped his mouth as his jaw unhinged and his teeth sharpened. Wings ripped free from his back, and he took to the skies as the transformation consumed him.

His power came back to him like an old friend who had been waiting impatiently for his return.

Gideon commanded the skies a dragon of gold, the last of his kind.

He let loose a roar of flames that set the heavens themselves on fire, and he dove into the burning ocean, swimming through his flames as he let his power announce to the Tower he had returned.

He felt flares of power in all directions. Some welcoming back their king, others in outward defiance. He grinned a dragon’s grin and took off in their direction.

He had a floor to reclaim.