eurekapd 155 (IV) Tarrasque
155 (IV) Tarrasque
155 (IV)Tarrasque
Once more, Shiv felt a surge of Biomancy pass through him. His flesh healed long enough for him to stand, long enough for him to realize what the Tarrasque was preparing to do. It brought a fist down against him, and through it all, it never stopped channeling its beam of Biomancy into his body.
The Tarrasque swung so hard that the air turned fluid with plasma around it. It would have been enough to disintegrate him entirely if it weren't constantly healing him as well. Because of that, Shiv got to learn what it felt like to burn alive from the inside, to be boiled and fried over and over again, but prevented from dying fully in an endless spiral.
Worse, he felt Blackedge dip as the wards held, but the spells and contraptions keeping it afloat did not. The air resounded with a deafening explosion, but then came the screaming wind as the entire town began to drop toward the chasm, bound for the Abyss.
“Shit…” Shiv groaned. He gritted his teeth and fought on anyway.
He lashed out using his Biomancy field. It crashed against the Tarrasque's face once more—and did nothing. It drew another fist back and showed him a contemptuous sneer. Shiv felt a special kind of hatred for the beast bloom inside him, for it stole not only his Vitae, but also his face. He spat at it. It didn't matter if the act was insolent or that he'd never reach it with his spit anyway. He spat at the Tarrasque even if it was the last thing he would ever do. "Alright then, give me a proper hit, you big—”
It obliged him.ernity. By the end, he found himself lying halfway up a staircase of cracked stone.
Strings of mucus leaked out from his nose, and blood dripped out from his mouth as he rolled over.
Then, as he looked down upon the ground, in a surreal moment of clarity, he realized he'd lain on these very steps once before.
Shiv choked out something between a pained sob and a disbelieving laugh.
Life probably thought it was being real funny right now. Shiv just thought it was kind of an asshole.
He'd looked towards Starhawk's Perch. Roland Arrow wasn't going to be able to save him. Not like that time. Shiv hoped beyond hope that Adam had fled with the others as Shiv and Uva kept the Tarrasque busy.
No one could save them. No one here, at least.
Shiv thought.
He pushed himself off the ground and glared at the Tarrasque. He spat red on the ground and scoffed. Force wasn’t working, so it was time for a new strategy: Psychology.
"So I guess you're a little too good to kill me with your own hands, huh, Sullain? Now that I mention it, do you even have your own hands anymore? Do you even have a real body at all?" Shiv laughed. “Or did Roland take that from you too?”
The Tarrasque's eyes widened. The beast stared at him with utter disbelief.
"Because I get to tell you to go fuck yourself," Shiv rasped as he took an agonizing step forward. "Because I don't know any other way. It doesn't matter that it's hopeless. It never mattered. I'm here right now, and so I'll do whatever it takes. I'll do whatever I can."
And the one thing Shiv didn't mention was that he was doing all that he could to stall for time. Because there might just be help on the way. The massive envelope of destruction left over from when Roland's great arrow clashed against the Tarrasque's falling form continued to block the sky. Below the cloud of devastation, Shiv saw shapes glittering in the air, coming into existence with bursts of teleportation. And to his dismay, what he saw were Necrotech Pathbearers. They appeared in the sky and above the Tarrasque in their thousands upon thousands.
As if he hadn't been fucked enough already.
The Tarrasque turned slightly but mostly ignored its allies. More Necrotechs began to blink into Blackedge. They emerged from pockets, from spilling waves of Dimensionality. They glared at Shiv as he staggered toward the Tarrasque. His fists were clenched, and he was just waiting for the great beast to strike him again.
But it didn't. It hesitated.
And Shiv continued. "Okay, so all of you..." He waved his hands at the Necrotechs. "All of you crawled out of the Abyss… just to burn this specific town down, yeah?" He looked upon the gathered army with scorn, and he spat a globule of blood in their direction. "But what the hells did this town do to you? Roland Arrow? Him? Okay, fine. I get that." He turned in the direction of Starhawk's Perch and snorted. "But I probably have more grievances with Roland Arrow than most of you do. If anyone's going to be kicking his ass, it would be me at the top of his list."
Several of the death-armored Necrotechs looked at each other, surprised by his words more than offended. A scornful laugh escaped the Tarrasque.
the Vicar whispered.
"My life!" Shiv shouted. "My entire life! I lived here, yet I was barely a person. So what? You lost a city? You lost loved ones? Yeah, they're gone. They don't suffer anymore. I have known nothing but the heel of Roland Arrow—pressed just hard enough to hold me down, but not hard enough to end my misery. Your punishment was death. My punishment was life. I lived it, and yet here I am, standing up for it!"
Shiv knew he was being absolutely outrageous. He knew that his grievances were practically nothing compared to theirs, the Necrotechs who had likely lost families and loved ones to whatever atrocity Roland had inflicted upon their city for reasons Shiv couldn't begin to grasp. That part had always stuck out to Shiv. Even if he hated the Town Lord, the man had never struck him as someone who would burn a city to the ground. But that didn't matter at this moment. What mattered right now was that, since he couldn't beat them through force, maybe he could capture their attention for just a while longer. And this was where his experience with the orcs finally came in handy. Not because of violence, but just because of power plays.
Psychology 34 > 42
Sullain sputtered, and then he let out a disgusted breath.
Shiv felt his bowels plummet. "No," he said, with all the conviction he could muster. "Just think about it. I'm still here for one reason and one reason alone: I'm not going to let anyone kick the shit out of Roland Arrow before I do. Me!" He slammed his fist into his chest. "I don't care what he did to the rest of you, but I know this for a fact. Blackedge…”
Shiv swallowed as he looked around, at the streets he'd known all his life, at the people hiding within the stripped-down buildings. He saw faces caked in blood and dust. Some he recognized, most he'd never bothered to remember. But they knew him, and strings of fear flowed into his flesh as well, feeding him with strength, infusing his magic with more power. It wasn't nearly enough to stop the Tarrasque, but it did make him feel a little bit better.
"I hate most of the people here," Shiv said honestly. His words were barely a whisper. "I hate almost all of you. For everything you did to me, and everything you didn't. For treating me like I was a goddamn plague, I despise you, and I think I always will."
Shiv saw several of the locals look away from him.
"But just because I hate them doesn't mean they deserve to die." He looked at Sullain. "If you weren't full of shit, if you were being honest at all, then you would let these people go. You'd teleport them somewhere else, move them to the ruins below, and deal with Roland by himself. Because he’s the one who sinned.”
Sullain hissed. There was an edge of outrage to his voice now.
“Yeah, I know,"Shiv interrupted him audaciously. "Yeah, when Roland sacked your city, he killed countless billions of people. But just how much do you want him to rule over you?”
The Tarrasque fell silent once more. No one else spoke. The Necrotechs looked at him as if he were mad, and Shiv noticed a look of appreciation on Uva’s weary face.
"Well, how much? Tell me. Because right now, it looks to me that he scarred you so deeply that you will never let it go. That you can't turn away from the fact that everything he took from you will never come back."
Sullain whispered.
"And here you are, in your moment of triumph. And guess what your reward is? You made yourself into a mirror of Roland Arrow. Great fucking job, dumbshit. What a prize.”
Psychology 42 > 45
And the Tarrasque began whipping him once more. He was launched through the air and slammed down on the ground over and over again. His flesh was torn open. His flesh was used back shut. For ten minutes, or maybe just ten seconds, he was brutalized. For ten seconds, he prayed for death. And at the end of those ten seconds, he got back up, like nothing had happened. "So, as I was saying—”
He was ripped off the ground by a tug of Dynamancy. He hovered in the air, trying not to black out as the Tarrasque choked him with its ocean of magic.
Sullain’s voice was edged with hurt rather than actual hatred.
Then, two voices interrupted the vicar. The first was Valor’s as the Legendary Pathbearer emerged from Shiv’s cloak and raised a ghostly hand. “Sullain! You blind, ignorant fool! Stop this!”
And the other—
“OI, CUNT! LET MY FUCKING COMMIS GO!”
Shiv’s head snapped toward the voice, and his jaw dropped. Standing a hundred meters away, at the end of Minhall Avenue, where the stairs rose to the upper city, was a man in chef’s whites. His messy mane of dirty blonde hair was even more wild than before, and his cheeks were slimmer than Shiv remembered. But his face was red. Raw-red and . And he advanced on the Tarrasque with nothing but a chef’s knife.
Sullain hissed with surprise.
“Georges!” Shiv gasped.
And just then, all at the same time, the dark clouds above were silently parted by a . Shiv blinked up at the sky, and he thought that the shape loosely resembled a sword. One that was the size and width of a mountain range.
“Ohhh, shit,” Shiv groaned. “Sullain. Look up!”
Sullain said. Two tentacles extended out from the Tarrasque’s body, prepared to seize both Valor and Georges.
“BY THE GREAT ONE!” a Necrotech cried, pointing up into the air. “It's—”
And his breath caught in his throat as a colossal humanoid burst through the clouds just behind the blade, clad in Inertium armor and standing upon wheels of screaming flame.
Hawgrave’s voice lost any hint of lackadaisy as she noticed the massive beast looming over Blackedge. And Sullain snarled as he noticed her as well.
And then came a third voice.
A voice Shiv knew all too well.
A voice that came not from the sky, but from the Abyss deep below.
The Deathless felt his jaw drop. The Tarrasque’s expression was much the same.
Then, suddenly and without warning, teleportation pockets exploded all across Blackedge as a horde of gray-skinned monsters flashed into existence and immediately leaped at the Necrotech army.
“SECURE THE INSUL!” Bonk cried through the havoc. “AND KILL THAT CHALLENGER-BLESSED TARRASQUE!”
World Quest Gained: Slay the Undying Tarrasque.