224 (II)

Fire

Dense fingers of smoke curled around his eyes, but with a wave of his hand, he cleaved an opening into the obfuscation.

He was inside a study of some kind. There was a glass wall to his left, a burning door to his right, and in front of him, lying upon the pieces of a splintered table, was a weakly groaning girl with a horrific set of burns trailing down her lower back and left leg.

Just a few steps away from her stood a tall, thin figure who was breathing heavily, breaking chunks of frost off his body with his hands.

His features were hidden by a molten mask, and it gleamed brightly, as if it had just been pulled out of a forge. The rest of the man's body was shrouded by smoke and ash as well, and a trilling chain of spell patterns connected him to the exposed metal supports jutting out from the ceiling of the room. He coiled the pattern around his finger as if a man tightening a chain, turning it into a ball, and with a sudden rush of power, the room grew brighter as well.

"You stupid little bitch," the man hissed. "If only you'd stayed—" His words came to a halt as he finally noticed the intruder for the first time, and as soon as he did, Shiv's body flashed white as the Hidden World Quest notification activated.

"You start this fire?" Shiv grunted.

"Who the hells—"

"I asked you: Did you start this fire?" Shiv said calmly, his urge to commit extreme violence hidden.

A slight chain of fear flowed from the man to Shiv, and he seemed surprised. It didn't last. He slashed out with a cutting gesture, and a wave of splitting heat whipped through the air, the spell tearing across the room in a fraction of a fraction of a second.

It might as well have been crawling through mud when it came to Shiv. His Inertial Overdrive Skill roared with a violent fervor. Shiv didn't bother dodging. He shattered the spell with a jab, and then he was on the Pyromancer.

The man flinched back, stunned that his magic had been undone so casually, and barely able to react to the Deathless's sudden encroachment. He pulled out a saber from thin air, the blade manifesting in a surge of Pyromancy. The denseness of the man's field revealed itself right then, and it shaped itself into a layer of molten plate around his body.

Ah, Heroic-Tier, Shiv thought derisively. I'm so felling scared. What am I going to even do with you?

The man aimed an arcing cut at Shiv. He barely got to move his arm before Shiv drove a descending elbow down on his left shoulder. A loud snap echoed through the room, and the Pyromancer screamed. His molten armor burst apart in a spray of ash and shattering alloy. His fire-forged sword fell from his hand and dissipated. He tried to shape another blade using the molten substance of his armor, but then Shiv slammed his left hand on the back of the man's head and established a collar tie.

A blast of force and clashing mana rippled through the room as Shiv clubbed the back of the Pyromancer's head. The spell chain connecting the man to the mana flowing through the building sputtered out, and the Deathless focused his tides. He bade them to collapse inward around the man's head, and the Pyromancer's helmet shattered like rotten wood greeted by a falling axe.

Revealed beneath the blazing alloy was a man Shiv didn't recognize. He screamed as pieces of glinting metal embedded themselves into his flesh. The scream was cut off as Shiv slammed a knee into his testicles, bursting both. He bent down to vomit. Shiv spiked his head through the ground, offering him the bliss of unconsciousness instead.

As the Pyromancer went still in the rubble, every flame engulfed in the building suddenly cut out. Thereafter, all that remained were rising waves of dust and steam. Shiv looked about, trying to sense if any fire still lingered. None did.

He swept his mana hydra through the building once more. He froze time, waiting, using every moment he could to heal even more people. But the moment he did, a few more vitality signatures winked out. A thought passed through Shiv's mind, an enticing thought, for him to put his foot down and simply pulp the man's skull. He decided against it. He wanted to know why someone would burn down an entire dorm and, more importantly, why he was trying to kill this girl specifically.

Looks like we got someone else we need to interrogate, he thought to himself. He directed his Aegis of Assimilation and coiled a hydra head around the man's body. He fused a layer of flesh around the Pyromancer, sculpting him within a cocoon. The biomass was harvested from Shiv's homunculus, and it likely wouldn't stand up to a sudden surge of Heroic-Tier Pyromancy, but Shiv would leave the man in Helix's charge.

In the meantime, he had a building to keep standing, at least until all the students were evacuated. As another wave of counter-Chronomancy arrived, Shiv deactivated his temporal shell and reached out using his Biomancy. He ripped the wounds away from the downed girl nearby, and he slammed both hands into the wall to his right. He didn't need to focus on the fire anymore, but the smoke was also lethal.

Shiv closed his eyes, ignored the world, ignored all sounds, all senses, even Helix's complaining. He directed his vectors, sent them swimming all the way up to the very top of the building, passing through broken strips of rebar, melted matter, and the shaking, coughing bodies of students. Then, with a sudden twist of kinetic energy, they activated. They ripped the floor of the dorm room asunder, allowing the blackness choking the air to billow free up into the night sky.

Multi-Tasking 42 43

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With that feat, he earned another level in Multi-Tasking and reduced the number of fatalities that were to follow. But many had already perished. A heaviness fell upon Shiv. This entire thing had been a senseless slaughter.

A groan sounded from the downed girl, and Shiv quickly reached down and tossed the Pyromancer into his cape.

"Watch him while you keep the students alive," Shiv barked. "If he does anything, knock him out. Do not kill him. We're going to have to talk to him in a minute. He's the one that started the fire."

"Oh, good, a Hero." Helix chuckled from within the cape. "Another volunteer for our lessons."

The Deathless reached into his cape with his free hand and pulled out his Mask of Stolen Paths again. He slammed it on his head after his helmet unlatched itself, and his Perfect Semblance triggered just in time for the coughing girl to lift her head. She looked up, blinking through the blurry haze of dissipating smoke. She didn't see Shiv. Instead, in his place stood one Marcus Unblood, who seemed as uncertain and terrified as she did.

Marcus leaned hard against the walls, and his legs were quivering. He didn't know if he was putting up too much of an act, but it was best to exaggerate in times like these, to make up for deficiencies in his skill.

Acting 16 17

"Ah, what… what happened?" The girl rubbed at her face. Despite the fire, her hair and body seemed mostly untouched. Waves of strange cold radiated out from her, and she seemed like a spot of snow amidst a garden claimed by soot. Her skin, her hair, even her lips were unnaturally pale. She was of whiteness that stung Shiv's eyes to look at. She was beyond albino. If you had to compare her to something, it would be the pieces of the broken moon drifting in the sky above. She reminded him a bit of Uva.

"There was a fire," Shiv stammered, playing up Marcus's shock. "A big fire engulfed your dorm, and I saw you... You fell over, and I pulled you here, so that you didn't get burned. Wouldn't—w-wouldn't get burned."

She blinked at him, and her eyes flashed brightly, the color of an all-encompassing winter. Something about that made Shiv think of… Andra. The coldness in the room grew exponentially. A wave of visible Cryomancy erupted from the girl, and sprawling tendrils of ice began to coil through the flame-eaten space.

She looked around, her breath hitching, her heart rate accelerating. "Where... where is he? He was..."

"Where's who?" Shiv said, playing dumb. "There was no one following me. I didn't see anyone. There was someone... He probably got swallowed by the flames. It was... it was pretty bad."

The girl stared at him, and there was a flicker in her eyes; confusion, a hint of disbelief.

Not that good at this, am I? Shiv thought to himself.

But then the girl shook herself and rose from the floor. The ceiling above her groaned, and part of it broke apart, metal and concrete buckling under the dorm's succumbing weight.

"We need to get out of here," she said. "This is... The building's going to come down."

"The notification says we're to shelter in place."

"We can't!" the girl cried aloud. "He's still after me! I need to... We both need to leave before he finds us!"

"Who?" Shiv almost shouted. "Listen, you're clearly in shock. Let's just... Let's just wait for campus security to arrive. They'll be here any moment."

The girl tried to get up, but she groaned and nearly fell over. "I don't have any time! I can't stay—they found me! And we can't trust them! They're compromised!"

"Who's compromised?" Shiv's curiosity was piqued. Just his luck that he managed to stumble at first into another conspiracy. He thought about his Non-Sequitur skill, how it didn't give him any vision for this. Now, you're being real selective, aren't you, System?

Then he paused as he considered the possibility that this wasn't his strife or quest, that he might have ended up stumbling into this girl simply by pure coincidence, or because she was also favored in a way. That seemed just as likely as anything else by this point.

Just then, he saw more life signatures blinking out all around. For a moment, Shiv felt dismayed; he thought they were dying. But with the rapid pace they were vanishing, and then suddenly reappearing in the far distance of his Vitaemancy's awareness, he realized they were being teleported out. The Deathless paused, and played the role of terrified, shell-shocked student in anticipation of the Jump Mages' arrival.

Not three seconds later, a crushing pressure filled the room, and three heavily armed Pathbearers suddenly appeared. A wave of water crashed down, hammering both Shiv and the mystery girl, who nearly dropped to the ground from the pressure. Then they were grabbed, and Shiv barely cut his Shapeless Tides in time for the next jump.

"We got him!" one of the academy militia members cried out. "Go, go, go!"

And not a second after, the building began crumbling down, everything inside it folding inward without Shiv holding it up, who felt himself get swallowed and pulled along a narrow spatial tunnel. A few moments later, he burst back into existence and was flung out onto a lawn. Here, hundreds of students gasped and wept. Most of them were still clad in their nightwear, and others were wrapped only in towels.

A sizable contingent of the student body and a few hundred Poly-Magi hovered in the air. A massive spell was being shaped. The coiling strands of a complex Hydromancy spell turned and twisted, forming the shape of a large storm cloud. A second after, a concentrated deluge followed, blasting only the badly incinerated Dragon Dorm. It was too late to do anything, and as the rain fell, the structure succumbed entirely, crashing down in a massive cloud of dust and debris. It reminded him of a picture he'd seen in a book once: the bleached bones of a long-decayed whale, lying dead against a cliffside.

He looked on, speechless and dissatisfied, as the crumbling structure cast a final plume of dust and ash high up into the air, clashing against the falling pour of rain. He felt members from the campus militia pull at him, their berets poking into his peripheral vision, their questions incessant. Someone offered him a jug of water. Shiv took it and poured it over his head rather than drinking it. Couldn't anyway, with his helmet closed.

A sniffle sounded to his left, and he slowly turned, seeing the all-white girl clutching the sides of her head. She was crying and shaking. She ignored the academy militia's attempts to pull her away. On her lips was a repeated phrase: "It's all my fault... It's all my fault..."

Shiv wanted to ask her what was her fault, but he decided against it. Not right now, not when she was still unstable, and not when other people could hear them.

A blaring sound filled the air, and a moment later, a telepathic broadcast swept across the campus.

Attention all students of Phoenix Academy. Please avoid the Dragon Dorm. We repeat: please avoid the Dragon Dorm. The crisis is still considered to be ongoing. Surviving students of the Dragon Dorm, please proceed to your nearest aid station. Students with Biomancy and or surgical expertise, please make yourselves known. Repeat: please make yourselves known.

"Never a crisis without an opportunity," Shiv muttered to himself. Looks like I'm about to get an early peek into what Medic-301 is like.