Surprisingly, the answer I needed didn’t need long to arrive. I was seeking pretty much the sa things that Master Kostis had said in his reply, but not here. Not right now. So what I said wasn’t a lie at all.
“I want—” I cleared my throat and spoke louder. Firr. “I want to free the Councillor from whatever you’ve done to her.”
“Is that so? For what reason?”
“Because I ca here to stop the Blight Swarm without having to sacrifice anyone, and if there’s anything I can do to stop an unneeded death, then I won’t hesitate.”
We stood and stared at each other for a long ti. Maybe I should have been soothed by the fact that the Paragon wasn’t imdiately trying to obliterate like he had tried to do with Kostis. I couldn’t relax, though. Not in front of a man who could wipe out of existence with hardly a thought.
“Without sacrificing anyone, eh?” he mused. “Does that include yourself?”
I really didn’t get this guy. The way he was questioning everyone about their wants, I figured he was trying to judge who should be spared his malice. Since, apparently, he had been sent here by sothing or other to judge everything in the vicinity.
For a second, I had started to think that replying with an answer that was seemingly selfless would put in the clear, but of course, that was shallow thinking.
I shook my head. “I said I won’t hesitate to do what’s needed. I’ve Sacrificed a lot. Even parts of myself. Literally. If that’s what’s needed now, then…” I grinned. “I’ve got practice.”
“I see. Then how about this?” He held out his hand like he was offering a deal I’d be stupid to refuse. “I will release this Councillor of yours. In return, I’ll take one small part of you with .”
“And you’ll leave after?” I asked. “You won’t return what you took only to destroy and kill us all in the next mont?”
“Believe , interloper, I am not one to go back on my word. I do hate liars, and I am not in the business of hating myself. So what will it be? Are you ready to surrender what you hold dear to get what you want? Isn’t that what sacrificing is really all about?”
I considered it for a second. “That depends on what you’ll be taking.”
“True. It always depends, doesn’t it?” It was the Paragon’s turn to consider for a few monts. “How about I take a leg?”
I did my best not to show any reaction, but I felt my soul shrivel. There was no reason for to accept. Well, there hadn’t been to begin with. Was losing a leg worth the life of Se-Vigilance? Did I care that much about a woman I had interacted with only a handful of tis? Was I biased in favour of this sacrificial exchange because we’d had friendly, positive etings?
Because if it had been soone else, soone innocent but soone I didn’t know, would I imdiately reject this deal?
Once again, I was reminded of the ti I had been summoned here against my will. Of the ti I had allowed Escinca to die, Sacrificing his very heart to gain the power I needed to defeat my foe. Of the ti I had ripped open Tural’s chest, beat him to a pulp, traumatized him for who knows how long.
I wasn’t regretting any of that right now. It wasn’t that regret didn’t exist for them. Rather, now wasn’t the ti for regret.
No. Now was the ti I realized each and every single one of those instances were all sacrifices too.
Willing or unwilling, coerced or otherwise, every mont that the Heart Demon had used to assault was when I had given sothing up. Wasn’t that the essence of Sacrifice? I had given up my past ho, given up the life of the one who had possessed more faith in than even I had, given up my own moral compunctions as the circumstances had demanded.
In the face of all that, what the fuck was a single leg worth?
I stood resolute. “Deal,” I said.
A blue tattoo writhed off the Paragon’s shoulder to drip down to the ground, before slithering over to . Bile rose up my gullet and my whole body was screaming at to run. To get away. To decline the offer while I still had ti and save my leg before—
The navy energy spread around my foot, then curled up my leg until everything beneath the knee was encased in a cast of glowing azure energy.
I placed the top of my hand in my mouth, gritting my teeth against the skin and at there. “And the rest?”
“Fear not, interloper. The very first person I told the words don’t lie to was myself.”
His threads, enormous, blisteringly bright, bulging with power, thundered out from his body. A storm of the huge writhing blue tendrils twisted and warped everywhere. My eyes went wide. He had unleashed them all. The Paragon was returning everything he had seemingly consud.
“What—?”
My question didn’t even fully materialize, especially when I didn’t even hear myself over the din of energy. Especially when the thick thread encasing my leg pulled away.
With my leg in tow.
The agony turned my whole world red. I scread hard enough to rip my own vocal cords as I chomped bloodily down on my hand, using the only remaining bit of my consciousness not focused on the pure torture of losing a leg on Sacrifice.
[ Sacrifice
You have Sacrificed 1 [Minor] Experience of Pain. Windfall bonus activated.
Reward: Pain Sense Control: Modifiable threshold of pain sense by up to 4x for 4 hours ]
You could be reading stolen content. Head to for the genuine story.
The shock that almost made black out went down imdiately as I pushed my Sacrifice reward to its maximum threshold. No pain. After what the Paragon did to , to my leg, even if it had been for re seconds, I never wanted to feel agony ever again.
Of course, the reality wasn’t so cushy and ideal. The pain wasn’t completely gone. My leg was what was fucking gone, a small waterfall of blood erging from where it had been. But I couldn’t focus on it. Not when the bastard Paragon hadn’t just released the Councillor but had vomited out every single thing he had eaten since arriving here.
And his threads were still going wild, lashing out at everything, destroying the Nether Vein itself with his insane power.
“You still stand!” the Paragon said. I couldn’t tell if he was amused or amazed. Or both. “The more I see of you, the more I understand why you of all people are here. Why you stand before while all others are gone. Why you were the ss I was supposed to clean up.”
“You promised,” I said through gritted teeth. “You said you would—”
“You don’t have to remind , interloper. I know what I promised. I said I’d let your precious burden go. Which I have. I also promised to leave afterwards, so I shall.”
His eyes almost lazily flickered to where my leg was gone. “Fair fortune to you doing the sa.”
And then, he disappeared. Just like that. The threads retracted back into him in the space of a couple of heartbeats, and space itself seed to compress upon him before he was gone. There was no trace of him left at all. I knew he was gone because I couldn’t sense that oppressive aura any longer. That incredible, overwhelming pressure wasn’t trying to crush into fleshy putty anymore.
I wanted to take a few monts to centre myself. The sheer shock of losing a limb like that was making my thoughts terribly sluggish. I needed to co to terms with it.
But the Nether Vein was collapsing. The world was falling apart. I had to act.
My mind was turning woozier by the second. The only reason I was still standing was because I had used Gravity to staunch the blood flow. With the wonder of Pain Sense Control, my mind was still mine despite my horrific wound, letting keep my body light with Siphon while I combined it with Field Manipulation to keep the debris from falling on .
Siphon was also vastly reducing the blood loss, but it wouldn’t last forever.
Although I did keep my eye on one “debris”. The Councillor had been spat out at so point pretty far from . I saw her land in a heap, glimring blood pooling around her body.
The sight made curse. Was she even alive? Had I really sacrificed a whole leg just to drag a corpse back to Zairgon?
If we even made it out of the collapsing Nether Vein. The lightness via Siphon was all that helped get to the fallen Councillor as fast as I did. I wasn’t even maintaining any semblance of balance or posture on one leg, especially not when every little motion was causing vicious pain to lance up the remainder of my limb in an effort to paralyze my whole body.
It would have been so much worse if I hadn’t had Pain Sense Control.
A quick second Field Manipulation on my gloved hand was what got to Se-Vigilance. She was a real ss. I couldn’t even begin to tell if she was alive, and I certainly wasn’t about to waste ti trying to find a pulse or sothing. For all I knew, Se-Targa biology didn’t even have the pulse points I was familiar with from human bodies.
All I did just then was pull up Se-Vigilance onto my shoulder. That was all the ti I had. Even though the bugs that had been consud by the Paragon were dead, they were still raining down all over the area.
Then there was the Nether Vein’s entire chamber crumbling around us. Chunks of tal tore off the cavern’s walls and ceiling to crash onto the similarly tallic floor with deafening clangs.
Field Manipulation with Siphon was preventing anything within my vicinity from collapsing right on top of . Once they were caught in the artificial anti-gravity field, their plumt slowed, allowing to forge onwards in relative peace. Peace I needed because hopping forward with one leg while the stump of the missing one bled out wasn’t exactly easy.
I was starting to curse my lack of real choices. The ideal option would have been to get down, tie up my leg to fully stop the bleeding, then keep moving.
As it was, I just focused on carrying the possibly-dead Councillor along while I tried to use Granular Control to drag a makeshift prosthetic of tal to my bleeding stump. No doubt it was suprely unhealthy, but it wasn’t like I had ti to waste.
Despite my best efforts, the blood loss was starting to target my consciousness. If I didn’t get out in ti, not only would Se-Vigilance die, but so would I. Screw that Paragon’s eyeballs with a rusty fork.
It wasn’t surprising at all that I collapsed. I had managed to create a weird peg-leg with the tal particles pulled free from the floor, but it hadn’t been enough. Not surprising. I had no practice in healing, in using my powers creatively to do dical things such as staunching blood flows or cauterizing wounds or whatever it was.
All that had kept going for this long was the fact that the direction of blood loss was straight downwards, so I could manipulate gravity to vastly reduce the flow.
I forced my body to float, forced Field Manipulation with Siphon to keep airborne while little blasts of Flare with its Concentration Affix kept and my burden moving forward. It was harder when I had to carry soone significantly larger than .
But the fact that I couldn’t lighten the Councillor directly was actually good. It ant she was still alive. I wasn’t dragging a corpse along with .
For all that I was ready for chunks of the ceiling crashing down on , what I hadn’t thought about was the floor giving way. It cracked, and my panicked, pain-riddled, barely conscious brain really couldn’t do anything more than just curse the Paragon yet again. Because as the floor broke, Field Manipulation shattered as well, ruining my artificial field of repulsive force.
The first tal chunk that crashed into and the Councillor sent us painfully plumting into the void that had opened up under the Nether Vein’s broken floor. What in the world was this thing made over?
But we only fell for perhaps a few seconds—during which I had scread my lungs out, naturally—before our descent slowed down. A warm, prismatic glow enveloped and Se-Vigilance. Feathers that looked like they were made of pearls criss-crossed around us in a little protective cage. I forgot to breathe for a second as I watched her powers put a stop to our fall.
“Rest easy, Interpreter Moreland,” Se-Vigilance said. “You’ve done more than enough.”
“I almost thought you were dead,” I wheezed out. The words ca with difficulty. My mind was really starting to rebel against the oppressive, agonizing consciousness I was forcing upon it. “Or close enough.”
I tried to look up at her bleeding, broken form and see for myself if she really was alive. Well, she was since we were talking, but my pain-delirious brain didn’t want to believe it easily.
“Close enough, but not quite,” she said. Then she laughed. “I had not expected my first eting with a Paragon to be so overly climactic for .”
I recalled the brief talks we’d had about things like the Nether Vein and the Ascendants. I wondered if she was disappointed that it was now rather obvious how these people could have been responsible for the lack of a sun, for the missing rain and wind and warmth, for all the plants and animals and prosperity Epheroth would never see again.
Then the pain hit again. A violent flash of agony worming up my leg, numbness following soon after. It was almost scary.
“I cannot heal you,” Se-Vigilance said as we began floating back upwards. Debris was still raining on us, but her Jade-ranked cage was more than a match. “But I can put your body in a stasis that will staunch the flow of blood. At least until a real healer can get to you. So you need not worry. Just give in. You can trust . After all, I owe you my life.”
I fought back against the call of darkness for a bit. Se-Vigilance was right. If I could trust her, then I didn’t need to keep struggling. But then, it looked like the Weave had decided I had done enough too.
[ Rank Up!
Your Vitality Attribute has risen by one Rank.
Vitality: Gold III ]
Ah, alright. Now I could let temporary oblivion claim . Especially since the scaly, winged bastard who had abandoned against the Paragon had finally returned to help carry us back.
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