175 (IV)
Escape
Adam had no idea what the hells she was talking about, but he decided to respond by firing an arrow directly into her face. The Veilpuercer crashed against her chin, but rather than impacting her in any way, it splashed into her skin and glided along her body, becoming as if a tattoo itself.
And just then, Adam realized he might be dealing with something a bit more than just Heroic. Oh, good felling shit.
The nightmarish elven Pathbearer gave him a smirk and slammed him back-first against the nearest wall. Two things happened to Adam then. His shoulder shattered, and he leveled up in Toughness again.
Repulsion Shroud 100 > 101 (Skill Evolution Reached)
Skill Evolution: Repulsion Shroud (Adept) > Phoenix Riposte (Heroic)
A choked cry turned into a resounding shout of surprise as Adam felt his body combust. He was suddenly consumed by a rush of force, and a lightness took hold of him. A lightness as if he were a feather dancing in the wind. And then he was moving fast. The world twisted around him, and instinct took hold. He knew there was a lot of force resting inside him, derived from his injury—a great deal of weight he needed to impart on something else before time ran out. And so Adam did.
He launched himself directly into the elven Pathbearer that was holding him and let out a vicious shriek. Instead of hearing his own voice, the sound of a hawk echoed through the air, and Adam slammed into the elf, not as a person, but as a comet of falling flame.
A blast followed, a blast of force and fading ash. The elf was driven back a step, and Adam's cracked shoulder became a large bruise instead. It still hurt, but rather than being a jagged, stabbing pain, it was simply a throbbing ache. The combustion faded from Adam's body, and soon, weight returned to him as well. He stood before the stunned enemy and took advantage of her surprise.
He jammed a fist against her face and winced as his knuckle cracked. Once more, his body came ablaze, but the intensity was lesser, and he realized the time he could burn was far shorter as well. The moment he came alight, he began returning to his physical form again. But Adam didn't let that opportunity go, driving himself against the elf, and the impact that had cracked one of his knuckles simply became a bruise once more. This time, the elven Pathbearer wasn't driven back, but she was still startled. And Adam began to get the hang of his new skill evolution.
New plan, he decided. He clapped the elven Pathbearer across her left ear, not physically, but using a brief pulse of Necromancy. A splash of corrosive mana disfigured the rim of the elven Pathbearer's ear, and she let out a cry of alarm.
At the same time, Adam fired an arrow straight down and plunged through a dimensional pathway using his vector wings to accelerate even faster. He emerged from the wall right behind him and snatched the Raven out from the elven Pathbearer's grasp. The serpents, distracted just like their master was, gave little struggle as Adam slashed through them using a hydrokinetic blade.
Yet his evolution and momentary cunning granted him barely more than a second of breathing room. The elven Pathbearer was still far greater than he was, a Hero in Reflexes if he had to guess. By all rights, she should have cut him down. By all rights, the many snakes that infused her body should have lashed through the air and shredded him down to mincemeat and bloody mist.
Before she could do anything, however, a splash of black static emerged behind her, and a hand was driven through her chest. Suddenly, the snakes extending from her being splashed down, becoming nothing more than droplets of water. The elven Pathbearer groaned, and she stared at the appendage jutting free from her chest.
What it clutched, however, wasn't a heart, but what seemed to be a porous, pulsating hive with strange, wriggling creatures akin to insects crawling along its surface. Adam thought they resembled snakes as well, but they had feathers at the end instead of scaly tails.
The creatures looked up at the elf and let out a vicious cry. The noise was thin like a whistle, but it was bad enough that it gave Adam a nosebleed. The elven Pathbearer clutched at the arm jutting free from her, trying to pull it free, but then another hand joined the first, and a moment later, she was ripped in half. Both sides of her corpse impacted the far walls as Adam kept flying.
He caught sight of the figure from earlier. It was a tall Pathbearer clad in black, static armor. He wielded a massive scythe-like blade that also doubled as a great bow, and Adam recognized this enemy. This Pathbearer was the one that knocked both him and the Raven off track when they were trying to escape through the anchor. "Shit," Adam hissed again. “Godsdammit, System, just give me—”
The new Pathbearer vanished in a swell of black static. It was only instinct and guesswork that kept Adam from being knocked unconscious. He pointed his vector wings straight down, and a fist cut through the air where he used to be. The dimension-piercing Pathbearer emerged a good meter above Adam, and he let out an audible curse as he missed his swing. Adam cried out in panic. He was about to say something else when the hostile Pathbearer accelerated into him.
Adam let out a cry as he was driven down against the floor, and once more, his Phoenix Riposte activated. The enemy Pathbearer couldn't hold onto him. Adam swirled around the man's body and slammed into him one more time. He got a new bruise from the experience and fired two Veilpiercers straight into his lower back.
Both dimensional arrows bounced off like wooden javelins greeting steel plate. The Pathbearer swung his arm, cracking Adam across the jaw, and Phoenix Riposte activated again. Adam's teeth should have shattered. His jaw should have turned into nothing but shards of bone. Instead, he slammed against the offending Pathbearer once more and drove his head off at an angle.
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As Adam returned, he kicked off the enemy Pathbearer with a backflip and fired an arrow directly above him. As he plunged through the dimensional space, it collapsed immediately, and he felt himself displaced out from the same side he was trying to escape through. This time, there was nowhere to go. Instead of hitting him, the enemy Pathbearer seized him by the throat and pinned him to the wall gently.
"What is it with you bastards and strangulation?" Adam cried out through gritted teeth.
"Nice attempt," the warden growled, "but you're finished. This is done. You're going back to your cell."
A collapsing wave of mana slammed against Adam—and it was only his own Veilpiercer that kept him from being cast somewhere else immediately. Despite this, Adam cried out as his Dimensionality mana was practically flayed to its foundations. He wasn't a Master wrestling against a Hero. He was a Master facing something far greater.
Veilpiercer 163 > 165
Adam managed to endure for a full second before everything went to hell. Darkness curled around Adam, and the cold hand of another Pathbearer seemed fated to be the guide that decided Adam's path.
Yet Adam wasn't quite done just yet. He fired an arrow off to his left, and rather than aiming at the hulking Pathbearer, his own arrow slammed into the side of his head so hard that it should have been fatal. Yet Adam came ablaze. Suddenly, he shot past the enemy Pathbearer and crashed against the wall.
As soon as he did, a good portion of the force inflicted upon him was displaced. Adam slid down the wall with a swollen lump on his head rather than a shattered skull or even a concussion. But even that only brought him half a second of time. Adam zoomed backward using his vector-wings, and he barely avoided a swinging hand. One that left actual scratches on the Orichalcum.
Adam's eyes widened, and then they widened further as Adam noticed the large, snake-bodied Pathbearer approaching the dimensional hunter from behind. And it was then that Adam reacted. He tore at his uniform and struck himself in the jaw. Once more, he turned into a phoenix and bounced off the ground. He avoided the dimensional hunter for an instant, which bought him just enough time for the snake-limbed Pathbearer to intervene.
They slammed against the dimensional hunter, driving them against the wall before rolling across the ground. The two struggled, their bodies becoming a blur before Adam's eyes, but he had a few moments to breathe.
"Raven," Adam called out, "I need you to..." And then he realized the agent was missing. “Shit!” He directed his Awareness—and found the corpse of the Raven smeared against the wall. At some point, something had struck her and eviscerated her entirely. Adam didn’t even notice what killed her.
He didn't get even a second to think about her fate before a large, pitch-black arrow carved past Adam. It barely missed him, and he noticed the dimensional hunter being overpowered by the serpent-limbed prisoner. Adam moved to flee, but then his mind turned to other possibilities.
He knows just how many wardens were here, and just how many prisoners were fighting them. The prisoners here were strong, powerful, and right now, Adam was dressed too much like one of the wardens. If he managed to differentiate himself from the other prismatic armored people, he could mix in with the prisoners, perhaps even use them to—
Tactical Overseer 100 > 101 (Skill Evolution Reached)
Skill Evolution: Tactical Overseer (Adept) > Commander’s Foresight (Heroic)
Time halted. Adam's perspective shifted entirely, unlatching from his body. As he looked down at the battlefield from high above, a swelling heat flooded his mind, and he felt his consciousness overclock. And soon, Adam saw the world not as a person, but as a general looking down at a chessboard.
And right now, there were a lot of useful pieces he could possess. He'd lost the Raven, but maybe he'd gained something far, far greater. He used his Seer of Horizon Skill in tandem with his new Commander's Foresight, and he began composing a plan. He isolated prisoners that were struggling against the guards first, charting a path. Adam didn't know nearly enough about this prison to escape on his own, and he wasn't strong enough to stop some of his adversaries, but he would find people who could help. He would make them owe him.
Adam retracted his foresight back into his body, and he clenched his teeth as a rush of pain pulled at his mind. Using Commander’s Foresight stopped time as he planned, but it also cooked his brain, and likely took a lot of his cognition to do. He needed to be mindful when he used that skill. He fired an arrow, and as it sailed through the world, leaving a rupture, its other end impacted the head of an armored warden and sent them stumbling off to the side.
That created a domino effect, as the Pathbearer they were trying to hold down burst free. A humanoid shape seemingly composed of nothing but fire unleashed a searing wave of Pyromancy. The other guards were launched back, and Adam could sense them being cooked inside their armor.
When the flames died down again, Adam arrived through a dimensional tunnel, where he found the burning Pathbearer planting a foot on the skull of one of the wardens. He heard her scream, smelled her burning flesh, and winced as the escaped prisoner’s foot melted through the warden's helmet and finally cooked her brain matter.
A moment of peace followed amidst the surrounding chaos. The incandescent Pathbearer turned to regard Adam, noticing he had a Veilpiercer nocked, but pointed to the floor. By this point, Adam's uniform was shredded, leaving his torso partially bare.
"You looked like you needed help," Adam said, looking the prisoner up and down. They were about the same size as him, and it was only now that the flames had calmed slightly that he noticed that the Pathbearer didn't seem to have any flesh on their body. Instead, they were like a burning candle, with a pristine, human skeleton instead of a wick. “And you look like you really want out of this prison,” the Gate Lord continued. “A man after my own heart. What say we stick together and start increasing our odds?”
The burning skeleton regarded Adam briefly, pure-white spots flickering in its sockets, so bright that they seared spots into Adam's vision if he stared too long. He felt increasingly uneasy. For a moment, he wondered if he was just going to be incinerated, but then the fiery Pathbearer let out a low breath. "I would hug you right now for saying those words,” he rasped, his voice sounding far more like a normal man's than Adam had expected, “but I don't think you would survive it.”
"That's fine," Adam replied, his tension dissipating just slightly. "I think you should hug a few guards for me. I'll accept that as a recompense. And I think we should go make a few more friends too." He looked around. "It seems like there are more people than just us who wish to leave.”
And that made the burning man snicker, his fire dancing rhythmically with the noise. "Can't just be us, indeed. I like you, Bowman. But stay back. These flames are not good for your health.”
“Duly noted.”
Adam Arrow was good at making friends when he put his mind to it.