Forged Legacy

Chapter 164 - Undeath's Champion

“Damn, Dad! Those skills are amazing!” Harvey marveled as he read the descriptions a second time.

“Language!” Steve warned.

“How come yours are Rare, and mine are only Common? They’re basically the same skills?” Tyler complained.

“I’ve told you boys your entire lives to take your faith seriously,” Steve reprimanded. “Maybe if you’d listened, you would’ve gotten a better skill.”

Harvey chuckled when Tyler shrank back. He’d grown to look like a man, but inside he was still a boy desperate not to disappoint his father. “I’ve never seen any that scale with a resonance before.”

“They’re pretty common inside faith-based factions,” Cash commented. “Instead of using your own stats to power the skill, you tap into someone else’s using your shared resonance.”

“Does that mean it only works with holy skills?” Harvey asked.

“Not at all. Holy just happens to be the primary resonance used by our Father. People have faith in everything under the sun, and skills like these are why most people join a faction in the first place. It gives them access to knowledge, skills, and resources that best fit their chosen path.”

Steve gave Cash a perplexed look. “That sounds a little sacrilegious. Faith should be reserved for God, right? The whole thou shalt have no other gods before me thing?”

“I said his legacy bled through to your world, not that you all saw it clearly,” Cash laughed.

The four left the church and made way for home. Harvey’s feet felt heavy after using every last shred of essence to conjure weapons, and he worried every time he blinked that he wouldn’t be able to pull his eyelids open again. All the constant battle and forging late into the night was starting to get to him.

One of the only benefits of Hell’s decision to turtle up was that they knew exactly when tomorrow’s assault was going to take place. Celeste told Adrian they’d wait until the early afternoon, giving the soldiers plenty of time to rest and prepare before they made their move. That meant Harvey would have time to take a crack at his latest ink idea before testing it on some unlucky Gluthogs.

Maybe I should take a stab at it tonight. That way, I can recover some blood while I sleep in case I need to try again in the morning.

[Since she’s not here, do you need me to do my best Elena impression? It’s probably not very good, but at least I know exactly what she would be screaming at you right now,] Julius asked.

A chill shot down Harvey’s spine as her words after he’d fought his first F-Grade elemental, despite being dead tired, echoed inside his mind. That fight had nearly killed him, and he’d been lucky to survive with a broken weave and a few harsh words after blowing up the mine shaft.

Nope! I’ll go to bed.

Cassandra had dinner warming in the oven for them, the smell of roasted meat, melted cheese, and garlic wafting out the second they opened the door. They were all hot underneath their heavy armor, but the warmth of home still felt cozy and welcoming to him.

“Daddy!” Max cheered, tossing aside the toy he’d been playing with and charging towards them. His head bonked against the sturdy silver, but he didn’t seem to notice as he wrapped their father’s legs in a vice grip.

“Hey, buddy,” Steve smiled, tousling Max’s hair.

“I hungry,” Max said, pointing to his chest when he finally pulled away.

“Me too,” Tyler laughed.

They all gathered around the dinner table, enjoying a savory casserole with green beans and dinner rolls. Cassandra asked about their day, but the three of them were too busy shoveling food into their mouths to provide anything more than short answers. When Eleanor kept pushing for more details, Harvey gave her a subtle nod, telling her that she really didn’t want to know. Cassandra made them promise to keep her in the loop, but that didn’t mean death and destruction were good topics for the dinner table.

Instead, she and Eleanor told them all about the things they learned in their classes that day. There were a few interesting tidbits that caught his attention, but nothing Cash couldn’t explain in a minute or two. The fact that they were spending hours delving into the nitty-gritty of benign concepts that didn’t really matter to a G-Grade ascendant still seemed like a waste.

“Are you ok, Harvey?” Cassandra asked. “You keep staring off into space, and I’m worried you're going to fall asleep on your plate.”

“I’m exhausted,” he sighed.

“Why don’t you head to bed and get some rest. You pushed yourself pretty hard today,” Steve suggested.

“What happened?” Cassandra asked again, clearly concerned for her son.

“I’m awesome, but sadly being awesome requires constantly draining yourself of essence until you feel like a fat guy with the flu,” Harvey answered.

Everyone looked confused, except Tyler, who almost coughed out a bite of casserole. Harvey barely noticed, his head resting on his hand as he stuffed half a roll into his mouth.

“Well… I guess you'd better sleep it off, then,” his mother laughed. “Don’t worry about your dishes. I’ll take care of them.”

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Harvey thanked her, waved goodnight, and pulled himself up the stairs. Cash hadn’t given him any cleansing gel, so he debated whether he should take a shower before eventually stripping down to his boxers and collapsing into bed.

I’ll shower in the morning. Night, Julius.

[Goodnight.]

His body lurched, suddenly feeling like he was falling despite lying still on his bed. He let out a light gasp as he took in his surroundings, noticing the digital alarm clock with blinking red numbers reading 7:04 AM.

It felt like it had only been 10 minutes since the clock read 9:42 PM, his dreamless slumber almost feeling like time travel. The type of sleep that only came with utter exhaustion. Refreshing, sure, but without the satisfaction of feeling like he’d actually had time to rest.

The old Harvey would roll over and bury his head under the covers until at least 9:00 AM, but this was already the longest he’d slept in a while. The stronger his body became, the less sleep he seemed to need. 9 hours and change was already pushing it, and he had things to do.

First, he hopped in the shower, hoping to make use of humanity's most sacred place to ponder. He’d been debating for a while whether he should start using legacy’s in his ink. Cash seemed to think it was fine as long as he wasn’t turning an old friend into a stat boost, but something about it still felt wrong.

In the end, the need for a powerful weapon against the gluthogs won out, and he’d decided to try using the Undead Prophet Marcus legacy into a potent batch of thanefire ink. Even if destroying the tattoo hurt Marcus in the afterlife, who cared? He killed Julian, and Harvey would gladly sacrifice his story if it meant he could save anyone else from meeting the same fate.

His plan was to carve one of the teeth from the thanefire drake into a bullet tip that fit his revolver, then cover the thing in arrays. Heaven’s Wrath was good at suppressing the infernal resonance, but the flames didn’t exactly spread. It was like the difference between his old wildfire ink and the inferno ink he used now. The wildfire might be weaker, but it had a hunger to consume that let it spread through every fuel source it could find until it ran out of things to burn or someone put in a lot of effort to choke it out.

Harvey didn’t know for sure, but he guessed there was a lot of Vitality stored in the gluthogs' giant bodies. Thanefire might not be able to overcome the infernal power as easily as his Heaven’s Wrath bullets, but at least there’d be plenty of fuel to burn.

Drying himself off, he put on some work clothes and snuck down to the basement. He was relieved to make it down unnoticed, not because he was avoiding his family, but because he didn’t want to break his concentration after crystallizing his plan in the shower. Trying to lock the door behind him, he realized he could only deadbolt the door from inside the house.

Well. I hope nobody walks out here. Otherwise, I’m going to have a lot of explaining to do.

From the ring he used to wear on his bony, gray finger, Marcus’ lifeless corpse appeared on top of the workbench. Harvey hadn’t even looked at it since he’d picked it up on the battlefield, and a tidal wave of emotions came flooding back.

Pain. Anger. Fear.

Harvey had lied right to his face when he’d tried to convince them to willingly turn into undead revenants just like he had in his own integration trial. Then, he’d watched the life leave his eyes after Harvey shoved one arc charge after another into every open wound he could find.

Now, that face stared back at him, cold and lifeless. It didn’t take long for Harvey to find what he was looking for. Two tattoos crystallized on flakes of skin barely clinging to the unholy flesh. One was a Mark, the other was an Imprint.

If he had to guess, the Mark was one of nobility just like Julian’s old Guardian of Veil’s End, and would probably have evolved to an Imprint like Harvey’s Guardian of the GIlded Return if Marcus had succeeded. It could come in handy later on, but it wasn’t what he was looking for.

Harvey needed a condensed source of thanum to power his thanefire, and the Imprint he found did not disappoint.

Imprint | Undeath’s Champion

Having tasted life and found it wanting, you learned to embrace the power of undeath. Like a blade tempered in the flames of war, your pain has turned you into a weapon against the living. Invite them all to suffer as you have suffered, and drag them into the cold embrace of undeath, whether they accept it willingly or not.

If that isn’t an undeath resonance imprint, I don’t know what is.

[Sounds like one to me,] Julius agreed. The AI sharing his psyche had made a point of emphasizing that, even though Julian’s legacy was a big part of its creation, that didn’t mean it was Julian. Harvey had gotten more comfortable with the concept as time went on, but feeling the resentment hidden in Julius' words told him it might not be so cut and dry.

Peeling the Imprint off, Harvey returned the body to his spatial ring. In its place, he retrieved his inkwell and began filling it with his own blood. The runes carved within flared to life, and he readied himself for the struggle of Willpower he knew was sure to come.

[I got your back,] Julius encouraged.

With a deep breath, Harvey dropped a large dragon bone and the Imprint into the cauldron at the same time. The second his hands gripped the side of the steel bowl, the world around him warped.

Suddenly, the garage was gone. Harvey found himself lying in a dark cave. Except… he wasn’t Harvey. His body was different. His mind was different. Julius was gone, as if the Cognition Matrix embedded in the back of his neck had never existed in the first place.

Harvey, this new person thought, was nothing more than a character in a dream. One that had been cut short by the screams of agony echoing from the coccooned humans dangling from the ceiling all around him.

“Help! Marcus, help!” a woman screamed.

Cary? What was she doing here?

Without warning, he was plucked off the rocky floor, and the world began to spin like he’d been jammed inside a clothes dryer. At first, he felt dizzy, but that soon disappeared as pain overwhelmed him. It started at his feet, then spread upwards as something cold began wrapping around his body. Above, he saw flashes of milky-white bone, a line of cerulean silk extruding from long spinarets at the back of its spider-like body, wrapping him into a cocoon just like Cary.

“Could you all kindly quit screaming?” Anton, the revenant prophet of the Necrolord invasion, sighed dismissively. “The graveweaver’s can’t hear you, but I can.”

“It… hurts,” Marcus croaked through gritted teeth.

“You’re right! It does,” Anton replied, bending down so his face was level with his own. The wicked smile inverting over and over as Marcus spun like a rotisserie chicken. “Screaming won’t make it hurt any less.”

“You said… we’d be saved,” Marcus spat, managing to land a glob right in the teal orb that was Anton’s eye. He staggered backward, using a finger to wipe it away before kicking Marcus in the head. The graveweaver holding him clattered with annoyance, but kept wrapping him in more of the life-sucking silk.

“You will be! If you survive,” Anton laughed. “Perhaps one of you might. I did.”

“You… never… told us… It was going to hurt!” Cary cried.

“Would you have surrendered if we did?” Anton chuckled. “All we promised is that your feet would touch your planet’s soil, and it will. Whether your mind or an Ossari’s is driving those bones is up to your own fortitude. But know this. If you survive, you will become stronger than you could ever imagine, and together, we will unite your planet in undeath.”

Marcus wanted to say something. To scream at Anton for tricking him into convincing the others to surrender. But he couldn’t get the words out. The pain was overwhelming, and before he could muster up the courage, Anton was out of sight.

The last thing he heard before the silk covered his ears and he passed out was Anton saying, “Now please, STOP SCREAMING!”