Chapter 267: Shifting, Cracking, Breaking
Mercury stood in front of the statue of gold, and he demanded an answer. His Skill triggered, and it pulled at the thing that was an avatar of three sins. It was a thing of voice, of expression, and it had to reply.
"We," the statue started, for it was not truly one thing anymore, "are alive. We live. Is that not enough?"
That was as much of an answer as it was a deflection. Mercury took a long, deep breath, and felt this melded world. An overlapping cruelty, a wound of three cuts, each driving a little deeper. It was a pattern of hurt more than it was a place, and that hurt was infectious.
Much more so than ever before, Mercury felt it. The festering world pulling at who he was. This place was not meant for living things, it was not meant for people with identities and wishes. It was a living space for caricatures of life. Things that had overgrown and become so divorced from being alive that they only existed. And therein he found his rebuttal.
"You don't live," Mercury said to the statue. "You're alive. You exist. But you do not live."
A thousand faces twisted into cruel smiles. "Ah, it has found us out. It has spotted the lie."
The sin amalgam turned its golden limbs upon Mercury. It grew tooth and claw and looked upon him from a place high above. "We are superior / we will gut you for what you're worth / we will enjoy you," it spoke. Multiple voices, all at once, but at the end, they were just that. Voices.
Disparate but melded into one. Existing as a tentative agreement. And having to face all of it at once, Mercury was torn into a maelstrom.
It took only the blink of an eye for living metal to crash into him. Violent implements, forged by nature and competition, tore into his flesh. Mercury's was hardened, of course. His skin was tempered, his muscles like iron, and still they parted. He fell apart before their viciousness, as bits of him were pulled off.
He tried to dodge, or block, but it was meaningless. This world rejected him, and it was heavy. Every time he thought to do something, it was rejected by this place, because it wasn't greedy, it wasn't prideful. He was too little sin and too much virtue, and so, in this place, he was doomed to die.
Wasn't that funny, he thought, as his stomach was cut open, and blood sprayed. What an amusing thought that this place did, indeed, give him a choice. That choice was to die… or to sink into sin. To join the festering wound, that self-propagating infection. If he became a virus, he'd be safe. Embraced, wanted, worthwhile here.
Despite everything, Mercury refused. The insidious temptation flowed out of him like water flowing down a river. The gentle sound of falling rain enveloped him, but it was a thin shield. His drops broke through the amalgam, and the winds buffeted it, but it was a behemoth. A leader of an army of golden things that were meant only to kill him.
Mercury had made enemies, and those enemies had banded together. And wasn't that a strange thought? That the roles were so inverted - people usually put him on the deathbed, sought out to kill him. And then he hit back. Yet, this time, he was the one with the advantage. The sins had bonded, because he could have picked them apart one after another.
Had Pride known that? Was that why it had joined the others? How amusing. "You're pathetic," he said. "You could not face me on your own, so now you ally with others. What pride is that?"
There was a crack that followed, a ripple in this overlap of wound where the scars took hold. Threads of weave clung to those words, even as more of Mercury's blood sprayed .His fur was cleft apart, and then mended again, because pain was nothing to him. He simply
"We are greater than you," they snarled. "We will prove our pride with blood."
"You spill my blood, yet I still stand. This dance of yours will never end," Mercury intoned. Almost naturally, he found a rhythm to his words, and he felt the world-wound listen. Frayed threads, rapt at attention.
"Then your bones will snap until you break, until you are the one unmade," the statue countered, driving a hammer onto Mercury.
His rijn solidified above him, a sheet of iron will to resist the smash - and then it broke. Not because it was broken, but because it could never properly appear. A giant, metallic weight slammed onto Mercury, even as he stepped aside to dodge. The Storm's Raiment softened the blow. He almost escaped, too, until the ground refused to let him step.
Before his body fully reformed, more attacks rained down on him. Amusingly, even as they fell like raindrops, he simply focused. The world slowed, and he triggered
A step to the right, and the world tried to hold him - only to falter. This place was strong, but it could not shackle him forever. He was free, that was the
So it changed strategy.
One moment to the next, the blank world of gold shifted. And suddenly, Mercury did feel that this place wanted things. Pride was unlike the other two in that way - Pride only desired to be superior, and it was perfectly fine being static at perfection.
Greed and Lust, though, were all about wanting. The first about means. About money and power and fame, and the other was a more intrinsic desire. It had nothing to do with other people, it was a want simply for the sake of wanting. It was in pleasure of all kinds, and in that way, he found lust strange.
Because, in this context, it was a simple seeking of happiness. An unabashed desire to live and thrive - at any cost. Lust, in a way, was selfishness. It was a simple desire for joy, no matter who was hurt, no matter how directly.
Compared to that, Greed was calculating and sneaky, while Lust was craven and unabashed. Right now, Mercury found himself in the domain of Lust, fused with the others. Like a highlight reel of humanity's worst, this world reached for him.
Pride manifested as an iron suppression, a lockdown on who he was, what he could do. Lust was different from that. Mercury felt light and easy, and yet, the world took part in that. It was teeth and hunger. Lust for his flesh, in a rather visceral ways.
The ground turned to fangs, rows of teeth opening up as yawning chasms between his legs.
Mercury fell. He took a step upwards, only to fall further. He had only a heartbeat to think, to summon the Dream of Starvation, but before the grey metal grew to fully envelop him, the terrifying maws had already torn off his legs. Feeling sharp fangs sink into his flesh was scary, and the pain flooded him, even as it ebbed away.
For the first time in a long while, Mercury began to feel a hint of fear.
That, too, was amplified by this place. The moment his heart started beating, he felt his adrenaline surge, his desire for life grow. It was a primal sort of terror, existential, almost, and Mercury hated it. He hated how he shook even as he willed himself forward. That he felt so helpless, when he wasn't.
Platforms of iron will manifested, no longer resisted by this place. His fear drove his mind to new heights, and the rijn wrenched the mouths open. He formed a macabre toolkit of pliers and levers from his own mind, forcing rows of teeth apart, even as they bit down with enough force to shatter.
A moment passed, and he climbed out from that fleshy abyss. Dripping with saliva and stomach acid, Mercury felt his skin dissolve and regenerate at the same time. It hurt. It hurt bad enough to overwhelm his calm, and he was already sick of this place. Yet, just as he thought so, the world shifted again, cycling into another sin.
Gold spilled forth. Mountains of gold, glowing billboards, neon signs. Exploitative vices seeking to drain him for everything he was worth. Where Lust was ready to break and bite and tear into him, such was not the way of this place. Greed was an attack on his will, on his control, and, unfortunately, it was inviolable.
Mercury blinked, and found himself in a casino. The waiters around him swam, none of them coming into clear view. Another blink, and he sat at a roulette table. "Bet," the croupier beckoned. "Bet whatever you have."
The mopaaw grit his teeth, and sank deeper into his own mind, fortifying it against the effects. The blurry world grew sharper, and his thoughts flowed again, fighting against the maelstrom of vice that this place was. He breathed, and rain fell around him. It shattered the table, broke the things, and then, he felt more force crash into him.
His prosthetic legs, made from liquid metal, gave out. Mercury was forced to the ground. "Property damage," the casino owner noted dryly. "Tsk, tsk, tsk. You'll have to pay for that, champ."
A ragged scream wrenched itself from Mercury's throat, as debt took him into its clutches. He pulled back on that invisible chain, dulling the effect, clawing back what he owned, but the price was still extracted. Blood willingly poured from his veins, leaking through his metal shell, turning to golden coins in the hand of the owner.
The blurry avatar of golden greed grinned at him. "Pleasure doin' business," it said.
Mercury shot it a furiously glare. "I challenge you to a game of-"
Before he made the bet, the world shifted. Pride's violent suppression slammed into him. The amalgam, self-embodiment of perfection, superior of all sins, stood above him. "You are pitiful," their melded voices said. "You are nothing."
Crushing weight blanketed Mercury, choking the words in his throat. Rules changed the moment he grasped them, and the world slammed into him. The word first, and then another torrent of violence. Pride shifted from claws and fangs to hammers and blades. Metal screeched against metal as golden swords tore through the Dream of Starvation.
It was a violent battle between the two - with the Dream eating away at Pride's weaponry, and yet, that degradation was faint. Rust and decay covered the swords, but that did not make them any less painful slicing through Mercury's flesh and bones. He leaned on
But not pathetic, he decided. Never, ever pathetic. That was not who he was, that would never be him. His own
The rules changed on him. He was caught in that desire again, of lusting for life and its essence. Carnality descended, and he felt the way his flesh strained against his bones, as if his muscles were trying to escape from his body. With a snarl of effort, he kept them under control, clinging to his skeleton, moving forward.
Lust wanted to feel, to taste, to run its hands through his fur, to crunch his bones in its maw, and he hated it. Every moment of that violating, horrid plain, but he also needed to understand it. Despite everything, Mercury focused. He discarded the pain and the fear. He discarded the brutal beatdown he had experienced.
He had not lost yet.
Clarity washed over him in a moment. The world shifted, trying to throw him off, drowning him in Greed. Things trying to take from him via existence. But he remained
Before he spoke, it was Pride he faced again. But this time, before the first strike came, more power flooded into his
The first weakness was as follows: Pride is fragile.
From that fault, courage was born, and fear died. The flickering ember that threatened to ignite his mind was slowly stifled as the golden statue, and the wound-world it represented cracked. Instantly, the world shifted. Mercury predicted it, though, because Pride was fragile. It was a coward which could exist only in supremacy. Even a challenge of that was enough to hurt it.
And next would be Lust-
Greed welcomed him in its infernal bindings. Rules, regulations, wagers. Already, it all rearranged into a golde cage for him. A facsimile of freedom, served up with a smile. People acting as if they were his friends, only to bleed him dry. The whiplash was different.
Mercury had shifted to understand Lust, only to be met by an opposing conflict. He had prepared himself for vicious brutality, requiring rules of his own, only to find himself ensnared. In the blink of an eye, he lost a dozen bets, and his body was unmade. He lost his ribcage first, the bones simply slinking out of him. Then came his liver, his kidneys, his tongue, and his eyes.
Without any violence, no blades or fangs, the things simply melted away from inside him. His body began to flag and fail, his blood pumping aimlessly, his heart unprotected, his lungs without the means to breathe. Drowning on his own blood, Mercury's empty sockets widened, and he summoned air within his chest.
Layered just above his skin, the rains raged. He prepared himself, shifted to counter greed, challenged it with skill and knowledge and disengagement. He challenged it and ran away, all at the same time. Except, when he fled, the world shifted back to Pride.
That sin saw his fleeing and took it as a cue of superiority. It laughed, and mocked, and bound him once more, dealing more cuts to his flesh. His unprotected chest, no longer shielded by bones, was flayed open, and the pain reached far beyond what the
For the first time in seasons, Mercury felt proper pain again. Searing agony of his flesh being broken and shattered and torn. He tasted blood on his tongue, felt the ringing in his ears, the lightness of his head, and he shut it all out. His mind separated from his brain. He withdrew, sunk deeper into understanding, his mind splitting.
One dealt with the pain. Three more held Pride in a vice, and the fifth conjured up violence upon the statue. The cracks showed, and the world shifted. Mercury now knew he could not anticipate the shifts, so he had to wait, until Lust unveiled itself.
He grit his teeth, and resisted with everything he had. Withdrew into himself, into gratitude and a focus on what he had. He did not need more, he was not a prize to be had, and he felt the violating spirit break against him. It sniffed at his blood, came for his wounds like a shark, but found only an iron mind.
Mercury bled, but he did not bleed for Lust. He killed its joy, and in that, the sin threatened to fracture. Before he could pull the thread, though, it was back to Pride. When it was Lust, he'd admitted he bled-
And so, more violence.
- - -
Blood poured from Mercury. His lungs had been torn from his chest. His muscles were torn and shredded, and his skin had been almost entirely ruined with wounds. He was ragged, injured, missing organs and entire limbs. Blood flowed from his empty eye sockets, from his open chest cavity, and he still lived.
Despite everything, he lived.
His heart beat, his brain raced, and he sank deeper. Deeper and ever deeper into that world of pain and hurt and agony. His mind was split five ways, strained to the limit for what felt like hours. Switching, over and over, to combat the sins, in a brutal battle of attrition.
It was something he was meant to win, but they healed faster than he did. Because when he combated one sin, another used that thought pattern and exploited it. What he needed was different, was more. He needed to be stronger, to become more, and so, he embraced the agony.
The veils were long since shattered, his mind deep in ihn'ar. He understood everything, he had summoned all his items. Liquid metal swirled around him, the Dream of Starvation as his shield and weapon, the Stifled Silence wrapping around the world, and the Storm's Raiment holding him in its embrace. He ran
All of him, all at once, was deemed to little, an opening Pride exploited brutally.
Pain, more pain. Suffering. Sin. It invaded his mind, thin tendrils that he had to fend off. He tried to
He bled, and he flagged, and he ached. But all of that, all of that was fine.
Life was never meant to be easy. Mercury could handle it when things got tough, and things were tough right now. It just meant that he had to give his all and then some. He wanted to live, he noted, with a smile.
There was nothing he wanted more than to live.
Wrapped in the tapestry of meditation, Mercury stared. The sin he faced shifted again - Lust, to exploit his desire. And so, he shifted, too, matching its pace. He became a beacon of cold steel, again. Greed wrapped its chains, but he tore them in a storm of violence as they manifested.
Stalemate.
By overclocking his minds, all at the same time, he had slowed time enough to keep up. He swapped when the sins did, matching them blow for blow, step for step, idea for idea. There was no respite in that, though, just a cloying dance for his survival. If the sins moved left, so did he.
His body regenerated, but every tiny mistake he made meant another piece of it shattered. A bone, here and there. A group of muscles. It hurt and ached, but he lived. He lived and matched them, even as his minds burned.
[
Blood boiled and sizzled against worlds of cruelty and domination. But Mercury lived. He inched closer to death, but it slowed. He thought. With just a tiny, fractional part of his mind, he desperately clawed for a solution. Even as he took more wounds from his lack of focus, even as the world grew sharper in the vivid colours of death.
His vitality clung to his body like a thick blanket, blood misting around him. He had to find a solution, and he looked. He stared into the mana, expanding his own in a torrent around himself, only to have that siphoned by Greed. He focused his will on the sins, trying to
No, he needed a weapon. Something violent, something brutal. A weapon… and a target.
A long, deep breath. Mercury needed to hit, so he shot it out. Lust caught the fallout, a great, brutal rend covering the world as
But he would not let it escape. Mercury sunk deeper, deep into the haze of pain and violence, leaning into it. He felt it, every bit of agony inflincted, and he saw through it. His blood was a part of Lust. It had taken his legs, and that was a connection.
A thin thread, bringing them closer across the tapestry. He had taken from it, and it had taken from him. They were almost… adjacent.
Pride locked down his movement.
Grinning savagely, Mercury focused on that connection, on where Lust was hiding, and he sent a
A lie, a truth, and a trick of the light. But the Skill acquiesced.
[
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He blinked the notification away, unable to focus on it for the moment, simply watching as the blade of ethereal force travelled down the
The Dream of Starvation howled as soon as it made contact, drinking deep. It was hungry, and spread its cruel influence through Mercury's Skill. Usually, such wounds would be mended by rest… but Lust could no longer flee.
Mercury watched, and the cut connected. Lust - the ardent desire that was hidden behind layers of Pride and Greed - was cut. Its paper thin skin parted, hunger carved in two and replaced with hunger. It starved. It bled. It learnt fear.
All at once, Mercury could feel the way Lust came apart at the seams. It was almost fascinating to watch it happen. The way the cracks in it spread, the way the sin shrank away in the face of terror.
And that was what happened. Somehow, an entire dimension had tried to run away from Mercury and failed. He carved it, planted that seed of nightmare through his weapon, and sucked the life from it. That was what the Dream of Starvation did - it drank deep from his enemies, implanting fear and hunger, and that is what Lust felt.
Its joy at this dance died. Its superiority faded. Pride cracked from the display; seeing that Mercury could simply avoid it meant that he was superior in that way, so it shifted to greed. The only one whole.
But the swap was predictable, this time. Mercury knew which one he would face, and shifted accordingly. He met greed with nonchalance. He met it with poverty, and self-sustenance. He did not need to wager. There was nothing he needed.
Greed worked best on the greedy ones, amusingly. And Mercury… well, glancing at
Challenges were its rules, and Mercury was untouchable to its scams, so it had to wait for him to set the challenge. "Appy," he said calmly, while Pride and Lust cowered. "Make a
[Acknowledged.]
For a moment, the system whirred. The ability initiated, interfaced with Greed, and the sin's tendrils easily latched onto it. Anything to take another pound of flesh, right? Mercury grinned, even as blood poured from his wounds. The casino's floor was stained red. He blinked, and found himself in front of a table.
One that was decked with chips, cards, and everything else. Across from him was a thing made from gold. It had eight thin, spider-like hands, and wore a blank mask of solid metal. It cleared off the desk, scattering the gambler's material to the ground.
Mercury felt his Skills deactivate, one by one. The combat-based ones, consumed by bet, unsuitable for this game. He wasn't even told the rules, but that was fine. His offense was temporarily sealed away, and he allowed it to happen, letting the game fall over him like a blanket that hid the world.
Greed produced a simple thing. It was a beating heart. Mercury's own beating heart. And there was just one thing it wanted him to do.
Turn it into money.
Now, Mercury did take approximately a quarter second to get over the shock of seeing his own beating heart on a table, outside of his body. But after that, he very rapidly considered his options. In the end, there were two, maybe three things he needed for this.
Then he smiled at the masked thing. Four tools. That was what he needed. Luckily, he had all of them available to him. Mercury activated the Stifled Silence, watching liquid silver crawl amongst the floor. It poured forth from him in a steady stream, and it would form an ocean, but he only needed a drop.
He used that, in tandem with
Without
He threaded silver string after silver string into his heart, and by the end, what he was left with was an organ made from shining quicksilver. It shone in the dim casino light, reflecting the gold mask back at its many-limbed owner. But it was not yet done.
Mercury breathed. Then he sunk deeper into ihn'ar. He dove into that lake of understanding, and swam deeper. It was heavy. Like a pressure wrapping around his weary mind, and it made him feel a little like he was drowning when he looked at the world. And yet, he kept it up.
After all, he'd choked to death once. He could handle a second time.
With one last plunge, he sank deeper than he ever had before, and even without
So that is what he did. He
Still, he held on. He focused, with everything he had, and searched. Desperately clawing through a maze of threads for the detail he needed - until he found it. Slowly, he smiled. He'd found the thing that described the heart as being made from quicksilver. Just one more thing. One more step.
Mercury used his fourth tool - Greed.
He stared at the avatar, at its golden mask, and saw through it. Ihn'ar revealed its strings, its composition, too. He stared deep into it, everything that made the mask what it was.
A thousand pieces of information crashed into him. A million details about the mask, the sin associated, the lives turned into ruin for profit, the blood that went into making it. He discarded all of those.
None of the waste, the blood, the cruelty, the exploitation mattered. He had a way better way. Blood leaked from his mouth as his body began to incinerate from the information. His brain boiled, his mind began to fray at the edges. But he held on.
All he needed was one detail, one little thing… There.
The third layer of ihn'ar was the lie of separation. It told him that all things were connected, and even without
With gentle movements, perfectly controlled, he shifted what his heart was made from. Silver turned golden as he altered its very composition. The avatar instantly tried to tear off its mask and hide it from him, but the pattern was spotted. He put it in place, let the pattern snap back into reality, and instead of a silver heart, there was one of pure, untouched gold.
No blood, no cruelty.
Greed shattered.
[You have acquired the Skill
When his boosting Skills flooded back into him, Mercury breathed in relief. His blood reversed its course, flowing back into him, and his mind gained more depth, more force. He had voluntarily cut himself off from that, exposing his vulnerability and forcing Greed to do the same.
Only one of them still lived.
Lust was forced to the forefront. It smelled of fear, of terror, of cowardice. The Dream of Starvation had tasted it once, and left it hurt. Desire suddenly faded in front of consequence. A scar dragged itself across the sky of the realm, its threads torn and mangled, and Mercury simply looked at it.
He raised a paw - one woven purely from dull steel, the Dream of Starvation forming his prosthetic - and dragged it across the sky again. Another gash opened up, rending this world, and it grew unstable.
Pride was forced out of hiding. It had hid behind Lust, and that hurt it more. The cracks through its gold were so wide it was more broken than whole. Mercury smiled at it.
His fangs were stained with blood. He was still torn open, flayed, barely standing. He was hurt and near-death, but he wasn't dead yet. Despite everything, he stepped forward. And the avatar of Pride, the titanic golden statue made of superiority and glorious, resplendent, crushing power… staggered backwards.
Mercury licked his fangs. He tasted iron. His throat burnt. His blood still spilled, even as he healed,
"So," Mercury said. "You failed."
The world was fragile around him, and he felt it. Greed had lost, and it had to pay. Lust was afraid, and its desire cracked. Pride had hidden from him. Their overlapping wounds were still too little to restrain him anymore.
Mercury's dreamscape slowly crawled out from him.
It was a creeping process, one that Pride feared. Grass grew in a circle around Mercury, spreading outwards. The world resisted, but with each passing moment, more of Pride crumbled. It was losing, and it knew it, so it lost harder. Pride could only sustain itself when it was already winning.
Once the tides turned, it just kept cracking away.
Soon, wrought iron benches and lampposts with tinkling crystals of ice overlaid this horrid place. Grass grew between the legs of the statue, and it stumbled back more, falling on soft earth. Whisperstar flitted down from the spreading patchwork sky to get a good look at it.
Mercury stepped in front of it, looking at the cracking, breaking thing, and sighed softly. He felt a little bad, really. "It's alright," he said. "You don't need to be perfect. You don't need to be better than anyone else. It's fine to do… just okay," he said.
Then, he severed the avatar's connection to Pride.
It was a swift, brutal motion, and the thing collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut. It was never alive, simply a manifestation of cruelty. Mercury sighed at how easy it had been, the connection between
Silver poured forth from him. The Stifled Silence drew from his
Again, he looked at the notification.
[
"Yes," he said. "Initiate Skill fusion."
The points flooded out of him, and the options sprawled outwards. Hopefully, with this, he'd be able to salvage some more of these places.