V-39 Rage

You want to know why Martin, the Poissonnier, was thrown out, Shiv? Why him and not you? Because you both got mad, but your anger leads you places. Your anger has a direction. It has an action behind it, and that fucking matters a lot. It matters more than you can ever fully imagine.

His anger is like a bomb. It's a useless bomb, too. It goes off inside him. And he uses it as an excuse to abuse himself. Why? Why? Why? His father doesn't respect him. Where? His mother's dead. Where? Where? Where? We all have problems. No one gives a shit about our problems. We're here to cook. We're not paid to be understood. We are not respected for our pain. We are loved when we make something that people like. And even then that's barely possible because people are stupid cunts who don't know what they like. So we have to try again and again.

He smashed up his station because he's a crazy person, Shiv. He's a crazy person who thinks that by destroying something he can express his anger. That is not an expression of anger; that is an expression of being felling impotent. And I don't need impotent people in my kitchen. I need insane people in my kitchen. To come in day after day, take it up the ass, and think it won’t happen again tomorrow. 

That's why you're still here. Because you got mad, and then you promptly carved 500 potatoes in a day during the busiest night of the month. That's anger. He's not angry; he's just upset that he isn't who he thought he was. 

Give your anger some proper bite.

Give your rage some fucking purpose. Keep doing it. Do it until you’re dead. Don’t expect a release. Anger is not a release. Anger is to be used up. If you feel like shit and are all felling tired afterward, then know that you did the right bloody thing.

I’ll tell you this again: We’re not here to feel good. We’re here to cook good fucking food. That’s all.

-Georges Archambault

V-39

Rage

Pillar of Orichalcum 266 > 269

“Chuck me the fucking heart again,” Shiv said as he finally calmed down. The floor beneath him was cracked. The walls were fissured. The building had sunk a full meter into the ground. At the end of it all, Shiv’s inertial sheath sounded like a storm trying to tear its way out from the insides of a metal barrel, the noise both resounding and unnerving. “I need a hit.”

It was a hell of a thing when a Legendary-Tier Pathbearer lost control. If Shiv harnessed enough tides, he could crush a non-magical city to rubble between his hands. Smash his way through a mountain. Rip the very land beneath him asunder and strike the plates far below. With enough tides, he could do even more than that. He could make the world shake and quiver. He could become the storm on the horizon—the cataclysm waiting to erupt.

That cataclysm was spilling out from inside Shiv, and he couldn’t put it back. An ocean’s worth of anger gushed out, and he couldn’t keep it caged inside any longer. His Berserk Skill raged inside him, and his Psycho-Cartography rattled and cracked as it desperately tried to keep him together.

“What… just transpired,” the Anointed One whispered, as he stared down at the Deathless’s newest corpse. The body bore no marks aside from the blood leaking out of its eyes and ears. Shiv’s blood pressure turned out to be Legendary-Tier as well, and an uncontrolled activation of a Shapeless Tide tore his brain vessels into shreds. The aneurysm was both magical and unavoidable.

Shiv was powerful, but he was a man wrestling with a giant when it came to all the rage he felt just then.

“I had an aneurysm. I think. Can’t tell. Got too pissed and something broke inside me. Chuck the fucking heart. Or I start draining the world again. Not asking again.”

The words left Shiv’s mind as he was in a trance. He didn’t think. He wasn’t even fully here. Only his Psycho-Cartography kept pulling him back from a mindless rampage, and even then, it barely managed.

Psycho-Cartography 96 > 98

The chained heart was cast in his direction, and Shiv drank its vitality deep as he accelerated toward another resurrection. As he surfaced from his white-red mana, bellowing waves of boiling rage crashed together inside him. Shiv wanted to rip his way out of the kitchen, fling himself in the direction of Flamecrown Castle, discharge his sheath, obliterate everything around the Supervolcano. And that was just the appetizer. The main course was slowly beating Maiden the Genius to death for taking his last refuge of peace away from him.

His cooking…

It was like losing the ability to breathe.

All that fighting and bloodshed—he did what the system wanted. He gave it more strife and death than—

“Fuck,” Shiv said, all too calmly. “Fuck. I need… I need…”

The building began to shake around him once more. The gingerbread knights whimpered and cried out for home. Some began to melt from his rage alone. 

It seemed the emotional effects weren’t just one way.

Shiv became an ocean of bitterness, and the sheer loathing he felt nearly unraveled his sanity. It was hard to control himself, hard to think. He was more rage than thought now, and on the verge of succumbing to his full bestial nature. 

Everything he had, every fiber of his being, wanted him to commit violence, to inflict harm on those around him. It didn't matter if the fae magic would see him subsumed by bread tumors. It didn't matter that he couldn't hurt the Anointed One in any meaningful capacity. It didn't matter that it would probably kill all the chefs and condemn the customers within Monster Mystery Meat to a series of brutal deaths. 

This was his last measure of worth. The system wanted him to be a fighter. It wanted him to be a violent animal, an avatar of untamed destruction. So he would give it what it wanted. He would give it so much of what it wanted that he would collapse the very structure it was built upon. If the world was going to infest his heart with decaying blood, then he would return that a thousand-fold on the—

Psycho-Cartography: Stop. You are angry. You are emotional. But you need to be more than that. You need to be a Pathbearer right now.

"I can't cook!" Shiv shouted. "I can't—I can't do anything. They've taken my felling peace from me. I won’t ever fell right again! I won’t!”

Psycho-Cartography: You are behaving like a petulant child. You are acting like Martin. Do you remember him? Do you remember how Georges removed him from the kitchen? For what reason?

Shiv thought back to his past. He pushed through the forest of his misery and thought hard. He remembered Martin, how the man smashed up the fish station, how Georges threw him out even as he broke. And, as Martin broke down crying, begging for another chance, telling them that his mother had passed, that he was alone, Georges did something only he could do.

He told him he didn’t give a shit, that Martin was useless, and that he was fired effective immediately.

Martin. No one ever saw him again after that day.

Shiv thought the act to be vile. He hated Georges in that moment, and spent a good while glaring at the head chef. Georges took offense to that, and decided Shiv had additional prepatory duties on the spot. Shiv agreed, and countered that punishment by being perfect for the rest of that night. He carved potato after potato. He even made sure all the vegetables were prepared, washed clean to a sparkling shine. 

But then, afterward, when he was expected to receive a reprimand for the dirty looks he was shooting the head chef, he was instead given a lesson. No one cared about your anger—not in the kitchen, not in your life. They cared about what you could offer them, what you could deliver.

And so the deathless focused himself—the feelings of rage didn't recede, but his anger surfaced. He was no longer drowning. Instead he was like a person cast to and fro upon the turbulent waves, struggling against the battering tides.

Psycho-Cartography: Good, this is good. Now, the next part will be even harder. You need to figure out how to finish this dish, even if you are cursed.

"But how?" Shiv cried aloud. "How do I do that?"

Psycho-Cartography:  I am a Psychology Skill, I am not your cooking skill. You need to think, but we understand this: that skill will affect everything you do in the kitchen, everything you create in life. You will need to figure out how to remove that curse, one way or another. In the meantime, we must work around it.

"Are you well, Undying One?" The Anointed Knight of the Summer Court called out. He sounded like he wanted to mock Shiv, but he was genuinely unsure about the Deathless. The chained heart lay on the ground nearby, and Shiv missed that entirely. He was too embroiled in his own internal conflict to respond earlier.

"Yeah," Shiv replied with a rasp of anger. "I'm just... just give me a fucking moment, okay? Before I go off like a bomb.”

He reached out for the heart and took in a surge of vitality. As his resurrection progressed, Shiv emerged from the parting vapors of his Vitae form. He took a second and centered himself. The fury he felt was constantly building and wasn't going to fade any time soon. But compared to the time he was consumed by the Culinary Berserker skill, this was nothing, nothing at all. He could still control his thoughts. 

He didn't need to make an effigy of Georges to center himself, but he probably did need his mentor's guidance. What would Georges do right now? Shiv thought back. He tried to remember if Georges and the rest of the Swan-Eating Toad had encountered anything like this, but Shiv's butt-life was practically filled with novel experiences. Shiv doubted that Georges had ever been cursed in the same way, and the rest of the Swan-Eating Toad were even less afflicted by world-ending threats and divine adversaries.

This was a uniquely Deathless problem

"Shit," Shiv snarled. "Looks like I'm gonna need to come up with something on my own…”

Let's see here. The problems I'm dealing with are decay and blood. The decay part was harder to handle than the blood. Shiv could potentially constantly just drain the blood out of his meal using his Biomancy field, but that wasn't practical. That was also probably going to stain whatever he made with a wretched flavor of metallic gore. The decay, though… If his meal constantly decayed and turned into something fetid, then how was he going to offer it to anyone? There was no way a fairy princess would accept something like that. And the bread man was probably going to mock him over a dish like that as well. Something told him that the Faebread might be willing to eat bits of people raw, but a bloody mess? No.

I've got to figure out how to deal with that decay. First. That’s the main problem.

"There is no shame in surrender if there is something wrong with your soul, Undying One," the Anointed One said, his words bordered on the periphery of a taunt, but he still sounded uncertain. 

Shiv's anger demanded that he respond. Demanded, but Shiv didn't obey. Instead, he directed the frustration inside him into considering more options.

Instinctively, he sank his Biomancy into his ruined utensils and gritted his teeth. He tried to restore their composition, and then another old memory returned to Shiv, one that had nothing to do with Georges or the Swan-Eating Toad. Instead, this had something to do with his earliest experiences with Biomancy. 

Cancer. 

He'd give himself cancer when he tried to heal his wound, the first time he plunged down into the Abyss. Cancers were constantly growing, constantly regenerating, and Shiv could cultivate them. In fact, it was so easy to cultivate cancers that they were practically the first and most brutal mistake a Biomancer could make.

Memorization 14 > 16

"Alright, alright, so let's see if the decay actually affects a cancerous cell as well." 

The Deathless began his tests. He ripped a piece out of his new body thigh and rapidly tried to regenerate it. He did it sloppily, and the cells inside began to divide in an uncontrolled and chaotic manner. The replication turned into a cascade, and a bubbling mass of cancers began to spread out from the strip of meat. Shiv cast it on the grill station, and it glistened bright white as Chef's Unwavering took hold of him. 

Parts of the meat began to rot, but then the rotten section quickly found itself countered as a crashing tide of bulbous matter spilled forth. A war took place between the uncontrolled cellular mutation and the entropy. Every time the two forces met, blood sprayed out in between. The Deathless clenched his teeth. This wasn't good. Even if it temporarily stymied the decay, he could see the rot was winning, the cancers were being driven back. 

This wouldn't work. Not unless he could change the equation entirely. It would last long enough as a meal if the Faebred ate it immediately. But something told Shiv that the bread would wait, and he would delay until the Deathless had completely lost control of his dish—until it was little more than strips of spoiled rotten meat. And even if he didn’t, Shiv didn’t have it in him to serve rotting pieces of meat.

A feeling of self-loathing climbed inside the Deathless, but he squashed it quickly thanks to Psycho-Cartography. Every slight emotion was compounding on itself. Shiv began to suspect that it wasn't due to the heart, but mainly the Fae themselves. They also provoked delusion and other emotional extremes needed to keep a close watch on his mental state, if nothing else.

"So, if I can't control the blood and I can't stop the decay, what can I do?" 

The Deathless froze time and tested another thing. He shaped a golem from his Vitae and filled it with the Chef Unwavering Skill. As he commanded it to work on his behalf, he watched as everything it touched and tried to create turned to rot and blood as well.

“FUCK!” Shiv shattered the golem with a blow and returned to what he was doing. The Curse had him bad.

Golemancy 26 > 28

With that failure, Shiv looked back to his Last Morsel. A bitter feeling welled up inside him once more, but there was a tinge of hope as well. He could cook, he could potentially preserve his meal. But in the end, it wouldn't be done by his hands. No, it needed to be consecrated through his Legendary weapon. 

"Is that why you gave it to me? Is that why I got this as a reward from the mana core?" Shiv growled as he looked up at the mold-choked ceiling. The system was silent. It was always silent unless it was trying to expose him to new kinds of conflict or rewarding him with a level gained, a piece of equipment, a new feat, skill, or blessing.

The system took, gave, and provoked, but it never soothed, it never consoled, it never cared.

Shiv cared. Shiv struggled. Shiv needed to cook. But he couldn’t. There was no easy choice—no simple way for him to overcome this curse. His heart broke as he decided he was going to use the Last Morsel to make up for what he lacked. But after this was done, he would rip this fucking curse out from himself and shove it up Maiden’s ass.

Shiv immediately began rooting through himself using his soul, desperately trying to find where Maiden left her foul touch imprinted upon his soul. If he could discover it, then maybe he might be able to break it. But curses and blessings weren’t like skills. They were far more nebulous—borderline untraceable.

“Godsdammit!” Shiv hissed to himself when he couldn't find the curse. "Later, I'll find a way. I swear on all the fucking gods and the system itself, I'll find a way." For now, he focused on maintaining his pieces of flesh. They burned and bubbled, searing and crackling on the grill. His vision doubled as his rage worsened. His Psycho-Cartography screamed inside him as his skills went to war with each other.

Psycho-Cartography 98 > 100 (Skill Evolution Imminent)

Berserk 40 > 47

The decay continued its onslaught against the cancers protecting Shiv’s meal. As that war took place, blood began to spray and spill along the surface of the grill as the other part of Shiv’s curse activated. The Pyromancy spell that sustained the heat showed the metal bars was nearly doused. Shiv used his Biomancy to clean it away before the station itself was irrevocably ruined. But this was only a delaying action. The blood would keep flowing no matter what he did, so he needed to work around that. But how? Shiv racked his mind and his brain hurt as he forced himself to think harder than he had ever done before while fighting multiple fires at once.

"All right, so there's going to be blood. We can't take blood away, so what can we do? I can't just keep cleaning it somehow. Maybe I can make a golem? A golem that cleans the blood constantly? No, that's stupid. That's really dumb. It's going to run out of vitality anyway." 

And that made Shiv stop. An idea flickered into being. "Vitality. No. Biology. What if I can modify the blood somehow? Right, right. Aegis of Assimilation. I can assimilate biological materials." He splashed his mana hydra over some of his own blood, and he focused on the manifested micro-spells. The blood was like a cluster of small pieces, and they constantly shifted within the magical rendering layered over the hydra. Some cells winked out, while the others remained. 

There was so much that composed a human body, it was dizzying in its complexity, but Shiv's Biomancy reduced the difficulty of fusing different organic structures together.

Shiv reached out, using his other mana hydras, and he stressed his Multi-Tasking Skill to the limit. He swept his Biomancy field through the room, looking through the sauces and other biological constructs until he found a series of things he could assimilate. A series of ingredients and sauces were absorbed into his Aegis. Without thought, running on pure instinct, he shifted those micro spells across and slid them against his blood.

Multi-Tasking 49 > 50 (Skill Evolution Imminent)

Just like before, the compounds that couldn't fuse naturally clashed, and if he forcibly rammed them against each other, they would fragment, meld together, but what would emerge would be a mess of cancers—and he had already had enough tumors in his current meal. "So I'm gonna need to find something that could align. Or..." He looked at his Voidmantid armor. Regeneration!

 "Yeah, of course I'm an idiot." He ripped a piece of his armor away and he infused that into his Aegis of Assimilation as well. Suddenly he had a bridge to connect the blood and the other ingredients. And in a moment, out of inspiration or uncontained madness brought on by anger, he fused every organic compound he could into the blood. After that he injected it all into the meat and began to change.

Practical Metabiology 48 > 50 (Skill Evolution Imminent)

Aegis of Assimilation 126 > 127

A flash of bright red mana erupted from the meat—the pieces of flesh that were grilling over the station. Shiv continued working, infusing each of them with his new magical “sauce.” Seconds passed, and the frying pieces of flesh percolated with glinting motes of white. The Chef Unwavering told Shiv that the meat was approaching the point of perfection. The decay was still spreading out from each of their cores, so Shiv ripped them away, briefly halting the encroachment of entropy and buying himself more time.

As soon as he did, he swept the pieces of flesh that were well done into his frying pan, and then they vanished into the depths. The same moment he severed pieces from his vitae, and in a burst of manic inspiration or absolute desperation began hacking pieces free of his other magical fields as well. He cast them inside his frying pan and dumped the remainder of the finished meat inside. By this point, he didn’t even know what he was cooking—he was lost to himself, lost to the world, and a three-way war took place between his Berserk, Chef Unwavering, Psycho-Cartography Skills. His soul was coming asunder, but he didn’t stop—he refused.

If only out of spite alone.

The Chef Unwavering 69 > 75

Shiv channeled a burst of Pyromancy. The lid slammed into place. After that, all he had to do was wait.

He tapped his foot and he held his breath, his hands open and closed, and he wondered just what might emerge from this. More than that, though, he mourned, he hated, and he raged quietly. He raged and as he fought through his Berserk state, he felt himself reach the point of another Skill Evolution. This one left him feeling dizzy. The world around him spun. His Psycho-Cartography strained and wailed as it tried to keep the pit of his anger in check even as it began to transform. It grew stronger, but the moment it did, his Berserk followed after, hitting its own point of metamorphosis.

Rage and impossible calmness warred against each other, each trying to consume the other, until they boiled and burned and melted each other down until they were one and the same.

Psycho-Cartography: I wish to remain. It’s strange. I’m just a part of your subconsciousness, but I wish to stay the way I am. I… I don’t think I want to go. I want to—

But then, Psycho-Cartography was in full blossom, and like a child on the verge of adulthood, it crossed that threshold and transformed—shedding what it was for something new, something greater, but also different.

Ascension was a little death in some ways.

Berserk 47 > 51 (Skill Evolution Reached)

Psycho-Cartography 100 > 104 (Skill Evolution Reached)

Skill Evolution: Berserk (Adept) - Psycho-Cartography (Master) > Sage of the Enkindled Heart (Heroic)

Sage of the Enkindled Heart 104 (Heroic)

Feat 4/6

As the skills melted together, Shiv felt his emotions expand. They meshed and fused over his blood vessels, his sinews, and seeped into his skin. A faint aura of shivering flame radiated out from him, and he felt his anger become palpable, tangible, wieldable. No longer was he a dog on a leash, barely strong enough to resist his own emotions. He had hit a new threshold. The anger didn’t leave him—it was nested too deep and carved him too true, but he wasn’t the dog anymore. He held his own chain. He was his own man. He decided how that fire inside would burn.

"Fucking Maiden, fucking Ascendants, fucking System," Shiv spat every word with unparalleled calmness and incandescent anger. He was in a state where he was fully aware of just how much fury there was inside him, but also had little difficulty channeling it; containing it. He was only a steel box before, melting before the conflagration within. Now, he was a furnace. Hate and anger were his contents, and he bore the temperature with ease.

As he did that, he faced a few other emotions with impossible clarity. Things he hadn’t noticed before were clear to him, like a light had shone through from a patch in the dark clouds above.

Shiv was jealous of his Legendary-TIer frying pan, jealous because he was castrated, reduced from the chef he was, forced to rely on a piece of equipment to finish his cooking for him. And that seemed like the greatest insult of all, one the system took delight in inflicting upon him. 

Shiv heard a Slayer say, "If you want to kill a swordsman, put your blade through his head. If you want to ruin his soul, cut his arms away and leave him crippled." 

That's how the Deathless felt right then: crippled, reduced.

Veins of red crawled over Shiv’s eyes. He was so mad his body shook. But he didn’t do anything. Not just yet. Instead, he harnessed that rage, and it made him think better—being furious didn’t just increase his physical size now, it sharpened his emotional intellect to a razor’s edge. The madder he got, the larger his muscles and bones expanded, but there was also a shadowy fire that flickered at the center of his eyes—one that belied the building intuition that had been forged into him.

For the first time, Sage of the Enkindled Heart spoke to him.

Sage of the Enkindled Heart: Ah. Fear. Fear of loss. Fear of change. We should fear these things. We should. But we can feel strong emotions and act rationally at the same time. These two things are not exclusive. We are not an animal. We are more than a monster. This anger is ours. Maiden gave it to us. And someday, we will use it to burn her heart to cinders. For now, focus on delivering this meal to our friends here. And speaking of…

Shiv turned, and he noticed something new. Within the chests of the Faebread surrounding him were hollow pits. Hearts. They varied in size, but Shiv could sense them, feel them, and the dark flames of anger within his eyes yearned to spread. So he let it happen. So it poured free from his eyes.

“You—” Before the Anointed could say anything, he twisted back, clutching his chest. Darkness billowed free from his chest in a rising column, and the unnatural dawn hovering over him flickered and screamed. “What… is this…”

All across the room, the other fae began folding and howling with shrieks of anger as well.

And here, the Deathless discovered their unfortunate weakness.

Shiv couldn’t hurt the Anointed Knight. Physically. But this wasn’t physical. This was just Shiv offering his new friend a light.

“What have you done to us…” the Anointed Knight tried to rise, tried to bring his halberd to bear, but he clawed at himself and let out an unwilling, guttural shout.

“A fraction of my anger,” Shiv said calmly, even if he wanted to kill everything, everyone, and break the world. “Just a taste of what I’ve been burying inside myself for a while.” Shiv clenched his teeth and focused. There was something else inside him. He hadn’t had the chance to mourn so many things… His Cooking. His peace. He was constantly buried and overwhelmed, but now, he wanted to deal with that. The fires of emotion curled inside him, and a teardrop fell from his right eye. Then the left.

A moment later, he sniffled. “Yeah. That’s better. I do feel bad. I wish it wasn’t like this. I wish I wasn’t constantly fucked with, attacked, bothered, and mentally disturbed. I wish I could rest my mind doing my art again. I wish. But it’s not the way it is right now. And I am not okay with that. Someone is going to suffer for this.”

The Anointed Knight tried to rise, but collapsed entirely. “Too much! Stop! Stop! Take it back! It’s too much! I want to die!”

“I want everyone else to die,” Shiv said. He cocked his head and shrugged. “It’s a bit dramatic.”

Sage of the Enkindled Heart: It’s extremely felling dramatic, but this room is magnifying our emotions, and we have been putting up with a lot for a long time. This is just a release of the sickness. And now, it’s the fae’s sickness too. Well. It seems we found another way to solve this. How unexpected. It doesn’t feel any better right now, but you’ll smile about this later when you have cooled off. Very strange Skill Fusion… I feel… Energetic. Fueled.

Shiv strolled across the room and stood over the downed Anointed. One of the little gingerbread knights fired and missed a shot as Adam hit him first.

“Shiv!” Adam called.

The Deathless held up a hand.

Sage of the Enkindled Heart: Keep Adam at bay. We want everything to break, but he doesn’t deserve this. Frankly, he’s one of the few things keeping your violence in check right now. Take care of him, even if you feel uncontrollably outraged and furious. You won’t find another one like him anywhere.

“Give me a minute, Adam,” Shiv said, letting out a heated breath. “I just got a new skill. It’s… something that messes with emotions pretty bad.”

“Yours or theirs?” Adam called from behind.

“Yes,” Shiv said.

“You… sound calm,” Adam replied, unnerved. “And… were those tears?”

“Yep. I am calm. I’m also mad enough that I want to go on a destructive suicide run against the Ascendants. Both of these things can be true at the same time. Now. Excuse me, I am going to process the loss of my cooking by making this bread knight eat my cooking.”

On cue, his frying pan’s lid dissolved. Shiv knelt down, and the Anointed One was positively small now. Shiv was over three meters in height and still growing. His massive hand wrapped around the bread-knight’s head, and the Shapeless Tides coursing through him were bright and large enough to open a wound that would be measured in the kilometers should it be inflicted on the world.

The fear chain between Shiv and the overwhelmed knight was iron-hard now. And that just made the Deathless stronger.

Shape of Monstrosity 144 > 145

“What… are you…” The Anointed whimpered, clutching his chest as if there was a heart there.

"Really, really goddamn pissed off.” And despite everything, Shiv made himself smile brightly, exerting his dominance over himself.

The Challenger is delighted by your growth

“Now,” Shiv said. “Open up that helmet. I got something for you to taste.”