Chapter 440: Cursed Priam

Fourth chapter of the week. Read the 439 before this one!

PS: Priam Character Sheet 
PSS: Discord to say hello and discuss the chappies!

*

A silhouette ruined Thaal’s view at the best moment.

“You played me with that NDA! You knew he stole our bloodline and—”

Thaal stared straight into the Tier 7’s eyes, and flexed his Domain to silence the room, the moon, and the entire solar system. Then he smiled.

“My dear Neitlan’h… If we must speak aloud what’s already obvious, then my turn: interrupt me again, and I’ll enroll you in the coming war. Front line. I hear mages adore using phoenix blood as ink for their glyphs.”

The Queen trembled at the naked threat. Pride warred with fear, until the latter won. Flushed crimson, she sat. Thaal forgot her instantly, entranced by the sight of Priam raising the cursed cogwheel.

Gritting his teeth, Priam pressed it to his chest, at the center of the four others. His skin reacted as though touched by a branding iron. Steam hissed from the magical cauterization. When the ritual finished, Priam revealed the new tattoo. Each gear slotted perfectly into the existing array, forming a terrible five-part mechanism.

Clock’s emptied core slipped from Priam’s limp hand. The Champion’s eyes rolled back as the full weight of the malediction crashed into him.

“And that makes three,” Sweet Mama said with a smile. “Time to eat.”

Thaal drove his dessert fork into the cake and lifted it to his mouth. An almost orgasmic moan escaped him—and the other guests. Once again, the pâtissière had outdone herself. A few Tiers ago, a single bite might have revived him from death. For a Tier 0, it was enough to unlock [Ageless].

Meanwhile, Priam screamed until his vocal cords frayed.

To the Tier 8’s supernatural sight, violet fumes were spreading through his protégé’s body. Already the battleground of two curses, his physique now welcomed a third rival. For Clock’s malediction, the time for bowing was over; it stepped into the arena as a challenger.

[Chimera] attempted to stabilize everything by pitting the hexes against each other, but balance wasn’t in their nature. As soon as one faltered, the other two surged. A ruinous melee followed, the three curses devouring one another.

“Time to eat,” Sweet Mama had predicted. Thaal smiled at the pun… and, while no one was watching, stole a bite of cake from his neighbor’s plate.

Host to a triple mutant curse, Priam’s screams did not abate. Instead of dispersing, the monstrous amalgam swelled, burrowing roots into the fertile terrain that was the Juggernaut. Gorging itself on aether and energy, the abomination mutated into something more horrifying than the sum of its parents.

A madman’s masterpiece, a nightmarish hex blossomed before the audience.

“By the balls of the first Dragon,” Hastenash swore. “Hard to judge without aether sight, but that curse must have hit mid-Tier.”

“Indeed,” Seuz grimaced. “The sight of the poor boy makes my tentacles curl.”

Due to anatomical differences, Thaal suffered no such reaction, but he understood. Priam’s body had become grotesque. His left eye, now blacker than Vantablack, had doubled in size, deforming his face. His tanned skin had taken a bronze sheen; and for good reason as parts had become metal. Inside, nothing remained of his human heart but a rune-carved gear pumping hexed energy to propagate the curse. Already, his left arm resembled that of an automaton.

“If he can’t purge it, he’ll turn into a second Clock,” predicted Wang Lin.

“Good,” spat the phoenix, furious at her inability to prevent what she saw as a threat.

“He may be a masochist, but not suicidal,” Seuz judged.

Thaal sniffed. “Doubt.”

“I mean, there are faster ways to die than collecting all of Clock’s curses and fusing them with two other exotics.”

“You think he crafted this horror on purpose? But why?” asked Hastenash, licking cake from his fingers.

“[Curse Resistance].”

The drake froze, then shook his head.

“Bullshit. You need to be Tier 1 to get a legendary resistance without an epic parent.”

“Not exactly. You just need Tier 1 aether.”

Everyone stared at the halo crowning Priam. It hummed, siphoning a large portion of the Champion’s aether to refine it.

“That’s still doomed to fail,” Hastenash insisted, though his voice had lost some bite. “Soaking ones cells in Tier 1 aether isn’t enough to make them mutate: a legendary skill needs a solid foundation. Priam’s soul can’t resonate with the Curse Concept—as it’s Tier 2—and I don’t see Supremacy II anywhere.”

“But he can add to his story through an ideal skill,” Seuz countered. “And judging by our friend’s Achievements, that is not something we can dismiss. It would also explain why he’s inflicting himself with such a vile curse.”

“… I don’t believe it.” The drake snarled.

“Is your draconic pride choking on the idea that someone weaker might surpass you in audacity?” the merchant asked.

“Audacity? That’s generous. I’d call it insanity.”

Thaal smiled faintly. Watching an Immortal wrestle with the most probable answer on account of wounded pride was fun. As if Champions could be understood with statistics or probability curves.

“Ah! One last problem.” Hastenash tapped the table, still refusing to yield. “[Curse Resistance] is a Tier 1 skill, meaning a three-dimensional rune built from Tier 1 aether! Sure, the System supports the creation process, but the soul has to do the actual work. Impossible without the baptism of a High Tribulation, as it can’t manipulate Tier aether before!” He hesitated, then turned to Neitlan’h. “Unless your Nirvana—”

“No. And if his soul had been reforged by a Nirvana, we would’ve seen a—” She swallowed the rest. “Anyway, he’d be a Monarch, not a Prince.”

No one contradicted her. The phoenix bloodline was merely high, but a Nirvana pushed it almost a rank higher.

“Then it’s a fool’s errand born of ignorance,” Hastenash concluded, relieved.

Thaal sniffed louder this time, a clue enough for Wang Lin to stiffen. No one dared question a Primordial, but the high-Tiers immediately squeezed the poor Demiurge for answers.

“It’s just a rumor I heard… but they say that among the Titles crafted by the System from the Myth of our second Guild Master, there’s a secret to automatically forge some resistance runes.”

“When you say the second Guild Master of the Mercenaries, you mean—”

“The Tank archetype,” Wang Lin confirmed.

Hastenash frowned. Neitlan’h paled. Seuz grew thoughtful. Sweet Mama licked her lips.

“A Juggernaut’s body and a mind sharp enough to drive it… Death’s Obsession.”

Smiling, Thaal focused on the arena. Thanks to his Administrator privileges, he watched the Champion open his Trees of Merit.

[Life is Hard; I’m Harder - Gold] - Tier 4: You can develop resistances normally inaccessible to your Soul Tier. ACQUIRED

[Life is Hard; I’m Harder - Gold] - Tier 5: Locked. Requires a Legendary Title. 

7 Unused Merit Points.

The Merit, long gatekept by its Mind Ennoblement prerequisite, latched onto the Tier 1 aether within the halo. Driving the purified fluid into the Juggernaut’s body, it submerged every cell, every meridian, every gate. The energy did not heal his ruined physique or his mind besieged by the rampaging curse, but gave them the opportunity to adapt. And they did.

As his meta-endurance lost ground, Priam brought his meta-authority to bear, denying the hex’s appetite and preventing it from using his aether as fuel. Simultaneously, his addon and willpower rose against the emotional alterations forced by the curse. The System noticed the effort and, aided by the new Merit, recorded it as a fragment of rune on one of the soul layers. A first step—woefully insufficient to win a three-front war his body was losing pitifully.

The Juggernaut was not done. Bolstered by [Homo Elysian Obsession] and [Life is Hard; I’m Harder], his flesh began to mutate. As the curse advanced to turn his bones into bronze, his muscles into engines, his organs into batteries and his blood into oil, the cells in its path evolved. Most transmuted into alloy too quickly to defend themselves, but one rearranged its proteins to form a natural micro-rune capable of slowing the hex. A stochastic miracle, guided by an obsession powerful enough to bend the world. The signature of a Homo Elysian.

The soul detected the feat, and Micro relayed the favorable evolutionary path to nearby cells. As the System continued building the soul rune, a second cell resisted, then a third. Soon, the change spread throughout the body.

With meridians, mind, and flesh united against the malediction, the resistance quickly reached a critical threshold. 

Prerequisites met:

• Hecate’s shard: New Moon mutation

• You survived two Tribulation Curses (Fatal Misfortune/Brittle Bones)

• You purged a T3 curse (Léo’s requiem)

• You donned Clock’s ultimate curse

• Your body was the cauldron of a Curse Gu ritual, successfully giving birth to a Transcendent curse

You have gained an ideal skill.

[Curse Anathema - Legendary] - Hexcraft, jinxes, botched rituals, damnatio memoriae, dark astrology, voodoo dolls… curses come in many shapes, but they share a single purpose: to degrade their target’s life.
If you favor more direct attacks, it is always wise to be ready to endure malice. Paragon of defiance, you stare corruption in the eye. It looks away.
This skill establishes defensive protein-rituals at the cellular level, fortifies your mind against hexes, and directs your meta-endurance against curse invasions.
[…]
DEXT +9
WILL + 9
Meta (Endurance) +9

Tier 0 Soul legendary skill limit: 4/5

Time nearly froze as Thaal unleashed his high vivacity to think faster. He could have written a book in the time it took Priam to blink… but he settled for a few lines.

Not everyone enjoyed Administrator-personalized skill descriptions. As a Champion, Priam was one of the lucky few.

Opening the text field, Thaal wrote:

…Mages will curse the Juggernaut twice: first when casting their spells, then again when watching them slide off him.

“I’ve seen hydras show more respect for their bodies,” one of the Immortals grumbled.

Thaal looked up just in time to watch Priam tear off his automated arm. Amused, the Administrator sent the footage of all five waves to a certain human, along with a message:

“Hey Luc. Need a clip for 2die4. Handle the editing, will you? As for payment…”

As Thaal hesitated, his gaze fell on the last slice of cake. He smiled.

*

Priam wasn’t a trauma surgeon, but he had suffered enough to know what to expect when ripping off an arm: blood, torn ligaments, shredded muscle, and severed nerves. Not oil and a handful of loose gears. Yet that’s exactly what he found, courtesy of the unholy fusion of a triple curse.

Lvl Up: [Curse Anathema] lvl 2
DEXT +9
WILL + 9
Meta (Endurance) +9

A hex poised to annihilate him. Priam felt its influence swell and opted for drastic measures. [Kinetic Sovereignty] seized what had once been his human heart, and pulled. His ribcage opened like a blooming flower, ejecting a cluster of crystallized-aether gears among blood and bone shards: the fused remains of a mechanical heart, a core, and a curse’s focus.

Depriving the hex of its source was like taking the wind out of its sails. The changes ravaging Priam’s body halted, and the resistance even began reversing some of them. For instance, his left eye lost its pitch-black color and grotesque size. Hecate’s New Moon fell dormant.

Reassured, the Champion restored his human heart using [Tribulation Wyvern Heart] and regenerated his arm through [Four-headed Hydra]. With no more fast healing cards to play, he decided to let time do its work. After all, his high vitality had to be used once in a while. A guy can’t always burn his lifespan. 

“Seems I’m the only one condemned.”

Lifting his gaze toward Clock, Priam raised an eyebrow. First, because with a gaping hole in its chest and no battery-slash-core, the boss should have been dead. Second, because the automaton’s voice sounded far too gentle.

“Who’re you?”

“Charles. An elven troubadour.”

“… You look a hell of a lot like Clock, the boss of the Colosseum.”

The automaton shuddered with a small laugh. “Ah. Thank you, I needed that.” A cough shook him. “Before I die, I’d like to tell you a forbidden fable.”

“Forbidden why?”

“Because it’s a cognitohazard. Something that changes people that perceive it.”

Casting a glance at the elven boss, Priam grimaced. “My curiosity has limits.”

“As you wish. But the title is: Hecate’s Wedding.”

Feeling his left eye twitch, Priam sighed.

“I’m listening.”

And the troubadour sang:

In a far-off heaven, beyond any way,
Seven Moons, daughters of one ray,
All cast their tender beams on the same youth,
A prince born once, yet son to all, in truth.

Each Moon in silence cherished the same fire,
And dreamed one day to wed the boy of her desire.
But its parents spoke with single breath:
“No marriage till our son ascends the Throne, or death.”

Yet the Dragon, more cunning than celestial law,
Led the youngest Moon where mortal eyes never saw.
In the greatest Depths Hecate was wed,
And wore one stolen night upon her head. 

The parents woke, their wrath bright,
They tore her crown of light, 
Unhung her from the sky, 
Fragmented her soul so that never again would she fly.

Charles died on the last word.

Priam shook his head. “All these prophecies… You couldn’t just tell me Hecate’s probably the Necromoon’s sister? That they’re tied to the Depths? And that I’ve got a fucking fragment of her soul in my left eye?” he muttered before sighing. “Rest in peace, Charles.”

A minute later came a chime, and Priam forgot everything else. The next wave marked the divide between nobility and royalty. This was where things got difficult, and he couldn’t afford to stop now.

After all, his phoenix mentor was waiting at wave ninety-five.

*
Charles the elven Troubadour