Chapter 439: Cursed Clock v2

Double release.

Third chapter of the week.

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

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The Tier 7s fell silent as the duel began.

Having been offered an opening, Clock did not hesitate. His left hand fired a violet beam that the Champion tanked without so much as a flinch.

“I’m sure you can do better.” Priam paused. “In fact, I need you to do better.”

Pressing a hand against his left eye, he lengthened his mist-toga until it brushed the floor. A wave of fog crawled outward in every direction, drowning the arena.

“With only one eye, his depth perception is compromised,” Hastenash observed. “He is using his mist to lock down on his opponent.”

“Are you going to comment on everything?” Neitlan’h asked. She received a raised middle finger for her trouble.

At the center of the arena, Priam rode his mist to the edge of his opponent’s Domain. He stepped through the remaining distance and closed his hand around a mechanical arm. His expression bored, he pulled. Metal shrieked; the automaton lost a limb.

The Juggernaut had left this version of Clock in the dust weeks ago.

“He’s got the strength of a Behemoth,” murmured a Tier 5.

“Or a kinetic skill,” Wang Lin countered.

The amputation drew no scream from the automaton. Drawing a second mechanized arm, Clock unfolded a blade like a mechanical Swiss knife and counterattacked. Despite its magical alloy, the tip barely pierced Priam’s skin. A single drop of flame-red blood rolled down at an unhurried pace. It was as if the Juggernaut was bleeding magma.

“His blood has the viscosity of honey and an abnormal aether charge,” murmured the Phoenix Queen. “It resembles the ichor of my kin.”

Thaal nearly burst out laughing. Without knowing it, Neitlan’h had come close to guessing the name of Priam’s new hemorrhage resistance: [Fount of pseudo-Ichor].

“Terrifying vitality for a Tier 0,” the Immortal continued. “Not to mention his constitution. In raw attributes, he utterly outclasses his foe. But he ought to have dodged.” Her words trailed off as a tattoo of a violet cogwheel appeared around the wound.

“A rust-hex,” Seuz recognized. “Devastating against machines, yet also effective on humans due to the iron in the hemoglobin that carries oxygen. Our dear gladiator will suffocate.”

Priam lowered his head to inspect the curse and sighed. In disappointment, Thaal thought. The Champion lifted the hand covering his left eye, releasing a lightless wave that froze both tattoo and ambient aether.

Thaal grinned as the Tier 7s around him gaped.

“What the hell?! That aura—”

Hastenash didn’t finish his thought. In the foggy arena, the mist ignited. Juggling two Concepts, Priam unleashed the horror of Pyro to annihilate his foe.

“Such warm flames,” Sweet Mama commented as she served whipped cream. “Perfect for a crème brûlée.”

Neitlan’h narrowed her eyes. “An evolution of Fire. Combustion, perhaps? Possibly an alien Concept. Hard to tell with the naked eye.”

Thaal bit back another laugh.

Wiping blood from the corner of his mouth, Priam gestured that he needed no break. With his wounds worsening under Hecate’s and Sna’s curses, he had every reason to wrap these fights quickly. A chime announced the next wave.

The ceiling opened on a new iteration of Clock, one identical to the previous one, save for an extra pair of arms.

Priam wasted no breath on banter. He leapt forward, accepted another curse, and expressed his displeasure by kinetically compressing the automaton into a cube. A gulf in attributes could create such terrifying scenes.

Thaal’s eyes narrowed as a second cursed cogwheel appeared beside the first on Priam’s torso. Unlike the other spectators, the Administrator perceived the aetheric structure of the tattoo. It trapped the victim’s soul in its body even in death. Faced with Hecate’s New Moon, Clock’s second hex froze like a mouse before a cat. Busy warring against Sna’s curse, the ocular mutation spared no second glance for what it did not consider a rival.

Assuming this wasn’t coincidence, Thaal could see where this was going, and a smile crept over his face. Oh, Priam… You flirt with death so boldly your future wife will grow jealous.

The third version of Clock stood out against the cubical arena’s white background. Painted in full-moon black, it resisted kinetic pressure and Pyro long enough to grant Priam a new tattoo. Another gear—connecting to the others—forming a complex mechanism greater than the sum of its parts. Even so, the curse bowed its head, suppressing its own effect: turning skin to bronze and eyes to glass.

A draconic breath ended the fight.

“Dragon. How original a bloodline,” someone muttered.

“It is one of the supreme ones,” Hastenash proclaimed. “And the only one available in our Sector.”

“How proud you are, when ninety-nine percent of you serve as nothing but fat turkeys for true Dragons,” Neitlan’h shot back.

“What do I care, so long as I am part of the one percent?”

Unbothered by quarrels he couldn’t hear, Priam pressed on. The fourth Clock was spawn-killed by a thrust whose vibration shook the arena’s protections.

“[Age of Heroes]?” Seuz guessed, seeing the image of a Myth guide Priam’s arm without it being a skill.

“The first one,” Wang Lin confirmed. “Once per day, your weapon may pierce any defense up to ten times your own. It’s been a long time since the Sector’s seen a Hero.”

“And the peace was pleasant,” Neitlan’h said, lips tight. “Heroes are stones cast into a still pond: sinking swiftly, yet stirring waves in the hearts of our youth.”

“That mindset is exactly why my Sector stagnates,” Thaal growled.

No Immortal dared answer him.

“I believe you are overlooking the essential,” Sweet Mama said, drizzling silver-berry coulis over the slices of cake. “Our dashing Champion is collecting curses.”

All Tier 7s turned toward Priam. An arrangement of four gears encircled his right nipple, the last ready to turn the organs of his torso into mechanical components. Separately, the curses were harmless to a Prince, but together…

“He’s a masochist or what?” Hastenash asked.

“Considering the many resistances required to raise a constitution to such a level, it seems obvious. Three of them are already tempered,” Seuz noted, pupils dilated across sixteen eyes. A Tier 7’s perception easily spanned the electromagnetic spectrum down to X-rays, enough to see the three gates Priam had already built. “Nevertheless, masochism does not equate to stupidity. He must have a plan to let a curse grow while his eye is already tearing his body apart.”

At those words, Priam fell to one knee. Coughing blood onto the ground, he wiped his mouth, leaving a crimson smear on his cheek.

“Two curses, currently erupting,” Sweet Mama clarified. “At each other’s throat, ruining his body in their struggle to devour one another.” A pause. “What happens if a third contender arrives?”

“Priam is seeking a stalemate? A way to stabilize them?” Wang Lin proposed.

“That isn’t how curses behave,” the Immortal smiled, lighting seven candles atop Thaal’s cake. His favorite number. The human tradition amused him, though after a million years, pastries ran out of room.

The ceiling opened again, releasing the final version of Clock. Unlike the pristine earlier models, this one was half-destroyed. White paint scrawled its chassis in esoteric sigils, half its optics shattered, and one arm twitched erratically.

“Hecate. Hecate. Hecate.”

“Hecate?”

“H̷͍̾̈ë̵̪́͗ͅc̴̠͊͒ȃ̸̝͈̔t̵͙͈͌̌e̴̺͉̔.”

“I think someone needs a factory reset,” Priam muttered as he crouched. For the first time this run, he seemed to take his opponent seriously. As he should. Just before its death, Clock had brushed the rank of Prince.

Priam dashed forward, his footing flawless thanks to [Movement Virtuoso]. He crossed half the distance in a single stride, only to halt as a violet barrier slammed down before him. Promesse slipped through without resistance, but the instant his skin brushed the cursed shield, the flesh of his hand blistered.

With a grunt, the Champion threw himself backward. Summoning a dozen spears of searing fire, he fired them at his foe at gatling speed. In answer, Clock’s torso split open, belching a cloud of violet steam that smothered the incandescent projectiles.

Priam frowned. He was opening his mouth to channel a Breath, when a fit of coughing crippled him.

Clock showed no mercy. Snapping his fingers in rapid succession, he pressed various phalanges against his thumbs. It had nothing to do with the automaton’s newfound madness, and everything to do with its brilliance: it had carved runes where fingerprints should be. Each snap triggered a ritual, a magical pattern capable of forcing aether to rewrite reality. Which it promptly did.

As Priam straightened, a dozen area-of-effect curses reshaped the environment, shackling him. Darkness, silence, vertigo, mind-fog, dread, leaden weight, sensory reversal, shrieking noise—one after another turned the arena into hell.

Inside Priam, Hecate’s New Moon and Sna’s curse growled at the insolence of these new arrivals. Priam spat more blood as the internal war shredded his meridians and poisoned his veins.

Then something changed. His mindset shifted.

No longer smiling, the Juggernaut straightened, Micro ignoring the convulsions wracking his body. His posture looked proud enough to shoulder the sky. Mist thickened in his eyes, and his hair crackled like living flames. A halo shimmered above his crown. His toga dissolved into mist and condensed into pants, leaving his back bare. There, two tattoos ignited before unfurling into incandescent wings.

A chair clattered to the ground. The Phoenix Queen had bolted upright, mouth agape. “What—”

Thaal’s grin split wide as his protégé’s Domain pulsed. Dumping a tenth of his energy reserves at once, Priam flooded his surroundings with aether and blew the magical fuses of the curses. Before any of them could regenerate, the Champion inspected them one by one. Weaving aether with a dexterity some Transcendents would envy, he crafted tailored counters, unraveling his opponent’s traps with ease born of brutal dream-forged training.

Two heartbeats later, Priam’s gaze locked onto Clock.

“In the end,” he said, “the strongest Duke still isn’t a Prince. I am.”

“…”

With a sweep of burning wings, the Juggernaut launched forward. To the high Tiers, he blurred; to Clock, he may as well have teleported. Air screamed as a tunnel carved itself between them. Priam arrived before the sound did, gently placing his right palm on the automaton’s chest. Resonating with his Concept, the Pyro Sage converted his arm into flame and pressed down. His plasma hand slid between the gears until it reached Clock’s heart. Priam clenched his fist.

He drew his Concept back, reclaiming flesh. For an ordinary person, phasing an arm into alchemical metal was a great way to lose it. Indeed, every year, millions of fools died by teleporting into walls.

However, ordinary was not an adjective that applied to the Juggernaut. His constitution matched the alchemically treated alloy and won. With the shriek of tearing metal, Priam’s hand burst Clock’s chest before retracting. In his fist, a violet crystal cogwheel pulsed with corruption.

“Your core… and the anchor of the curse tormenting you, right?” Priam mused.

There was a difference between Clock the Curser and Cursed Clock. One was a torturer; the other, a victim. 

The boss didn’t answer. Couldn’t. Its body spasmed uncontrollably.

Priam let the automaton glitch and drew a deep breath. Thaal would have bet his best friend’s life that the boy was gathering his courage to do something monumentally stupid. And the Immortal Gambler was never wrong.

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Inspiration for Clock the Cursed: A clockwork soldier from Dishonored II

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