Chapter 400 - Mistakes Were Made (Patreon)

So the rhythm is a bit off, but hey, tuesday and thursday chapters instead of monday and wednesday isn't terrible, especially if I keep em coming! Everything's a start, right? Back at it we go.

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Laicization. A rare and distinctive form of removal from the Church, involving not a member of the lesser clergy or the removal of a simple churchgoer, but an active member of the higher echelons of the holy ordos. It is the removal of any rank or power that the prior clergymember possessed, officially taking from them any and all authority they possessed. In theory and according to its original definition, it is possible for one to experience laicization without excommunication. However… for a necromancer of the Church to be laicized is for every ounce of power and ontology that the Fallen Kingdom has assimilated to become effectively alien to them. It means to lose everything, save the one Death they have claimed for themselves, their own Death, which they have mantled. 

Usually, that’s enough to unmake some of the greater clergy outright. Our existence is so often tied to so many parts, so much active magic, that to lose access to the thousands of Deaths we hold, the Echo-matter we can manifest, and the wider necromantic energies of the land is to have us simply fall apart. 

Thus I cannot currently, empirically confirm any point in time where Laicization has led to anything less than the total unraveling of the clergy whose authority and placement have been removed. Ergo, while Laicization is classified distinctly from excommunication, and can, in theory, be applied to anyone, even upon their own personal request, it is, in practice, an execution.

-Personal notes of a censured and excommunicated Archbishop, whose name and martyrdom has been struck from Church records. 

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Fear. 

Louder than the incoming hum of missiles, more violent than the screaming of Echo-matter manifesting by force, taking up more of her attention than the way that space is collapsing inward around her.

She remembers fear. It is also her first time experiencing it as herself, as her new self, and it is so loud. 

She failed, and now her / Raika’s son is in danger, and her sister is in danger, and everything else is smaller than that. 

It didn’t work. It didn’t work, and now she’s afraid.

Rage is very easy to get to from fear, though. 

And the Pain of failure is familiar.

Mortaria’s Bishops all attack in perfect synchronicity, moving like machinery, enhanced and designed to perfectly complement each other’s function. A sense of crushing pressure and a few hundred fractals of revolving gears crushing phantasmal bodies both slam into her at once, Death made into form made into weapons to annihilate her. Distant artillery fires, missiles shining like stars in the firmament of night, heading towards her with the same kind of overwhelming magics that were used to try and trap Godfall’s armies. 

From below, spires of black metal start to rise, forming traps and sharp-edged weaponry that crawl out of the graves, and a strange humming noise unmakes portions of them, creating razor-sharp sands of metallic shavings that rise up to try and erase her. Alien angles start to sharpen themselves against her, perspective weaponized into cutting agonies. Her fear reaches a fever pitch, unnatural and violent enough to start to burn her, forcing the worms of her flesh to writhe and try to unmake themselves from fright.

All of it presses in against her, and none of it matters. 

She only has eyes for her family below. 

In an instant, her body gets pulped to nothing but toxic mash, turning to mist on the wind.

She moves anyways.

Her worms don’t Die, and they are her body. They only END, and they have not yet reached that point. 

A wave of toxic biomatter explodes outward even as Kai Ra reconstitutes herself, spraying the lingering stars and the attacks they manifest. The world is flooded with steam and smoke as her Gu-formed biology’s venoms start to burn through ghost-flesh and insubstantial attacks as easily as the physical ones.

And then she fills them with Pain.

She pushes Raika’s comprehension of the Dao of Pain into every impact she’s having on the world, infusing it into the very toxins she’s using, and feels existence shriek at her touch. 

Several of the glimmering stars of Death that hover around her flinch or retreat, murder-by-machinery being even less well-equipped against all-too-living agony than the usual wraiths. It buys Kai Ra a few seconds, just long enough for her to turn her reforming body and throw herself downwards.

And hits the “ground”.

Her Halo spasms and then spits back up her ability to fall, but that half-second cost her. 

The artillery strike lands. 

The world goes white.

The same sort of force that nearly annihilated Godsfall’s islands, now more undirected and chaotic, detonates against her. Obliteration once again echoes across reality as the force directed chaotically and violently through the world tries to unmake her, or at least pin her in place for the next round of attacks to get a hold of her. 

It hurts. It hurts. It hurts and she’s scared.

She’s failed. She’s failing. Kai Ra’s first true act is to fail, because now the danger she’s toyed with and tried to keep her son free of has come and she can’t-

Her bluff was called. Mutually assured destruction was put on the table, and now she has no choice but to commit to it or fail further, but she can’t commit to it because Jin is in danger and she has to keep him safe however she fucking can. 

And she’s scared.

She’s so scared it Hurts. 

Her body is sent tumbling from the impact, but she doesn’t come apart like the first round of attacks made her. Her Halo remains entirely untouched, hovering behind her unbothered as she is thrown about by the explosions, but her Gu-flesh survives the hit, a fresh generation of toxic beetles already eating and shitting out the Death and poisons around her. 

It wouldn’t be enough to save her, except that she has no Death. 

The impact is muted. The magic is muffled, eating away at bits of her but unable to fully touch her essence, now. She has no Death- she only has ENDs.

And parts of her do END. Some of the Gu-worms she’s infected and turned to a body take enough damage to be unmade at an invisible level, and they cross a threshold where they simply stop existing. Even then there’s an unexpected result- rather than adding to the Echo-matter around her or causing more Death-concept to manifest, it just leaves little… pockets. The parts that End leave little empty spaces where Death cannot touch because there is nothing to touch, and where there is nothing, there is no Death. 

She’s not completely sure how it works, but she takes it as the opportunity it is. 

In those tiny spaces, she moves, sacrificing chunks of herself, bits and pieces here and there, forcing tiny shadows in the ongoing detonations. She casts as much of herself aside as she has to to make sure she can still move, to make sure that she can still tell where she’s going, to make sure that she’s still on track to reach her son.

Desperation remains the loudest thing in the world to her. 

They wanted her son. She was powerless to stop them. Their little game would have, eventually, beaten her, because that’s how it works when you play the games they want you to play. Just like always, she had to do the unexpected, had to do something, and the gamble was her best shot, and it didn’t work. 

Her son is in danger. Her sister is in danger but her son is in danger and there is nothing of Kai Ra that wasn’t born of Raika and there is nothing of Raika that would ever let that happen, not if she can help it, not if anything from her can help it-

She clears the edge of the artillery barely a second before the next round of attacks hits.

Ragged and reforming even as she exits the thin slivers of open space her sacrifices have brought about, she uses the momentum of the explosion to fly forward. Behind her, space collapses, collapsing inwards at an ever-faster speed.

The ruins of the church are below her. Her son is there. Li Shu is there. Any chance of salvaging this is there. 

The air around her starts to twist and roil and pull at her, pulling her body apart and disconnecting her pieces as gravity seems to turn around. That single, collapsing point behind her turns the Echo-matter black instead of white, turns heat to cold and existence to Oblivion, and it tries to pull her into it like it’s pulling everything else. 

She tries to pull her corpse forward- but she’s not a corpse, she has no Death, she can’t wield it like a lich or a ghost anymore. She starts to lose momentum, to get dragged backward-

Instinct.

Desperation. 

Her son is in danger, and she can’t do anything about it if they END her. 

Her Halo rolls its “jaws”. 

Like a new organ, getting a feel for things. Like a fresh set of eyes trying to understand color. 

It takes a bite, the fangs closing over her and leaving her untouched.

And gravity stops working. 

Cause and effect are bitten through as a part of her she only just created does what it does. Gravity pulls at her- but the effect does not generate the cause.

That black pinpoint continues spiraling larger, inhaling everything inward, and instead, she falls. 

This does, unfortunately, mean that she is also very visible. 

She compresses her flesh, the worms crushing the beetles, and sprays out another burst of toxin. It eats through some of the bullets that are in the air, that are carving into her, and the air spasms as the puts Pain into the venom. 

The shrieking resumes again, even louder, as air and friction and steel and more all experience agony they are ontologically incapable of. It buys her an instant, if that, and then-

Six giant-sized hands of ghostly Echo-matter all clap together, crushing her body between them.

“What misery, that I must unmake you!” crows the ghost-king of Godsfall. “What joy, that I get the opportunity to kill you at your most!”

She spasms, but the Gu, while effectively immortal until they are completely obliterated, aren’t as powerful as her corpses or even puppets were. The Echo-matter presses inward, crushing and pulping the magical creatures that make up her body, and she can’t wrest control of the matter from a Bishop, can’t drain some Death and the Qi it’s tied to into herself or into an array-

Her Halo bites blindly, desperately, angrily, every move that of a trapped and feral animal.

Seo En-Hyun roars in pain as some of his hands simply stop, turning to sudden, violent clumps of Death. The magics binding them together stop binding them together, and she sees the minute, cellular-level arrays existing as disconnected pieces while humanoid ghosts are suddenly no longer forced to be hands. 

The cause and effect of the magics fail to connect as Fate comes undone, a sharp-edged set of teeth biting into it. 

And yet, his roaring anger turns to laughter, and his Echo-flesh writhes, regrowing the hands that got unmade.

“What lovely and novel magics you have!” Roars her once-favorite ghost king. “I shall enjoy-”

The jaws bite again, and she’s landing on the church ruins. 

This time the bite at causality, forcing an effect before a cause, hurts. The glowing, iridescent jaws behind her dim, diminishing, going from larger than her body to barely the size of her torso and far less bright. It pulls at something deeper than the rest of her, something as deep as Dao or deeper and-

She doesn’t care. She has to get to her son. She needs to get them out. She’ll burn her Halo if that’s what it takes, whatever it is, she doesn’t fucking care.

A mass of worms that barely resembles a body stumbles around the ruins of her array and the ruins of their ritual and the ruins of the army she used as a tool and-

A spear of obsidian, edged in screaming skulls that bleed black fire, breaks the sound barrier on the way to her.

A hundred glowing hammers, all orbiting another one of those impossible black points, comes in from the side to crush her like a building-sized morningstar.

Dozens of shadows come out of thin air around her, each one with limbs like spears, conical spires that hiss against the light like anathema.

A net of stars wraps around each and every attack and stops them dead. 

Li Shu emerges from the ruins, clad in a suit of keratin that perfectly mimics flesh. Pale white architecture and chitin act as blood, as muscle, as bone, as stranger organs still that spiral out from the needles that she keeps in orbit. Dozens of complex biological systems roil out into the world as Li Shu’s Qi floods reality, still only in the Core Formation realm but multiplied by the Sacrifices she’s made and the ways she’s created paradoxes in reality with them. 

Her second Sacrifice glows in the sight-beyond-sight that is one’s ability to sense Qi.

The ritual wasn’t just for the creation of Kai Ra, or the accidental summoning of the Tribulation. In fact, the latter was probably a consequence of the secondary goal.

Li Shu’s second ritual. Her next step of apotheosis in the Craft.

She Who Stills The Waters called it “Blessed Union”. When a Sacrifice is fully bound to a concept. 

Li Shu, of course, went above and beyond. 

She Sacrificed her spiritual organs, granting her a second focus for her powers, while also binding her original keratin to the idea of Biology. 

In an instant, a shell, like that of a complex insect or turtle, spawns into being, and the rain of incoming projectiles tracking Kai Ra slam hard into biological fractals. Each piece of the keratinous architecture multiplies, each piece grows its own sets of arrays, and the magics powering the attacks that strike the shell shatter against them. More array-grooves spawn in, absorbing the wisps of energy left behind by the destroyed attacks, further empowering more magics that grow out and on-

Li Shu’s face is crimson, the tendrils of starlight that are what used to be her spiritual organs illuminating the blood flooding out of her nose, eyes and ears. She is making quiet little grunts with every breath, the strain of pumping as much Qi as she needs to sustain the still-growing barrier obvious in every strained gasp. Still, her eyes are steady as more and more spirals of formulae cover the Sacrificial shell, growing well beyond even Kai Ra’s ability to keep track of.

“We have to go! They’re-”

That’s as far as she gets before hands made of gold come up out of the shadows, skeletal fingers tearing into the complex magics around them with surgical precision. She grunts, her feet slipping with the lapse, and then she’s focused entirely on their defense again, weaving spells of light to banish shadows as fast as they appear. 

And then Jin is there.

His eyes are wide, but his breathing is even. QUick but unpanicked, in spite of the nightmare of force raining down on them. The trembling piece of metal in his hands makes a sound, and it vibrates through her son, insulating him from some of the constant vibration around them. 

“What’s the plan?” he asks, his eyes wide and his jaw set.

Minutes ago, he’d said something that mattered to her so much.

“We’ll be fine. You’re here.”

She’s failing him.

She refuses to allow that. 

Fear and Pain, hand in hand. 

“The plan is that you run.”

“I can help, I have-” 

She rises up, finding it easy to form a limb from her amorphous mass because it means touching him, holding him, clutching at his shoulder.

“You’re in danger. I gambled and lost, but we’ll be fine. They want you, I don’t know why, and if you’re gone, this changes. So-

“So they’ll fight you even harder!” He says, waving at the chaos outside, at the fact that Li Shu is trembling with exertion and her shell is coming apart piece by piece, even as she rebuilds it frantically.

“I will not fail you,” Kai Ra tells him.

Truespeak ripples across the skin of reality. 

He goes to say something else, and she turns from him, facing Li Shu fully. 

She’s more than before. Better. She can’t do it alone, but she can do it. She won’t fail him.

“Li Shu! The portal system, is it-”

“I can’t focus on that!” Li Shu yells, right as something hits the outside of the shell hard enough to make the building-sized construct crunch. “Need space!”

Implying that she can. Good. 

Raika’s Halo opens wide, smaller and dimmer but wide enough to swallow a person whole,  and she goes to bite at Fate-

A pillar of white fire obliterates the shield Li Shu has crafted, impaling Kai Ra through the middle of her mass.

She recognizes it. It has windows, a door,, and three rings surround it at its peak, middle, and bottom. From them, veins of gold and charcoal-black material shatter out across the surface of the tower, wrapping around it like creeper veins or kintsugi artwork. 

Seo En-Hyun’s three heads smile down at her, his tower somehow compressed into the staff and torch currently pinning her to the ruins. The world around him burns as he smiles, and behind him, orbiting stars of machinery and glowing power circle, fractal mechanisms expanding as their Deaths become all the more real.

Industry Demands Sacrifice

Churning Gears Crush Bone

Falling Munitions Burn Space

Fear Silences Drumbeats

Unfortunate Materials Come Apart

There are more beyond them, more burning bright all at once, more of them coming for her, coming for her son-

Sigils start to crawl over the remains of Li Shu’s shell, mathematically perfect runes starting to undo her work stitch by stitch. They coordinate with the hands of golden skeletons, pulling their only safety apart from the shadows.

And Seo En-Hyun’s three skulls grin down at her, an Asura lusting for the murder she can suffer.

“No need to worry, sister!” he says, his voice loud enough to tear open Li Shu’ skin, to almost break past Dink’s protection around Jin. “I solemnly swear that I shall make you and your boy’s Death a beautiful affair.”

Seo En-Hyun’s Death blooms into existence, realer than real, Soul and Domain in one and neither.

Thousand Killers Beg For More