Chapter 401 - They're Coming For Her Son (Patreon)

Alright, aaaaand the first monday post has arrived! And then I'm aiming for a second one, followed by more on wednesday, then friday, then we have! Achieved! CONSISTENCY!

Soon, anyways. Fingers crossed! Let's get back to work, babes.

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A Blessed Mortal is an interesting religious conundrum, at least on its surface. To the uninitiated, a veneration of life in a Church of Death might well seem a madness, or at least an oxymoron. However, any deeper analysis reveals the truth- there is no Death without Life. There is no Life without Death. They are two sides of the same coin, as real and as concrete as the beliefs of the savages and their “yin and yang”, as real and concrete as nothing-and-something. Without Life, Death would not exist. 

Thus, while the nature of conversion demands the mantling of Death, and the more powerful and precise that Death, the deeper its truth. A life, well lived and properly refined, inevitably leads to a fuller Death, and thus, the cycle of refinement continues, multiplies, enhances itself. 

The power of Death is an inversion. It is the mantling and empowering of an Echo, made all the vaster by the size of what came before, made all the vaster by the void it leaves behind in the moment of transition. 

What, then, does it mean to be a Life that is already loved by Death? What would it mean, for an inversion to already possess what is being Inverted? For an Echo to have more Echoes within it? 

A Blessed Mortal is only an oxymoron to the uninitiated. To those who see, who understand, it is the refinement and evolution of an already potent truth, made all the more real.

--Excerpts of a History of the Fallen Kingdom, written by Bishop Hui Go, Scrivener Of Bone and First Among the Scholarly

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They’re coming for her son.

She stares up at Seo En-Hyun, at the pillar of undead flame he wields, impaling her central mass. She hears the scrabbling of gold on keratin and the hissing of spells cutting through each other. She sees bits of rot and insect life and vegetation beginning to sprout across the landscape, along the edges of their failing bunker.

Above, in the sky, stars of midnight steel and industrial devastation shine down on the world. 

And the land beneath them itself writhes with the attention of a corpse divine.

They’re coming for her son. 

It barely even factors in that they want to kill her. As shameful as it feels, she doesn’t even worry foremost about her friend, her sister, her healer and confidant. They’re coming for her son, and she’s afraid.

She will not allow it.

Behind the fear, which has been bubbling and growing and augmented by some of the effects launched towards her, there is rage. There is wrath.

She will not allow this.

Her mind itches as something slows her, tries to stop her. Rationality demands that she acknowledge the situation, because-

Your Madness Fails You

 -but she will not allow her son to be hurt.

With an act of will, she pulls on a power completely alien and yet intimately familiar.

Out of a jagged edge of the broken keratin bunker Li Shu has created, knives bloom. 

Blades made of impossible materials, darker than Death, extend out from every jagged, sharpened angle. More of them, expanding over and over, consuming the Death in the air around them to feed themselves and stabbing out into the world from every possibility.

The jaws of her Halo spasm shut, in spite of the pole thrust through the center of her mass. 

Causality warps. Fate is rewritten. 

The step between the blades of her Death cutting someone and the cuts themselves stops existing.

Seo En-Hyun screams, even as the souls that make up his being shriek in joy at their suffering as they are unmade. 

A sense of lethargy washes over Kai Ra as she scrambles to move, Seo En-Hyun’s pillar-staff lifting just enough for her central self-image to escape from beneath it. The jaws behind her have shrunk to barely the size of her head now, centered directly behind the peak of her “body”, and their glow has faded to the point that they’re a little ephemeral. She’s not sure how many more attacks against Fate it has in it, nor what the process is for recharging it, so she puts it to the back of her mind for now, focusing on the blades instead.

Her Sacrifice was her Death. She’s not entirely sure what her Halo is, save that it feels like it merits the capitalization and that it has to do with her ARTS and the Tribulation, but the Death, in theory, is the same as before. It’s changed from a garden of flowers to a garden of blades,and it feels alien to her now, moving differently. It’s no longer a part of her, like it was originally- ergo, the Sacrifice portion. But it remains under her control. 

It’s weaker, and more alien, but also more unique. More powerful. Harder to predict.

Good enough. 

She forcibly condenses her “body”, smushing the worms together in a way that would definitely kill a living thing but isn’t enough to End any of them, forcing them to be a more concrete and stabilized form for her to inhabit. She uses that to move as fast as she can, which feels cripplingly slow without her Death powering a corpse into movement. 

She reaches out and commands her Sacrifice to her will. 

All of the Death in the area starts to fall towards her and it. 

Li Shu’s arrays spark back into life, their damaged forms briefly lighting up with the influx of power, and Kai Ra’s Sacrifice starts to balloon in scope. Every angle and sharpened corner in every direction blooms a shadow, which is a knife, which is a blade of non-existence. Where they intersect, reality shrieks, and she’s forced to readjust from the feedback, but everywhere they don’t, whatever material is in their way is unmade, vanishing beneath the cuts rather than suffering any friction or division. 

Good enough. 

“Li Shu! We’re moving! I’ll hold the line, you-”

“I’ve got it!” she yells back, several acupoints actively pierced with Sacrificial keratin, forcibly adjusting the way her body is responding to the stress of the moment. Several of the needles are also embedded into her free-floating meridians, a Sacrifice embedded into another Sacrifice, forcibly stimulating both into higher and higher flows of Qi. She’s still openly bleeding, and the recoil from managing everything has her trembling, but by force of will and strength of arm she refuses to fall.

They both adjust, with Kai Ra forcibly commanding her Death to keep blooming until there is a nest of blades like thorns, all turning the world black around them. Li Shu, in turn, switches from managing her bunker and the arrays within to just focusing on light spells and preparing a portal. The shadows bend backwards, and the wall of Sacrificial Death, while barely more than a mess of blades, works well enough that the attacks that reach it are cut into and unmade, affected by the END that the original knife was built from and feeding the Death it became. 

The limbs of gold and spiraling, multiplying new arrays fall apart, deprived of their sources and prey, respectively. It buys a few more seconds, even as other things inside of their dome of cover start to appear, new means of attack finding their way in. 

She cuts into and through as many of them as she can manage, and even still, they keep coming. Most of them don’t End right away either, the things behind them powerful enough that having a direct counter doesn’t make up for inexperience or weakness. 

It’s fine, though. There’s so much Death in the air, so much of it falling into her Sacrifice, and We Are What We-

Nothing happens.

Her knowledge of Death keeps guiding her, tells her what and how her Sacrifice should be able to tap into the Death all around- but there should be more, and there isn’t. Her Truth is there, it’s real but it- it doesn’t-

Your Madness Fails You

No. It’s still there, and-

“Focus!” Li Shu screams, her legs trembling, her body barely keeping upright. Even free of managing their defense, building a spatial array and managing the more esoteric assaults at once is overwhelming her. 

Kai Ra listens. She focuses. 

No flesh to mold, no Truth, just Dao and some new powers she barely understands.

They will not take her son. 

She just met him and she has every memory of watching him change for years now and he’s her responsibility and she will not let them take him.

Because I-

The walls of blades she’s formed from her Sacrifice start to shatter as a more serious attack hits them. The End is overwhelmed by Death, an ever-convulsing cascade of it dashing itself against the edges of her magic.

Focus.

Her Halo is smaller now, weaker. The big, world-changing moves she made a few seconds ago are out of reach, save maybe one, if she really pushes it. Her Sacrifice is functional, and while her Truth is still restrained, she has enough theory to be able to use necromancy in broad strokes with it. 

She can’t see out of her Sacrifice, but she can feel some sort of feedback as it suffers annihilation, obliteration, or any of the other blends of assaults. Instinctively, she forces more and more Qi into it, grabbing hold of reality with its power even as it’s getting torn apart. 

She will not allow them to take her son.

Her body comes apart, spreading through the miniscule spaces between her Sacrifice. Lesser attacks that slip through hit her instead of wasting her magics, cutting and stabbing and bludgeoning and unbending and inverting her worms- which do not Die, and (mostly) aren’t hit hard enough to End. The toxic beetles and eggs wrapped up in her Gu-body come along, and the overwhelming toxin they’re drenched in melts some more of the damage.

A worm catches sight of another obsidian spear, colored in black skulls and bright purple eyes, a moment before it hits and unmakes a whole chunk of her Sacrifice. Another briefly sees an incoming light before the artillery fire lands, forcing the rubble to slant to one side as parts of it evaporate or turn to magma under the heat and force. 

And still they feel like warning shots. Like they’re still testing her, unwilling to over-commit. 

She has no mouth at the moment. Still, she screams.

“I WILL NOT LET YOU TAKE MY SON.”

Truespeak floods the world, echoing out of her and the cluster of keratin and End-Death that she’s hiding in. Rage, absolute, overcoming the fear. 

The world trembles with the weight of her speech, not so loud as the Holiest of Holies but loud, and at the echo of it, her Sacrifice multiplies.

Major moves, altering causality in a vulgar way, is a bit beyond her at the moment, but there’s all sorts of things happening that can be changed.

The sound of snapping jaws, louder and more possible than any that have been heard before, cuts through the weight of her proclamation. 

She was already absorbing the Death in the area, dragging the remnants of it out of the broken attacks that break against her defenses. She just skips the middle part of the process.

Her Sacrifice, the blade of End that is her Death, unsheathes from every angle and shadow and corner in the world.

More than half of it is drowned out by attacks a moment after, but it buys another second. 

Multiple spells and angles of attack are cut apart from the inside-out, voids where Death used to be appearing in their makeup as they touch the knives. Several of the strange radiations leaking into the world from spell-castings crack under the pressure, coming apart in bright flashes of arcane energies or warping with the need to adjust. 

A ghost-king in white, standing at the front of the war raining down on her, laughs and laughs and laughs, even as she carves pieces of him away. 

“Glorious! Glorious, sister of mine! A blessing, to find one in the shape of my own soul, cast in the light of a divine foe! Truly, the Church grants its grace to the bold, wouldn’t you say?”

She wouldn’t, and doesn’t. She’s said all she needs to say. 

A hundred knives appear out of the corners of his torch-staff, out of the edges of his robes, and invert themselves into his flesh, wiping away Wraithflesh and Echo-matter freely. 

And then he swings his staff. 

A wave of pure white fire washes over the world, all moonlight and ghost-flame and blue-tinged incineration. Hundreds of arms and faces and misty smoke all reach out from every point it touches, the flames spreading as the integrity of the ruins they’re in Dies further, matching the pace of her End-knives and then surpassing them.

Three fresh artillery shells land, unmaking the furthest edges of her den of blades. Another set of those spears from someone in Mortaria wipes out another portion, while more and more undead matter floods the world in every direction.

“Must I break you out of your shell, little corpseling? Shall I rip the Blessed babe away from you, that you might at last act with truth and violence? For shame! How you cower!”

Another wave, and a whole other layer of Sacrifice is torn away from her, drowned out of existence entirely. 

She’s running out of it. The attacks are getting more efficient, more serious, demanding more from her with every defense.

“I almost have it!” Li Shu screams, her voice ragged. 

“Dink!” says Dink, volume warbling and pitching as it protects Rai Jin from the spells that are slipping through the cracks, vibrating away the shadows that try to drag themselves beneath his feet. 

“No, wait, there’s-”

Rai Jin doesn’t quite get to finish before Kai Ra’s starts screaming and her Sacrifice breaks.

A few thousand Gu-creatures, still breeding and multiplying desperately, tumble across the flaming ruins, screeching in agony as they’re unmade over and over, not allowed to Die. Raika takes that Pain, spreading it out with her Dao, embracing it and holding it but-

The Sacrifice is broken and the hillside is aflame, and the ashen landscape for miles is turning to further devastation. 

“Godsfall has made you, and Godsfall claims you!” roars the ghost king, his aggression only multiplying the joy on his skulls. “We found you, and we fed you, and now, bereft of the sanctity of worship, we harvest! Give me a fight worth Dying for!”

“I WILL NOT LET YOU TAKE MY SON”, she screams, and it is a sound beyond human words and above mortal weight, and it echoes from thousands of insectile mouths. 

Toxic blood burns the earth in every direction, toxic enough to burn Death, but it’s not enough. More and more and more, necromancy pours in, and many of the alien flora and fauna of Viviae’s Bishops drink and drown her fluids. 

Fresh blades start to spawn, her Sacrifice reforming from the Death all around, and she screams and rages and lifts herself up, reforming parts of herself in a central mass around the Halo that still floats freely behind her-

The bugs fall out of her control, her blood flows freely.

I Am Me, I Am Mine

Nothing. It remains True, but its effect is completely muted, crippled and bound by the word of a Death made a world made a god. 

Still, she fights through it. Still, she forces existence to bend. 

A wraith of obliteration lands at her center, splattering a dozen worms and crushing chunks of her would-be body.

“Focus, child!” roars Seo En-Hyun, his torch blazing bright, mists of Echo-matter rebuilding his body from the shadows of End-knives she’s carved him with. “You can do better! You can do more! Don’t disappoint me! Fight, with all you have, or I will take your son and rip him in half in front of you!”

She is furious and wrathful and rabid.

She is afraid.

She hurts so badly. 

The Holiest of Holies, a star in the night-sky that is the land of the Fallen Kingdom, looks down at her. Empty robes full of judgement watching the malformed army of self-interested monsters that pray with it as they tear her to pieces.

Mortaria’s cordon around her makes a pillar of Blacksteel and orbiting satellites of weaponized industry.  The city seems to be growing, its edges warping as space itself breaks beneath demi-divine will, obeying the wills of the Bishops that make it up and unfolding more and more weapons against her.

A thousand lines of arrays and magical script spawns in the midst of undead jungles and waves of endless rot, turning the ashen plains into a malformed sea. 

Golden skeletons and twisted magics creep ever-closer, and at their vanguard, an asura, a maddened beast of screaming, dead killers, laughs and screams and begs her to hurt him.

Kai Ra feels the moment Li Shu’s spell complete. 

Her array clicks into place.

Space warps. 

Her sister and her son and her main body all start to fold inward, one point of space replacing another. 

And then-

“You Are Trapped Here.”

Truth, enforced by power beyond any Raika ever faced, tells reality what is and isn’t.

The spell stops in its tracks. The inversion of space continues, but the intended effect fails, and it collapses in on them.

Kai Ra doesn’t hesitate. 

A thousand bugs that cannot die throw themselves over Li Shu and Rai Jin as the array goes from mode of transportation to attack. 

It hurts.

Half of her ends in an instant. Even the nature of her being, Sacrificed of Death, can’t stop massive chunks of her from vanishing, the laws of physiks crushing her out of being entirely. 

DINK

As Above, So Below

As Within, So Without

Li Shu is screaming, one of her arms missing at the elbow, a corner of her foot carved off with it. 

Rai Jin gives out a gasp as the tuning fork around his neck goes white-hot, its structure warped slightly by the force and precision it just used, leaving the boy untouched.

Kai Ra hurts. 

And screams. 

“YOU WILL NOT TAKE HIM.” 

Another chunk of her Ends. 

The jaws of her Halo snap shut, diminishing to barely the size of her palm. 

The Truespeak makes it out of her throat nonetheless. Not a conditional statement, not a statement of intent- a proclamation, directly against the Holiest of Holies, against them all.

And then she takes the worst Pain she’s ever experienced, mixes it with the memory of the worst pain Raika ever experienced, and unleashes it screaming into the world.

When she split from the original Raika, she had two Daos. The Dao of Guns, and the Dao of Blades. Since then, she’s added a third, the Dao of Pain.

The world changes as her comprehension of it shifts to fit her definition of its deeper mysteries.

Seo En-Hyun laughs in glee, even as a wave of toxin and Sacrificed Death Fires and Cuts and casts Agony at a world that she will not allow.