Chapter 402 - They're Coming For Her Son (II) (Patreon)

And that's consistency twice in a row, babes! Monday and wednesday chapters successfully locked and loaded, and with this snowstorm incoming in the US of A, I might just get the mindset to go ham and do some more of this whole "build back up my backlog and have consistent dates". Who knows!

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A vision has been received. The Order of the Divine Sight has foretold that a great danger is approaching, and what was recently a great source of benefit shall soon become a terrible danger. Multiple divinations have confirmed this, and three sacrifices of increasing magnitude have been performed to verify it and confirm its greater details- yet none could be much clearer than the first.

The seer that first witnessed the vision bled from his eyes until death, and his cultivation was later found to have been shattered. 

The signs are thus-

Flesh, worn and wielded, turned to disease and a vile infection.

Death from the east, crawling under the skin of the world and beyond the sky.

Fire rising from the south, bleeding every color imaginable.

A forest of strange flora, growing too perfectly.

This, among other such visions, leaves a particular worry in the minds of our fellow diviners. The Order of the Divine Sight has requested direct aid from the Five Peaks and their respective subordinate sects in securing medical aid and further formation-crafting around their central orrery, in the hopes that they might continue to practice their teachings while minimizing the number of casualties.

-Missive from the Burning Rains sect, sent out to multiple local points of contact for each of the Five Peaks of the Republic of Morae

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The Gun Made Of Pain was a hell of a creation. She built it with corpsewood and Blacksteel and Radiant Metal. She blessed it with a brand new Dao. She tied it to her very being, connecting it on a profound level. 

Then she ate it, along with the rest of herself. 

Now, she reaches for it again.

A sea of toxic blood and drowning, malformed insects all suddenly bend, break, and malform all the more, reorienting themselves. 

Worms become impact bracing and barrels and chambers and firing mechanisms and shells and shrapnel. Beetles and eggs become bullets and flechettes and knife-edged projectiles. 

And she reaches for more.

Her Dao of Pain and of the Gun blend together for the sake of transforming herself into what she has created and bound and made hers. Beside those Daos, less tied to them but no less real, the Dao of Blades shimmers and fills the darkness of her Sacrifice. 

Like Li Shu’s needles, they transform as they are infused. They extend, turning to larger and more violent and stranger blades, each of them transforming and preparing to Cut, each of them growing and writhing as an assassin’s knife made of eldritch oblivion, turned to Death, turned again into a Sacrifice, blossom and lengthen further. 

The colors of the Divine fill the world. 

Red. Blue. Purple.

Above all else-Black.

Kai Ra fires a thousand guns made of herself, which is to say made of fucked up magic death-bugs, and cuts everything in reach. And she fills each and every movement with the worst pain she’s ever felt.

She does not hold back.

[TRANSCENDENT ART: A BULLET FOR EVERY BREATH]

Existence screams. 

The storm of incoming fire is met by a thundercloud of her own violence. Shadows are met by the absence of space that is her Sacrifice, and find themselves suddenly too deep and too painful to touch. 

Weapons made of End and undying life fill the world with her defiance. 

It’s the first time she’s tried to access the unknown “ART” that Raika could wield. It feels… not unlike how her Halo does. 

Her last act with her Halo was to cut the space between touching the energies all around her, Death included, and empowering herself with it. Possible, doable, a pre-existing process, and thus, easier than before to bite away the causality. It gives her a pool to work with, a burst of power that she can equip herself with. 

The weight of it breaks the world.

Bishop Seo En-Hyun, titan and demi-divine of the Church of the Fallen Kingdom, matches her.

The others attack, but they do so efficiently, in waves, wearing her down as she embodies their opposing concept, as she weathers the wash of violence crashing all around. He, however, does not hesitate. He does not pull back. He does not wait for an opportune moment, or wait for orders, or play the games of his fellows, who glory slowly at taking pieces of her, who follow the commandments of the Church as their main objective.

Seo En-Hyun, a killer of killers, who begs for more Death, laughs in the face of an End come to fight him.

In two of his six hands, he holds the torch and pillar that is his keep and castle. With the other four, he summons further tools.

In one hand, he wields a bell. In another, a curved knife. In a third, what looks like a rock. In his final one, a spear, balanced over his shoulder, its edge keening against the colors of the sky. 

“This is what I’ve wanted!” he roars, and strikes down at her. The mass of guns and blades that she’s turned Gu-flesh into writhes, catching flame and burying it as quickly as it comes, but still, she screams. 

And then she reflects that pain back.

Every impact and bullet and blade, no matter its content, screams with agony absolute, and transfers it directly to what they strike. Their nature, to fire, to cut, blends with the nature of agony, and enacts pain onto things which cannot experience it. Enemy attacks convulse and shatter, incoming Daos distort and crack under the pressure, machinery and corpse-magics alike contort in all-too living pains.

But Seo En-Hyun takes the blows head on. 

Chunks of his guts are blasted out of him. One of his limbs partially tears itself off the bone before rebuilding itself. One of his skulls gains a fresh bullet hole from a blow that got past his defenses, and it builds itself anew a moment later.

“This is what I’ve needed!” he roars, and the bell rings and unmakes the bullets near him, and the knife cuts and briefly causes friction against her End-Sacrifices, diverting them, and his spear cuts down and carves apart pieces of her. 

He swings down his torch-staff, and she has to divert almost all she has to avoid him breaking her body and unleashing himself against those she’s protecting.

“All this time! All your promise! Realized! Evolved! And every possible reason with which to fight!”

She forms something like an upper body, and as his Death-flames shatter against her, she stands firm. The Death in them can’t touch her, even as the fire breaks her apart and unmakes her, piece by piece, but she keeps her form, concentrating her body down to something like a building-sized mass.

“Your allies make you strong! Your fear of losing them makes you desperate! Blessed be, you are a wounded animal, cornered and afraid- how could I ask for more?”

And he swings down, and his torch-staff lights up with his fires.

And they turn Red and Black at the edges.

Two of the colors of Dao strike her hard enough to make the world ring, and even her worms, untouched by Death, end up so unmade that they End anyways. 

She’s resistant to them, can neutralize some of their magics, but the power being wielded against her is astronomical.

The horizon in every direction is lit in the colors of wraithflesh and Echo-matter, off-white and radiating. 

She screams again.

Every part of her is dedicated to one thing alone- escape.

The urge for victory is there but-

Your Madness Fails You

- it isn’t enough to stop her from knowing it wouldn’t work, that it wouldn’t be enough, that-

She screams.

She will not let them take either one of them. 

A fresh wave of attacks comes in from the other Bishops, who continue to bombard her. Her comprehension of Dao allows her to weaponize herself and asymmetrically oppose them more than she should, but it still takes time, takes energy. Her Sacrifice is up and running still, drinking in Death to create End, but her body is finite, limited. Breeding itself more, supernaturally virile and divorced from Death, but limited nonetheless. 

Death, End, Flesh, Guns, Blades, and Pain, all working in an alien, superhuman cycle of power that allows her to endure the weight of falling stars. 

Seo En-Hyun laughs, and the rest of the crowd of Bishops simply adds to the pyre. 

Behind them, the cold darkness of a corpse on a throne stares at her, out from behind a set of empty robes that hold all the empty spaces where millions, maybe billions, used to be.

She can’t do it alone. 

She can’t ask any more of them. This is her fault. It’s her responsibility, her job, her-

She can’t do it alone.

“Li Shu!”

Her sister responds.

Off in the distance, back in the direction they came, the horizon turns red.

Li Shu emerges from the blanket of worms and beetles that’s coated her and Jin. Her arm is still missing, but it’s already regrowing, her Sacrifice blending seamlessly into the biology there and becoming less and less keratin by the second. Her face is still drenched in blood, dripping down onto her robes, but still she stands, and her hands weave through signs that push and pull the Qi and concepts in the air. Tendrils of glowing spiritual organs dance around her, existing in a separate layer of reality where matter is meaningless, and they weave further patterns. 

Now outside her body, her meridians shape themselves into patterns and arrays that would be literally impossible while still inside a body.

Spells cast by magic itself. Techniques built from pure Qi and pure cultivation. 

She roars, the sound of it no less ragged and violent than Kai Ra’s own screams. 

Another spell completes, and the horizon grows brighter.

The Bishops of Viviae turn behind themselves, looking back to the distant city and fungal biome they have built their power centers in, as it catches flame.

“Did you-” 

“It’s not finished yet!” she roars, her voice almost gurgling with the blood in her mouth. “Can’t take it over! But I can fucking burn it!”

Pairs of brightly colored eyes lock on her as the life-drinkers of Viviae hear her loud and clear.

“Your plague was caught!” yells the Bishop Tonura Eneru, his eyes bright emerald, his robes billowing as streams of twisted plant life emerge from out of a book he carries. They run aground against Kai Ra’s beetles, her toxicity melting them, but slowly and surely they’re adapting, getting better and better at feeding off the toxins and the sludge left behind by their own breakdowns. “There’s nothing you can do there. Your bluff is-”

“It wasn’t finished!” Li Shu yells in response, a mad cackle in the back of her throat. “Not done spreading! Not done covering for itself! But you thought… you thought it was a plague! It’s fertilizer! Healing!”

She laughs, so very fucking loud that blood spews from her open mouth. 

“Life from Death, you broken parasites! A whole biome of spores and rot- and enough growth to make it all catch fire!”

The glow on the horizon continues to grow brighter.

As Above, So Below

The very foundation of the Craft, which requires Truth rather than traditional cultivation. Something happening in one place is the same as something happening in another. 

Li Shu can access a Sacrifice from anywhere in the world as if it’s right next to her. Activating or creating spells left behind was tricky, and a gamble, and incomplete- but the spores burn, and the biome of one of the Fallen Kingdom’s few remaining powerhouses begins to catch flame. 

And Li Shu laughs and cries as her healing becomes the death-knell of so much life. 

Multihued eyes light up in panic. Some of the Bishops use the spatially altered plane they’re in to rush back towards their city, where they’ll be able to put out the fire easily enough. Others turn their attention back onto the ruins where Kai Ra, Li Shu and Rai Jin stand, their fury reignited. Tonura Eneru in particular manifests an aura of creeping vines, the very air around him warping into a mirage of a deadly garden evergrowing.

“You-”

Kai Ra shoots him in the face.

The bullet blooms into toxic sludge on contact, and though it’s disintegrated an instant later, the slightest discoloration mars the ivory skin of the Bishop.

“You let us leave, and I’ll stop it!” Li Shu says, her teeth grinning and bloody, and Kai Ra has never been so happy to have a sister. “Keep us here, and your city burns!”

They don’t stop attacking- but some of them do glance towards the distant, ever-present throne.

The empty robes say nothing.

The Bishops turn back to her, and they stop taking slow, measured actions.

Rot.

Bugs.

Vines.

Discolored blood and ruined flesh.

The force of a dozen lifedrinkers, elders of their clans, Bishops of the church, floods into existence. In an instant, Kai Ra’s outer perimeter is breached, sheer momentum and absolute power overwhelming her agony and the attacks that carry it. Even as she transfers the pain of burning, adding the present suffering to her Dao, they still breach her perimeter, drowning her many Sacrificial knives of End and her toxic bugs both.

And all throughout, Seo En-Hyun keeps attacking. Keeps hitting her, keeps cutting her, keeps blocking her attacks or keeping her from moving or doing anything other than focus on him, even as she has to spend herself keeping everything else at bay.

“So cruel! And to think, your little fleshie had such fire! Perhaps I will keep her after her Death, a supplicant with which to maintain my tower!”

It’s hard to tell what he really means and what he’s saying just to infuriate her, but it’s working.

The spatial rules of this place are broken. She can’t leave. Her Truths are shackled, and she’s running out of tools, energy, and time.

All the while, the corpses of a civilization stand in judgement above her, disdainfully casting attacks at her or desperately trying to crush her so they can deal with their problems in the stupidest ways possible.

Li Shu is snarling, grinning, weaving spell after spell to keep the more esoteric enemy casters busy. Shadows, gold limbs and arrays shaped for direct attacks all get undercut as her second, equally insane Sacrifice weaves impossible shapes with non-euclidean organs, but there’s so many. Kai Ra is screaming, on fire, actively transforming herself into an arsenal and garden of violence, and it’s still not enough.

The Halo behind her, barely the size of her palm, rolls its jaws in sympathy. A hundred hundred guns fire flesh and suffering, and a sea of Un-blades carve out a desperate defense. 

It hasn’t even been a minute since her laicization. 

They’re coming for her son.

Rai Jin is standing, clutching to the still-steaming Dink, his cultivation in chaos. An aura of smoke and whispers surrounds him, but he’s so outmatched and outclassed by the giants that surround him that the most he can do is obfuscate his presence, and even then, only barely. Buffeted by winds of Death and constant bombardment, he’s hidden under her Gu-flesh, his eyes and ears bleeding but his head unbowed.

They’re coming for her son, and-

And nothing.

She will not let them have him.

She said so. She commanded it be True. Intent and Qi mixed with language to make Truespeak, and-

And that’s what the Holiest did. The pope. The empty robes.

She’s lost almost half of the territory she’s carved out. The ruins, the leftover bits of rubble from Godsfall’s floating islands, the church she’s in, all of it is being eroded by the sheer magnitude of the powers being thrown about. 

She has Intent. She has Qi, if in a roundabout way. She has her Sacrifice, her Dao, her Halo, whatever it is.

We Are What We Eat

But that’s not the only way she’s expressed that.

Something in her feels drained, almost down to the bone… but she doesn’t have bones anymore, and she will not let them take him.

Seo En-Hyun swings at her, grinning, enjoying himself, wielding his powers like a killer would over a victim, like a warrior over a defeated but still enjoyable battle. 

She pulls at something deep down, and feels the same source that her Halo draws power from strain again as she pulls at that deeper ART.

[TRANSCENDENT ART: A BULLET FOR EVERY BREATH] continues to echo out. Causality is inverted, as the art demands an action and process both, and so her body, made up of necromantic flesh and arcane gunfire, fires a bullet for every target she can think of. It barely holds back the tide.

The jaws of her Halo shiver and shrink to a pinprick of light.

[TRANSCENDENT ART: EAT OF THE FRUIT, GOLDEN AND RIPE]

Seo En-Hyun stops laughing.

He keeps smiling. 

The ART touches him. 

A bite that consumes, even without anything to bite with, or a place to consume to. 

Oblivion devours all, and from it, new things can be born.

Seo En-Hyun, the Bishop most like Raika, from the city closest to Stillness and furthest from the central Church, grins and strikes with all his force against the only weapon she has that might kill him.

She feels him flex his might. Feels a thousand years of Death. Sees his manifestation, Thousand Killers Beg For More, and how it stretches back for centuries of battle, of slaughter, all the way back to a man who laughed as he was stabbed and cut and broken and refused to surrender. 

His attack levels the landscape. It blasts back many of the nearby Bishops, forces Mortaria’s hovering satellites to pull back, burns away the incoming flood from Viviae’s desperation. 

Everything goes white, and the church is vaporized, and she is reduced to barely a few worms, and Li Shu is screaming and Jin is screaming and the light curves around them and blasts them away and Cuts / Kills / Burns the world and-

And then she bites down, even without anything to bite with, or a place to consume to.

And then he’s gone.

Something is in her gut. White hot and churning.

She has no gut.

She has no Death.

Her Sacrifice. Her ART. Her existence.

Three paradoxes intersect.

The Cold Sun turns, and something behind it takes notice.