Chapter 405 - Are You Tired Of Being Nice? (Patreon)

Alright! Time to boogie, babes. I am doing One. More. Chapter. And then Arc 9 is Over. That's it. Done. I REFUSE to fuck around and do another twenty chapters, it's my longest arc by far, I NEED to start wrapping shit up. At LEAST get to some mcfuckin interlude chapters leading into arc 10. I got shit to DO Kai Ra you can't be holding me HOSTAGE like this!

________________________________________________________________________

“What if I didn’t run? What if I’m not a coward? What if I’m not going to run away? What if I’m going to stand right here? What if I’m gonna make my stand? Huh? What if I want to go toe to toe with whatever’s gonna come through that door? What if I want them to get me? What if I want them to kill me? What if I want them to try?”

“Anyways-”

-Recorded words of a well-loved maniac, moments before a cataclysmic event which led to his death. Multiple times. Records of the relevant event are myriad and contradictory, but somehow, the statement remains intact.

_______________________________________________________________

“I swear, on my power, that they are safe.”

Seo En-Hyun’s body stands perfectly still, expression no longer quite so jovial, as Kai Ra’s blades and barrels point right at it. 

The oath, spoken in Truespeak, echoes, somehow more melodious than Kai Ra’s way of doing it. Some quirk of language, maybe, or a facet of experience. 

Only after the world is done trembling with the corpse’s promise does she lower her weapons.

“Fine. What next?”

The corpse smiles again, waving casually out “behind” the mass that is Kai Ra. “Well, I figure that now we go about teaching our juniors a rather dramatic series of lessons. Does that sound amenable?”

She turns her attention back outwards, wondering at why exactly her defenses haven’t fucking vanished already from the flood of attacks, only to find the world… grey. 

Everything seems to be moving slowly. Color has drained a bit, not to black and white but to a sort of vaguely reddish tint. Looking beyond it, all of the stars of the Fallen Kingdom still shine, the clergy all equipped for war (or ready to watch the show), but they’re slow. The fastest of them seems like they’re moving through molasses, the air combusting around cannons and moving satellites of black machines, their velocity seemingly nonexistent as the flames and sonic booms seem to stand nearly still. 

She turns back to the Corpse Martyr, who smiles broadly through the face of another.

“An interesting trick I learned. Turns out, everything is always ENDing, at least a bit. Even the wind is always losing momentum, bit by bit, unless fed by Qi. The world turns towards entropy, and what’s that if not another word for END?”

“And with that… you’re bending time?”

Seo En-Hyun’s corpse shakes its heads ruefully. “Not really. More just… stretching it. Bending it takes much more force than your senior sibling can muster. But, if you take in all that END at once, it provides a lot of power. Remove the END, slow CHANGE, take all that energy into Stillness, and suddenly, you can do all sorts of tricks. I’m not certain you’ll be able to do this trick specifically, but if that Halo of yours is anything to go by, you’ll find your own way to it.”

Kai Ra takes in the information. There’s… a lot in what he’s saying. In another context, it’s the sort of thing that could lead to some real enlightenment-type breakthroughs. His reference to CHANGE stands out, the way the word echoed out past the skin of reality, the way he seemed to connect it and the END… 

But she looks out to the almost-stillness all around them. At the Fallen Kingdom, held nearly powerless. 

She smiles.

It looks rather odd, what with no teeth and being made of Gu-bugs, but it’s hungry nonetheless. 

“You can stretch time. And they can’t. And… you can share it. With me.”

The corpse of her almost-friend wobbles one of its six arms back and forth in a “so-so” gesture. “Only because you’re connected to the END like I am. Death can be delayed, but an END is as absolute and final as it gets. Plus, it’s temporary. Once you start moving or acting, it’ll break, and there’s backlash from that. Still, this senior sibling is true to its word. I’ll handle the backlash for you, and, in the meantime, you can take a moment to prepare.”

Kai Ra processes, then nods, hundreds of thousands of insectile eyes and intangible sight dancing from target to target, Bishop to Bishop. “You won’t be fighting, then.”

Po, the Corpse Martyr, shakes the heads its wearing. “No. Acting through a filter like good old Seo leaves me limited, and neither of us gains anything from mutually assured destruction even if I could fight them. I’d lose, and then they’d be useless, or they’d just wipe you out after.”

She hesitates. And then she… slumps forward a bit.

“In that case… it might be best if we just left.”

Seo En-Hyun’s body turns to her, and though skulls don’t have eyebrows (or facial muscles), wraithflesh made of ghosts is expressive enough to make up for it.

“Now this is a surprise,” says the avatar of the END. “The sister I’ve heard of would never turn down such an opportunity to wreak a little havoc. Such passivity is unbecoming.”

She growls, the sound made into a storm of chittering mandibles. “I’m not her. I’m from her, of her, but I’m Me.”

“Ah! Wisdom from the mouth of babes. Still, I would think you’d be more inclined for at least a bit of vengeance. I can imagine how they have been acting, what with a Blessed Mortal. Even for immortals, sacrifices like that come only once or twice in a lifetime.”

She does her best not to rearm herself at the mention of the Church’s obsession with her kid. Pain, Guns and Blades all blend as weaponry, emerging out of living flesh and Sacrificed Death, but she feels the strain when they try to respond instinctively. The further out on her biomass her techniques extend, the slower they move relative to her central body.

She takes a moment. Centers herself. Recompiles a little further into a denser, more functional form.

“My objective has failed. I wanted to push them into acknowledging me, break their rules, except, surprising no one but me, they’re perfectly willing to break the rules too. I was never going to win playing their game, but overturning it only cornered me. My son is safe. I can’t beat them all. What would be the point of spending myself against them?.”

The red shift of the light coming to her eyes seems to darken a bit, back towards “normalcy”. The bodies of the more martial Bishops are starting to go from static images to slow-motion, picking up speed agonizingly slowly but surely.

Seo En-Hyun’s body, which is made of twice-dead ghosts, pulls in a deep breath and lets out an even deeper sigh.

“The point, junior sister, is that they need to give you respect. And, seeing as they’re not kind enough to offer it, you have to be strong enough to take it.”

The Corpse Martyr, in its robes of stolen ghosts, lifts a hand and waves it, the action causing the time-dilation to wear even thinner. By now, some of the bullets and techniques launched against them are starting to approach, leaving their starting points.

“Look at them! Ten thousand years ago, the strongest of them made rules that best suited them, and everything since then has been an eon-long calcification. They fear the END as much as their predecessors feared Death, unaware of its mysteries, convinced they know all they need to know. They stick to hierarchies that always benefit the strongest before those below, bound to commandments unchanged even by interpretation for longer than they’ve been dead.”

It turns to her and moves closer, the time-dilation burning down more, the colors of the world coming closer to their original gradient. 

 “Running now reinforces them. Strengthens them. No need to wipe them out. No need to break yourself for them. But you need to show them they’re wrong. Show them that they’re beneath you. That your will and view are more than theirs. And if the only language they can speak is violence?

“I hear that you’re fluent.”

The corpse of a ghost smiles at her, giggling a bit. 

“Besides- you’ll have your senior brother here with you. What better way to earn trust than by making trouble together?”

The angels of Death are moving quickly enough now that there’s an actual timetable to things. The world is warping, air bending from the friction of movement, cold waves of white Echo-matter starting to crowd in from all sides.

Kai Ra looks at the corpse of Seo En-Hyun, smiling wide. The eyes, empty as the void, still seem… distressingly sincere. 

She looks at herself, half-formed and half-understood, evolved from what she was yet still learning. 

She looks to the horizon, where the flames of Viviae still color the world.

She thinks of her son, who saw beyond what she was and trusted her to be who she is. 

She looks to the fuckoff-huge pile of ghost-mush that he was staring at earlier, now fallen from where the black hole warped reality. 

She looks at the horrifying, terrible, monstrous old thing that rules over this corpse of a world, and the way that it glares down at her from empty spaces and makes the world dark and cold and meaningless. All the world, turned to the pursuit of a meaningless ideal. 

“Yeah alright. Let’s do something crazy.”

Po smiles. 

Time resumes. 

Seo En-Hyun’s eyes flare, and there is a devastating explosion of force, striking back against a hundred different attacks. Hints of the END touch on the Death that the Bishop accumulated, and instead of unmaking it, multiply it exponentially.

Wraithflame obliterates all of the incoming assaults, burning intensely enough to go from flame to Plasma, itching at a Dao that Kai Ra remembers but can’t quite touch. What little material manages to sneak through the barrier comes through molten and ruined, turning to iridescent ash and crumbling to nothing. 

In the time that her new ally has bought her, Kai Ra launches herself forward. 

Gu-flesh, with Death torn from it, flies forward in a wave. The toxic sludge that is her blood and biomatter melts through the stone beneath her, digging through the earth as fast as it can liquify. In seconds, she’s turned the ruins of the church into a rich swamp, a bubbling, acidic morass of molten matter, and has dived down beneath it. 

Some parts remain on the surface, arming themselves all at once. Mechanisms that were improvised instead start to adapt more closely to the Dao of the Gun and Blade, bit by bit. In the seconds that the Corpse Martyr buys her, as the world comes crashing down in a torrent of Death, she meditates.

Barrel. Cylinder. Chamber. Frame. Hammer.

All of these things and more are literal. All of these things and more are metaphorical. 

Flesh can be a Gun. Anatomy can be a frame. Will can be a trigger. 

Gu worms, born of necromancy and multiplied by paradox, evolve. They grow new joints, new insectile limbs, new orifices and muscles and chitinous plating. The beetles that roam among them, integrated by the same paradox of Sacrifice and sustained by supernatural forces, change in that same environment. The Dao of Flesh blend with Gun to create ever-multiplying new forms, and even the dead-end evolutionary tracts still provide munitions and toxins for the mass. 

Her understanding of blades, meanwhile, finds a better home. Her biology has claws and sharp edges, most certainly, but there is another piece of her that is sharper.

A sea of flowers, each petal a knife. 

Each knife, an assassin’s dagger. 

Every cut, a space where reality isn’t. Higher-level magics, reflected through her Death, made into higher level magics again. 

She has a Dao for that. 

And in both, and in the acid she bleeds, and in every movement she makes, in her very Intent, she infuses the Dao of Pain.

In the end, given free reign, given the opportunity, without someone she has to protect she wants nothing more than to make them hurt.

The wall of necromancy drops, and the first wave of attacks makes it through. The cold star of the Holiest of Holies shines bright, a hand sweeping away the magics holding back the tide of assaults-

And the world is met by Kai Ra’s storm. 

The sky comes aglow with the colors of acidic discharge and explosive flame. The ground assaults of blooming rot and spawning abominations is met by a garden that unmakes them, cut by cut, stab by stab, leaving nothing behind and drinking dry what little energy remains afterwards so as to power the next cut. 

The Corpse Martyr cackles, a sound of malice and genuine loathing mixed with the jubilation of someone getting to unleash pent up emotion at last. Seo En-Hyun’s body melts, burning with how quickly he’s being consumed, but every attack made is exponentially stronger than it should be. The Holiest of Holies casts down its empty sleeves, directing the energies of the landscape itself to turn against the two heretics in their midst, and even still, Po the Corpse Martyr simply dances in a borrowed corpse and matches every blow. 

And everywhere else, Kai Ra is. 

She’s not nearly as powerful as the heaviest hitters in the field, and not enough to stand against an army all on her own. Not forever.

She doesn’t need forever. She has now. 

The toxins of her Gu-flesh keep turning, keep transforming into new and stranger combinations with every bit of corpse-flesh or necromancy that wanders into them. Pretty soon, the swamp she’s created begins to spread, and arrays start to grow within it, guns and garden alike forming to patterns of magical design that reinforce their forms, add to their firepower, grant them new effects and combinations. Fire, water, wind, light, shadow, and more are added to the bullets being fired, not enough to radically transform them, just enough to make defending against them the tiniest bit harder, every hit the littlest bit more unpredictable. 

As the skies are fought back by the grand heretic of the Church, the lands and armies are held back by the Burnt, Broken, Undead Kai Ra. 

Bishop Tonoru Eneru blinks first. 

Switching tactics, the emerald-eyed life-drinker steps back his tidal waves of flora, starting to mimic her actions and make arrays of his own. His are far more intricate and controlled, more like full formations, but the gap left by his now-missing pressure doesn’t help his side. 

Some of the other life-drinkers are busy trying to rot or corrupt her toxins, to mixed results, and several Bishops have to step back as more acids and toxicity is redirected from where it was needed to combat the foreign biome. The swamp expands further, letting Kai Ra’s central mass move between more locations, spreading herself around more of a quasi-domain. 

The Bishops of Mortaria retaliate, orbiting satellites of mechanical necromancy shelling every inch of land they can reach- only to be shot down by the swarms of Gun-Dao wielding Gu. Their firepower is matched, even if only for a little while, even as their manifested Deaths press down on existence. The city itself is aiding their efforts, and the weaponry there is at least as potent- together, Mortaria’s weapons cut through the flak-shield enough to hit clusters of flesh or parts of her garden.

They don’t manage to hit enough. 

In the distance, Kai Ra can feel hands of skeletal gold arranging things, the shape of a grander formation growing step by step. Even with her new form, she can’t handle everything at once, focusing on spreading her toxins into a wider and wider pool, even as she feels the cold touch of Glorianna and her lover in the distance. They, Tonura Eneru, and other more esoteric Bishops are working on spells and formations of their own, preparing trump cards to overwhelm her where the direct assaults work mostly to hold her back. 

In seconds, some grand working of magic or other will hit her and the Corpse Martyr, and her momentum will get pushed back. 

So it’s lucky that she’s already made it to her destination.

The pool of acidic toxins continues to spread- but Kai Ra’s main body comes up from underground well outside its boundaries. 

Entirely without Death, surrounded by an absolute shitstorm of potent energies, Kai Ra makes it, undetected, to what’s left of the nascent moon that the Cold Sun’s black-hole created.