Chapter 406 - Isn't It Divine To Go Ape-Shit? (Patreon)

And we're back! Happy monday, folks! New chapter and the end of arc 9! Is it a bit abrupt? A bit awkward? A bit imperfect? Despite my very very best efforts?

Yes!

Is it bad?

I don't think so!

I actually kind of like it thematically. Not quite a case of me managing to set seeds I didn't see coming that make something come together perfectly, but kind of a "find beauty in the imperfections" kind of thing. As bobby hill would say, this chapter, just like the rest of this arc, have got wabi-sabi! Enjoy, babes, and I'll be hitting y'all with the epilogue / transition chapters shortly!

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Oh me, oh my, oh loving eye

That smiles from the mirror, lo

Oh monster, oh verse, oh beautiful curse 

Answer please what I already know

Oh me, oh my, oh broken eye

Tell me there’s good in the world

Oh blessing, oh glory, oh goddess so gory

I demand you let your flag unfurl 

Oh me, oh my, oh self-seeing eye

That stares out from deep within

Oh beloved, oh hated, oh self-flagellated, 

Hug close the pain of chagrin

Oh me, oh my, oh loving eye

Please, just pray, tell me I plead

Oh self, oh me, oh crooked, bent tree

What joy it is to be freed

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In spite of everything, it almost reminds her of old times. Being strong in unexpected ways, being hard to detect due to weird curses and “spells” she casts on herself, finding a way to surprise and undercut those who would try to destroy her. Or who get in her way. Or who treated her in a way that she felt better suited them to get the shit kicked out of them.

It’s weird, acknowledging that she’s a hypocrite. For most of her life, she’s been dealing with the unfair, unjust bullshit of those with power. Whether that’s been bureaucracy holding her down, violence and violation from more individuals, or the sort of institutional restriction and consequence that an Empire can enforce, she’s been trapped by the ideas others have for what she should be, what should be allowed, for as long as she can remember. 

And yet, when she has a bit of power, does she not act the same way? Does she not reach out and bend the world to her will? Does she not stare down others who would try to do things she finds unjust, or wrong, and act against them?

Yes. Yes she does. 

It’s a messy thought. People have been grappling for millenia, trying to figure out what it means to have justice, what it means to enforce one’s will over another, what it means to try to shape the world rather than accept it. Kai Ra’s sure that there are quite a few schools of thought and quite a few philosophers who would be ready and willing to grapple about it some more.

In the moment, however, that falls to the wayside. 

She has the opportunity to fuck up something that does not work and is bad. She has the opportunity to punish those who would try to harm her son, who would take and use him for their own ends. She has the chance to fuck some shit up that has earned it. 

She reaches the core of the collapsed moon that was the Cold Sun’s attention on the world, and  goes to take it. 

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

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

She eats Death. 

Death has no place within her. Her existence is a state of Without-Death, possessing only END. She is, in some ways, more Undead than any of the other bastards of the Fallen Kingdom can claim to be. 

The paradox reasserts itself. 

Her Halo grows a bit larger. Glows a bit brighter.

The massive island of ectoplasm goes from a literal mountain of Echo-matter to barely more than a hillside, and out of that hillside, an avatar of the END emerges.

She has no Death in her. Her Death has been Sacrificed. 

Death and END are linked. Her Sacrifice is linked to her. The paradox blooms. 

One of the satellites that is one of Mortaria’s Bishops shrieks in agony as metal and industry and necromancy are overcome by a single devastating impact. 

Like an armor-piercing round, a series of blades made of END stab through it, a flechette of oblivion-ontology fired by ghost-matter. It explodes in one side, cratering open the back of the gunnery platform that is the Bishop, and then explodes within it. 

The Dao of Pain makes something dead and inanimate recoil in agony a moment before a shell of pure, uncontrolled necromancy explodes with the force of a thousand bombs inside of it. 

It’s messy. Uncoordinated. Grossly inefficient. There’s barely a hint of any kind of array or synergistic magics woven into it. The END-blades of her Sacrifice carve open the world, and the ghost-matter they are wrapped in and pierced through detonate, a few runes chaotically wrapped up in its structure with just enough artistry to keep it from blowing up early.

When she has this much Echo-matter to spare, it hardly matters. 

By the time Mortaria’s defenses have reoriented to try and target the Echo-matter, her Halo has clacked its jaws together three more times, and three more of magic missiles are breaking through the sound barrier to carve open more targets.

The battlefield descends into chaos as Kai Ra takes some fucking initiative. 

The swamplands of toxin keep Viviae’s hordes at bay, the life-drinkers and their swarms of constructs and quasi-living magics still struggling to cope with her Gu-based toxins. Flesh-guns continue to bombard incoming fire and incoming opponents, even as more and more Bishops advance, carving through her outer perimeter. 

And she’s flying. 

She fires another burst of Echo-matter, this time wrapped up with some of the worms and beetles of her body, and as she flies, her flesh consumes it. 

Her Halo grows brighter, and the bugs multiply, and then there’s a new cluster of biology and un-Death flying through the air. 

She’s shot out of the sky in seconds.

Which is why she’s already fired off six more. 

Each shot flies into a fresh cluster of violence, and more than once, she’s actively pushed back or has part of herself destroyed, taking enough damage to be rendered powerless and then reaching that critical mass of self-destruction where having no Death is meaningless. And yet, she still has ammunition, and with every bite of the Echo-matter she’s burrowed into, her Halo grows wider, and she bites through more of causality, and thus has more and more weapons ready. 

And she doesn’t die. And she doesn’t stop.

Her jaws gnash at the air.

[TRANSCENDENT ART: A BULLET FOR EVERY BREATH]

Every single Bishop she can detect, everyone she sees, every target she can identify, all at once and forever, is fired upon. Missiles of Echo-matter and END, fired from guns of flesh and from gardens of oblivion, spawn a hundred new bodies from which spawn more gardens and magics and explosions in a cycle of violence as she lets loose. 

There is enough Death here to last lifetimes. There is enough chaos here to burn the world. She understands herself better with every piece ENDed, with every bit of Pain delivered back unto those who live without it. 

She is not without push-back. 

Mortaria’s guns turn on the mountain of Echo-matter, blasting through it with hundred-tonne guns and mountain-killers, railguns and deep-bore explosives. Tarkus Valdir, the brute that is always following the emerald-eyed Toruna, slams into her central mass, crushing an island of END-flowers and bulldozing through a hundred guns all at once, his flesh seemingly inviolable so long as he has Rot with which to sustain himself. Glorianna’s magics continue to circle the entire battlefield, her and others scrawling complex spellcraft over hundreds of miles in seconds. 

The Corpse Martyr laughs a dry, horrifying laugh, the sky glowing with wraithfire and END-enhanced necromancy. 

Kai Ra, in spite of her best efforts, finds herself laughing alongside him. 

It’s just too much fun to let loose. 

No one to worry about. No one to be afraid for. Not even her own self-destruction to chase or hold herself back from. 

She lets it all go. 

She is as she is. 

I Am Me, I A-

No. That’s not enough. That part’s still held back, the pressure of the demigod that is the Holiest of Holies keeping her madness in check, but…

It’s a mad world. 

It’s a mad world.

She may be a hypocrite, and she may be imperfect- but she doesn’t need to be perfect. She doesn’t need to have all the answers. 

She has help. 

She laughs, out of a hundred thousand mouths of writhing worms, wrapped in END-flowers sharper than knives and toxins and Pain and weapons to make the dead weep. 

She has help. 

Several of Viviae’s Bishops are still holding back, some of them outright pushing out of the conflict towards their burning farm-lands. 

Mortaria’s clergy are matched, her newfound existence twisted enough and antithetical to their magics enough to cripple their attacks against her. 

New Inquisum, and the Arch-Bishops theoretically within, have yet to enter the fray, watching as the Holiest of Holies does battle with the twisted ruin of Seo En-Hyun’s existence, as Kai Ra runs rampant against the other cities. 

She laughs, out of a jaw of iridescent divinity that is a Halo that is proof of paradox and of the breaking of even the most fundamental of existence’s laws.

She failed. Empirically. Her plan did not succeed. She did not, in fact, bend an entire empire to her knees in a single savage burst of intellect and violence. 

And that is alright. 

She disrupted an entire civilization. She broke millenia-old foundations and dragged entities whole realms above her into war, whether they like it or not. She kept her child safe, all the way up until the point that she had even more help to do so.

And Rai Jin and Li Shu are stronger than they’ve ever been. Li Shu has skillsets all her own, stronger than Raika was even as a Bishop- or at least different. She’s become something other than Raika was before, grown and evolved yet again. She’s learned, and even though her plans have fallen through, even though she underestimated the Fallen Kingdom and failed to properly predict every possible thing…

It still worked. 

The END of the world saw her. 

The Fallen Kingdom bleeds and comes apart around itself. 

She laughs.

Po, the Corpse Martyr, laughs right alongside her, and together, they paint the world in shades of infinity. 

The Holiest of Holies howls as proclamation after proclamation is burned out of existence by fires that END all they touch. 

Kai Ra is beaten back, destroyed, regenerates, grows, attacks, defends, dancing in a dizzying wave of apocalyptic battle that can be felt throughout the entire world. 

Her jaws ache as she bites, as she drinks of paradox and eats of causality, as her Halo grows and dims and glows and shrinks. With each bite, more and more Death is consumed, more and more END is made manifest, more and more fusions thereof are forcefully brought into existence, the process between creation and culmination cut out entirely. 

She laughs out of a hundred mouths, out of ghosts and Echo-puppets anchored by knives of END, out of barely functional arrays that detonate like bombs at the slightest touch, out of guns and blades made of flesh and shadows. 

I Am Me, I Am…

Her jaws ache as she bites at reality and causality and the will of someone so far above her. She gnaws and chews and tears at the screaming of a broken authority that roars and enacts laws that are not True but attempt to be. 

She laughs, let loose and let wild. 

She is imperfect. 

She’s imperfect. 

And in this moment, tearing through an army, fighting back as an asymmetric nightmare to a whole school of power, her allies safe, her plan failed but the steps taken still having meaning, she laughs and laughs and laughs. 

Who is some old, dusty set of robes to say what is true?

What bearing does holiness have on what is right?

What meaning do the words of chained ghosts have in the face of her?

Kai Ra, who was Raika, who is Undead and Undying and of the END, laughs.

I Can Change.

Her jaws snap shut. 

The spot between what isn’t real and what is falls into jaws that break the world. 

We Are What We Eat.

She takes another bite, and another, and another, and she consumes Death, and the paradox grows, and she consumes the weapons cast against her, and the paradox grows, and her Halo shines. 

Dao and Truth and Craft and Qi and now something else, something more, something of them and beyond them, all laugh alongside her.

Her jaws snap shut. 

The Corpse Martyr laughs, even as the last of Seo En-Hyun falls apart, even as the arrays that the magic-focused Bishops were preparing click into place, even as a fresh assault burns through another chunk of the beachhead that is Kai Ra. 

Kai Ra laughs. The mountain she’s feeding from comes undone as Mortaria and Viviae and Godsfall’s combined efforts unmake it. The swampland that is part of her body that is part of her power is torn apart by swarms of unlife and the movements of the world itself, the entire kingdom turned against her. A hundred bodies cause a hundred fresh wounds and a hundred ruined magics and tear into more and more of the clergy.

Her jaws snap shut.

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

What is half-formed law in the face of hunger divine? In the face of the END?

In the face of CHANGE?

I Am Me, I Am Mine.

Kai Ra laughs and laughs and laughs. 

Existence bends. The spatial distortion of the landscape spirals in wilder and wilder directions. Mortaria screeches as buildings are twisted to exist inside each other, as magics are warped out of place. 

A roar of something impossible comes from out of the swamplands as a trio of Viviae’s Bishops throw all they into an impossible, ever-rotting, ever fermenting, ever twisting abomination of un-life, tearing building-sized chunks out of the ground with every burst of movement. The world cracks open beneath it, the ground itself unable to bear the weight of the many-clawed and flowering beast, even as her gardens of END tear chunks from it with every shadow and angle it touches. 

The arrays that Glorianna, Lu Karai, and the other Bishops were working on as the satellites of Mortaria fire and fly and break above the world finally connects.

A world away, the howling of Beasts comes over the horizon, accompanied by a creaking that can only be city-sized vegetation growing too fast, all at once. 

The sound and smell and taste of greater powers, of ancient sects and inhuman super-beings, wafts over the edge of existence, the smell of blood in the water drawing interest from even the sanest of the mad. 

Two avatars of the END laugh, as the Fallen Kingdom’s millenia-old carcinization breaks apart. 

Kai Ra sees what she is, and sees what she has done, and feels something new. Something even Raika had never felt, not so deeply, not as herself. 

It’s imperfect.

That’s good enough. 

Kai Ra smiles with a Halo that is every color that is all the colors, that is all of her, that is proof that she IS. 

The magics of some of the best spell-crafters “alive” finally click home, and everything goes white. 

She’s not alone. She’s not perfect. She is enough. 

She doesn’t stop laughing, even as a formation the size of an island closes shut over her. 

Even as the world tells her that she should bend. That she should break. That existence demands she sit back and suffer, that she let her loved ones suffer, that power is all that matters and that the greatest powers of all say things should stay as they are.  

She laughs.