Chapter 425 - Creative, Experimental Hate, First Of All (Patreon)

Hello babes! Here we are! It's fun and really difficult writing higher-realm fights, lemme tell ya! Hard to say something's scary without going "and then the mountain exploded", hard to say someone survived without "and they endured a million blows!", but it's still fun, and the more I practice, the more I get the hang of it! Reading Ave Rem Xia and Sky Pride both help 0n that front, as does doing more of it, period! I hope that this works out, though I very much look forward to Raika's powerset condensing a bit as she fuses back together, and exploring how to do, like, viable, non self-destructive powers. Hopefully this chapter gives y'all some hints about the direction I want to take things in!

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“Kill me. Kill me! Kill me! Kill me! You DARE to keep me alive? Kill me! Do it! DO IT! DO IT, I DARE YOU! DO IT YOU BASTARDS! I’M NOT GOING TO DO IT SO JUST KILL ME! I’M NOT GOING IN THERE!”

…

“...I don’t fucking CARE how long you keep me in here. I don’t CARE! FUCK YOU! Just kill me you stupid, pathetic, worthless fucks. Your mothers are whores, your fathers inbred with donkeys, and all of your siblings FUCKED your SKULL in the goddamn WOMB. I’m not doing it. I’m NOT!”

…

“You can’t make me. You can’t. Just kill me. I know you can do that much. You can just kill me. Why even bother with this shit? Why even- who cares about this? Are you watching? Are you watching right now? Can you hear me? Can you hear me, you stupid, disgusting monsters? You’re wasting both of our times. Wasting it! Wasting it! You could be doing anything! You could just end this already! Finish me off! I’m NOT going in there so stop wasting everyone’s goddamn time and kill me already!”

…

“Kill me. I know you can. I know you’re not going to let me leave but I’m… I’m not going in there. I can’t.

“Please. Is that what you wanted? Please. Please just… just kill me.  I’ll beg. I’ll beg, I will. Please. Please. Please kill me. Please kill me. Please.

“Just don’t make me go in there.”

…

“How long has it been? Can you tell me? Can you say anything? Can you give me some sign that, that, that someone’s listening to this? It’s…

“I don’t need to sleep a lot. Or eat. You… you know that. Right? You knew that when you put me in here. I… I can’t tell time. I don’t know how long it’s been. I’ve… I think I’ve slept ten times. Maybe eleven. How long did it take me to sleep, outside? I think I could go for months. Nothing to do here, so…

“I’m so hungry. Almost drained. Why drag this out? Why are you doing this to me? What advantage does this provide you? Just to torture me? You could have killed me in the first hour. In the first day. Why do this? Do you want to see it? You want to see me do it? I…”

…

“Anyone. Anyone. Please. Please help me.”

…

“Alright.”

-Recorded excerpts of Warrior Shao Yun, judged guilty for the crime of sedition and denial of Imperial Authority.  Subject voluntarily sacrificed himself to the Wall as raw material and inspiration for its construct-spirit, that his visage and knowledge might serve the Empire evermore as penance.

Glory Be.

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The horde works pretty damn well as a quick, improvised tool. 

Malformed, barely-functional, spliced together with Flesh Qi and blind stitching, each of them is little more than an amalgamation of limbs and pieces. Bits and surgically severed pieces of hundreds of different spiritual organs festoon each of them, harvested from the wounds that have been suffered by those in her body, added to by the keratinous growths that she’s implanted into them. They won’t survive more than an hour, and probably won’t be able to move themselves very much in the latter half of that time, but thirty minutes is plenty for suicidal bruisers designed to launch themselves at the enemy and then detonate.

Most of them scream while they do it. Comes with having misshapen lungs and adrenal glands the size of cats. 

They only have as much neural tissue as is needed to throw themselves bodily at the Feng, no ability to suffer, no higher thoughts. No time to make them and no need. 

They still scream as they die. 

A cluster of explosives herds the leftmost killer into a fresh body, wrapping a dozen limbs around the Warrior realm cultivator to try and grapple him. His sheer existence is enough to rebuff the creature, the defenses on his cloak never even needing to activate to keep it from touching him, but it doesn’t need to. Before the Feng can dedicate the focus needed to cast it aside, it’s self-destructed. A dozen meridians purposely misaligned all flex at once, shooting discordant, chaotic Qi into reactive keratin crystals that multiply the discord.

The explosion also doesn’t hurt the higher-realm cultivator. It’s not supposed to. 

It keeps them in place. Forces them to push aside the sudden flood of nonsensical concepts that’s trying to drown them, lest it affect their techniques. Only takes a half-second or so to wipe the concepts clean and replace them with violence and forestry, but that’s alright.

A half-second is enough time for the bombs. 

Mutagenic super-matter, compressed beyond natural limits by Daos of Flesh and Space, explodes with the force of a miniature sun. 

The echoing boom of the detonations is loud enough to crack stone and send some of the distant clouds a bit further back. It superheats the air to plasma, ignites the oxygen around it, and mutates further afterwards, Flesh Qi transforming each detonation into a steam of veins and roots and muscle made of energy that grabs and stabs and rips at its target. 

And by the time it’s begun to fade, there’s already a half-dozen more amalgamated constructs launching themselves at her target. 

It’s wonderful.

It feels like catharsis. Like screaming with desperation and anger and hate, letting it all out in a big burst that doesn’t stop. It relieves something deep down further than she can even remember she goes, scratching at a long-unresolved itch. 

Some of the screaming mouths are laughing. 

Their song gets louder, outputting enough volume to liquify parts of herself and crack the stone of the mountain all around. Each voice pursues a specific pitch, and there’s a sort of tug that she’s following. Like she can tell, instinctively, what hurts the most, and then follow the pain of her targets into a louder, more specific pitch. Against well-armored, high-realm foes, it’s not enough to kill, but against any lessers, she’s pretty sure she could find the right sound to shout someone out of existence. 

And she can do the same for the bombs, and for the amalgamations. She has to feel for it, which is hard to focus on, but she can tell what hurts more, and then follow that down. More amalgamations are born, the combinations of spiritual organs getting more calculated based on responses.

And they carve and they cut and they slash at her, and the forest keeps trying to grow, but it’s in her body so it’s a part of her now and fuck the Fengs.

The battle stops being two-on-one as the Feng that fell earlier returns. His robes have transformed, going from cloth to something more like a liquid. They’ve fused with the advanced arrays on the armor-plating to become a set of midnight-black defenses, leaving the Feng featureless save for the family crest on his robes. 

A slash that cuts the world severs a part of herself completely, turning the tip of her mountain-form into a falling meteor of flesh. 

She makes more.

In the instant it takes, he’s arrived, landing on her surface like it’s horizontal beneath him and not a roiling mass of ever-changing landscape. She tries to expand around him, to absorb him, to know his Flesh as she knows her own- but the armor makes a slight hissing sound. Each attempt falls to nothing, and where he touches her, she turns grey, falling apart, lifelessly. 

He kneels on her surface as a hundred tendrils and a dozen bombs fall at him, and punches. 

The blow sends the entire structure of Raika back, rocking her hard enough to slam into the mountain. It cracks further, the hundreds of anchor-points she has coming apart as the mountain crumbles. The pillar, crawling up into the sky, cracks, a seam opening like a vertical canyon.

The fold in space stays right where it’s been, though it feels like she has to clench. 

The other Feng, the one trying to be a forest inside her, takes the opportunity to advance. More of her turns from Flesh to Soil, from which sprout more trees in a continuous cycle. She devours and absorbs them while their roots dig through her defenses, churning meat and bone into dirt. 

A fresh set of lungs opens and she screams.

Half of the trees disintegrate, and there’s a cry of frustration from the shadow hiding among them. 

The armored Feng rears back and goes to hit her again-

A half-dozen bombs she’s moved beneath the patch of her he’s kneeling on explode, ejecting that part of her forcing back the night-black figure. He doesn’t move as far as he should, inertia and momentum somehow sliding off him, but it buys a few feet of space. 

She is singing and laughing and there are so many things crawling from her.

She’s used up most of her harvested spiritual organs, though. Running low on those. She could just… harvest the little cultivators inside of her?

Hmm.

No mental blocks in that direction. No safeguards for shutdown. Makes it safer to think about, but… still. Something’s a bit uncomfortable about the thought.

She could figure it out, given a moment to think, but her enemies don’t allow her that.

The lead Feng, the one whose sword is vibrating hard enough to sing sharpness everywhere, enters the fray. His blade Cuts, its nature aligned further with the concept it’s using, and a rush of Qi floods the world as a hundred sword-edges cut down from a hundred directions.

His Jian warps, a screech of twisting metal cutting a few nicks into it from the attack, but the mountain that is Raika is torn open. 

Rivers of blood gush forth, painting the sky and the ground in bright crimson and purplish-red in equal measure. She screams, and it hurts, but she can tell that it hurts him too, just a touch.

The blood alone is powerful enough, rich enough in Qi, that the stones of the mountain start to change. Rocks start to marble and grow sinuous, cracks in the mountain start to shed pale, stony fluids, and tendrils of nerves and sinews sprout like weeds from the ground. Shards of her bones tumble free, severed out of her existence, and where they land, they are planted, their weight too vast for the stones to hold without cracking.

And she laughs.

It hurts him too. The Jian, the Cut it holds, it’s stronger than he can handle- ergo the weapon in the first place. Overstressing it like this has backfired, and beneath his armor, she can feel the pain of cuts running up his arm.

An arm that can survive industrial fires and a thousand swords bleeds from the blade it holds. And for all the pain that it causes her, for all the damage, she can just make more, while he needs to heal.

Supernatural capital-C Cuts are harder to heal, and might take minutes instead of milliseconds, but they will heal. His own blade has caused more damage to him than she’s managed to hit all three of them with.

It’s a losing battle, really. 

The catharsis is starting to wear off. Not as fun, beating someone you hate to death, if they’re beating you harder. 

If she kills off all the cultivators inside of her and eats them up, she’d gain more materials and a bit more Qi. Maybe… ten percent of her current total? That’s not bad. More, if she converts them into more obelisks, but that takes time and focus. 

And she doesn’t have a lot of time to think about it, either, because the lead fighter hasn’t stopped Cutting just because he hurt his arm.

The arm he’s swinging with is bleeding through his armor, droplets falling to her surface as he carves away, his Jian vibrating more and more. It’s getting nicked and chipped, but hasn’t actually broken in a meaningful way yet. Somehow, his forest-friend grows between the Cuts, the sort of masterful control needed for the Warrior realm allowing them both to unleash upon her their attacks without hurting each other.

Half of the landmass around the fold has been turned to an evergreen forest or severed chunks of bits, and at that point the third Feng descends to hit her again.

She has an idea.

Using every muscle she has on her surface, she takes hold of herself and pulls. 

Dao bends the world. 

At the last second, space constricts, pulled at by her muscles and her comprehension of it. The armored Feng’s punch travels through a piece of reality that was directly over her body, and instead is redirected violently towards part of the growing forest.

The armor he’s wearing creaks as it resists the effect, and the weight of a Warrior realm cultivator is enough that the space doesn’t want to bend. His very existence is loud, all of their existences are, and they make the world bend around them by the sheer ontological mass they carry.

She pulled hard enough to make another fold, but all it does is divert the blow a few degrees away from a direct impact. 

Which is still enough to make the forest growing out of her body explode. 

Splinters explode, each one a shard of a manifestation that carves through the world. They embed in a wave across her skin, reflecting off the armor of their companions- or vanishing entirely as it enters their space.

More trees start to grow from the splinters, spread over her surface, but they’re weaker. 

More mouths emerge and she keeps singing and laughing. That hurt them. That hurt.

She screams, and vomits out one more amalgamation.

Most of the remaining third of her harvested materials went into it. It’s heavy.

It’ll survive seconds. 

It crawls free of a pool-sized esophagus, a hundred arms yanking it forward, pulling it as she pushes. 

All three Fengs respond immediately. The leader stops cutting for a moment, turning his ever-sharpening, ever-chipping Jian up at the new arrival. The forested one grows further, pushing power into the shattered seeds that have been sent out. The armored one punches at her again.

She pulls.

The amalgamation is her. It’s a part of her. It’s born of her and made of her and connected to her and hers. It pulls a lot more easily than any of the Fengs do, even as it exudes a weight of chaotic, malformed Qi almost half as heavy as they are.

It opens its eyes as it is cut in half.

Raika wakes up inside a new body.

It hurts. 

It hurts.

It hurts.

Every nerve and neuron has been enhanced. Every ounce of chemical artistry she knows communicates every sensation she has as fast as possible. Each and every ounce of her has had its sensitivity heightened beyond any evolutionary metric, and the air itself feels like razors on her skin, even before she is Cut. 

Everything HURTS.

She thinks about the last time every single thing HURT.

Then, too, there was a Feng. 

And she-

Safeguards shut down. Her mind locks in on itself and the world’s most perfectly suicidal brain begins to experience the world’s worst seizure. 

In a healthier mind, there’d be some nuance. Enough understanding to understand. 

In her mind, in Raika’s latest mind, there is only pain.

Everything Hurts.

All three of the Fengs seize up. 

A Truth manifests into the world. Barely. It only flickers, a microsecond of madness reinforced by absolute waves of Qi, enough to power a hundred conventional cultivation Core Formations.

It’s enough. For a moment, the whole world hurts.

The rocks scream and crack. The air hums a horrific vibration through itself, shrieking in synch. Space and flesh and everything in between all cry out as the Everything Hurts.

Raika is used to pain. Things hurting doesn’t stop her. It doesn’t stop the Fengs either- but it slows them for a moment. 

She feels every single piece of them light up. She feels all of their existence become bright, as every vein and synapse becomes visible to her as part of their Pain. 

For a brief moment, she knows them as deeply as she knows her own Body.

Older Truths come forth.

I Am Me, I Am Mine.

I Can Change.

They’re on her body. And she knows them like her body. And she feels them the same as she feels herself.

It takes barely any alterations to her primary neurochemistry to convince herself.

Each of their bodies begins to change.

The trees expand with her breath.

The armor pulls like skin.

Their bodies malform like putty.

Everything of her outside the fold in space she’s hiding in goes away.

The mountain is gone. Everything above the fold is gone. 

There is a Cut that carves across the world. On the horizon and across a dozen other mountain-pillars that intersect it, there is a line across the world, above which Severance and the Dao of the Cut have unmade all. 

The lead Fend, a trickle of blood going down his lip, glares at her from where he CUT. 

His sword is left at his side, its vibrations dulling. 

His other hand is up, and the nails on it have been worn down to nothing by the act of severing part of the world from itself.

“Lan,” says their leader. “Elimination is now the only priority. Don’t hold back.”

Three other Souls, each one brighter and louder than the Fengs, wash over the world at his words. They’re not fast enough.

The forested Feng, who vanished amidst the trees-that-are-him and who is now half-visible in the last little patch of them, nods.

[Domain Of Woods Both Deep And Dark]

[Blessed Shadow Dances Beneath Leaves].

Domain and Soul both remake the world, and the fold in space is lost amidst the green.