Chapter 436 - How Sweet, To Be Proper Monsters Again (Patreon)

Whoo! This one took a bit longer- not quite burnout, but I am sure as shit gonna try and use tomorrow for a bit of recuperation! I've got lots to do with the move, back to editing, all around and around and aaaaah.

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“There you are.”

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It may not be the best body She ever made, but Raika’s pretty proud of this one. 

Taken from the framework that she presented herself to her spouses with and magnified by the increased Qi she’s working with, its body is denser, more real than her usual fare. It’s full to bursting with disparate elements, and what’s more, part of it calls out to the Fengs, whispering of ontologies torn apart and re-arranged. 

The serpent-form is as much centipede as it is serpent, as much a cluster of thorns and knives as it is a centipede, but deep in its armored interior, a patch of [Woods Both Deep And Dark] tries to assert itself. Crimson flowers and branches sprout from between armor-plates and as a violent mane around the “face” of the body, and the shadows they cast are darker than they should be. 

She giggles, and through a hundred lungs up and down a spine the size of a city street, the sound comes out distorted and loud enough to rattle bone. 

Oh but it feels good to exist.

Oh but it feels good to HATE.

Oh but it feels so good to feel the Intent washing down upon her as they scent the blood of their own on her lips, in her teeth, down her throat.

She doesn’t make a secret of it. She broadcasts it for all the world to know. A piece of a Domain, forcibly extracted and contained in a bubble of Flesh, made to act as mutagen and fuel source and victim all at once. Even if they weren’t intimately familiar with the centuries old fellow Feng-clan combatant, they can surely taste the essence of clan-style cultivation in the aura washing off of her, shed forth from forest flora along her being. 

Between that and the insults, one of them finally cracks.

Raika launches herself diagonally towards the distant trio, using her newly-grown vines and limbs and claws and thorns to pull at Space all around her and enforce movement. She leaves the dome behind, her form relying on esoteric ontology more than aerodynamics for velocity, and where she flies that same crimson mist floats off her as the dome threw out before, adding to the smoke cloud around the plateau.

It’s not nearly enough to avoid the attack that comes for her, nor does it possess any way to manipulate the Feng’s senses. It does look nice. 

All-Consuming Forest Technique: Root Through The Earth

An attack by an expert at the peak of the Nascent Soul Realm enters the world and exits out the back of her frontmost skull. 

It manifests as streaks of black lightning, hungering roots made of pure energy streaking down from an impossible tree high in the sky. Each root spirals and contorts, arching with strange patterns along itself that draw in one’s gaze the same way they draw in the Qi of the air around them.

Tracking perfectly to her location, the strike spears into and out of her, exploding through her like a thorny vine ripping into and through a foolish caterpillar. Armor-plates and segmented layers are torn apart and splayed open as the root-technique curves through her, exhibiting the properties of biologies, Shadow, and raw energy all at once.

Worse, it’s an efficient technique, and powerful, using its own formula to become nearly self-sustaining. It acts as the concept it is modeled around: a root. It drains nutrients from that which it grows through, what it’s rooted in. 

Raika laughs around the root-branch growing through her primary eye socket and out one side of her cranium, then contorts herself to bite at it. 

It burns her teeth, eating into her and trying to turn her to fuel to spawn more roots- but she’s been at this long enough to get good at it, and at the end of the day, as complex as it is, it’s not truly conscious. 

It shatters beneath her bite, and the root coils and churns as crimson flowers and gastric acids devour it whole from within her skull. It doesn’t burn away quickly, but it does, and she’s still moving, every muscle independently pulling at Space without much care for connective systems.

She’s still laughing, even as the roots continue to spasm and she continues to bleed crimson air into the world. 

The Nascent Soul Realm Feng throws himself towards her, breaking the sound barrier twice and shoving aside the clouds that remained after his assault. Behind him, the two Warrior Realm Fengs continue to prepare their techniques, one of them wielding a series of floating tablets running some sort of mathematical formula, the other chanting something too far away for her to hear and weaving complex hand signs. 

She’ll get to them eventually. She needs to make sure attention is on her, and not on the other her that’s still currently shielding a few hundred lives inside herself, but what’s the worst that can happen if she fails? She dies? Big whoop, there’s more of her.

Another of those Sword-infused Jians comes out to strike at her, the Nascent Soul Feng roaring as his armor activates and clads him in a coat of midnight black. 

She laughs as she opens her mouth wide. 

The Jian vibrates violently, starting to cut into the hand that wields it, as the weapon sends out a Cut to sever all before it. Raika’s body is cut cleanly in half, horizontally, with multiple chunks falling away.

The root reaches back out to itself, the technique trying to self-propagate, and Raika rides it as Flesh and blood and pulls the pieces back together.

A Cut has the consequence of cutting an idea as much as an object, so the flesh doesn’t rebind- but when she dissolves it, reabsorbing it into the whirlpool of flesh she’s moving as, it does so seamlessly. 

The Feng roars something, tries to say some words-

She is upon him, faster than physiks should allow.

He cuts once, twice, three times-

Each time, she discards what is lost and remakes it, not even bothering to slow down.

All-Consuming Forest Technique: Endless Boughs

A fractal explosion of branches and leaves detonates out, mimicking a flower and shield at once. It’s recursive, each branch holding another branch behind it, and it makes for a beautiful attempt at defense.

Raika opens her split mouth wider, all two-dozen of her lesser skulls matching it, and screams her hatred.

Most cultivators fight people one on one. That’s fine for them. Sometimes they’ll fight a little army if it’s of a weak enough Realm, but that’s usually in poor taste. The occasional slaughter probably counts as well, though.

Raika doesn’t fight alone. Raika has Raika. 

And at the end of the day, most wars are won by logistics.

The Qi-enfused blood and tissue that some of her have been working on since they first glimpsed the Feng finds an exit out through a screaming set of mouths, and a jet of crimson like nothing in the world explodes against the fractal barrier.

When compressed, a lesser amount of Qi grew her tissue fast enough to friction into an explosion. 

A greater amount does much the same.

The Feng screams as a bottomless stream of blood carves into his shield and then detonates.

The stream is broad, but there’s so much that it counts as being concentrated anyways, and it carves effortlessly through a mastered Nascent Soul Realm technique. Each drop then combusts, turning to flesh and mutation so quickly that physiks demand a chemical consequence, lighting up the sky with a blood-red conflagration.

Pieces of random flesh rain down on the world, dissolving into mist, as the surviving bits of Raika’s blood mutate out of the explosion. The Feng’s leaves do not experience quite the same longevity.

He’s still alive, of course. Their armor is impressive, as are the defensive artifacts. A jade talisman has shattered in place of his life, and even then, she still managed to take an arm and a chunk out of his torso.

The arm that survives holds his Jian, and he cuts at her to gain space.

She pulls Space itself and is beside him anyways, even as she comes apart and back together. 

All-Consuming Forest Technique: Shrike’s Nest

Branches again, but this time they stab outwards, feeding on the blood and the pain that surrounds them. Raika feels the technique pull at her Pain and body, but she’s got so much of both that it barely registers, even as the thorns of it explode outward and try to impale her.

By the time they’ve touched her body, they’re already more a part of her than not. 

By the time she opens her mouth, the Feng’s eyes have filled with fear. 

The memory is so strong she can taste it. It punches through a safeguard at the same time as she unleashes the technique, new connections forming over the hidden ones.

Its name used to be Pressurized Crimson Cut.

Supreme Body Art: Fluid-Jet

A beam of liquid obliteration flashes across the sky.

A millisecond after, its trail detonates in stunning violence, painting the blue sky in the colors of heat and light and blood. 

In the aftermath, she swims through a sea of falling biology to find the single piece that still stinks of hateful forestry. 

Making the attack a technique refines it. Augments it. It has a name now, more than just an action, and she feels the way that the world bends around that, ever so slightly. 

Three more jade talismans tumble in shattered pieces, falling through the sky. 

The Feng survived.

Considering the number of parts left, and the way his armor is only barely holding together, flaking apart as it tries to liquify and coat what remains, she thinks he might regret that.

She’s alive. She’s real.

And what she just did was more than herself. It was worthy of Her.

Raika is the happiest she has ever been, considering she’s been alive for about four minutes. 

The Feng tries to gather itself, tries to bring together enough Qi to do more than fall through the air, but she’s already over it. 

Her mouth dislocates and stretches wide, the smile as hateful and joyful as could be, and swallows him whole in one bite. 

In an instant he’s far, far away, and she’s taking him apart, and he’s screaming.

Two down. Two to go.

She starts pulling herself towards the two Warrior Realm Feng clanmates up above. They’re far enough away that the air likely doesn’t work the same where they are, that her earlier attack couldn’t even reach them, and she has a long way to go.

They don’t just wait for her to arrive. 

The one calculating on the mathematical artifacts waves a hand, and several falling artifacts tumble free of his storage ring. On the way down, they warp and distort, growing into animated puppets of incredibly delicate make.

They fall towards her, an instantaneously deployed army of chaff, already unlimbering guns and inbuilt weaponry to fire down at her. 

She tracks her tools as she watches them fall, in between her and her targets. 

Flesh, Space, Pain. Her three greatest pieces and greatest comprehensions, her three… Daos. That’s what they’re called. 

She pulls herself with Flesh through Space and-

The first wave of bullets start hitting her, breaking on her armor and nicking at unoptimized tissues, but fail to harm her. Arrays on them flash on contact, causing bursts of flame, ice, lightning and other elements to flash, throwing her off-course, forcing her to adjust for the pressure, slowing her by a few bare seconds at most. 

A lot can happen in seconds. Especially amongst those that can move faster than sound.

Raika opens her mouth and lets her feelings out. 

She laughs. She screams and howls and cackles and it sounds like madness. 

Out from behind it comes the sound of screaming. 

Pain. 

They’re too far for her ability to impart Pain to reach directly, and the bullets are weakened but not stopped by agonies. But that’s not all Pain is, is it? It’s not just something nearby, not just something that happens when you’re touched or when you’re in one specific location.

Things hurt because they hurt. 

For the barest moment, one of the two Fengs feels pain. He hears his companion, someone he had some sort of connection to, cry out in the agony of being unmade piece-by-piece, and it hurts him.

Flesh that is Space grabs onto Pain.

She pulls.

The other Feng is, quite suddenly, inside of a big red whirlpool that hates him. Two positions overlap as Pain is shared, as Pain is made identical to Space and Flesh alike.

He does not enjoy the experience.

Another memory clicks as inspiration giggles inside the depths of her skulls. 

There was more than just one technique in her original self. More ideas. 

She tries a new one.

Supreme Body Art: Compression

Feng Clan Hidden Technique: Dance Among The Leaves

The Feng doesn’t stop dancing or waving his fan, even as a few thousand pounds of force collapse in on him, even as biology stronger than steel tries to crush him. 

It’s a genuinely novel experience, to have a person dance inside of her, every wave and twirl ripping her apart into pieces. 

She does slow him, though.

She feels the technique destabilize, a ritual technique finally coming to a violent culmination.

Her technique crashes down in turn, trying to block his attacks or contain it, maybe redirect it at the other Feng-

Oh.

Raika blinks as the Raika up in the sky rather dramatically comes apart.

The view from the dome is hardly the best for a conflict undertaken that far away, but her other self was pretty big. She can see her come apart into hundreds, then thousands of little pieces, each piece trying to regenerate and build itself anew and being torn apart in turn. It’s like watching ants get stepped on, but from every angle at once, and what’s crushed and torn apart and ripped open becomes leaves which then spiral out into more dancing.

Each bursting piece of flesh is matched by the sounds of explosive devastation, each “impact” occurring spontaneously yet in sequence. Each one makes a thunderclap loud enough to make the sky shake, thundering sonic booms matching the technique’s activation. She sees her other self try to survive, but the dancing devastation and the leaves spread across the sky, pushing aside clouds for miles, turning the sky an unbroken mix of blue and fading crimson.

Even from almost a mile below, her soft tissues quake and shiver at each impact. If that technique had hit her down here-

Not pretty. 

She opens the dome, and Raika comes out again, similar but not identical to the previous one. A whirlwind-serpent of flesh and sharp edges, outlined in stolen Soul, growing crimson flowers and hateful branches from between armor and colossal, clawed limbs.

She laughs, and every other Raika laughs with her.

I Am Me, I Am Mine

She’s all Raika. All of her is. Each and every one. 

It takes a little while for her to make more strong Raikas, but her laughter is strong enough for a thousand of her, and she tastes the Pain of the Feng she got ahold of. She only got a hint, for all that her technique did hurt him, just the slightest bit of pain, but that’s enough. 

The latest Raika grabs hold of that Pain with Flesh that is Space and she pulls. 

And then she’s there, and the Feng is bursting out of her, retreating, both of them moving fast enough to break the sound barrier, waving limbs and fans and weapons at each other.

Behind the one with the fan, the other Warrior finishes a calculation.

Raika, the dome, feels something. 

Then she feels nothing, because all of the Flesh that is her is coming apart. 

It starts at the top of the dome, disintegrating it, moving down. Milliseconds count, and in that time another Raika steps in, trying to process-

Whatever the technique was, it made Flesh just stop working, broke some mechanic that she doesn’t understand-

In the sky, Raika carves burst of pressurized crimson into the world as the Feng waves a fan, hitting her with typhoon winds that unmake whatever part they pull too far out of her-

“Glurk-”

Both of the combatants pause, turning to the sound behind their battle. 

The other Feng, the one with the ongoing calculation that’s tearing down into the Crimson Manse, holds a hand to his throat.

There’s an empty gap where his throat was. 

No blood. No damage. Just nothingness. Like there was never anything there at all, just a space where his throat doesn’t anymore.

His eyes are wide, and there’s a look of panic on his face- but it’s replaced as his eyes lose their light, and he goes limp. 

Standing behind him is someone who Is Not There, holding onto a piece of flesh that might once have been a throat.

The Feng falls out of the sky, tumbling away into the nothingness of Death. 

The man who Is Not There smiles with teeth that are not and a body that is not and a point in space that is him and thus isn’t.

“Found you.”