Book 2, Chapter 7 – Damn, The Woods' Got Hands (Patreon)

Back on that editing grindset I guess!

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The migratory patterns of spirit beasts are a rare thing indeed, and rarer still is one with any understanding of them. In truth, so many of the aforementioned creatures can become so unique and distinctive from one another that conventional patterns found in traditional herds or packs can be undone entirely. Where a pack of deer might migrate to warmer climates, a Snow-White Brilliance Deer might instead trek towards the cold, where it might find the necessary natural treasures to enhance its personal path of cultivation. However, while this does often change the specific pathways one might look for, as well as the likelihood of consistent patterns emerging at all, there are some wider trends that can be pursued. 

The primary things that determine migratory patterns of spirit beasts are danger and hunger. 

Self-explanatory, perhaps, though even with these broad categories there are exceptions. Generally, the greater the danger in the area, be it from beasts with higher realms of cultivation or predatory intent, higher presence of cultivators, or environmental hazards, the more likely it is that a spirit beast will move away from that area. In turn, the closer a resource connects to a beast’s natural path of cultivation, and the more potent it is, the more likely it is that the beast will move toward the area it’s in. These two factors alone can be reliably used to determine the path that the myriad powers of the natural world will move, independently of whether they pursue the more common paths of Bestial Cultivation, a more Orthodox approach, or something altogether distinctive. 

–Introductory notes on the nature of Spirit Beasts and their many intricacies, by Explorator Liu Fen of the Division of Discovery

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Her soul doesn’t hurt. 

It’s just for a second, really, but for a moment, she doesn’t feel the leash. For a moment, she doesn’t care about the rest of the world. For a moment, she is not a thing that deserves punishment, she is not a slave to those who broke her and the one she owed and chose to help. She gives herself the gift of forgetting about her friends, and how alone she is, and where she stands, and simply flies, free and true, teeth bared and body little more than a weapon to strike with.

The beast meets her in kind.

Its skin is metallic, plates of some kind of biological alloy rippling like scales and armor both, large enough to act as daggers in and of themselves, and extend over every vulnerable area she can see. It has six legs, each of them rippling with muscle beneath tough greenish-brown skin as it shifts position and extends claws shaped like reaper’s blades, designed to cut across whole swathes of flesh and bring the filetted slices to a face that is all maw except for the eyes.

So many eyes. A crown of them, like a bubble made of shifting pupils in over-wet black scleras sitting atop a jaw that unhinges in a half-dozen different directions to shriek a battle cry at her as she flies at it.

And then, as it raises its frontmost claws to catch her in her mad forward dash, she plants a single step onto the ground and forces her entire body to launch itself sideways, against a tree trunk, and then forward again in the time it takes for a human to blink.

The energy and momentum tear at her, trying to keep the action from happening and, failing that, hurt her for attempting it, but her body endures. Modified as it is, muscle fibers interlaced and rewoven into new formats, tendons and ligaments strengthened and given space to work with, joints reinforced and rearranged, her flesh does not care about what she should be doing, only about what it can do. And right now, she can switch directions on a dime at the speed of a living rocket and still be ready to tear apart her prey.

A cluster of its eyes swivel and manage to track her, and a moment before impact, even at her speed, the spirit beast raises its hackles, armored scales becoming erect like a line of daggers for her to impale itself on.

So be it. 

She lands between most of them, puppeteering her hand and body to find points of contact she chooses rather than just what is instinctively quick, but even still she still gets cut open. Two into her guts, one into her arm, one straight through her palm and another through her wrist. She focuses on her heartbeat, pushing Qi towards the wounded areas while slowing the bloodflow around them to keep herself from bleeding too much, and then she forces her hand down further, fingers hooked into claws against the base of the armored quills / armor.

She wrenches, not sharp enough to pierce the leathery hide but still strong enough to damage the flesh beneath as she yanks it out of place. Several of the dagger-quills freeze up and spasm at the torn muscle and dislocated tissues,  leaving a cluster of them suddenly stiff and still. She roars again, and the beast roars with her, a wave of new scales lifting along its body as it tries to roll over and crush her. 

Instead, she leaps back and away, flexing her new musculature and clearing a large enough space that the creature’s roll falls short. She has to tear through her own body to do it, ripping open the wounds she got from getting too close, but it works. Instead, as it writhes and rolls viciously on the ground, trying to rip apart an enemy no longer trapped to it, she charges forward again and kicks it in the face as hard as she can.

The force of it shocks even her. Two of its six jaws dislocate with a crunch, flapping about obscenely and bleeding freely where the tearing force broke its skin. The beast shrieks again, more garbled this time, finding its feet, and Raika has already moved, ducking a wild swipe that she can feel just barely miss her.

She tracks the thing. It’s heart beats erratically, a strange rhythm that she can’t quite parse until she realizes that there’s two, beating together yet slightly apart. The creature does not seem to breathe, its throat emitting no sound unless it is performing one of those frighteningly high-pitched screeches, but she can smell a fleshy, mucousy scent near its stomach and, as she watches, notices vents pulling in air and letting it flow back out through what must be a series of lungs.

Raika adds not stealing more medical texts from the pavilion of the Purple Flame something-or-other sect to her list of regrets, but even looking at this thing is a joy. It’s just… fascinating.

It takes to its hind legs then, disturbing cracking and flexing sounds coming from it as its two frontmost pairs of limbs extend and distort, their reach increasing as if they gain a new joint to stretch out. Armor-quills on its back extend outward in a complete cone from its spine, blocking off an avenue of attack. It’s a defensive posture; come towards its more vulnerable belly, and there’s four sets of scythes ready to rip and tear and shred whatever comes close, but come at it from behind and there’s an impenetrable shell.

Raika grins, her mouth so wide that it’s hurting her gums and showing too much teeth. 

Yes. 

Yes.

This thing can kill her. A good enough swipe across the throat, a cut deep enough to sever joint or bone, and she’ll be back to square one of her crippling or worse. And for the first time since Taurus stole her, for the first time since she’s realized exactly how deserving she is of all the misery she’s built and been given, she feels… just a bit of joy, at that thought.

A part of her seems to think that that’s a concerning development, but that’s not very helpful, so she ignores it. 

She hears Maen gasp as she dashes in. She hears the wind, whistling through the trees and the sharpened edges of the thing before her. She can smell the rich earth she kicks up as she moves, the fallen rain it has absorbed in the last few days, the things which have walked and crawled on it. She can feel the breeze of air resistance pushing against her skin, whispering of her opponents weight and presence on the world as it continues to somehow mask its Qi scent from her. 

And she feels her own flesh, like a symphony, like a tool so lovingly forged into shape by pain and technique and blind experimentation. And, after just a moment of blissful peace, she takes that tool in hand.

Her heart thunders. Her blood flows to muscle and bone, flushing the air her lungs have purified and absorbed into every part that needs it, every part she knows she can use. Even with all of her enhancements and changes, she can still feel her bones creak and her muscles groan at the force she demands they exert.

She is in range of the beast’s claws.

The first strike comes from her right, and she forces her arm so fast the tendons crackle as she intercepts it, earning another gash along her arm that opens her to the bone. It forces the blow up and away, the impact of it ringing in her deliciously and making even Dink, hanging about her neck, tremble with the force, but it’s diverted just over her head. The second strike is from the left, down towards her throat, and she takes diagonally to duck beneath it and lets it whiff. The third and fourth attacks come at the same time, dislocated joints letting the limbs move like razored whips towards her stomach.

She pushes herself up and she is airborne, only just enough to roll in the air above both blades.

And then she is in, and she forces herself to move faster.

She lands and corrects her stance at the same time, her entire body redirecting every ounce of force into one, two, three punches, blood splattering from the cuts all over her in strange patterns from the force. The first blow lands on the dislocated muscle, making it worse, shoving it deeper, while the second and third land just above and beneath it, cracking the ribs around it and forcing the beast’s chest to dent inwards on its left side, collapsing inward. The creature spasms even as its limbs are already retracting, arcing down into a four-sided attack that she can’t back out of.

So instead of back, she goes up, using the creature’s own lower legs as a platform to jump up and to its face. Its throat is protected by its mouth, unhinged jaw more than blocking access to it with a gaping throat and rings of teeth, but that’s fine; she doesn’t need to hit its throat from the outside. She locks her legs around its upper shoulders, ignoring the cuts that tear apart her back and legs, rears back and punches full force into its open maw.

The spirit beast rears back, choking from collapsed ribs and violently impacted throat, and she takes the opportunity to grab it by the eyeballs.

Her hand crushes a good dozen of them, grabbing the fleshy, gooey cluster of three hundred and sixty degree vision in a vice grip. The beast screams again, the screech even higher pitched than before, like a demented teakettle in the body of a multi-ton abomination of grown steel and hidden flesh, but that just tells her she’s doing well. She uses her arm and the transformed musculature within to bring her entire body out of reach of the thing’s claws and force an awkward handstand on the top of its head.

She whispers to it then. Just a soft thing, a little exchange between foes.

This thing brought her joy. It cut her, and she broke it, and neither one expected differently, except which of them would win. It flails its disjointed whip-limbs and flutters its armored quills like wind chimes against each other, trying to find her, but she remains blissfully calm, even as it tries to sever the bone in the arm that’s holding her up and actively crushing dozens of its eyes. 

“Thank you,” she says, wearing the calmest, most beatific smile.

Then she flexes again, tossing herself straight up above it, spinning in place, and bringing down an axe kick with every ounce of her body and its altered properties.

And then the clearing is silent, save for the sound of metal scraping on metal. Like wind chimes at first, then like swords scraping against each other, slowly increasing in volume as the beast slips, totters, and falls.

She lays on the ground next to it, collapsed from the exertion. And she laughs, and laughs, and laughs. She just… lets herself be, for a while. There’s a corpse beside her, and everything hurts, her body cut into pieces and her reworked systems already showing signs of strain and a need for improvement, and she feels at peace with the world in a way she has not allowed herself, not earned, in months.

It hurts so much. 

It hurts better than any of the other pains she makes herself keep feeling, always, always, always.

Then she hears Maen give a yell. Raika turns her gaze to her, still smiling, but lets it fall as she notices the amount of fear on her friend’s face. 

Maen’s eyes keep snapping over to Raika, but in between each moment she’s looking around at the woods, turning slowly, a controlled panic clear in her features. 

Raika forgot about Maen. That’s a bad thing. That’s a monstrous, horrible, hateful thing that proves exactly how much pain she always deserves. 

“What’s wrong?” she asks. “What’re you-”

“That’s a spirit beast?” Maen asks, her voice quiet. She’s talking as if she expects something to be listening. 

“Well… yeah. Have you never seen one before?”

“Obviously I haven’t! If I had, I’d be dead! I thought they were just, like, bears on fire or something!” 

Raika snorts. “Maybe in the second ring. Out in the real world, most beast bloodlines intermix semi-freely, and they tend to eat whatever they can find. They live in the wilds, not in some precise, perfect little valley or whatever.”

“Ok. Do all of them feel like that?”

Raika tilts her head. “Feel like what?”

A bit of adrenaline-scent is filling the clearing now. The battle was brief, over so quickly and so violently that the smell didn’t have much of a chance to permeate, but now it’s still wafting off the felinid woman, still filling the space around them.

“It’s not- that’s only one of them. I think. Can’t you feel them?”

Raika takes a breath. The mania starts to abate as she forces herself to focus on her senses, ignoring the still twitching body of the beast she took down. It’s not hard- she might not be a cultivator anymore, but being able to control one’s emotions enough to meditate anywhere is a skill that doesn’t just vanish. 

The state doesn’t come as easily anymore, not with so little overall combat recently and so much else cluttering up her mind, but it is still there, and she brings it back to herself, replacing the emptiness of her cultivation with the depths of her perception. 

And still, she can’t smell anything out of place, not a whiff of Qi save Maen’s, panicked and agitated and flung about around her body in an untrained attempt to somehow protect herself. There are no cultivators, no Qi save the natural Qi all around, the wind through the trees, the scent of upturned earth and spilled blood and something vital and animalistic, the sound only of her heart and Maen’s heart and-

And another.

Quieter. It… blends into the background, somehow. She has to feel it, track her own heart and Maen’s mortal heart, and then- there. Synchronized with them. Kept nearly silent, but somehow… deeper.

And then… it clicks. 

She searches for it. Recognizes it, even as Maen spasms with fear, her eyes getting wider as her scent gets louder and louder. Her body trembles in place, straining in animal panic to get away as the scent of her Qi, sharp and animalistic and feral, screams out into the air.

Raika tunes her out. She goes deeper again, focusing on the meditation, on her senses. 

There. The heartbeat. Synchronized, precisely and perfectly, to the beat of their would-be prey.

One reverb, an echo. Then another. And another. And a fourth, fifth, sixth.

Raika reaches out a hand, very carefully grabbing hold of Maen’s shoulder. The touch makes her friend flinch, then wince from the tension in the grip. 

“Maen, I need you to stay very still. I need you to stay right. Here. You understand? Whatever you do, do not leave this spot.”

Maen whimpers, once. And then, in a fit of what must be tremendous focus, makes herself quiet, crouches down low to the ground, and freezes in place, her eyes darting about constantly. 

“Good girl,” Raika whispers. And then, she takes one step back. Another.

As she does, she takes hold of her own heart, forcibly slowing her pulse bit by bit. 

The heartbeats almost instantly diverge. 

Gradually, Maen’s heartbeat becomes more and more distinct. Gradually, the sound of the echoes, the hidden heartbeats, starts to follow only Raika’s, slowing to match her pace. 

“Maen,” Raika whispers, “they’re not after you. They’re not hiding from you. Remember when we escaped the sect? How you hid yourself? Try to think back to that. I need you to try and do that again, ok? I need you to stay very, very still, and make yourself hide. Can you do that for me?”

Maen whimpers, once, eyes still violently wide, a little trembling running through her.

Why aren’t they after her? She’s prey. Even Raika can tell, can feel it. Why are they coming after her instead?

She’s broken out of the thought as Maen gulps, then nods, crouched like a cat tight against the ground. Raika picks up the body of the scale-beast, dragging it over to where Maen is crouched, inch by inch, even as the heartbeats keep echoing her own, getting louder, approaching. 

She rolls the beast over, exposing its underbelly, the bracing it partially over Maen, giving her a shield of biological daggers and a body as well-armored as it is dead. Beneath the smell of it, bloody and sharp and already beginning to decompose, Maen’s scent starts to fade, unnaturally but helpfully gone silent and replaced only ever so lightly by the smell of citrus.

Before she leaves, Raika reaches over and violently tears off one of the scale-beasts many jaws, splattering blood over Maen and the floor and pulling it free with a grunt of effort. She takes a few steps away from the body, opening up space between it and her protected, feeling the echoing heartbeats following her movements. 

She reaches down and takes a bite of the flesh of the jaw, tearing loose a few teeth as she does and swallowing it all whole.

“Well? Will you leave me to enjoy a meal all on my lonesome?”

She can feel it. She can taste it, deep in herself, mingling with the scent of iron and meat. Worry and fear and pain and something like joy, but far less friendly. 

“Come on then! I don’t have all day! Come kill me if you’d like, but don’t leave me waiting!”

It’s just one at first. Then two. Then three of the heartbeats start to shift, abandoning any effort at echoing hers. 

Slowly, the woods all around come to life with the rustling of movement and the growling of beasts.