Chapter 454 – The Lyrics Discordant And Hateful (Patreon)

Bweh. Chaptertime. Early and juicy. Time to go do editing and VISCERAE.

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It hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts It hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts It hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts It hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts it–

-Psychic broadcast detected near priority site #3 by Oracular Pool 11756, origin believed to be due to noospheric overload

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A snort from Zhen Zixiang is all that it takes to obliterate the centaur, its presence tickling at neural bottlenecks that are a bit less lethal than Raika’s usual.

Like it was never gone, the man with hands for feet and hooves for fingers, green in skin and with flowing locks of hair, is back where it was before the snort obliterated it. 

“What ho there, combatants! Such a joy it is to see fine fellows as yourselves exercising such restraint. A pity that has come to an end!”

Raika ignores the new entity. It’s strong, relatively, but beneath her current form in scale, and the Emperor seems to agree with her assessment. She’s not on his level, not by far, but the moment where she was centralized enough to be threatened by someone in the Warrior Realm scale of things has passed.

Well. Mostly.

And he did appear inside of an Emperor’s technique somehow. 

And then didn’t die.

“What place does a Beast have to interrupt its betters?” Grand Elder Zhen Zixiang asks, the fan in his hand quickly replacing the crimson that’s all that’s left of her technique with more green and blue.

“I am Lord Aurick, beloved by many, protector of some, envoy and herald and guide to those who wish it to be so, and I have come to announce that, since thine own forces have emerged in truth, the hunger of others can no longer be kept at bay. A courtesy, one I have chosen to extend by mine own will, now that things are going to get so messy. Also, I was curious. I haven’t seen a chunk of flesh this strange since an ally I was told perished terribly, and who I now see in some approximation here before me once more.”

The safeguards itch. There’s no time for this. 

Almost as if waiting for the last word to come from his mouth, the room that is the nothingness around them vanishes. 

Beyond it, the sound of magics being rent asunder, like screaming ozone and breaking glaciers, echoes.

The dome is torn open as two clawed hands pull it apart, fracturing chunks of it, like ripping apart a pane of glass. Each hand is the size of a small village, each claw the length of a street, covered in coarse brown fur that hisses on contact with the air. 

The haze of brilliance from the defensive array putting up a fight and the swarms of winged beasts coating the skies makes it hard to see the shape of the Beast behind it, but the pressure of its being is potent and absolute enough to nullify even the Pain Raika is transmitting. 

Exposed to the air, chunks of her densest, most powerful supermaterials liquify and splatter as the thing prying into the array growls. 

Zhen Zixiang is gone, but his presence continues to pervade across the whole of the sect and its lands. From somewhere within the mountain at the center of the array, tall enough to not have easy access to air at its peak, that same subtle aura wafts out, weaving something into the rules of the world around her. It washes past her tendrils, which are suddenly pressed tight to the earth, washing across the landscape. She doesn’t even get a chance to resist, nor does she feel any sort of force– like with the room, one moment she is free and present, the next, her existence has been put aside somewhere new, bound by some new rules. 

Her Dao of Pain collapses into the shape of her tendrils, the moat of limbs surrounding the mountain shivering under the combined agony she’d been transmitting. Between one blink and the next, the ruined mud of the Watchful Fields Sect’s territory is replaced with pristine grass and wild crops.

In her mind, in her comprehension, behind where thought sits, comes meaning.

Formless Dance, Second Step: Prepare The Paint

The defensive array shrieks, its light magnifying until it blinds some of the mortals in her range. The glass shoves itself back together, cutting into the palms of the thing pulling itself through it. In the gaps of the struggle, thousands of bodies tumble into the dome, slipping past cracks that form and are unwritten just as quickly while their betters struggle.

The cantering of hoof-hands echoes beside on of her tendrils. 

“Terrifying, isn’t it?” asks the centauroid she knows that the old Raika once knew. 

A mouth opens, ready to emit another blast of hyperconcentrated force.

Supreme Body Art: Fluid Jet

A wash of explosive growth and lethal biomass cuts through the centauroid. 

He turns to look at her, seemingly unbothered and untouched, even as rolling hills behind him explode hard enough to send up a cloud of ash and flame. 

“I must say, you seem a bit less conversational than you used to be,” says the centauroid. “Such vitriol. Perhaps we were not the closest of allies to begin with, but we have been well-met in the times since your collapse. Your help at Singheart has been appreciated. Why so much aggression?”

There are waves of Intent washing over her as he speaks, translating his words into beast-speak in near-perfect fluency. Sincerity, curiosity, and a bit of concern all leak through, melding with boredom. 

She bursts out of her own body, a new mouth and tendril behind it spawning out to clamp her jaws shut around him.

That subtle pressure ripples past her and she is pinned to the ground, the hillside transformed from a burning crater into a lush valley. 

“Not quite so fun, is it?” Aurick asks, standing utterly unfazed. “Against such opponents, the preparation of proper techniques is often the difference between death and defeat. If the Emperor cannot slay me as I am now, why would you?”

The question fills her with fury, even as his name pings against buried memories. She feels waves of brain-bleeds cascading back and forth through her as her gestalt keeps straining, trying to understand the technique that keeps trapping her in place seemingly without effort.

“Doesn’t… hurt to try,” she says, having to build and rebuild the mouth she uses as it keeps getting “placed” down into stillness. 

“It might hurt me!” Aurick says, though his Intent washes over her with more amusement than anything. “It certainly seems to be hurting you, no?”

It’s Just Pain.

Aurick winces at that. “My. Quite a nasty one you’re building there. I thought you a bit more civilized than that. It would seem you’ve changed, even between pieces of yourself.”

“I don’t know you,” she hisses.

Aurick chuckles, even as the sky above them goes from incandescent to half-shattered, two Emperors facing each other in an arena she can barely feel.

“Well that isn’t… hmm.” In that pause, he examines her, examines her Intent, pulling it out of her even as she refuses to transmit it to him. Sheer stubbornness, maybe. Maybe just anger. It’s been a difficult day. 

“Interesting. You’re being honest. Do you see yourself more as spawn then as rebirth, then?”

“I Am Me, I Am Mine.”

“Ah! You remain eminently recognizable. Or perhaps She does, through you. I must say, you’re much gentler to speak to back home. What a surprise it is to find so feral a sample of her here.”

Feral?

“I’m dealing with shit,” she growls, frustration climbing. Even as they’re speaking, she hasn’t stopped trying to shift, move, or otherwise transform out of the hold had on her, failing consistently. There are options, the weapons she’d been preparing, but using them just to escape now feels like a waste. She can do more, she can try harder.

“As are we all!” Aurick says, the Beast of the Pack smiling at the tendril of meat beside him. She dwarfs him, easily four times taller with just the width of the tendril beside him, but he remains utterly unbothered. “It has been some mess indeed. What a surprise, to find so much our hunger can be sated on in the land of weakened enemies! What work, to organize such a mass migration like this. I say, even with my skills, I find myself nearly overwhelmed by the presence of these others.”

He doesn’t seem it. He seems fine.

“How are you standing there? How are you fine?” she asks.

“I am lord of the herd, dear not-Raika.”

Her mind flinches, recoils, aches at that name. Before she has the chance to find a way to kill him for it, he’s kept talking.

“When they gallop, when they migrate, when they stride to new horizons, with me at their head? Who can harm me? Killing me would not stop the trek, which is a part of me large as myself, so how could anything that cannot kill the herd possibly kill me? How can anything that cannot hold such a migration hold me?

“I Am One With Those Who Travel With Me,” he says, the words echoing at the same level of reality as his true name. “If those that travel with me would endure something, how could I not?”

“All that, and you’re here talking to me? Why not kill it all, be done with it?”

He snorts. “A herd is hard to kill, but it is not always the most deadly. I would not bet the lives beyond the dome against the tall thing in your mountain, as I would not bet them against that which I have escorted here.”

Escorted. Like he brought it along. Like it traveled with him.

Can he borrow power from that thing? The Beast that drew away the Emperor Realm master that had clearly just been toying with me. 

Toying with me. Using me for something? What could it have been? Waiting for an excuse?

“It’s not often one gets to witness a struggle of this scale,” Aurick says, looking up at the sky.

 At the peak of the atmospheric array defending the land below, the hole that has been torn and broken open continues to try to expand, a single technique holding the beast beyond it in place. And yet, the Beast has yet to use any technique at all, carving apart millenia of spellcraft and forcing an Emperor Realm cultivator to deal with it with brute force and scale alone.

Beneath them, hordes of Beasts are sprinting across the landscape, those with higher cultivations and more evolutions devouring the distance between themselves and the Watchful Fields Sect and the food within. At the same time, freed from the agony she was transmitting, cultivators of all stripes and levels have begun to emerge to match them, their own techniques launching them supernaturally fast across the world into battle. 

Amidst the swarming beasts, she can feel some presences that rival Aurick, a few which have tumbled or slipped through the gaps in the defenses. Within the sect, Warrior Realm experts that were held back to deal with her Dao or simply kept out of the way stir in turn, existence bending around their weight.

Aurick sighs contentedly, hands on his upper set of hips. “Stunning, is it not? Quite an opportunity. Much insight to be gained from watching the peaks above us battle.”

She doesn’t care. They’re distracted. She could kill them all. She could climb up the mountain to the inverted sun which even now paints the world in sunset agony and crimson light. 

But she’s trapped. Physical movement seems to do nothing– she’s as much a part of the landscape as everything else being painted onto reality by that impossibly subtle technique. 

“It’s rare, even amongst such rare conflicts, for beings at such high peaks to face each other like this, you know. Entering the territory of another Divine Beast is often a recipe fit only for death. And if they don’t die, the aggressor often loses any reward they might have sought, for such battles change whole countries and continents. And in a world with only a few dozen of these great ones, who would risk their eternity in meaningless conflict?”

He sighs. “And yet, here we stand. Dangerous times we live in.”

Raika pulls.

Half of her coiled tendrils slip free of the presence holding her still, recoiling back inside herself. Along that unique axis, movement still exists, retracting her biology back into herself rather than properly “moving” it through space.

“Ah! A good trick! I don’t suppose you–”

She ignores him.

She’s so close. He’s not a combatant, not a threat, not a memory, not anything.

Rather than try to move her body, she simply makes more of it. Along the axis of her own existence, where she retracted herself, she expands.

Waves of flesh bloom from her, washing over the ground, building up and grasping the mountain, expanding like a flow of bloody foam. She grows and expands and pushes out rather than up, directing herself against a technique she doesn’t understand yet, pushing forward, harder, harder, more.

And as she does, she screams. 

PAIN

It washes over the painted landscape, completely real and completely fake at once. It washes over the city and the cultivators within it. It washes over the approaching beasts. It rises to the sky and saturates into the ground.

It is what she knows. The thing she comprehends more than anything else, which has had more impact on her life than anything else.

It hurts.

It’s just pain. 

She climbs the mountain towards the inverted sun, as the sky and earth both recoil from her, as she unmakes the illusion from the sheer scope of the agony she comprehends. No technique, no greater power, no supreme plan– just raw, unfiltered power and the paradoxical understanding therein. 

The barrier cracks, weakened by supernatural suffering. 

In the cracks that form, the Divine Beast pushing through it growls, deep enough to turn rock to powder and shake apart buildings, and tears.

Formless Dance, Third Step: Know Thy Canvas

The world transforms as an Emperor is forced to use a third technique, and as the beast from beyond pushes through it to join the chaos of suffering Flesh.