Chapter 484 – A Chance To Show Off The Good Shit (Patreon)

This might not be all that Raika's got cooked up and designed in anticipation for the Big War, but it's one of the higher elements for sure. I've decided to follow through on how I treated things at the end of Arc 10, and truly let loose. Fuck the limits, we're gonna do some Godclads-type shit.

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Oh, this is my favorite part, check this out.

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Hao Nera braces himself as the world shifts, a force like an undercurrent in the ocean dragging him beneath / beyond what he conventionally understands. It’s not a real direction, not one of the directions he’s familiar with at least, but the feeling of having been moved is absolute, and it takes him a moment to get his bearings.

When he does, he sees a sky unlike any other.

It’s like looking at the world from inside out. Like he’s standing under the ground, staring up at the core of things, watching an inverted planet rotating around a central point. Illuminating the strange planetoid he finds himself in, there at the center, is a constellation of stars, dozens of points of incredible brightness and heat shining around a central sun large enough to swallow them whole, which is a [STAR OF DIVINE PLASMA]. It’s perched atop a spire of a castle that has millions of roots and branches breaking through it, ethereal energies shaped like trees bursting from its impossible contours and the edges of what should be possible, along angles he can’t recognize.

The castle, the trees it surrounds and is pierced by, the star and its celestial court, all rest upon an island. 

Around the castle is a moat, a battlefield, a war zone, a garden, a hospital, where violence and protection intermingle beneath the starry skies. Vast plains of flesh-shaped biomes, vast enough to make a city seem like a meaningless dot on their surface, are filled with strange life-forms and complex sparks of magic, fluttering through the air and painting the world in the colors of spellwork. The raw Qi and strange flashes of concepts intermingle with the entities of air and ground, half-formed of metal and stone and stranger synthetic materials which are fused seamlessly to organic matter. 

And around the edge of the alien matter, growing gradually and organically from the eldritch fields of flesh and power, is a forest.

It makes up all the rest of the island, as vast and endless as an ocean, a thing of blue-green eternal that shifts in an invisible wind. Beneath the canopy there is a darkness of perfect pitch, beyond any light, anathema to the concept of stealth and peace alike. Things roam there, making the plants shift and move, adding more patterns, and Hao Nera feels his head hurt as he tries to track them, feeling the sensation of pre-runes shaping Qi around them in accordance to the movements. 

Raika smiles where she sits, still topless and lounging on a chair that he can now no longer perceive. “Pretty cool, right?”

He turns to look at her, and she gets to watch him as he realizes that he’s here. 

“How did you– what the fuck is this? How’d you break my technique?”

She shrugs. “I didn’t. It’s still active. You’re still nowhere, back in the normal world, but the rules in here are a little different.”

She gets up, stretching like a cat as Hao Nera catches sight of the ground beneath them. They’re standing on a night-black shadow of blue and purple, the ground made of a sort of mist or ash of night. Flowing through it like rivers are tears, or teardrops, emerging from half-real faces that come and go in the mist, large enough to devour hillsides in their eyes, which stare inwards and outwards at once, promising Tribulation should they be unleashed. 

“Crazy how things grow, huh?” Raika asks him, smirking at the look on his face.

He lets out a breath. “I knew it was big, but…”

“Yeah, I get intimidated by it too. It’s ok. We can go slow.”

He snorts, and they both laugh. 

“Fuck off, boss. This is… this is fucking massive. You’ve got a whole world in here…”

“Hardly,” she says, running a hand through the peace of the night sky that swirls in the form of mist around them. “At most I’ve got a continent.”

“Wow, truly my senior has mastered the art of humbly bragging.”

She barks a laugh. “I have mastered many skills, foolish spy. Behold, my power of understatement; this next part is kind of cool.”

She reaches out and waves her hand back, transporting the both of them through the layers of the night sky that envelops that continent of madness. They dive through it, intangible as they move across a different axis of space, falling through layers of solid light and divine energies, until they emerge into the next sphere. 

There is another planet, surrounding the planet they emerged from. Past the night sky, surrounding it completely, its circumference a dozen times grander than the shell of Souls and Concepts surrounding that central island, which is in turn hundreds of miles across. Even separated by strange spatial magics as they are, Raika knows that Hao Nera can feel the heat of it. 

When they stop moving, they are standing on the inside of a world made of flesh. 

Muscle and bone form lattices of impossible magnitude, larger than anything conventionally possible under the Will of Heaven. Within them, traveling through veins as freely as the hyper-dense blood they can see pumping from a million heartbeats, is Flame, thousands of colors of it. They flow like rivers of energy through that impossible landscape of biomass, which is not biomass entirely, for the muscle and bone and ligament and organs are made with metal and magic as much as flesh. Roots and branches touch that impossible outer world, the same ones that are fused to the palace at the center of it all, somehow appearing without crossing the intervening space to add enlightenment to the already insane magical material this place is made of. 

Raika smiles at Hao Nera’s speechlessness. 

“Took a while to get production back up and running, and to integrate all of our pieces into something coherent,” she admits. “A lot of us didn’t work well together at first, even with all of our Truths backing us up, but when you’ve got as much perspective as I do, it gets easier. A million brains are better than ten, and ten are better than one at some things. There’s still room for improvement, and there’s a bunch of projects that are still an absolute mess right now, but… we’re more or less ready to get the party started.”

“How… how much of you is there?” Hao Nera asks, his face uncharacteristically serious.

She pauses, pretending to think about it (as if she hasn’t already heard Pillar’s calculations about the subject). “Well, a lot. I / we’ve estimated it to be more or less the size of Rua, though theoretically much denser.”

“Rua? As in the moon in the sky?”

“Yeah, but the smaller one.”

Hao Nera runs a hand down his face, then scratches at his beard, then gives a grunt. “That… is a lot of you.”

“Yup. Like everyone’s always saying, I’m a big girl.”

“That… that you are, boss. With this… damn. Do we even need to fight?”

She lets him have the thought for a moment. Then, she takes the question away.

“We do. I was strong before, strong enough to take on pretty much any Warrior Realm I could find. After my Death, I got pretty severely downgraded, had to learn how to do things from the ground up. But doing so from so many different angles at once? There’s probably not an Emperor in the world that I couldn’t put up a damn good chance of winning. But there’s also a good few I’d lose against. And there’s monsters even beyond that.”

“Fuck that,” Hao Nera says. “I’ve been to the damn heart of the second ring. I’ve been in some of those sects. Emperor Realms are fucking scary, but they’re not scarier than this.”

“I know at least three other members of the Apex of the Pack that I think I’d lose against, and not one of them is at the level of a true Titan.” 

That shuts him up a bit.

“Higher-realm combat isn’t something easy to quantify. In terms of scale, I think I outclass just about anyone under the big golden bastard on the throne or that fucking tree-bitch, Feng, but that doesn’t mean shit if we aren’t fighting with scale. There are Truths out there, there’s Daos I don’t know or have a counter for, there’s esoteric techniques and Craft users and array masters better at it than me that have been making traps and powers for millenia. And there’s people who hit really fucking hard.”

She watches Hao Nera’s expression processing that. Gradually, he lets out a huff of air, running his hand through his beard in a different way. Pensive, now, rather than stunned.

“If I didn’t know you ahead of time, Nera, I wouldn’t have a counter for you,” she tells him, hammering the point home further. “And you’re not even a true Warrior yet, just a half-step past Nascent Soul. I can sometimes tell when you’re around, but that’s because I felt you before. We’re going into a battle of qualities as much as quantities. I could probably walk through an army of cultivators from the wall, and any dozen Warrior Realms at once, but how about a hundred Warriors? A thousand? Ten thousand? How about a hundred Emperors at once, or something designed specifically to take me out?”

“Alright, alright, I get it.”

“I know, but I’m hammering it in. I’m more than enough to change the world as I am. I’m not enough to change the world to something better yet. And even if I was, I can’t do it alone.”

He snorts. “Yeah, definitely not.”

She pauses, then throws a playful glare his way. “The fuck you mean by that?”

He raises an eyebrow, not backing down an inch. “Bitch, have you seen you? You couldn’t run a spy operation if your life depended on it. You definitely couldn’t run a war, and you most absolutely couldn’t run an Empire.”

She grunts. “Good thing I don’t want to.”

She waves a hand, pulling them back out of the world of impossible flesh, through that planet of night sky and Tribulation and deep oceans and strange peace, back until they’re standing on thin air looking over at the central island of her being again. Illuminated by the suns on its crown, she turns to face Hao Nera.

“We’re past the point where victory just looks like making a mess or forcing a parley. Between me, the other Apex, and the Republic, we’ve got enough firepower and variety to break the Empire down the middle. If we’re willing to accept the kinds of losses that would bring, if we went in through a frontal assault, and if that’s what we wanted to do in the first place. Breaking it’s not enough. We have to kill it dead, in a few years, not a few centuries, and then build something capable of fixing all the shit that’s going wrong after. 

“We’re not there yet. But we can be.”

“And I suppose that an organization spread through the whole Empire at once, feeding information and subverting things from the inside, helps with that?”

She laughs. “Fuck yeah it does.”

He looks around. Turns to look at that impossible island in the middle of the world that is Raika. 

He sighs. 

“All this, and still, huh?”

She nods. “All this and still. It’s easy to break a world. It’s hard to break it in a way where we all live happily ever after in the end.”

They stay that way for a while, in silence. Admiring the glowing constellation, and the world which it orbits. 

“You do fucking love to show off, don’t you?”

“Oh you have no fucking idea. I’m being so zen with these kids, and I’m doing so goddamn well about it, but holy shit I have not had anyone I can show this off to except myself and we already all know about it!”

Hao Nera sighs, putting his hands on his hips and shaking his head. “Alright. All this is fancy as fuck, but it’s not really a true update, per se. Can you tell me something I can tell people, other than ‘hey she’s a moon now’.”

She nods. “That’s fair. Alright. Short summary, then.

“I’ve got staging grounds spread through the entire Overgrowth, and spreading north and south damn fast. I’ll be opening up access to pockets of this space through them for people to gain more enlightenment and augmentations if they want it. I’m working with the Martyr about the Fallen Kingdom, but that’s slow going. The Flame is mostly under control. Once everyone’s aligned, I’ll break through the sky-fortress and open the breach of the Wall to carve a clear path into the third ring.”

“Any timeline?” he asks, his posture entirely serious now.

“Six months. Any longer and I think the Empire’s momentum will shift too far into action. We need to get the Pack, the Tribes, the Republic, and hopefully the Fallen Kingdom all aligned by then, and I should have a clearer picture of what’s in the other compass-points past the Empire to know if need to brace there.”

He nods, then blows out a long, slow breath. “Shit. Six months. Six months and the world changes.”

She pats him on the shoulder. “The world is always CHANGING, Nera. The difference is that this time, we can grasp it.”

That seems to get him a bit more focused. He shakes himself off, then grunts. 

She really hopes she isn’t letting him see just how worried she still is. 

“Right. So I’ll–”

“Master, who are you talking to?”

Raika turns, too distracted by her conversation to have noticed Jin approaching. He is studiously not looking at her chest, covering his eyes demurely as he walks up.

“Oh, just a friend of mine. Don’t worry about it.”

With a wave of her hand, she is where she has been the entire time, and Hao Nera is once again kinda-sorta nowhere. 

“What’s up, kid?”

“Heard you talking and got curious,” he says. “Is there something I should know about?”

She laughs, low and soft and a little bit fake. “Yes, kid. But not yet. We’ve got a bit longer before you have to worry about any of all that. You want some tea?”

His nose wrinkles, visible disgust on his face at the smell of the unholy concoction she has in her hand, and Hao Nera laughs, a sound from nowhere and to no one which Rai Jin doesn’t even notice. 

There are lots of things he doesn’t notice. That neither of them notice. Even amongst friends and family, it’s important not to over-burden people. 

Isn’t that right? She asks me.

Yes, I answer. I think it is. But I do so love to watch you dance around it all.