Chapter 293 - Proper Introductions (Patreon)

This one was tough! Addled headspace + really high level combat makes for a LOT of work getting things right, and if you guys have any critiques for the chapter, please feel free to share it! I liked how it turned out- loved finally showcasing some motherfuckers that can still threaten Raika, and some more unique abilities. She's strong enough to be a problem for some pretty heavy hitters, but that doesn't mean she's going to win every fight, or that she won't struggle with the more unique and interesting enemies I've got planned!!

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“We should be arriving at the edge of its territory. Beyond here, it’s important to present ourselves properly- we may not have the foolishness of sect politics, but there are still standards to asking a favor from an Apex.”

She blinks. “A favor?”

He cocks his head, pausing on the root he’s landed on (larger than he is by a factor of three). “For entry into the Pack, of course. It’s a privilege and a strength, and a valuable mutual alliance. Any Apex will be happy to have you, but that’s no reason not to understand that you are the supplicant here, the recruit.”

She cocks her head right back at him, her avatar’s expression going a bit flat. “Oh? I can appreciate that your efforts to recruit me are generous, but to ask a favor to be recruited? Well, that’s certainly an interesting perspective on it.”

Lord Aurick gains a concerned edge to his smile. “Ah- I don’t mean to imply that-”

“No no, that’s so entirely fair,” she interrupts, still keeping her expression neutral, her smile casual. “If I were an incredibly powerful leader of a massive group of super-beasts, I would certainly expect a would-be ally with no real history to come in and ask politely for me to consider an alliance with them. That’s genuinely reasonable.”

“...I-”

“And I appreciate your role in this Lord Aurick. An introduction from you would surely carry quite a bit of weight. But you know, personally, I just think that certain things need to be shown rather than told, and I don’t really know you or your master. You mentioned that plenty of beasts come in with outright aggression, so I suppose a little playful demonstration might show the both of us a lot about each other, no?”

“Raika, don’t-”

“I’m very curious to see what you intend to say, Lord Aurick. I know you’re a well-trusted individual around here, and I respect that. I just think that I could learn a little more about your Apex if I introduced myself.”

Her strider-form spasms, fast enough that it’s practically a flicker of movement, and a sonic-boom echoes throughout the clearing as something is fired out towards their destination.

The beauty of multiplicity- she smiles sweetly at Lord Aurick, watches the Thresher for a reaction, and also tunnels through the air at a velocity that cuts through the air like soft flesh, spinning from the rifling of the barrel she deployed from within her Body. She’s got a solid arsenal pre-built and ready to be used, backup-bodies and weapons of all sorts prepared and much easier to deploy and modify, and one such cannon is particularly well-equipped to launch payloads. She doesn’t need a brain, really- I Am Me, I Am Mine ensures that she can feel and experience through even the smallest pieces easily enough, and a brain in such a package would only demand a shitload of buffering.

No need for all that, when she can just CHANGE as she needs to.

A nervous system that is both inside her body and completely separate from her registers an impact, and she blooms into being at the landing site.

Cultivators move fast. Qi-charged bullets move faster, especially when charged with the Dao of the Gun, imbued with the pattern of velocity and destructive arrival.

Her “core” Body is well-past the horizon, gone from view entirely even to her Qi-saturated sensory package, the two beasts left behind in turn- but there’s a lot more to focus on right here and now. 

She didn’t hit the ground- she hit a person.

She finds herself blooming around the blade of a massive fan, placed atop a long staff of what looks like shaped pearl. Wielding it is a being only vaguely humanoid, nearly fifty feet tall and with its proportions skewed heavily towards length, with a neck almost as long as its limbs and limbs longer than full trees, pitch-black eyes meeting hers from a face as tall as a human body. Its skin is an aqua-azure, blending beautifully into the wilderness all around, somehow even denser here than the rest of the overgrowth.  Greenery so solid it must be burrowed into rather than walked through undulates like the waves of a strange ocean as the giant beast flexes a muscle, letting the force travel along its limb until the pearl fan-spear launches her down towards the ground.

She transmits a burst of Intent, a complex message filled with a roiling sort of interest and a challenge.

Here For Your Master. Prove Ourselves Worthy Of Each Other.

The beast sends out a response of derision, something like an eye-roll- but then it has no time to formulate anything but surprise as Raika launches a drop of blood towards it and forms another body from it, an undulating wave of tentacles and bone-spikes that wrap around the spear entirely. One reaching tendril grabs the bundle of eyes and meat of her last form and drink it back in, and then she’s moving to attack, her Intent as playful as it is violent.

She forms a series of limbs that click together into a shield to block a blast of energy, coming in from the side. Purple-black flames detonate, hints of Red and Black at its edges eating through her skin, burning down into muscle- and she swallows it down, wrapping up the burning flesh in a bubble.

Always good to have a sample for study.

The fan-spear moves, disobeying physics with its acceleration and igniting the air with friction as it slams towards the ground. A sea of writhing plant-life and strange creatures rises up- and she slams a dozen spear-points of her own down into it, anchoring herself as best she can. A lattice of Radiant Metal and bone architecture catch the spear and reduce its momentum enough that it only pulverises her upper layers, letting her absorb a lot of the rest- and then the flames return, coming in from a new direction.

Good start.

Time to do more.

A sword of Blacksteel emerges from the chaotic mass she’s wearing, swinging into the flames and cutting through them, the concept of End in the blade forcing the flame to die abruptly. A dozen other fireballs are already incoming, and she spawns a half-dozen swords to parry them as well- but then the fan-spear moves again, again accelerating from nothing to incredibly fast quickly enough that it squashes her, literally like a bug.

Blood and bits of undifferentiated meat go flying, splattering a building’s worth of guts across the terrain.

The viscera ripples, and she emerges.

Multiple opponents, a half-dozen distinct Qi signatures making up those arrayed against her. Intent is transmitted between them at the speed of thought, weaving conversations she can see but can’t directly touch; allies, asking questions, directing each other.

But not a hive-mind. Nothing that screams “Many-Mouths”.

Other Divine Beasts, then. Members of the Pack, blocking the incoming shot and now acting as a welcome party for their unruly new friend.

They might not know that last part yet. That’s alright- she can make friends after she’s properly introduced herself.

She fires a fusillade of shrapnel, Blacksteel and bone shards out of the pool of blood she’s been reduced to, aiming them more as buckshot than anything targeted. Some of her opponents deflect, others dodge, others yet simply allow themselves to be hit- but none of that’s as important as the projectiles that miss.

Raika pulls on her Qi generators, dipping into her storage for the amount of energy she’s going to need for this trick.

Every projectile multiplies in size, flesh emerging from them to create just enough space to form eyes on and see through. In an instant three of her brains begin to hemorrhage, forced to input too much data even for her neurology- but she’s got a few hundred to support her now, and the loss is barely felt.

A fully-rendered image of the battlefield forms in her mind, formed by a thousand-thousand eyes, each born and dead in an instant.

Besides the long-necked humanoid, there is something that looks like a serpent that ate a tree, branches of its body stretching from a scaled trunk and burning with torches of purple-black flame, tinged with Dao and the scent of toxins. Above, actively eliminating the shrapnel as it transforms, there is a being with six wings, seven arms and five eyes, each of them glowing a resplendent green-gold and crackling with power. Something that evades perception, dancing in and out of Intent and awareness, its flickering imprint something like a ball of mucous, blinking with mouths and chewing with eyes. Off to one side, two standing together, something feline lounging across a wave of light and a long-legged avian abomination of claws for feathers and feathers for eyes, waving like cilia in the breeze.

She sees them, and in an instant, those facing her speak. Intent broadcasts the idea of them, a proclamation- a challenge, spoken between equals to acknowledge each other.

Thief Of Many Wings

Twisting Inversion Of Senses

Sage Of Motion Born Again

Flame-Scale Of Many Branches 

Not quite like seeing a Soul, its purpose and meaning announced by its mere presence against the world- this is a proclamation. Identity, spoken into form in the language which has no lies.

There is a pause. It lasts approximately 1-16th of a second, barely perceptible- but there, waiting for a response.

Hmm. 

Her senses are annihilated in a wave of air and radiation, her blood forcibly compressed to a single point, her manifestation beginning to burn.

It’s an interesting question- one she’ll have to find time answer later.

Across the fourth ring, five different women that are all Raika shudder as the acupuncture needles in their bodies and brains shift, pushing away and letting their knowledge return to the prime. Not much of a harvest, not yet- but good to have every advantage when making a first impression.

As her form is compressed to a hyper-dense point, she does what they don’t expect- she self-immolates.

Flames of Dao begin to battle with ignited Qi, two different manifestations of all-consuming energy, motion, and transformation through consumption annihilating everything in a sphere around her. True Flame isn’t fire per se- it’s Qi in an active plasma-state, Qi wielding concepts which fire often shares. As it is, all-transforming Qi strikes all-burning Flame  and begins to dance, turning the area around her into a no-go zone. Sage Of Motion Born Again moves so fast that it simply reappears, shaking a hand with its strangely undulating movement-style to flick reality-altering plasma off its wrist, and the serpentine Divine Beast hisses in displeasure, its flames beginning to weave something-

Raika doesn’t give it the chance. She emerges from the conflagration, moving fast enough to break the sound barrier to wrap a clawed hand around its throat.

Raika, in her “true” form, breaks the beast’s spine in one wrench. Six arms, glowing with Plasma and Flame and Lightning, wrapped in Blacksteel scales and reflecting the light off iridescent eyes, grab onto the branches coming from the central body, breaking them just as easily.

She smiles.

Nice To Meet You, she says, her Intent as perfectly honest as only it can be.

The beast hisses, its body exploding. Raika has to drop it, flying away from the flames (already reforming and regenerating, as if the damage was never there) and only barely moves in time to block the fan-spear of the Sage, its blade-edge moving so fast that the Blacksteel that blocks it glows with heat, supercooling in the next instant- and then glowing on the other side as the spear is just there.

It takes all most of her processing power to keep track and block, the impossible speed of the weapon and its wielder defying the need for acceleration and inertia- and an instant later the flame has returned, less than a second having passed from her tearing the snake apart to its reformation. 

She ensures that she has a brain tracking the winged Thief above, tracking what it’s doing and preparing. It’s building something, Qi and a concept she doesn’t quite recognize melding together in a complex formation.

On her upper arms and from creases and vents of flesh, Guns emerge, filling the air around her with missiles and bullets aimed with the Intent to kill. The onlookers are forced to dodge or block, the guns dangerous but not lethal, not without modifications- and it’s all she can do to keep up here, the melee moving fast enough to cut into her again and again, even as she blocks and parries at lightning speed. 

Divine Beasts, as Aurick informed her, are a broad subject, not as neatly defined as the also broad idea of a cultivator’s realms. They’re not equal in strength or style. 

That being said, even one of them would push her. Even one of them would be enough to remind her of her fight against the Warrior realm Feng. Perfect for a friendly spar.

A spear-Blade of obsidian flesh and a sword-Blade of iridescent Radiance emerge from her storage, thrusting and cutting, parried and parrying the Sage. She notices it frown as the pearl of its spear begins to chip, and with a breath-

All the air in the space around her is gone. Sucked away into a vacuum with a single inhale.

She tries to breath, redirects to her air-storage-

The serpentine beast ignites a perfect sphere of air collapsing inward, trapping from every direction.

The Sage strikes, the fan-spear moving so fast that, were it not for the vacuum, it would warp from the heat.

Her chest unfolds, sternum and ribcage cracking and unfurling to reveal a mess of indigo and red- and a black hole, the rifling along its interior glowing with heat and power, cradled and aimed by a dozen titanic arms of Blacksteel and indigo-crimson biology.

Supreme Body Art: Pressurized Indigo + Supreme Body Art: Transmutation + Dao Tree of Gun + Dao Tree of Flame + Lightning + Plasma, wrapped up in Radiant Metal, Blacksteel and the care of [Enacted Artistry Of Function].

Raika frowns. It’s… not quite right. Not quite lined up properly. It could use some work still.

Then, she “shrugs” and grins. Doesn’t have to be perfect- it’s nice to have room for improvement. 

The world twitches, she finds her targets, she pulls the trigger-

The implosion and attacks go away.

Raika blinks, reforming her eyes from where they melted, from where her body warped and cracked from the recoil, from where she’s landed from the gunshot.

The world in front of her has gone away.

In a straight line, the world has been carved away, a furrow carved into the overgrowth and glowing with the colors of Plasma and Dao. Iridescent fires and crackling lightning flicker between pieces of ruined terrain, the edges of the shot almost perfectly smooth, the plant-life glassed to nothing nearly to the horizon- where it hit something.

She frowns. 

Hmm. I missed.

The Sage is still there, intact and unharmed. She’d been aiming for its arm, not a lethal shot- but something went wrong. A moment of memory- there were four combatants, one of them relating to… inversion? Some kind of-

She doesn’t have time to finish the thought. She is, quite suddenly, dying.

She can’t really frame it any other way, she’s just… dying. She can feel her body breaking down, melting, collapsing, as if every part of it suddenly stopped holding its own structural integrity. She tries to regenerate- nothing. The flesh doesn’t respond.

Ok. That’s bad.

Brains flood in from other projects, neural tissue failing just as fast as the rest, and somehow failing to change, falling out of her control. What’s-

Fuck. What’s-

She reshapes her body, layering dead flesh over dead flesh, separating each strata with Radiant Metal of every kind she has available. It actually starts to dig into her reserves, but something’s-

Fuck, again. What’s-

There. The air is glowing, it tastes different. The plant life around her is dying too, turning to mush, simply falling apart.

The Thief Of Many Wings is above, keeping well away- but with every wingbeat, the air around her is reshaped, keeping something trapped close to her. An aura a-

A radiation. Like that of an aura, but it’s unique, distinct. It’s like the air itself is radiating something, and where it touches her the Blacksteel sings, resonates like a plucked string, transmitting whatever it is deeper. Wherever that note, that energy travels, her flesh just dies, unmade- veins burst open, muscles uncoil and melt, bones turning brittle and then into gritty dust.

And it starts going deeper. Past this body, through a non-euclidean space that is her and is where all of her Body is, every disconnected-connected part-

NO.

There are options. Not many, but a few, and the longer she survives the damage, the sooner she can figure out a defense-

Fuck, again, the brains nearby died. She has to think in other bodies, the distance from those minds to this body leaving a lag in her movements. She’s barely alive here, rotting flesh dragging itself forward- but the aura follows her, radiating into her body, unmaking her. 

Hmm. Cut her losses? 

…

Nah.

In for a silver, in for a gold. 

She can do more.

She forces more and more flesh into being, pushing it out through their connection, using the liquified corpse-flesh as a buffer as it expands from the growth beneath it. She pours through herself, spiraling into the world, dying and producing more of herself fast enough that it’s absolutely chugging through her Qi- but it does what she needs.

Some pieces last longer. She preserves them, redirects brains to them, studies the chunks as they rot- and as she does, she wields her own dead mass like armor, building bones inside bones for shielding and spreading through the necrotic flesh. She feels the aura increase, but none of the other beasts are attacking- no eyes or senses on the outside, but she could tell that much. Whatever this is, they’re avoiding it too, keeping their distance.

She growls, the sound muffled as every mouth she makes for it is buried under liquified flesh. 

Fuck it. She came here to impress.

Raika reaches deep, down into her inner world, to her Heart- and to the thing it’s wrapped tight around, restraining it tightly.

There is a moment of intrinsic agony, her inner world cracking and breaking at its emergence- but then it’s out, and coming, and tearing her apart and remaking her and coming forth and-

She reaches her mind to a little piece of metal, one held in reserve.

Ready? She asks.

Dink.

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It’s still alive somehow.

Many-Branches hisses, her tongue a flickering chain of embers that ignites the air and interprets the ash. It would be one thing if the creature (who apparently doesn’t even have a proper name) were transforming itself- if its… somewhat commendable use of Flame weren’t so rudimentary, it could do as Many-Branches does and transform from a purer state back into a healthy form. Clearly, it hasn’t yet reached that illustrious level of control and majesty.

But for a flesh-thing… it should be dead. In theory. It clearly had some unique properties- whatever that weapon it had unveiled had been, it was frightfully powerful, emanating a threat even Many-Branches had to respond to, and it was able to transform incredibly freely. But flesh, against Thief Of Many Wings, is simply a poor match. Near-anything is, in truth- only a greater concept, like Flame, can measure against the concept it has comprehended and formed.

But it still writhes.

It would be better if it was burning. She can burn it properly, and then this whole mess will be over. Thief Of Many Wings hovers there, all arrogant, letting others fight for it while it prepares its deadly masterpieces. It would be perfectly reasonable, an entirely true form of strength, if only it wasn’t so rude about it.

She can burn them. It’ll be easy- it’s a writhing mess, crimson and off-white and runny indigo making the once-impressive humanoid into a shambling blob. One good flame, purify the batch-

A fan-spear appears in front of her, as if by magic.

She hisses, some of her branch-heads glowering at the Sage Of Motion Born Again as it blocks her. It shakes its head, the movement an undulating motion, but the meaning is clear- Restraint.

She hisses again, harsher. She doesn’t need to bother with Intent to transmit her displeasure, but still, the Sage holds her back. Advises caution.

Why, she asks- and then is answered.

Dink.

A word, and a sound, and a single, ringing note, all in one. Thief’s technique vanishes, its energies dissipating as if torn away- the note rings with a complexity it should not have, somehow reflecting and inverting the sound of the radiation that the winged beast wields. For a moment, the air echoes with silence, the technique shattered into Qi and comprehension that is even now diluting into the air around itself.

In that silence, freed from the attack on itself, something emerges from the still-living mass of dead tissue.

The flesh around it warps out of the way, like a trick of perspective mimicking the opening of a flower or the bursting of a volcano. The air hums in its presence, as if it wants to sing a tune half-remembered. The world seems to bend in towards it, as if it is so vast or so dense a thing that it would be easy to fall into it.

It’s shaped like a star, if a star was a solid form. Its facets seem to fall into themselves, mirrored into fractals that wind in spirals down deeper, deeper into each side of it, each of its points somehow never quite reaching their end, yet short and symmetrical across its facets, like… like projecting a sphere onto a flat plane. Like a snowflake, born out into more dimensions, ever shifting along lines she can’t quite see- and at its heart, visible from between gaps in the constellation-coated exterior, is something like sunlight.

There is a pulse as it fully emerges, made entirely real in a way that she can’t quite identify-

No. That’s not true. She can. It has a name.

TRANSCENDENT ART: GLIMPSE OF THE EVER-CHANGE

And then- everything freezes.

The air. The space around her. Her body. Her heartbeat. Her flames. Qi itself. 

And the floating impossibility before her.

The attention of something beyond all of them turns to this place, to this moment, and- very gently, very carefully, as if handling something that might bite at any moment- pushes the shape back down into the mass of flesh.

“Enough of that,” says a voice in the tongue of lords and truth. “Not many make so much of a mess on my doorstep. I think perhaps its time I said hello.”