Chapter 391 - Flexin' On 'Em

So! Turns out, I fucked up the launch a little, but that's ok! You see, I have a secret plan, which is that I can wait and work on what I control and do better next time, and prepare for when the review period is finally up and publication can be official. It's scary! But... I have hope that things will turn out alright. I'll post on here when the book is up- any support, be it with reviews, purchases, or even just spreading the good word is extremely appreciated!

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All things return to the Dao.

An old saying, and one that has fallen out of favor, but an accurate one nonetheless. By existing, we add to the Dao, and by dying, we add to it further, and return to our base components and transform again, thus acting as parts of the Dao. All of existence is within the grasp of the Heavenly Will, and all things ultimately cannot truly escape said will.

And yet, we struggle anyways. 

Some would say it is wiser to accept what is, without illusion. Enlightenment, to these peoples, is submission, unification with a higher will.

It is the sole responsibility of those who wish to enact change to accept what is, without illusion, and understand it- and then to choose to defy it anyways. To create new meaning, or perhaps meaning where there was none.

Neither truth is particularly painless, but only one promises freedom from strife.

I find it a far superior madness to embrace it.

--”Path Of The Deathless”, primer on Cultivation of all forms, written by Sun “Murder The Heavens And Eat Their Thrones” Dailou, Burning Ambitions Made Flesh, The Screaming Sunlight Turned Sweet And Savory. Redacted by official Imperial Decree, held in perpetuity amongst the Divine Vaults.

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The world gets darker as they march east. The clouds above get denser, thicker, and a smog of ash and smoke starts to fill the air with a burning scent. As tens of thousands of Death-worshipping semi-divine beings wander across the world further to the east, the world shifts and turns, progressing further towards a more transformed landscape. 

Mortaria approaches on the horizon. 

The third of the four great cities of the Fallen Kingdom, and the home of its production centers, as well as the most militant of the lot. The first to launch an assault against Raika and those who support her, and the first to break the rules of engagement, kind of, by Bishop Anaya’s hand. 

Raika’s pretty sure it’ll be only the second most difficult city to take. In spite of all of the concepts of industry and mechanization and how well suited they are to war, she doubts that New Inquisum, the heart of the Church, will be simple to face off against.

Still- doesn’t mean it’s not going to be a fucking nightmare to take this place. Especially since she doesn’t have an inside saboteur like she did with Viviae. Especially especially considering the way that three of the grave-islands of their formation just exploded hard enough to rattle the ground and send Centi-croc into a backwards, stumbling halt. Raika, Rai Jin and Li Shu brace themselves inside the tent on its back, several of their supplies rattling and half-falling across the space.

From across the horizons, bright, sharpened towers emerge from the blasted landscape. What were rolling, empty hills has become an ashen nothingness, full of vast pits made of strip-mined canyons where resources have been extracted violently and ceaselessly for millenia. After nearly a day’s travel through the consumed lands, left without even enough to rot, the distant specks of infrastructure finally became visible, just in time for the defensive attacks to start firing at the approaching army. 

Death here is an all-encompassing thing, but simultaneously almost shallow, as if bereft of variety. This part of the world died an absolute death, one of starvation and exploitation, strip-mined until nothing could live here. A single Death has become all that this land holds, rather than the Life-and-Death cycle of Viviae, or the pervasive Unlife of Godsfall, making the entire space contain a lot of power but demanding a lot of effort to use it for anything conceptually different from the stripmined form it’s been made into. 

Mortaria, of course, has built its systems around that. 

Another thundercrack hits Raika’s allied forces a half-second after another grave-island explodes, a few hundred tons of matter gored through with a precise shot through its center. It holds together for a few moments, and several golden hands emerge from the shadows of the damage to grip the chunks that are starting to crumble apart. It drifts back into a different part of the formation, orbiting away from the frontlines. It’s quickly replaced by another one, this one festooned with denser plates of material, each one further enhanced by golden magics and arrays focused on kinetic nullification, energy absorption and other forms of reactive protections. 

As the army’s formation changes, the incoming violence from the distant towers starting to hit vast bubbles of magic rather than punching through the islands. The approach continues, the two cities’ arcane mechanisms facing off with increasing ferocity as the borders of their forces get closer and closer. 

It’s a preliminary defense, of course. No big guns have been unleashed just yet, and in a battle of attrition, the losers are likely to be those who have to actively work to flavor the Death energy and Qi around them, rather than those designed to utilize it freely. They’ll breach the front lines eventually, but it’ll be a slog and a drain.

Centi-croc hisses at the thunderous barrage hitting the shielding, the sound magnified into a geological effect by its size. Beetle, riding on the floor of the tent, gives off some reassuring stomps, and between the two of them, the spirit beast redirects, away from the direct vanguard.

Raika stands, grabbing hold of the preparations she’s been working on and moving to the tent entrance. “Li Shu, Jin, you both remember the plan?”

“Stay safe and keep practicing?” Rai Jin asks.

“Keep working and ignore the rest of this mess?” Li Shu asks.

“Yep. Feel free to watch, though. Jin, I expect at least a minor breakthrough out of you- things are going to get pretty interesting out there, and it’s probably going to do at least something for your insight. Just don’t get too fixated, alright? Pretty much everyone out here is going to be a maniac and a moron.”

“Master, you’re heading out there.”

“Exactly.”

Out of a small wardrobe to one side, a cabinet door opens, letting out several dozen puppets. The majority of them follow Raika out of the tent, leaving two behind for security purposes. They pile out of the tent in droves, circuitry of arrays and Death-worms empowering them as they leap and skitter across Centi-croc and then out onto the surrounding islands. With the energies of her anchors and her mind, Raika directs them to spread out, moving past the grave-diggers, walking skeletons and ghosts of Godsfall.

As they move from island to island, they leave behind small marks, bits of array markings ready to be activated later. She herself, or at least her current “main” body, heads directly to the islands providing shielding. 

Inside her body, several clusters of worms writhe into formations, opening up the stored pockets of space she’s enchanted into her bones.

She lands just as one of the distant towers fires another blast, lightning and flame crackling along a projectile twice the size of her. The islands floating about flare, bright and loud, their arrays crackling as they manifest a glowing existence into being, intercepting the shot enough that it doesn’t explode any islands.

It does, however, still make it through the barrier, and it does, in fact, ricochet off a mausoleum-bunker to shoot directly at Raika’s face. 

Without needing to move her corpse, her will flexes, and Echo-stuff manifests into a dozen small runes. Force, impact, and kinetic energy runes all intermingle, connected by the array’s structure with inversion and nullification runes. Not a particularly artistic or complex array, but solid, made with competence, and good enough to catch the particle, removing all velocity from its vector.

It pauses, perfectly inert for a moment, before potential energy generated by its weight and gravity help it to fall solidly into her palm.

She’s holding a skull as large as her torso.

It’s been deformed significantly, warped by heat and pressure, one side dented from the ricochet, but even half-slagged, it’s still recognizable. Metallic, made of a material she doesn’t recognize but which feels like something between iron and her Blacksteel. Some alloy, developed by necromancers specializing in metallurgy and industry, capable of easier infusion with Death energies, and shaped to match it.

She stares at the steaming, glowing metal, glowing white, gray and red with heat and Echo-stuff… and then tosses it back up into the air. 

One of her Blacksteel spears stabs directly through the skull shot’s forehead, piercing all the way through. 

A moment later, it becomes haloed by a formation directly inverting the one that she used to catch the bullet. 

She opens one of the pockets inside herself, summoning a series of steel shavings and rotted bits of matter, infused with her latest Gu’s poison. It wraps around the spear, compressing against it instantly, forming a purple-black seal around its obsidian dark. It instantly becomes so toxic that the air around it starts to hiss, oddly hued smoke manifesting on contact with anything not already dead.

She breathes, once. In, then out.

The world around her starts to break. The ground starts to come apart, every particle and bit of space around her distorting as she radiates her Intent, suffuses it into the spear, fills it with her desire to harm, with the absolute, world-altering, conscious will to destroy. 

The arrays carved into the spear’s angled, obsidian-edged metal begin to glow as Death energy and Echo-matter fill them, creating a profound, monochromatic appearance. 

Intent, arrays, Death-magics, the supernatural toxins of her Gu, all create the foundation of the weapon, warping reality itself. The space around her starts to bend, the magics of the islands and local arrays starting to sway towards her.

And then, because she can, she adds a finishing touch.

With another moment of meditation, she feels her body. She feels what she’s been through. She feels her history, and what it’s taught her about the world, and about violence, and about war. 

The air itself screams with the supernatural weight of Pain and lesser weights of her understanding of other Daos, of Guns and Blades. 

She doesn’t need to, really, but she raises one arm, hand open towards the distant towers that are still thundering against Glorianna’s shielding array. 

The spear fires.

The island she’s on rocks back slightly, the arrays keeping it afloat struggling to deal with the recoil of the sonic boom of the launch. 

It passes seamlessly through the array, which isn’t designed to block attacks from the direction of the islands, the thunder-crack of its passage echoing over how quietly it flies. The only sound it makes through the air is the whistle of wind against the massive skull it’s been speared through.

Then the second, delayed set of arrays she carved into the spear activates at her will, right as it leaves the range of her control. 

A second explosion echoes through the air, containing enough power to ignite the air in a brief, sharp burst of flame and force.

On the horizon, one of the towers emits a sound of agonized, tearing metal. Half of its upper structure is consumed in a brilliant star of white Death-magic- and the rest of it shrieks as it sharply bends, cracks, compresses, and then implodes into a ball of melting sludge and spasming, pain-addled stone and steel.

There is a brief lull in the firing from the other towers. 

Then, they resume, their shots pounding against the approaching army, failing to entirely break its protections but damaging it nonetheless. 

The halo of several dozen spears around her rotates, and another one comes forward, parallel to her arm. 

A small crater starts to form beneath her as she infuses this one just as much as the last one.

The biggest difference when launched is that, without the skull at the front, it flies faster, and has nothing to stop its edge from shearing into the next tower.

A bright white line of Death energy manifests, the power of another dozen of the flowers of her Garden turned to a manifestation of destruction. An instant later, the line spreads out, severing the entire structure from itself in jagged lines of impossible sharpness. The air fills with a perfect and impossible scream of alien agony as an inanimate tower and ancient ghosts alike feel pain beyond agony, so beyond what should be that reality itself bends to this misapplication of its concepts.

And then she fires her next one. 

A dozen towers line this outer perimeter of Mortaria. Built by thousand-year-old experts in manufacturing, in creating enchanted materials and structures, designed to hold off an invading force indefinitely, or snipe them from existence entirely. Each one is firing dozens of those metallic skulls out of dozens of cannons, filling the earth and air with pounding recoil. 

The sound of each one gets replaced, one after another, with the tortured screams of Unliving and inanimate matter as they are undone. 

It takes less than a tenth of the arsenal she’s carved into being. 

A sea of floating islands drift, undamaged and shielded, over a vast line of devastated emplacements, following the trail of retreating vehicles and mechanical zombies towards the more distant city beyond.

She breathes in, then out. Once. 

Most of the spears drift back behind her, following her will and keeping a halo around her as she moves. A few, she stores in the enchanted spaces within herself, the far more complex arrays she’s had help in copying down making supernatural areas of space within her. 

She doesn’t bother moving her corpse like a living body. Having expended all that energy, she elects to lift her anchor-needles, pulling her body along like a marionette by invisible strings and moving back towards Centi-croc. It, being the good reptile that it is, skitters closer, until she can just drop from one of the islands straight down onto it. She ignores the way that the ghostly and skeletal clergy and soldiers look at her, how they drift out of her way and how at her presence. She ignores how the world feels light, lighter all the time, now that her Garden continues to get sparser and sparser. 

Within expectations, for now… but she’ll have to improve her arrays a bit further, make sure they’re as efficient as she can make them. Energy used is good, is according to plan, but energy wasted is something she can’t afford. Not when she can feel her Garden getting smaller all the time. 

As she lands, her shadow lengthens unnaturally as a gilded skeleton emerges from it. Appearing as if from a pool of still water.

“That was… unnecessary,” Lu Karai says, his voice echoing with lesser Intent, lesser Truth.

She keeps her corpse limp, her anchors lowering her to Centicroc’s back, her head low- but her will “turns”, centering itself on the Bishop.

“Maybe,” she says, foregoing manipulating her vocal cords to transmit directly at him. “Fun as fuck, though. You should try it sometime. Cut loose a little.”

He watches her, standing with his arms behind him, his head tilted at an angle that, on a living person, might be uncomfortable. The rotating halo of spears behind Raika drifts forward, slowly settling into a neat pile before her, easier to transport back into the tent for some more minor modifications. So many refinements still to make.

In the end, rather than respond, he just sinks back into her shadow. Makes sense, really. He knows that she’s lying and provoking him, and she knows that he knows, and they both know that she’s not going to say what’s really going on.

He also knows that her being “reckless” is what won her their fucking trial, though, and that she’s a genius without equal who will ultimately surpass all creation. Obviously. 

She takes a little longer to center herself. Reroutes a few of her worms to act as tighter support for her corpse. 

Only when she’s completely steady does she get back up and walk back into the tent, smiling wide.

“See? Nothing but maniacs and morons out here.”