Chapter 390 - Deals With The Devil You Know

Wheeeee it's chapter tiiiiime and it's only five more days till Kindle releeeeeease and I'm so spooooked. Gaaah! We movin or we dying, homies, and only thing that kills me is God itself. Seeing as it hasn't gotten around to it, awaaaaay we go.

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Sometimes, you’re going to have to do super shitty things. I mean bad ones. Things you didn’t think you were capable of, didn’t think that you’d ever do, until you arrived at wherever you arrived at and realized that you were wrong. 

Once you get to that point, you only have a few choices left. The first is the easiest- you pretend it didn’t happen. You pretend that you were right all along, that it’s no big deal, that next time, you’ll definitely, for sure, have something different be the case. 

Option two; you give up. You decide that you were wrong, so you’ll always be wrong, and you can never be right again. You broke, and you stay broken. This one’s a lot harder, because people don’t want to be broken, because it’s easier to use glue and sticks to hold something together than to leave it laying on the inside of you. Making something be shaped wrong is easier than not touching something that’s shattered, and much more possible than making it like it never happened. 

Option three is the smart one. The one where you don’t end up fucked in the head. 

Option three: you build it back like it was, but keep an empty spot for where you were wrong. And then, now you know there’s a spot there, and the shape of it, you decide what to put in it. Whether you want to add or subtract, reshape or fill it in.

Usually people don’t pick one on purpose. Usually it just happens. Someday, though, something bad enough might happen that you’ll need to be conscious about it. So… be fucking conscious about it. 

-Words attributed to the Faceless Man, often referred to as The Thief That Wasn’t, target of an official Imperial Bounty, thought to be located in the third ring of the Empire’s sacred domain.

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Carefully, Raika sharpens the point of her spear.

Blasteel chips against Blacksteel as she knaps and breaks it into pieces, slowly honing the point. At times, it acts more like obsidian, at others, more like metal, and the sharpening process, when done actively like she is, takes time. Slowly, carefully, each edge taken to its finest point as best she can. 

Only when the skeleton hand she’s using catches on the edge of the blade, losing the tip of its thumb, does she set down what’s left of her whetstone. She sets the shard aside, placing it into a pile of similar shards, each no larger than a finger, no thicker than a flechette.

The worms that make up her flesh open, forming into a cluster of runes that glow with Death and circle around her prosthetic. In a few seconds, another large, sharp-angled block grows free from it, the mold of the End’s perfect marble forming more infinitely pointed material.

With a manifestation of another small array, bedecked in runes of emission, separation, and shattering, forms around the block, and it snaps off, cleanly. Raika catches it, and goes back to sharpening the spear she’s holding. 

Outside, an army advances.

The scales of Centicroc are smooth and cool beneath her, but the leather-like tent flapping about her offers some privacy, even aboard the street-sized reptile. Tent poles of ceramics and bone are wrapped tight around the spirit beast, its hypervelocity ironically making things move smoothly and calmly on its back. 

Through the tent flaps made for just that purpose, kept open for the sake of the view, she can see massive amounts of land shooting past, fungal colonies rarer now compared to the rolling hills that have taken precedence in the local geography. Behind them, Viviae looms, the smoke of its fires extinguished but leaving a haze around the horizon. 

To either side of her and her lovely living carriage, the dead go marching on. 

Godfall’s armies aren’t particularly designed for their mobility. In that, Viviae clearly has them beat. The trench-diggers and crawling monsters, the ghost-flesh Echoes and the skeletal abominations, aren’t designed for fast, thunderous charges, built for ambushes from out of dark soil or trained on slow-moving advances. Still, they’ve compensated. 

Massive islands of rock and earth have been tilled, enhanced, refined, their matter anchored along metal and gravestones. Some of them walk on hands of gold, massive, twisting limbs that emerge from out of shadows to lift or pull them along. Others are more complex, enhanced by that same strange gold to allow grander platforms, covered in intricate runic formations. Gravestones and corpses imbued with enough power to make the world bend around them are implanted in these hovering islands, allowing them to travel without being bound by gravity or the conventional rules of movement. 

On one of these, she can see a cathedral, smaller than the Cathedral of Godsfall, resplendent in gorgeous and gothic architecture. From it, Glorianna’s presence emanates, undershadowed by the stranger, more esoteric shadows of her… partner or husband, whatever she and Lu Karai are to each other. It acts as a sort of central hub, around which the dozens of other islands orbit and transform, their magics combining and unbending to make the grave-dirt fuse and unfuse as they connect and separate. It turns the entire army formation into an ever-shifting, ever-changing sequence of different shapes and satellites, constantly transforming into new entrenchments and supply points. She’s not sure, but Raika thinks she can see some elements of array-formations in there as well, like there’s something in the patterns of their movement or shapes that’s constantly almost clicking into place, but never quite there. 

And, yes, it’s not the most eye-catching thing going on. 

See, there’s a massive goddamn tower trawling through the sky.

Seo En-Hyun’s palace, for want of a better term, is a display so alien to the rest of Godsfall’s armies. A massive spire of flame, shaped to an incredibly precise figure, such that it’s basically like a single, massive torch. In it, if one looks close enough, they can see screaming faces, tableaus of battles and deaths wrought in shifting ghost-fire, esoteric concepts whispering from out of its form. Three rings surround it at its peak, middle, and bottom, and from them, veins of gold and charcoal-black material shatter out across the surface of the tower, wrapping around it like creeper veins or kintsugi artwork. 

It flies not through complex arrays, or strange summons, but, seemingly, under its own power. It emanates a raw, vibrant, seemingly bottomless potency, and defies gravity by the nature of its Echo-material, its essence of Death shaped so that only the parts that are useful of its Echo upon reality really matter- and falling isn’t one of them. 

With Centi-croc in the midst of their forces, below the floating islands, they dominate the airspace above and ground below, a grave-defying force to rival the other cities. A force, in theory, to break apart the whole Kingdom.

And, of course, they’re a joke.

A show of force at most. Less than that, maybe.

They ride around her. They ride so that she may prove to them that they’re worth anything at all. They ride as tools, unwilling to act on their own volition, to do anything other than what she specifically says- and maybe not even that, if she pushes them too far. 

She has no doubt that the Bishops alone around her have enough power to change the course of things at the Wall. Direct comparisons between Cultivation realms and Death-wielders are… doable, but only somewhat. The Bishops she’s met all seem equivalent to the Warrior Realm, but their age and experience, as well as the inherently esoteric properties they have. If she had to put it to a direct comparison, she’d bet on any one of them over a fortress city of the Wall, at least if they had a day or so to prepare.

The three she’s with, and the ones trailing behind, are… scary. 

She still has only ever fought one of them directly, sincerely, truly with everything on the line, and she would’ve lost if not for Jin. Or… hmm. She still can’t convince herself she wouldn’t have figured something out, actually, but still, it had not been going well. 

Behind the army she’s in is the second army she’s gotten.

Unlike Godsfall, Viviae isn’t really that keen on the whole thing, even with their loss. In the end, three of its Bishops came along, with the rest simply giving her their “vote” for the victory of her trial. 

Elder Toruna Eneru, Bishop of Viviae, is on an island all her own, prepared for her by Glorianna as a… “courtesy”. It, along with another island, orbit at the far rear of the formation, the life-drinkers of the only living city of the Fallen Kingdom kept at arms length. Darus Eneru, the emerald-eyed scholar and his crimson-eyed friend have taken up the other island, and have kept their distance. 

There is one other Bishop from Viviae, but he doesn’t get his own island. He’s just visiting. 

Her hand catches on another bit of Blacksteel, now too small to properly use, and she sets it onto the flechette pile. To her other side, she plants the spear she’s been sharpening, adding it to a few dozen more. 

Kai Valdir keeps on smiling, his eyes and gums a bright, distressing crimson. 

He sits on the other side of the tent from her, seemingly entirely at ease, no matter how long she keeps him waiting. 

Behind her, Li Shu is busy studying the formations carved into the floating graveyards all around, her eyes carefully not darting over to where Kai Valdir is sitting. Jin makes no such pretences, calmly seated right behind Raika and looking, calmly, to where the traitorous Bishop sits. 

She manifests another complex duality of arrays, forming a larger, fractal chunk of Blacksteel, drinking in a massive amount of Death in the space around her and condensing it into the metallic not-mold of the Cold Sun. 

She takes another whetstone of the same material, and starts sharpening again. 

His smile doesn’t shift one inch. Worse, his presence to her more esoteric senses doesn’t so much as twitch. He gives every indication that he’d be content to stay there a few more days, weeks, months, unbothered by this little game they’re doing. 

“Honored Master… are you both just going to keep staring at each other?” Rai Jin eventually asks. “Because… I thought that-”

“No, Jin,” Raika sighs, having lost their battle of attrition. “Kai Valdir here is going to remind us what it is that we have a deal about.”

“Quite!” he says, that slender grin never leaving him. “And I do believe I’ve lived up to my side of the bargain. Access to Viviae, information on its infrastructure, space for you and yours to work and shelter yourselves from within the city’s own walls… if I were an un-generous sort, I would be well within my right to ask for more. And yet, I am a beast of grace and poise, and gave my word.

“But! I do believe that what I have been promised is… rather time-sensitive. Perhaps you’d care to enlighten your apprentice as to the matter?”

She rolls her eyes, petals shifting in her sockets. “He knows.”

The Valdir’s eyes brighten, his smile widening. “How excellent! Such honesty, such intimate trust between you two! I suppose that there’s no trouble at all, then.”

He leans forward, the red of his eyes somehow both darker and brighter than the rest of the room. Her nose is long dead now, but Raika can still pick up hints of Rot, emanating out from his breath. 

“I was promised a taste.”

Raika makes sure to angle the next brush against a whetstone rather harshly, letting the pitch-dark metal hiss loudly into the space of the tent. The ground rumbles, Centi-croc’s many legs thrumming against the world below, and is the only sound in the room for a bit.

Jin goes to rise, slowly, and Raika pushes a wave of energy at him, shaped to push him back down into sitting again.

Kai Valdir briefly flicks his eyes to her, but stays focused almost entirely on the young man beside her. 

“I know you’ve been told oh so many things, dear boy, but I doubt you understand just how enticing you can be to ever so many. A Blessed Mortal, still young, un-killed, touched by Death only willingly… well. Quite a treat.”

The smile widens, long fangs extending very slightly to touch his lips. 

“And considering how some of our lovely little mutual allies look at you… it’s only a matter of time. Especially if you want to keep being useful, little one.”

With an act of will, the latest spear mutates, its angles shifting impossibly as Raika blasts it with a mixture of Intent and her understanding of Dao until it becomes a single, person-sized scalpel. 

She doesn’t have access to the parts of her that were designed for the Dao of the Blade, or even that of the Gun, but she remembers them, remembers being those parts of her, and she’s been putting in the practice. The air in the tent practically crackles with the act of transformation, the glorious alteration forced into the real. 

“You don’t speak to him like that,” she says, and her voice is heavier than sound. 

Kai Valdir, predictably, ducks back instantly, his hands up in mock surrender, his smile shifting to something that pretends at innocence. “Of course! I wouldn’t dream of insulting my host and partner. But it doesn’t change our terms, does it? After all… think of what I could offer you with ever so little effort. How entirely undercut every other defense of the city became, simply by my will. I don’t think either one of us needs to move to threats, but if we did…

“Your little trial might not go quite so smoothly, perhaps, without proper support.”

Rai Jin looks at her, and she very carefully sets down the borderline paracausal piece of metal onto the pile. 

Instead of forming another hunk of metal, she raises her other arm, letting the corpse-flesh part to reveal where muscle used to be. Worms, parasitized from a strange beast at the Wall, transmuted and enchanted and resurrected over and over by Death-magics, spill from the gap, falling onto the spears.

More than a few of them are cut open, but for the most part, that just makes them divide and squirm into more, their flesh half-ghost, half real. They begin to trace and carve and paint patterns and runes into the pile, wriggling into and between spears to ensure that they are properly enchanted. 

Then, she picks up one of the flechettes from the other pile, raising it to eye level.

“I made promises. But there are promises, and there are promises, and whether or not you get what you want is still up for debate.”

I turn my head to look at Rai Jin, my eyes instantly softening, the shape of the petals emoting almost as well as eyeballs would. 

“I can kill him no problem,” I tell him.

Kai Valdir does actually blink at that. “I do believe-”

“Most of his city hates him, and they might not want him dead, but I can be convincing. I might have to bullshit around their obsession with you a little more, but that’s an ongoing struggle. In some ways, it’ll be a lot easier for us if he’s out of the picture.”

Kai Valdir doesn’t interrupt this time, or shoot a pithy comment. He stays quiet, and for the first time, she feels a slight change in his energy, the Rot and Death that he passively embodies shifting into a slightly different configuration. 

Rai Jin notices too, but his eyes barely twitch, staying focused on Raika. In them, there’s something that almost hurts her to see. 

Trust. Total and absolute. 

She said that she could kill a Bishop, a world-altering force, a thing of alien might and horror. Their ally, and the reason that their whole guerilla warfare tactic worked as well as it did with Viviae. And he believes her completely. 

“It’s ok,” he says instead. 

She nods. 

“Hold out your hand,” she says. 

He does, without discomfort or fear. She reaches for him with her prosthetic, shards of vantablack metal shaped into a skeletal limb matching his movement… and pricks his finger. 

Then, more carefully, she tilts his hand down, letting the blood from his finger drip down into her palm. 

The tension in the room changes. Where before Kai Valdir seemed borderline static, unbothered, now his energy is pulled taut, radiating through the tent, sharp and hungry. His presence, emanating out in an exponentially larger density than before, feels like the crawling of black mold, the chewing and biting and spawning of bacteria running through stilled flesh, like blood coagulating and turning to life only to turn back to death yet again. 

Li Shu’s Sacrifice lifts up from its orbit around her, acting as satellites for an array that blocks the energy roaming toward her. Raika, meanwhile, simply emanates her own force to match his. An impression of a growing place, a place of ghosts and horrors turned to a garden, strange patterns running through it. 

He isn’t truly exerting himself, even as his eyes fixate on the blood pooling in her hand, but he’s also not bothering to contain himself nearly as much as before. 

For once, when she matches a Bishop, she doesn’t feel that much weaker. Her aura is smaller than his, more compact, but it feels almost as solid, and the flowers of her garden rustle at the taste of fresh rot, ready for the soil and the roots. 

Slowly, she gets up from where she was sitting, walking across the tent to where the life-drinker sits, poised. 

She holds out her hand. 

To what’s left of her biology, it feels warm and wet. 

To what’s become of the rest of her, it feels like she’s holding a hunk of iron, heated to the point of glowing. 

It hurts.

She holds it regardless.

“Drink,” she commands. 

Kai Valdir looks up at her, a hint of surprise- and then the weight of her word hits him. Not hard enough to make some kind of oath, not imbued with so much  power that he can’t break free from it if he tried… but enough that he can feel the weight on his shoulders, the way the world bends at her words.

And the flower petals of her eyes rustle to the sound of hungry roots, eager for fresh Death on which to feed. 

So he leans forward, his eyes breaking contact with hers to fixate on the crimson in her hand, and opens his mouth to drink. 

It is not polite. It is not as calm or controlled or careful as he’s appeared to be. His tongue shoots out, long and slender, sliding over her palm, taking up every single ounce of red blood on her skin. He slurps, suckles, barely holds himself back from biting into her palm, the knowledge that her body holds no more of such vitality the only thing keeping his control. He almost starts to breathe again- she can feel the moments where his organs want to react, where his body apes a frenzied, feverish hunger, but has no true biological impulse left to do it with. 

In seconds, her palm has been licked clean, and the room gets quiet again. 

Rather than seeming ashamed, he looks up at her unabashedly, smiling, low and soft. She can feel that sort of… not heat, but pressure, energy, sliding down into him, rolling through his body.

“Virginal blood,” he whispers, humming contentedly. “In every sense of the word.”

She feels Rai Jin shiver behind her, and the amount of control it takes her not to act on that revulsion immediately and absolutely. Still, the spears and flechettes hum, shivering for the barest second. 

“Leave,” she commands. 

In place of saying anything, the life-drinker very wisely decides to simply vanish. The array carved into the stone plate he was sitting on flashes, once, and where he was sitting, there is only ash, already vanishing out of reality. 

Raika sighs. Very quietly. 

“Are you okay?” her son asks.

She can’t close her eyes. That’s not how her body works. Eyelids are as useless for sight as the azalea petals crawling of her sockets. They’re not even useful as a focusing exercise anymore, because everything she does is conscious, aware, awake. 

But he just asked her if she was ok. After he had to do… that. After she played a part in him having to do that. 

“It’s fine,” she says, keeping her voice firm. “Are you okay?”

“It was just a bit of blood,” he replies, smiling reassuringly. “No big deal.”

She uses dead lungs to fake a laugh, then nods. “Just a bit of blood. Yeah.”

Just a bit of blood. 

And the second Bishop she’s going to End by the time she’s done in the Kingdom.