Chapter 386 - Expensive

Alright! Two in three days. Progress. Ramping back up. This would've been out sooner, but it wasn't- now it's here! Enjoy. I like Raika being smart and clever and a bit of a shit. It's fun.

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The applications of complex life-forms in battlefield conditions are well-known, and have been instituted in warfare to varying degrees since the early days of bonding with base spirit beasts. Trained animals were a natural evolution, but the efficacy of the techniques were always dependent on the cultivator above their own merit. It was only when early visionaries advanced into applying their learnings to insects that we began to see marked development in proper bio-engineering of war machines.

Refining a spirit beast into a specific form through giving them specific foods has merit, but many insect variants drastically alter the life-forms within their hives for whatever purpose best suits them, creating whatever life-forms best fit the needs of the current moment. 

From this, early proto-forms of biological warfare were born, fusing the arts of poison, bestial cultivation, and the intricacies of living flesh to create purpose-driven weapons. In spite of the efficacy of these new practices, their high requirements for entry acted as an impediment, with most early practitioners being labeled as demonic cultivators, in spite of the hypocrisy of the bloodlines, breeding practices, and active drug-use of most clans of the time. Now, in the Empire’s more enlightened age and the demands of the war preceding it, we find ourselves better equipped and surrounded by those with the ability to pursue higher understanding. 

And yet, even now, we find ourselves stymied. The higher reaches of possibility are barred from us, even as the expertise of fellow flesh-crafters is used to enhance the blessed Wall which protects us all from the ravenous hordes of the outside. What of the self-propagating plagues? What of biomorphic flesh attuned to itself, that it may evolve faster and more drastically to outside changes? What of the potential heights of what was once known as “bestial cultivation”, and might now be better known as bio-conceptual assimilation techniques? 

My proposition is simple, honored ones. Hear the words of this lowly Researcher, and allow the profound depths that are possible with the lines of inquiry that have been closed to once again flourish. For all that we have created wonders of flesh and soldiery, with the proper tools, we could eliminate the need for soldiers altogether. We could unleash gods across the Wall, that they might consume it and return it to us fertilized, colonized, prepared. I pray to the Emperor of Emperors, wise beyond accounting, powerful beyond compare- please. Let us make the world right. Let us bring to life that which might make it so.

-Essay and official plea on the matter of the merit of furthering fleshcrafting-based magics and biomantic research in the Empire, by Researcher Yan Huo of the Division of Research. Redacted by official Imperial Decree, held in perpetuity amongst the Divine Vaults. Author moved to the Division of Altered Cultivation by order of Grandmaster Errath.

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Raika’s “transcendent arts” aren’t like her regular techniques. They’re not like the Supreme Body Art she used when she had more use for living systems, not like the ideas she had about some possible martial arts, not even quite like manifestations of Dao. It’s more… vague than any of those. It’s like a feeling of inspiration, or like a moment when things all sort of just come together into something new. Rather than using carrots to make a carrot soup, she’s using carrots to make a stew with a bunch of other vegetables and meats in it. It’s hard to explain.

It just feels like something… more. A multiplication rather than an addition, maybe. The same normal ingredients, plus some kind of additional catalyst she can’t name.

More importantly, they feel like the first time. Every time.

[TRANSCENDENT ART: A BULLET FOR EVERY BREATH]

The Gun made of Pain is designed to fire once before it has to cycle its chamber. Additionally, Raika’s fast, strong, but compared to her peak and compared to a true sharpshooter, or someone entirely dedicated to the Dao of the Gun, she’s not that accurate. 

And yet, somehow, the horizon fills with gunfire.

The world cracks, the ground beneath the fungal forests and farmlands breaking at the sound of it. The recoil devastates their surroundings, throwing a shockwave that utterly decimates the arm holding the gun and the entirety of the space around them. The implosion of returning air is twice as violent still, slamming into a perfect central point that shrieks and detonates with something approaching energy fission, igniting the world around it.

All of this is the secondary consequence of the technique.

If not for the Centicroc and Beetle being out of the way, the technique would have struck them as well. Instead, it just hits every other thing on the battlefield. 

Every single thing with motive energy, with signs of life, which in any way could be construed as “breathing”, sports a brand new bullet hole.

There are tens of thousands of insects crawling out of the Eneru elder, each made of many living parts. 

An impossible technique. No constructs manifested to cause the bullet wounds, no additional bullets were teleported from elsewhere. One moment, there was no possibility of such an outcome. The next, it occurred. 

The shriek of exploding friction overwhelms everything, eclipsing even the screams from the city, lighting up the sky like a second sun. It’s cataclysmic boom is barely fading before it’s replaced by a screaming twice as loud, emerging from tens of thousands of mouths.

The elder got her technique off, dessicating and draining some of her summoned insects and somehow using that to multiply their strength and power. Enough, at least, that the gunshots inhabiting every major organ system in their bodies, but the Gun made of Pain isn’t really a traditional killer. Dozens of the beasts, condensed into pillars of night-black flesh and viridian energies, scream in unimaginable agony as Raika’s Dao of Pain floods through them, over and over. 

The bullets of her transcendent art feed her understanding of agony in perfect and absolute detail to those they touch, all at once. 

Nine out of ten of the beasts spontaneously die, their systems hitting a point of total shutdown. Of the last tenth, maybe a fraction of them survive entirely, with the rest spasming and clawing at themselves so violently that they rip themselves apart.

The elder, a single bullet hole decorating her face, holds herself perfectly still for a moment.

It’s long enough for Raika to generate a new limb from available corpse matter, to retrieve the shattered pieces of the rifle from where the recoil shattered it. It’s not enough time to rebuild her arrays and get the fuck out of reach.

A snarl, echoing along the ruined ash of what was once rich farmland.

“Aaaaaaah… pain. How long has it been?”

Shit. She met one of the freaks.

She sees behind herself with her Death senses, and sees the skittering supernova approaching faster than she can run. 

There’s a brief and explosive burst of air as Centicroc returns, covered in burnt fungus and the remains of the centipedes he was snacking on. Building-scale jaws open wide, preparing to shut hard enough to chomp through solid metal, her spirit beast’s velocity high enough to break the sound barrier.

The Elder hits him once, and she feels as much as sees both him and Beetle be sent tumbling, part of the reptile’s snout caved in by the impact.

In the next second, the Eneru elder has arrived beside her, already swinging another fist. 

Apparently, she’s adapted to the technique, focusing on direct force application rather than offering more targets for Raika’s transcendent art to do crazy shit about. 

Perfect. 

Raika’s Blacksteel prosthetic comes up, punching the incoming fist and stabbing into it. Obsidian-sharp, molecule-thick shards immediately embed themselves into the fist, saturating the corpse-flesh with death, sending the protected life-forms in some sort of pocket realm under the elder’s skin into a frenzy.

Raika’s other hand comes up and completes a hand sign, improvising the shape of the rune required and feeling her Death briefly managing to penetrate the Elder’s exterior.

Tricks and traps. It’s not her usual style, but a good plan coming together is almost as fun as getting the improvisation just right. Getting to do both in one? Priceless. 

The force rune manifests, shattering her fingers into shrapnel and transmitting the concept through its shape, empowered by Death and Qi- and shooting the Blacksteel into the elder’s arm like rockets. 

She blinks in surprise, staring down at the material like she’s unfamiliar- and then cackles, laughs, staring at Raika with eyes of brilliant green.

“What a treat this is! After all your antics, I should have expected such tricks, but novelty is such a rare treat!”

The woman’s face bursts like a rotten egg, and a single insect leg emerges to pierce directly through Raika’s torso. 

It’s annoying- the elder moves in bursts, seemingly supersonic at some moments and barely faster than Raika herself at others. It seems more like a quirk of her powers than something intentional, but she uses it to her advantage, making her harder to predict, like she’s flickering between different frequencies. Raika tears herself free of the insect limb, avoiding dislodging her acupuncture-anchors- just in time for a second limb to come down.

Three of her puppets jump out of her shadow, leaping to her defense. All three of them grab onto the leg, its tip sharp enough to pierce metal, and they manage to slow it just enough for it to only carve half of Raika’s face away, rather than impaling her through the head.

Wouldn’t kill her, not any more than the Eneru elder’s head getting exploded out by whatever’s emerging kills her, but it would make things harder.

Instead, she dances back, and, with a flex of will, summons a field of flowers.

Her Death manifests, a garden of cultivated murder, suicide, and accidental End spawning all around her. Crawling up one leg is a longer stalk, its knife-shaped petals hanging far from her skin but still wrapped around her, and the garden is smaller than it was, drained after so many magics drank deeply from it. 

She sacrifices the flowers freely anyways, manifesting the Deaths she wields and is fueled by and making them real upon her opponent. 

The insect limbs shatter, explode, are severed, are crushed, leaving flailing bits of chitin and gore- and then more emerge, taking the free space opened by the destruction of the others.

And the Eneru elder hasn’t stopped moving. Her body flows across the ash of the battlefield, martial stances of a style different than Raika’s familiar with but recognizably designed to enhance the lethality of a body guiding her. Raika steps back, dodges, ducks, but her own relative lack of talent for higher-end martial arts costs her here. She was never the part designed for physical fighting, and she doesn’t have the mechanics to alter her corpse the same way that a living, more complex version of herself could. She can manipulate as much corpse-flesh as she wants, but her self-image is stabilized, and it doesn’t include the sorts of mad science experiments she could add.

The elder’s body stomps forward, over and over, dozens of pillar-like insect limbs scrabbling out of the gaping abyss that was her face as it continues fighting to emerge. Fists strike, steps glide over the ground to put her in the right positions to strike, a supernatural dance of speed and stasis that keeps Raika constantly on the back foot.

More puppets emerge, more of her garden is spent in destroying the limbs coming for her, but the elder keeps coming, keeps pressuring her, and-

With a bone-shaking snap of closing jaws, a bundle of the alien limbs coming from the elder’s face are severed, bitten off by a reptilian jaw. 

This time he’s fast enough to dodge the retaliatory blow, guided by the stamping of her little Beetle on his head. Still, the force of the strike actively throws him back, a physical force strong enough to warp the air pressure around the blow nearly catching him.

Raika steps forward, prosthetic regenerated, puppets sprinting forward- 

The elder has already turned back around, and her face has partially returned. Just the mouth. 

A cavity in the shape of a head smiles at her, emerald corpse-flesh regenerating joyously. 

The back of the head explodes, and the beast within her emerges in truth. 

It’s another centipede, but calling it a centipede is like calling Centicroc a crocodile. Its shell is liquid, mercurial, colored a rich blue and green that shines in the light of the stars. It rises and as it does, it splits, opening itself, unfolding into dozens more identical bodies only loosely connected to each other at the roots.

Raika can’t help herself- she laughs.

“Still holding back, are we?”

The elder cackles, her smile bloody and green. 

“There’s more to see!” she roars. “Why else invite you to our home?”

The insect-beast’s mere presence is enough to make the air shake, miles of flesh emerging from out of a skull cavity barely twice the size of the average humanoid’s. Hundreds of thousands of pillar-like legs squirm and writhe in the air, their tips painted in Dao (or Comprehension, as the Fallen Kingdom calls it), its aura drenching the world in Death. A Death of consumption, of being overtaken, of being unmade for the sake of fueling something greater than you.

Raika, close to a third of her Death-garden drained, can’t compare. 

So instead, she lets her guts spill out of the hole that the bug left in her, letting the arrays and Death-magics hiding the item within unravel with her intestines.

A canopic jar falls out and shatters against the ground, unleashing a dark powder and a buzzing sound.

“Can’t say I mind your attitude,” she says to the elder, “but I have better places to be.”

Out of the Gu jar scuttles… a beetle. 

Not like the herculean specimen of Beetle, of course, for nothing could rival her general in that regard. No, it’s small, shaped almost politely, like it’s sort of… cute. Plump, soft, with cartoonishly simple-looking limbs and a weird little snout-proboscis in its face, between two adorably big eyes to either side of it.

It is also the size of a perfectly normal beetle. Smaller than a finger. Perfectly normal. 

And then it’s gone.

It moves fast. Faster than she or the elder can follow, apparently. One moment, it’s still on the ground, and in the next, points of discoloration are starting to spread across multiple contact points on the elder’s skin, the liquid mercury of the beast emerging from her skull starting to sport the same spreading dots. 

Ah. She had wondered if one of them was going to become poisonous, like the old myths seemed to imply.

The body of the centipede writhes, pulling fruitlessly at the elder as the discolored points on her skin spread, the flesh at their centers starting to putrefy. She laughs, her face still missing its upper half but the joy she shows quite real.

“Interesting! So like the Valdir. A connection to rot, is it? Or pure venom? A fascinating creature. Strong for its scale. Tell me, how many Deaths did it cost?”

Raika blinks. “...No? I actually don’t have to tell you anything?”

The elder’s grin turns to a slight frown. “It’s a gift, child. For the offer of pain, after so long. You ignore my generosity at your peril. In spite of your little tricks, you’re not winning this. I’m giving the poison time to spread, letting you prepare your next step. The least you could do is engage in a decent conversation.”

“I’m afraid your gifts are a little small for me, elder,” Raika replies. “This whole city is, really. You’re not going to be able to kill me, but all of you are so in love with a status quo where you’re comfortable above all else that you’re going to keep trying. I’ve seen how the people in your city live. They do live, you have that above some of your competition, but they live for you. Thousands of life-drinkers, those who rely on a constant feeding to empower yourselves, and the prey they generously allow safety and refuge.”

The elder scoffs, her ten-foot frame starting to bend slightly as the poison’s acidic properties keep spreading. “Oh? What alternatives shall we present? Shall we fight the Overgrowth, allow them to spread out into its embrace and be lost to the beasts? Shall we send them to the Morae, that they might be killed just as often, for far less benefit? Shall we send them to your Wall? Hmm? North or south, east or west, little worshipper- all hold Death. Here, at least, there is home.”

Raika frowns at that. She inhales, then exhales a huff that makes the flower in her remaining eye-socket flutter. 

“Yeah. Alright. Definitely not bothering to learn your name.”

The elder’s frown deepens. 

With a sudden burst, a hundred, two, three hundred feet of the massive centipede emerges, exiting her body fully. 

A second one starts to emerge, even as its earlier sibling towers high enough to block out the stars, a multi-bodied hydra that even now shifts like a whirlpool made flesh, turned to chitin and darkness and sharp-edged murder. Mandibles the size of buildings gnash from a dozen mouths, echoed by the second entity emerging- and again, and again, from deeper in the supernatural body of the elder.

Dozens. Maybe hundreds. 

Distantly, she can still feel the orbiting stars of other grand Deaths, mantled and turned to reality. 

This is one elder, among many. 

For all the chaos she’s causing in the city proper, she’s not really killing folks. The loss, then, is minimal. The chaos is real, as is the ongoing assassination of multiple of their lesser clan members, but true damage? Enough to cause a surrender, before she’s forced to retreat wholesale or Ended? Unlikely.

The trial she set is simple. If her “armies” lose, she surrenders, or she’s killed for good, she loses. Her opponents, on the other hand, have to actively choose to surrender. They have to concede defeat, with far less on the line and far more resources.

Yet again, she’s confronted by the reality of entrenched power.

Any less ridiculous a challenge would be dismissed. Any more would be treated as poorly timed humor. There are, as ever, only so many options before her.

She continues to make the best of it, and make new options where she can.

Reaching through her garden, through the Death that is she and that fed that which she has created, she feels her place in the battlefield.

A still-repairing magic gun. Her puppets. Arrays and craft-work. Centicroc and Beetle, circling around the grander beasts that now rule the fungal ruins. And, of course, her new Gu, who seems to be operating very differently than the last one already.

With this, she needs a show of force enough to force a surrender, before breaching the unspoken rules that will turn this challenge from a game to a genuine threat, one which needs concerted wiping out. 

She smiles, staring back at this one of many elders. 

The more perceptive ones, still holding back at the city in the face of Godsfall’s approaching bluff, begin to move. A few even leave their towers, briefly silencing the chaos of a few sections of the city as they emerge and start to move towards the battlefield.

The elder in front of her notices enough, and says no more. In an instant, the sound barrier shatters as the centipedal hydra throws itself at her, oozing the pale power of Death and Dao and the mercury black of magics. 

Raika laughs, just once, before they land.

Her body is obliterated. Her anchors are cast to the winds, some of them actively shattering.

From the opposite side of the city, nearly over the horizon, where the more perceptive elders are now rushing, Raika, surrounded by a hundred puppets actively completing the array she’s designed, claps. Just once.

Blacksteel on corpse-flesh rings out against the screaming of a city and the devastation of a distant battle of high-powered Death-wielders. Li Shu, beside her, rolls her eyes, pillars of keratin clicking and connecting, acting as pylons and foci for the ritual.

The chaos and messiness of the other fight, using a truer “puppet” than the others, covered for most of the preparation. The rest was done by Li Shu, actively diluting the Death energy around them, weakening the spell in some ways but, more importantly, keeping them hidden.

As the strongest fighters of Viviae approach, each one individually far stronger than Raika directly, she activates the array. 

It’s a bit less showy than her transcendent art. A lot less showy, actually, which is the point. 

When the elders arrive above her and hesitate at the edge of the array’s effects, she waves at them, giving a rather theatrical bow.

“What did you do?” One of them asks. 

Before she even has to answer, another, to his side, picks a chunk of fungal matter, lifting it to examine it closer. 

“She’s… poisoned it. Ruined it.”

Raika grins. “Yup.”

The distant battle echoes, but surrounding the four elders of the life-drinker clans, Raika, and Li Shu, there is a deathly quiet.

“Well?” Asks the first elder, his eyes a bright red and clearly showing his irritation. He’s the weak point, then, Raika thinks. She can use him.

“It’s a subtle working. Creative. She’s spread some sort of… plague, I believe. Not a true Death-casting. It’s…”

His eyes widen, bright green to counter the two red and one purple of the others around him. “The life you’ve spread in the city. The pale wood.”

“That feeds on Death? The very same.”

The red-eyed elder, long hair writhing like serpents, snarls, taking a step forward. “It’s weak. Pathetic. Wiped out in a heartbeat. Every grove, we’ll burn, and then-”

“It’ll spread,” she says, her shit-eating grin widening. “Fast. It’s in the spores now. Even if you burn down this entire farm, and the next few miles around it, it won’t be enough. We started planting that shit the day we arrived, and the array just sends out a signal. Big signal, real complex, real delicate- but breaking it doesn’t do anything at this point.”

The Valdir-clan elder seems ready to start some shit anyways, but the green-eyed Dreyus beside him steps forward, placing a hand on his arm. The others clearly notice the breach of decorum, but the green-eyes and the Valdir don’t seem to mind, which Raika finds interesting.

“You’d ruin the entire ecosystem? Destroy the city’s food for-”

“Probably only weeks,” she says, shrugging. “It’s not that hard to fix. I’m sure your experts will figure it out sooner than later. But… not before hunger sets in. Not before we activate another wave, or another variant, or one of the other tricks we’ve been working on.

“So. How do we feel about negotiating?”