This isn’t a fight.
It is a culling.
Eight days of things that were once regular fauna in a frenetic rush to get away. The sight is dumbfounding, are their survival instincts so broken by the Godbeasts? Tantra genuinely feels bad for them, but she can’t exactly let them trample through the village. So she keeps swinging with her right arm as her left remains useless. She has to take breaks, frequently, once she exhausts either her Qi or body. Rakan’s only taken two breaks, and he should be closing in on his third. She doesn’t know how he does it, she assumed from the bear that he preferred quick spending for devastating results, but apparently he can be judicious.
She’s gonna have to start picking up on the habit because she’s been filling and draining her core at a rate that cannot be maintained. She’s been forcing herself to gather faster, to impose her will on the ambient Qi harder, so that she can keep up with the slaughter. It worked, for a while, but something’s happening to her soul, like it’s being squeezed, and the more she pushes that harder the constriction.
She can tell, instinctively, that there is a threshold she does not want to cross, like stepping off a cliff into a raging ravine. It scares her, but she has to keep fighting.
Why?
Because her friends are fighting, and they’re not like her, they won’t survive being gored or impaled. Yet they’re still putting in the effort. They’re beside her, Yorin swinging his guandao in wide strokes, cutting down multiple mongrels at once as Kisrin stabs at a pace that beggars belief. Etra crushes heads with her iron staff, one by one but with an inevitability attached to her strikes. None of them can match Tantra, for each of them mongrels push through to the second line, but for Tantra? Nothing passes, nothing at all.
The only problem is she can’t maintain that kind of effort for longer than a-quarter-hour at which point she needs to gather for an hour (or three if she doesn’t force herself to grab more quicker). Sometimes she keeps going, just without the boosting, and then the true difference in skill can be seen as she easily lets through the most of all of them.
But right now?
She’s barely even started.
Boosting her arm and shoulder, she brings down her club on the head of a bear, she doesn’t recognize any mutations, but it’s still a bear. Its skull caves in and it hits the dirt hard, the momentum of its charge causing it to flip and almost crushes Tantra.
But she still has the presence of mind to dodge.
A lizard the size of her palm tries to run past her but she crushes it underfoot as an opossum with razor sharp teeth jumps and bites her in the shoulder. She can’t pull it off, one arm holding her kanabō, the other limp and useless. So in the fugue of combat she bites back.
Her teeth sink into flesh and crushes its neck.
During which she’s swinging at a badger with three eyes.
She boost her arm a little and pulps it just like the rest
-
Jorin is standing amidst a mountain of corpses, breathing deep and slow, barely able to hold himself up now that the violence is over. He has more wounds than not, but that’s okay, his roots are deep, so he can survive most things without really caring, the only real way to kill cultivators like him is to destroy his heart or head. He still feels pain though, and exhaustion, and he’s spent three weeks without rest, massacring mongrels and beasts.
So he’s tired.
Tired enough where he really doesn’t want to deal with a very specific person.
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“impressive,” a sword sliding on stone says, clapping his hands, “you never cease to amaze, to think that one of your cultivation would be able to do so much, truly impressive.”
“What do you want, Dousou?”
The man of sharp stone shrugs, “still no respect for those above you? Truly your only flaw, If only you knew when to bow your head.”
“I bow to no one but Jorokan”
A scoff, and the man is in front of him, “hmmm, that’s an impressive amount of wounds, you’ll be needing the medicine hall, what say I take you there?”
“I’d rather eat a live eel”
The man frowns, “you really won’t budge will you?”
“No”
There is silence as the two men stare each other down, a stark contrast they are, with Jorin’s shredded robes, torn apart flesh, and frayed braids. Dousou is immaculately dressed, as though he were going to court, he wears two robes purple over brown, and minerals adorn him like jewels, his skin is textured like stone, and has a slight gleam from the sun's rays.
“You know what happened wasn’t my fault Jorin, people die all the time, especially cultivators. They were simply too weak for our reality.”
Jorin’s nostrils flare, “do not speak to me about blame, you were there, and all you did was watch.”
He shrugs, “If they couldn’t protect themselves then they weren’t worthy of the lives they held.”
“That's enough now Dousou,” the crumbling of stone echoes throughout the field, “no need to rub shit into the metaphorical wound as they say. Look at him, he deserves rest, not to deal with your brand of bullshit.”
Jorin tilts his head to see a woman of cracked granite walking towards him, each step sending reverberations through the ground as though her petite frame were a mere illusion. She puts a hand on her chin and considers Jorin.
“You always end up so battered during a tide,” she says.
“Such is the way for cultivators”
“Oh we both know that’s not the reason, but sure, let's pretend that it is. Right now you need healers more than you need a conversation.”
Jorin nods.
“I offered just earlier,” Dousou grumbles.
“And no one appreciates the display of blatant manipulation, Dousou, just accept that the man doesn’t like you and move on.”
-
One.
Yorin’s guandao cuts through flesh and air, decapitating a caribou. He doesn’t know how long it's been, he doesn’t care. There are beasts and this is his home, his purpose is clear. Clearer than it's ever been. This is why he became a cultivator, why he bothered with the tournament at all.
Well, some of it was because of how cool cultivators are.
But it was mostly for his home!
Two.
A gerbil the size of a dog is bisected, the smell of offal invading his nostrils as its guts spill to the floor. A spirit beast, in one strike. Funny how some spirit beasts are no better than mongrels, when it comes to strength the form matters as much as Qi saturation, and rodents don’t tend to be very intimidating, except in numbers of course. There’s also bunnies, they breed like…well…bunnies.
That metaphor doesn’t really work with the original subject does it?
Ah well, the point still stands.
Three
He got the idea of using numbers from Tantra. Apparently, a large goal is easier to reach if you break it up into small segments rather than tackling it all at once. He finds it working wonders, he barely feels tired at all! His body protests vehemently, but he can ignore it.
It’s a coward after all.
So its opinion is therefore invalid!
One
-
He takes a deep inhale from his pipe, letting the smoke burn through his lungs before letting it all out in a cloud. One of the wonders of cultivation, the more he damages his lungs, the stronger they get, so long as he infuses them with Qi.
Far along as he is he doesn’t really need to but it’s always good to stay in practice.
He takes another pull, tobacco with a…professional touch absorbs into his bloodstream, he lets out another breath of smoke.
The ruined village doesn’t really care how long he spends enjoying his pipe afterall. It was a decently sized one too, held about twenty three thousand. He’s standing where the market square would have been, probably a lively sight, probably filled with moving bodies and hawking vendors.
Now it’s just moss and debris.
He takes another pull.
Not the first time he’s seen a sight like this, probably won't be the last either. Shame that, he doesn’t exactly like this job, but someone has to do it.
Now to find whoever did this.