“Here and now, we begin our tournament, without further ado all you beauties!” The announcer roars, Qi flowing through the arena on the sound of their voice and the scent of gold and drumbeats. “We begin, here and now, with the elimination tournament! One by one, we will witness the glory of divine conflict as our would-be champions engage in duels to decide who amongst them will make it to the next round, where the final bracket will lead to combat against she who has called us here by challenge!”
Again, a roar of booing and cheering in almost equal measure as Raika blows kisses to the crowd.
“For our first match, hailing from the far lands of-”
“No.”
It takes enough air and effort that she can actually feel her throat strain and begin to bleed a bit, but for a moment, Raika manages to drown out the sound of the announcer. She can sense his Qi, saturating the area, feel how it pulls people’s attention, but it’s not enough, not when her lungs are larger on the inside and her throat shifts to project the sound all the louder.
“We do this a little differently,” Raika says. “We start this off strong. I’m not here for a slow start, and I’m not here to waste time.”
She casually discards her sandals, kicking them away. She enjoys the looks of confusion and worry on her guards’ faces, but her Truth itches for this, and so does she.
“I am Raika, the Unbroken.” She lets her legs shift, toes curling and growing clawed, muscles flexing and switching to a more useful position. “I am not a duelist. I am not a warrior. I am a beautiful, fucked up monster, and we do this my way.”
With a flex of now-enhanced biology, she barely needs to leap to launch herself forward, cracking the platform behind her and letting a slight dusting of powdered stone drift towards the stands beneath the Imperial section as she flies. She lands in the central arena, its ever-shifting form changing to one with ground that she can land on, defaulting to a flat plane as someone in the control system panics.
Raika stands, before a crowd of thousands, throws her arms wide, and smiles.
“Come at me all at once. Come at me with your friends. Swing at me as hard as you please. Let us dispense with the pomp for a moment.
I Am Me, I Am Mine, and I challenge you all to try and take me down.”
For a few seconds, there is a devastating silence in the arena, even the announcer, for all his cultivation and charisma, stunned for a brilliant moment. For just a few seconds, Raika glories in shutting up a city.
And then she smiles wider as she hears someone begin to laugh.
“Very well!” comes a surprisingly quiet voice. “I accept this challenge! Let us be barbarians, and glory in senseless violence.”
Before she can get a good look at who’s coming, she’s already ducked under their punch, air pressure and sound reaching her before his fist and her enhanced reflexes moving her out of the way in time. A second swing is already on its way, but she doesn’t need to see him to hear his blood pumping and his fists moving through air.
Once again, she floods her system with adrenaline, and gives herself in to the fight.
The man in front of her is slim, almost slender, his body lined with whipcord muscle and glowing a soft golden color. As he moves, she can feel a slight humm coming off him, like a soft vibration or the purring of electricity, and his flesh glints as it shifts towards the metallic.
Training sessions with Jun Vral and Taran kick in, and she dodges the next hit as well, blocking only the fourth and feeling the impact reverberate through her. It literally rings, her opponent’s now-metallic flesh sending a shock of electricity through her, but not nearly enough to get through hyper-dense structures beneath her skin.
In a flash, she punches once, twice, three times, and newly created spring-coiled joints have her fist fly out flicker-fast and break his nose, cheekbone, and front tooth, in that order.
He stumbles backwards, and before she can get another swing in, a sword cuts through the air between them, aiming to sever her arm.
She dislocates it, bending the joint in the opposite of its intended direction to dodge, and before she’s even properly caught sight of the attacker instinct has already sent a clawed kick into his chest and shoved him back.
A third attacker follows after, but by this point she’s gotten comfortable.
Say what you will about the dangers of battle lust and adrenaline overdoses, there’s simply nothing better to calm her nerves. Well, besides a good smoke, but she’s only got a few left. When she has reason to react to the constant chaos and overwhelming sensation of the world, she can let herself move, rather than constantly trying to pick out the right details to hold a conversation or keep still. Every movement is important, every sight and sound life or death, and by riding that fine line of recklessness and caution, she feels her senses come alight in a way she feels nowhere else.
The third attacker is here because there’s plenty on the way.
The main platform of the arena is massive, nearly a mile wide and twice as long, and without the added magic of the transforming ground and environments it can create, reduced to a flat plane of stone, she can hear and see the dozens of cultivators running out onto the field, many of them smiling, some snarling. The honorable ones, the ones more worried about presentation, or a fair fight, or a deeper test of skill remain back: those are the ones that matter. She sees the monk, the Aspirant of the Cut, most of the sect-robed figures (all the ones from Cragend’s two groups), a figure wrapped in bone and jewelry, a person with two shadows, a woman with strange, chitinous animals at her side, and more all holding back, waiting.
It’s the hungry ones, the desperate, the easily provoked, and those who think this is some kind of joke that run onto the platform, and there’s plenty enough of those. Close to a hundred sets of running feet echo across the arena to her senses, and she has to dedicate part of her attention to tracking them behind the renewed screams of the crowd.
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
Nothing like a good brawl to get an audience cheering.
Someone swings a fucking battleaxe, and now that there’s a good ten or so Cultivators surrounding her and the pace is slowing a bit, she decides to grab it rather than dodge.
A joint opens up on her arm, and hyper-dense bone sprouts to clamp down on the axe like a mouth.
Gasps come up from the crowd, more than a few of the cultivators looking shocked and stepping back, but she doesn’t give them a chance to retreat.
As much as this is a test for the competition, this is a test for herself, too.
Weeks ago, Taran gave her a wake up call. For all her ability to bloom into incredible weapons and tools, there’s the simple fact that she let herself get sloppy. The fact that she deserves the pain, that she can take the pain, and that she can regenerate all bundled together to make her weaker, when she needs to grow. It’s not enough to be able to do something unique if she can’t do anything else well either.
The greater the foundation, the higher the tower. So for the last few weeks, with her training sessions, between riling up merchants and nobles and giving Kaena the ammunition they needed to get this thing set up, she’s been building her foundation.
It’s not perfect yet. There’s pieces just… missing. Some things just don’t click yet.
But it’s better.
She rips the axe away and breaks it over a knee, throwing the pieces back at its wielder, and before the next attack can come, slams her foot into the ground.
Again, the spring-loaded joint comes in handy.
Rather than creating a dozen sets of muscles to overlap or over-developing what she has, she’s focused on adding small but distinct improvements. Things to enhance her reflexes, pack as much speed and force as possible into precise blows, and minor enhancements to bone structure and density. So it is that, at the cost of a bit of harm she can heal quickly enough to compensate for, she hits a bit above her weight class now.
Old training and new flesh wrap together to crack the ground, breaking dark lines through the floor they stand on, and she grows enough bone over her hands to make full mallets as the turns and slams a second time into the rock.
This time, it lifts up sections of the floor and throws powdered stone into the air in a cloud, obscuring the vision of most of the cultivators around her in a sudden burst. While most of them keep moving, only a few letting themselves get defensive, there’s still a moment of hesitation, and a burst of movement in the smokescreen.
And, like all talented cultivators in the Foundational and Core Formation realms, they default to their Qi senses. Which Raika, despite the sheer mass of Qi she possesses, only appears hazily against.
Four bodies go flying backwards out of the cloud, trailing blood and dust and tumbling as they fall. Another two follow not long after as the sound of shouts and clanging of weapons rises up from the center of the cloud.
Raika emerges from its outer edge instead, ready and waiting as the more impetuous of the tournament goers finally get their instincts under control and flare their Qi to disperse the cloud. By this point she’s outside it, necessary to avoid choking on the sheer density and variety of Qi scents, and already moving and shifting something deeper inside than mawed limbs and spring-loaded muscle.
By the time they’ve cleared the cloud and turned to face her, a good seventy or more cultivators hungry for blood, she’s moved a bubble of Qi up into the back of her throat.
It took an embarrassingly long time to think of it. It only makes sense, really. She can produce a type of Qi that, when catalyzed, bursts into strange fire. It’s obvious what might be a useful source of inspiration.
Riled up chaotic Qi, wrapped in a thin layer of flesh, touches on the idea that all things end as she cuts it on her black-steel fangs, and an explosive stream of gold-white flame floods the space in front of her.
To their credit, as is only reasonable in a large city like Cragend’s tournament, most of them get out of the way, but a few of the cultivators are too slow, or rely on shields and artifacts to defend themselves. Barriers, glass walls, massive vines and crystal blockades of all colors and styles bloom to life as about a third of the warriors in question rely on their toughness or their gear to get them through the flame, ready to get a hit in while she’s blinded by the fire.
Of course, they don’t have access to all the information. In their favor: the fire explodes in all directions, ripping through her jaw and throat in an unexpected complication and choking off her air supply while she struggles to contain and adapt to it. Against them: she can still hear and feel them just fine, and is more than capable of moving fast enough to dodge or fight even as she feels part of herself she doesn’t normally train burning.
Additionally, they don’t know that Raika’s flames are weird. She hasn’t let Yun Ka take a look at them, hasn’t shown them publicly before her little show in the early section of the arena, so all she knows is what she’s managed to theorize.
Her Qi is “raw”: unrefined, without a Qi signature, acting more as an accumulation of natural, ambient Qi than a proper cultivator’s, even as she’s managed to build it to serious densities. Further, she “cultivates” it by making it excited and chaotic, forcing the energy to roil and grind against itself and grow, as all natural Qi grows by movement and interaction with other Qi (which is why areas with many different types or multiple flows can be such powerful cultivation aids). By this point, all her reserves are dense, excited, and charged to grow. And third, the black-steel teeth she has, aided by the nugget of the Cold Sun she consumed, act as a way of inciting change in things, sharp-edged oblivion to cut with.
And apparently, when her roiling, growing, dense natural Qi runs into the concept of a steel-tipped hunger, it ignites.
It doesn’t turn to fire. It doesn’t combust into alchemical flame. It doesn’t take on the properties of the Cold Sun, either. Instead, the properties fuse: roiling, chaotic growth of energy, mixed with the concept of consumption turns to something that embodies both, a sort of fire that is close to what the concept of fire does, an energy consuming and transforming… which manifests as ignition.
At least, that’s what she thinks is happening. It seems to fit pretty well.
And it burns even better.
The barriers that don’t immediately break are instead consumed, eaten at by golden-white flame that grows as it touches more Qi. and dozens of cultivators scream and retreat. Even as she reforms part of her jaw and strangles the flame in the density of her saturated flesh, like using wet green wood to smother a flame, she smiles and listens to the sound of a dozen cultivators realizing they made the wrong decision.
It doesn’t put most of them out of commission, but it takes out more than a few, several outright retreating or collapsing with severe burns. The white-gold flame isn’t intense enough to really spread, most techniques fading and Qi going undirected as pain overwhelms many of her opponents, and fades fairly quickly without more to feed on. It doesn’t kill them, though several will have scars or need serious medical aid.
She smiles. Better than expected.
Some of those who got out of the way come for her now, a good fifty or more cultivators of varying levels sprinting forwards. Just because they’re the least restrained and most eager of the tournament’s participants doesn’t mean they’re weak, far from it, but with this many all at once, drawn in by herd mentality and her own unknown capabilities, they’re predictable.
She proved shields don’t work as a hard counter, and that giving her time to set up another smoke screen is a bad idea. So they rush in, eager to engage her more directly, trying to get their shot in before anyone else gets a chance, pride and reactive planning running hand in hand… right at her.
She smiles, new lips only just finished regrowing. Time for part two.
With a single, flexing pull on her reserves, a massive amount of her Qi is pulled out and into her flesh, her first Truth allowing her to direct how her flesh moves… and her second Truth helping it to do more than just what it naturally would.
Raika tears free of her robes, rips through her own skin and emerges from rags and blood, and roars a challenge to all those who think they’re fucking hard enough to have a go.