I Can Change.
Her second Truth. One with a well of potential to it, a depth barely touched. She can feel how fundamental it is, beyond the reality that it is simply a fact of life. Just like her first truth, I Am Me, I Am Mine, she can tell that she’s not using it to its full potential. Considering some take decades, even centuries mastering their Truths, it’s hardly surprising, but that doesn’t make it any less frustrating.
Still, even with only the shallowest applications of them, the effects of both are what allow her to continue to exist as she does. Her first Truth lets her control herself literally, choosing every part of how her physical body moves and acts if she can only think precisely enough and with enough will, but considering how it chafes when she’s under house arrest or given orders, there’s probably more that it’s doing. But her second Truth… either because it simply ties in so well with her interpretation of I Am Me, I Am Mine, or because she doesn’t know as strongly that other parts can change the way her flesh can, it focuses on her body its elements as well.
Feeding upon Qi, as it was designed and pushed to do, her flesh expands, her blood multiplies from her bones, her body hums and burns with power and fuel. With her first Truth, she guides her Qi and her body into the proper patterns for her new transformation. With her second Truth, she catalyzes that transformation, turning blood to bone, bone to flesh, to keratin, to chitin, to minerals, to metals, back to blood and into new forms again. She knows flesh well enough, she knows its materials enough, and while she can’t make more from nothing she can shift her body to and from what she knows and can use faster and faster.
So it is that as she emerges from her old form, she feels more comfortable and more herself than she has in so, so long.
She kept the brain, the organs, the basics all intact, adding two new sets of lungs and enlarging the heart as she goes, but the rest she discards or transforms. She can feel a ripple of power in her skin as it changes, her curse remaining true, but now she doesn’t need to grow something around it: skin turns to chitin and bone, interlaced with different densities and patterns, even as the subdermal armor she’s created (scales and chitin, overlapping and coming together to nullify impacts) flourishes beneath it. She grows, turning her body to produce blood, which it can make faster than flesh or bone, and then simply Changing that blood to muscle that expands her form, to bone that acts like structural architecture so she isn’t weighed down, striking a balance.
She can do better. She has ideas about how to make it more complex and useful, more specialized. But for a first showing, for a bit of the ol razzle dazzle and a spot of fun?
She takes her first step, and a colossus of dark grey bone and chitin strides out, a good eleven feet tall and humming with power. Tendons flex, the already cracked ground breaks further, and reactive armor beneath her overlapping exoskeleton keeps her intact as she nearly triples her weight.
A good half of the cultivators rushing in to attack stop cold, frozen where they stand. The other half start to hesitate, turning their weapons and techniques, trying to find new spots to aim. One launches a string of orbiting glass spheres at her and watches it ricochet harmlessly, cracking the armored exterior and failing to penetrate any deeper. Another throws his hands forward, tossing an entire flood of glowing green water at her, and she simply stands against the tide, letting it wash away those who get too close and fails to budge her an inch. A third takes the opportunity of the water to pause, step back, and put forth an overwhelming wave of Qi into a single blast, launching it as a burst of lightning that turns to thorns and rains blood behind it. The whole technique, something sacrificial or pre-prepared maybe, rises a step above any other hits so far, touching the water and turning it to blood as well, multiplying through it and jumping, thorns-first, into her body from a hundred different points.
And her curse ritual, months and months old, designed to block Qi from entering her body or leaving it through her outer layer, blunts it enough that by the time it reaches her internals, it goes only a few inches in.
She can feel the blood-lightning try to dig deeper, feel it try to feed on her own body to magnify the electricity- and fail, unable to pull hyper-dense Qi into itself, unable to overcome her Truth. She is her own, and it can’t overcome that.
It’s a damn good reminder to get serious, though. Not every technique is going to be something she can just power through, and as fun as basking in her new form is, she didn’t come into this just to get taken out by being arrogant.
Drenched crimson from the transmuted blood, she crouches, breaking the hardening lightning and its thorned edges and launching forward hard enough to knock back everyone too close. At this size, at this speed, she can feel air pressure pressed hard against her, resisting as she moves. She still has only two arms, two legs, kept limited to the human form to keep from being even more overwhelmed, but without needing to overdose on muscle, spring-locked tendons pushing and pulling more efficiently, she moves fast enough to hit almost as fast as in her base form.
The cultivator of the water technique gets half their face broken and is launched across the air.
The cultivator with the glass orbs gets a kick to the ribs and spits blood, flying back, his heartbeat faint.
A cultivator with sword and shield roars out a challenge, his shield glowing bright, and his arm breaks apart as she punches through it.
A cultivator with brilliant purple skin and flowing scales strikes with complex hand motions, weaving kata that cracks several plates of armor in an instant- and then reels backwards as she breaks his collarbone with a headbutt.
She is flooded with sensation, drowning in information, burning up inside with Qi and bloodflow and altered chemicals she barely understands- and she is home.
She is in pain, her armor cracked and battered, her internals half-pulped, her flesh torn apart, and she is home.
She is in the flow of combat, surrounded by the din of battle, feeling a hundred heartbeats beating in fear and adrenaline- and she is home.
Once again, she lets go of her fears, of her thoughts. Like during the beast tide she survived, she discards everything unnecessary, all her focus tuned to survival and bloody, heart-stopping violence. She holds back, barely, setting a restriction on killing or maiming where she can, but she lets herself go more than she has in recent memory. The smell of blood is thick in the air, awash with Qi, and she can taste some of it in her throat. She is in pain, and she is tearing into her enemies, and she is glorious, and she is home.
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A little voice in the back of her head whispers that maybe she should look into getting help for these sorts of thoughts, but it is a foolish thing that helps no one that deserves helping, so she tells it to be quiet.
This tournament wasn’t designed around her, not really. Oh she’s a sort of “final boss”, put into the winner’s bracket, but the other winners and fighters were always at least as important, and more than likely to win and bring glory to their sects or themselves. Most of the fighters here, though, came looking for smaller fish, hoping to make a name for themselves, fight people near their level, or join a tournament for the prizes or for the hell of it. Of those, she drew a good chunk of them into the ring with her challenge, pride, anger and greed driving many to leap on the opportunity. That is to say, most of the fighters here weren’t ever in the running for the final rounds of the tournament… but some were.
One cultivator, waiting until after she’s beaten her way through the riff-raff, manages to rip her arm off at the elbow before she makes a hole in the stone floor with his skull. Another launches a beam of light, so concentrated and bright it hurts to even try to look at, and it punches a hole almost entirely through her sternum, breaking her breathing for a moment before she forces the enemy to retreat with some sort of shadow technique. For every three cultivators she moves too fast for or who she manages to strike hard enough to break immediately, there’s one who can take a few hits, give his fellows a chance to regroup, or deal actual damage to her.
Even as a titan, even at the highest peak she has yet reached, she is not invincible, and she is not without weakness.
One cultivator pulls out an illusion technique, and while it probably isn’t as effective as it would normally be, her ability to take in her surroundings briefly works against her, making her miss several blows before she closes her eyes and uses just her hearing to find the illusionist. One cultivator she attacks seems literally slippery, the tingly feeling of a Truth making her blows slip off him as often as she hits, and another uses the distraction to hit her so hard with a metal staff she feels her spine quiver in the jelly it’s made of her guts.
And she is home.
She heals quickly. She heals faster when she takes a bite.
One of the larger cultivators, who looks like he’ll probably survive the blow, gets a chunk of his thigh ripped out, and for an instant the pain is gone. She tastes the scent of cold, of trees that grow in the dark, of musty, muddy water from a poor technique, and it’s like she’s there, experiencing it all. The sensation is like her sense of smell tuned past its limits, and as she swallows, her arm sprouts back, her stomach reforms, her muscles heal and the cracks in her armor seal up.
It tastes like kissing her first love, like being content on a chilly winter morning, and it makes her whole.
Good to know for later.
The fight goes on for an hour and a half.
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In the end, it’s not Raika that calls the fighting to a close. The announcer tried to say something once or twice, but whatever his name is, he gave up after she dragged some of the retreating figures back by the ankles. Even for her, a hundred cultivators of varying talent is a hell of a thing, and it’s the cheering of the crowd and the fact that none of them really coordinate that keeps her in the fight.
None of them can afford to give potential opponents insight into their techniques, so cooperation is spotty, and no one manages to keep her down long enough for them to pile on. It is a long, grueling hour and a half of the most comfortable harm and chaos Raika has felt in months.
She ignores the voice that worries about that.
She might have kept going, had it not been for some of the big fishes of this particular pond beginning to stir.
It’s hard to keep track of the space outside the ring, but the more comfortable she became, the easier it got. She saw Kaena and the twins that smell like them, milling about, sowing seeds as needed to spin the whole affair, as she hoped they would. She sees Maen, twitching in her seat, her face half full of concern and half with a sort of fidgeting anxiety, following the movements with swift jerks and sharp breaths. She sees Taran, leaning forward, hands steepled together, looking down at her with concern, Jun Vral standing close to him.
And, of course, she sees the real contenders of the tournament.
The Unearthly Depths Sect and the Stone Divers Sect both stir, most of their lower-level fighters held back from the initial melee and thus their respective forces in the tournament much more intact. Some of their older members, talented inner sect disciples and younger elders of one of the Third Ring’s major cities, begin to shift in place, whispering among themselves. The woman with the beasts that Raika saw earlier, a giant of a man wielding a battle ax half the size of his torso, and some others that she can’t take the time to discern but can sense the quality of the Qi of all sense the change, and begin to shift.
And then, a new fighter steps onto the arena.
By this point, the ground is drenched in blood, much of it Raika’s, most of it her opponents. Of the original hundred or so cultivators that jumped into the ring, there’s perhaps twenty still fighting, some retreating and most having gotten their asses beat. Still, Raika stirs at the sound of the new set of footsteps.
She only noticed them when they got within twenty feet of her, after all.
With perception ranging all the way into the stands, that’s enough to draw her attention from her joy, and she turns, blocking a blow and striking back in the same motion, to see the Aspirant of the Cut.
He stands, slim and skinny, looking almost malnourished. He wears a sort of hijab-style cloth wrapped around his head, keeping his chin and mouth out of sight and covering one eye, and prayer beads clink softly against dirty white fabric that makes up what might generously be called an outfit. He looks like a religious man thrown out of a bar, and left to rot in the mud for a few days.
And, without her even seeing him move, he is holding the hilt of a blade.
It’s barely a dagger in length, and is chipped, dull, its edge cracked clean through. If she saw a weapon like that in the hands of anyone else, it would seem like a joke.
Twenty wounded, lesser cultivators from all across the eastern Ring move out of the way in an instant.
He didn’t flare his Qi, or make a sound, or do anything besides shift the blade in his hand. And yet, she can feel him. Like a sense she’d never noticed before, left to the subconscious, now woken a hundred times louder. The man exudes a sense of danger so severe that he stops the brawl without a drop of power.
Sheer killing intent floods the arena as he grabs the broken dagger with two hands, empty and sharp, and Raika can’t help but smile, half in fear and half in a strange sort of arousal at the sensation.
The ground shatters as the announcer lands between them, holding what looks like some kind of stringed instrument and resplendent in gold and white. The sound of the impact ripples out across both of them as an individual high in the Nascent Soul realm exerts his pressure on them.
“And with that, I think we’ll wrap up the tournament preliminaries!” he roars, ignoring the two of them to face the crowd even as Raika feels waves of sound start to subtly push against her. “To all our eager first contestants, we thank you for your participation and a glorious showing of martial prowess, but before we move on to any sort of main event, we’ll be taking a brief break to reset the arena and begin the next step of the tournament!”
And just like that, the fight is over.
The Aspirant of the Cut says nothing. The dagger in his hands is gone, and he simply steps back and goes still.
Ignoring the announcer (and getting a vein on his forehead to pulse in fury at that), she emerges from her combat form. It pulls back into her, chitinous armor turned to skin, bulging muscle and claws turned to something almost human, maw closing back up and giving her her vocal cords back. She stands, naked and blood-soaked, and blows the Aspirant a kiss.
“We can finish this next time, hot stuff,” she smiles. “This has been fun.”
And the first round of the tournament ends, to thunderous applause.