The domain returns, and the space bends and warps. The roots reach out and begin to overtake the ground, the world itself warping in response to the Qi and Soul of Feng Gao, honored cultivator of the Feng bloodline, Soul Warrior realm cultivator-

And Raika spasms, and is eaten, and laughs anyways.

It is difficult to laugh with only one lung and a head like a sea urchin, but she manages.

For all his control, Feng Gao is visibly brute forcing things, showing off his skill and power to end the fight as quickly as possible. He’s got a crowd, and while it might not be his focus, considering all his talk of honor and family, Raika figures it’s a good bet he gives a shit deep down.

Which is why he isn’t ready or paying attention when a strand of muscles loosely arranged into a tendril throws a flaming chunk of flesh into the woods.

Good fertilizer, normally.

But the Flame is golden, and rather than be consumed or put out as normal fire, True Flame feeds on more… important things than air or wood. It feeds on Qi, and souls, and all the big important things in life. And it feeds on Feng Gao’s domain.

In moments, a vast swathe of the metaphysical trees are aflame, real enough to affect the world but not real enough to be fully material here and now. Maybe with a full manifestation, but the limited show Feng Gao is putting on limits him. Raika moves through the flame, spreading in a dozen directions, and though it hurts… she’s used to it.

Feng Gao cancels his domain, the flame briefly holding its shape before collapsing onto the ground into a golden, writhing pyre. He turns, and the world quakes under his gaze, and he is not fast enough to stop her.

Say what you will about Feng Gao, he was thorough. There’s bits of every organ she had splattered across the ground, all over the place. Lucky for her. Regrowing things from a shred of themselves is easier than creating wholesale organs she doesn’t understand, and in a few moments, she’s managed to regrow her second lung and reattach it to a central stem. Like a flower made of meat, she raises herself up, spine reforming in misshapen pieces as she speeds through regeneration, her Truth pulling everything that she is back towards her center.

Feng Gao, on the other hand… stops.

He looks at her. By now, the crowd has mostly evacuated, though many of the cultivators still remain on the sidelines. A fight with a Warrior realm cultivator isn’t something to be taken lightly, and more than one such battle has turned a city to rubble and ruin, but the appeal of a fight like this, against such an unexpected opponent, cannot be overstated for the battle-hungry of the colosseum.

Slowly, he rotates a ring on his hand. With a pulse of Qi, space warps and bends along strange curves, and he is holding a jian by his side. The blade is made almost entirely of jade, and glowing with a terrible green light. Another turn of the ring, and his robes change, a stole falling over them, runic formulae and formations on it flaring to life.

He points the blade at her, in a silent challenge.

Nice to get a little fucking respect for once.

She’s maybe halfway together. A spinal bloom, a single limb growing from a quasi-shoulder to support her. She could regrow her body in minutes, but speed-growth like this, and alterations besides… it costs. With her body shattered, her Qi is wasted as flame or dispersed entirely, and not every piece she could recover is useful. There’s maybe minutes more of this kind of regeneration she can do, less if she tries to build something with it.

Fuck it.

Flesh turns to skin turns to bone turns to… something else. Layer after layer of bone and keratin, like steel folded over itself dozens of times, and then arranged into patterns, connected to muscles that spasm and twitch as they brush against each other. Her head blossoms, five new eyes spawning, a new and larger mouth like that of a wild beast, six new airways pulling in air and smells from every direction. As her ribcage reforms, she lets a newly-generated heart pump blood and let her take her attention away from the task for a while, freeing up more space.

The Mask says they should bow back to him. Make it a true duel. Use it to ensure no one interferes and humiliate him further.

The Flesh disagrees. Its adrenal glands are compiled from pieces across the floor and beg to be used, and in a duel, instinct says they are sure to lose.

Raika, what’s left of her, somewhere in between, offers a compromise.

It’s been maybe thirty seconds since the fight began. Much longer and Taran, Jun Vral and maybe even Project- (a Cut) - and maybe even Shapefixit might get involved. She can’t risk them. Kaena has likely healed themself already, but the casual abuse remains bright and clear. This has to happen in a way where they don’t get involved. So it has to be quick, and it has to be messy, and it has to be decisive.

Slowly, thirty two fangs of blacksteel move into place. Some of them fall into the place of claws, at the end of long talons, while others decorate limbs and forearms, only a few remaining in her jaw in reserve.

It’s not enough. She needs more.

She’s at four arms now, and it’s hard to maneuver all of them at once but that’s fine, she doesn’t need fine control, just enough speed to threaten him with her claws. At long last a leg forms, cracking the stone beneath it as she stands.

Her Qi runs nearly dry. She’s already set a second of three total hearts to circulate her blood, trying to generate more, but without some ready, and without the ability to absorb any, it could take hours. A final movement, a third lower limb, a tail, long and segmented and interlaced with fractal plates of bone, and her reservoir runs dry.

She stands, nearly ten feet tall, surrounded by flame. One solid blow, no matter how she layers her defenses, would be enough to shatter her again, without a drop of Qi to rebuild herself with.

She raises one long, clawed hand, as if mirroring the jian before her…

And turns it, raising a single finger towards Feng Gao.

He clenches his teeth, a vein bulges in his forehead, and he cuts.

A Sword technique flies out, augmented by the blade and multiplying into three, then four, then ten cuts, each of them severing the very space they cut through. Even a single blade might be enough to separate her into pieces-

So she doesn’t wait for them. She jumps, spring-locked muscle launching her into the air. The next flurry is instantaneous, aimed at her while she’s trapped by the whims of physics- and her tail lances down, anchoring her to the ground and pulling her out of the way, losing only half a hand and part of her hip.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

She lands and moves, and it barely matters, because Feng Gao is more than two realms above her even with her specialization and that is not a barrier one simply overcomes. Even as she feels pressure from air resistance slow her minutely from how fast she sprints towards him, she cannot even perceive the speed at which he steps behind her.

There is simply a boom of concussive force from his passage and then a cut touching the base of her spine.

She Changes her flesh again, angling her entire spine in a disgusting contortion that sends her backwards over the blade. It severs half her tail and the heel of a clawed foot, but that’s nothing compared to her midsection being lost.

Even if she had Qi, the tail feels lost, the flesh Severed in a way that feels… oddly familiar. Still, it doesn’t matter. The world is tinged in shades of gold and shadow as True Flame bathes the arena around them, and she moves again.

And again, Feng Gao is there, ready. He is starting to look bored.

Pisses her the fuck off, but sure. Useful.

“A tiger’s head with a snake’s tail is no threat to anyone but fools,” he says, another Sword technique cutting the world around them and severing a finger she is too slow to move out of the way. “Had you bowed your head properly, you may have yet lived a long and prosperous life as the monster you are, and instead, you bare your fangs at me. At the very least wounding one of my caliber earns you a proper death, but I had hoped for more than just spit and bark.”

Her overhead limbs arc down, and this time when his sword swings its edge is met with blacksteel.

The air screams, like it is in agony pressed between two versions of Severance, one martial, the other predatory, and in the end, both break.

Her newfound fangs shatter into shards, most of them flechetting back into her body in agonizing, unhealing stabs- but the Cut Feng Gao threw shatters as well, and the feedback of it sends him staggering back a step. A single tear of blood falls from his eye, and he growls.

She can feel him straining, feel how badly he wants to summon his Domain and his Soul- but the True Flame all around prevents that advantage, endangering his cultivation if it eats away at too much, and even now it is spreading, eating at her flesh, at the lingering Severance in Feng Gao’s cuts, in the runic formations at the edges of the arena. Even with that handicap, she has yet to land a proper hit on him that wasn’t by surprise, and…

Fuck it. That ain’t so bad. Surprise the bastard.

Grabbing her upper wrist, her arm pops out of its joint as she swings it like a club, shards of blacksteel all along it like shrapnel as she swings. He parries it aside easily, a cut of flesh falling away- but some of the shards ricochet off his blade, making a discordant ring come from it. He growls, face set, and if she had lips left, she would sneer at him.

Every joint is kept hypermobile, every blood vessel improvised and oversized, and in every part of her, there is the armor. It slows the Cut, maybe a quarter of a second, maybe less, but it slows it, and that matters when she cannot even follow his movements. The air reeks of fire and purity and the woods and dark soil and scything trees and-

Feng Gao steps back, assumes a stance, and every nerve in her body floods her adrenal glands into her bloodstream to move her out of the way.

Before, there were casual cuts. Here, it is something else. His Qi circulates as he embraces an actual technique, and he steps.

He is behind her. He moved through the space she occupies.

The Cut moved with him.

She had enough time, barely, to put her arms up in front of her. It saves her torso from falling in half immediately. Instead, it takes two or three seconds.

The body doesn’t heal. It couldn’t even with her Qi. So… fuck it.

Her Truth grabs her blood, moving it through severed veins even as armor plates lock onto each other and hold her body in place together.

She turns to face Feng Gao, all five eyes rolling to fix on him, open maw panting as her many airways whistle air in and out of her.

He stares at her, eyebrow raised.

“All right, then,” he says. “Fine.”

With a flourish, the sword returns to his spatial ring.

Raika’s mind races, running through possibilities, near-delirious on adrenal overdose.

Think. Domain and Soul, locked. Qi reserves still vast. He’s shown a movement technique and Sword techniques. What else? He’s in the Warrior realm, he has to have-

Again, the stance. Again, he moves through occupied space, his speed magnified without air pressure or gravity to interfere.

This time, it’s a punch.

She feels it when he hits. It’s a basic technique, but elevated, not esoteric but refined mastery. Where he hit, her shoulder vanishes. Qi, condensed to a point, explodes from it, and she is left missing two of her three still-remaining limbs.

All of this, and not one advanced technique.

She staggers. Blood loss is a bitch, even for her, even circulating it by force, and despite holding herself together at least one heart and lung are Cut open, leaking oxygen and spasming muscle into her.

It’s done. No more healing.

There is a part of her that’s relieved. It’s not a good end, she’s won no revenge, but-

But… what?

Fuck.

She’s… she wants to give up.

She almost laughs, before remembering she can’t as she is now.

Feng Gao turns from where his blows took him, martial arts elevated by ontology to a point of warping space and matter leaving him as he leaves the stance. He looks at her, slumped, unsteady on her footing, right arm holding a severed limb and torso unmade to the point of ruin.

“Well. Can’t say this hasn’t been surprising.”

And he raises a hand, Qi concentrating in his palm, ready to form a technique and unmake her.

She turns to him. She lets herself breathe. She can smell some members of the audience she knows. She was right about timing, too, most of her allies are making their way towards her now.

Pity they’ll have to see her die like this. Defeated.

So maybe, says what’s left of her, between Mask and Flesh, we shouldn’t make them see that.

Hmm.

Yes. She can agree with that.

A monstrous, inhuman abomination of flesh and bone and eyes looks at Feng Gao… and smiles.

Without lips, its hard to speak. So instead, she braces her feet, holds her severed arm like a bat, and roars, with all she has left. Her strange vocal cords, regrown back the same somehow, turn it into a ringing, violent note, like the sound of a landslide reflected over mountains, and it echoes in the arena.

Every cultivator watching is silent. For a moment, Feng Gao is silent. The roar rings, and Feng Gao condenses enough Qi that she can see it, a ripple in the air tinted green and black. When it ends, he will fire. They both can feel it is the only way it can continue.

And then something roars back.

Everyone and everything in the colosseum turns to look at the thing that crouches over the edge of the stands, having leapt up atop the architecture of one of the tallest buildings in the city.

It is not a tiger. Tigers don’t have six legs. Tigers have fur, rather than dripping, oil slick iridescence. Tigers have snouts, rather than an open, descending, spiral maw that goes down… down… down…

And from that maw, in the voice of a scream painfully stretched into words, the creature speaks.

“Found. You.”