Chaos, for all its faults, happens fast.

Almost as one, the remaining cultivators from both of the city’s great sects and many of the independents throw themselves toward the divine beast. Since before there was a written history of the world, it has been the role and glory of cultivators to fight back the beasts of the world which prey upon their families and homes, and for all their faults, the cultivators of Cragend and its tournament do not shy from that duty.

Those too weak to fight against the beast retreat from it, rolling waves of pressure rivaling Feng Gao’s washing over the arena in a much less restrained example of brute force Qi application. Unlike the cultivator, however, the aura of the beast crackles and squirms, and where it touches the world spawns more of what the aura speaks of. Thick and blooming maggot-things, a mix of feline and plump, delicious-looking insects seem to squirm free of the ripples in the air, landing wetly or crawling on small, sharp claws from out of impossible, invisible wounds, and immediately there are hundreds of targets where there was one.

Feng Gao looks over at the commotion, frowning slightly, but then… shrugs. Behind him, Raika sees Taran shaking off his fugue, weapons jangling and ammunition forming from his being, and Jun Vral alongside him, hundreds of serpents slithering between stone seats to rip and tear into their strange prey. Kaena is out of sight, but Yun Ka arrives with the rest of her friend’s fighters, mechanical arms alight and runic formations decorating every surface she touches.

They do look at her. Before the worm-kittens turn to them and begin to eat the air and the world and the ground to try and dig into them, they look over and see her.

It doesn’t take much to feel the weight of Feng Gao’s Qi, or see how much chaos and harm there is surrounding them all. They make the right choice. It makes her feel a strange, bittersweet cold and warmth inside, to see them hesitate before turning away.

“A pity your end will not be enjoyed by a proper audience,” Feng Gao says, his jian once more manifested into his hand, “but I suppose I more than make up for it in quality. Goodbye, little monster. What a fucking waste you were.”

He raises the blade, goes to swing- and pauses.

There is a third person in the arena now.

As the world descends into cacophonies of techniques and chaotic battle, as the yowling speech of the not-tiger rings through the air and its violence rends apart the stone above them, in the middle of it all, there is nothing but the crackling of Flame.

A man in ragged, torn robes stands between Raika and Feng Gao. In one hand, he holds prayer beads, each bead entirely metallic, and he mumbles as he holds them to his lips, so quietly even she cannot hear what he says. In the other, he holds a broken blade, so ruinously useless as to be unfit to decorate a mantle, much less actually face combat.

Feng Gao takes a step back.

The Aspirant of the Cut continues to mumble a whispered prayer.

Raika, no longer faced by an immediate death, slips, stutters, one leg giving out even as her new battle form fails to sustain itself. She does not have the Qi to change back, and in all the chaos it is taking everything she has to hold herself together, but her Truth, healed in part by her use of it against someone demanding her obedience, is enough to keep her alive for now. Alive, and little else.

But she remains conscious enough to see what’s happening.

Feng Gao takes a step forward, squaring his shoulders.

“Aspirant. I know of your order. I know of the Cut. Stand aside, so I may finish my business, and you will have my attention upon its completion.”

The Aspirant mumbles, the clacking of steel prayer beads the only sound to balance against raging True Flame.

Feng Gao growls, brow furrowing. “Do not mistake respect for subservience, infant. No matter your mastery, you still stand beneath the Paths, and I will not have my retribution delayed. Stand aside, now, or face consequences beyond what your paltry little trinket can handle.”

The mumbling stops. The clicking of the prayer beads goes quiet.

Gracefully, without any wasted movement, the blade comes up to his face, and she hears him kiss it, faint and dry.

“Ys Acharya. Bless me for this violence I commit. Forgive me for the gentleness I request. In Division, Existence.”

Feng Gao moves so fast she cannot see it, that same technique which allows him to step past friction and air pressure moving him through space faster than she is able to perceive.

The Aspirant’s blade is there.

It, too, moved without her noticing, but not through velocity of some kind. Where before, it was in a position of prayer, now the blade is placed against an ornate artifact, a jian of pure jade and burning, incredible power.

And the Jade cracks, ever so slightly, as the rusted, chipped short sword cuts into it.

Feng Gao appears again, another step taking him near to the opposite end of the arena, and from that side of things, he takes a stance. Raika cannot move much at all at the moment, hoping against hope her body can generate something to get her back on her feet, but the Aspirant turns to face him languidly, calmly.

Feng Gao places the blade against his shoulder, takes the short sword in both hands, and moves his Qi into a technique so blinding in its complexity that the smell makes her nauseous.

Bolstered by his Qi and with its pattern reshaped into a true technique, when he swings, his Cut is elevated higher than before. Rather than a single cut to sever along its path, the sword now hums with power, and a single Cut is born into ten, a hundred, a thousand more of itself. The edge of the cut that he slices into the world glows a dull orange as it severs the air, as it travels forward, as it reforms into a wall of Severance that flies towards both the Aspirant, Raika, and the divine beast (and nearly every cultivator in the arena besides).

The Aspirant makes a sound. It is breathy, and soft, and filled with a sort of painful yearning and miserable rapture.

He steps forward. A wall of annihilation rushes towards them, a cut to sever space made manifest and multiplied… and he squares his stance. Holds his blade. Kisses the prayer beads.

And Cuts.

The world splits in two. There is the world to one side of the Aspirant, and the world on the other. In its center, there is nothing, for the path of the blade’s swing is nothing more than a perfect, complete Division.

It is not quite Dao. It is not quite Truth. It is not quite even witchcraft, the art of Chaos, of which she knows little.

It is simply a Cut.

If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.

Feng Gao is very, very fast. It is what allows his survival. A single cut across his shoulder highlights where he was nearly bisected, before his defensive artifact turned itself to glowing, smoldering rags around him and he moved out of the way. Where he stood, the arena holds itself upright while missing a wedge of itself, as if all things before the path of the blade and the eye of its wielder are simply gone.

Feng Gao’s technique, however, does not vanish.

Raika flinches and is thrown back by the wind of its passing, split in twain and rocketing off at an angle. Two diagonal walls of impossible bladework carve into the world, and the beast-cultivator screams as one of her creatures is turned to dust and bloody mist, the worm-kittens it fought joining it in nonexistence. Dozens of cultivators use movement techniques or desperate dodges to get out of the way, but even still, the scent of human blood mixes with the strange oily smells of the divine beast. The arena holds, if only barely, almost half its seats gone and two swathes of it scraped clean by the wall of blades sent crashing over it, and the not-tiger roars.

Feng Gao does not hold back now.

Frankly, he looks like an idiot, still swinging his sword rather than changing techniques after getting shown up so badly, but he does not retreat. Despite the fire, the world bends towards greenery and razors as his Domain manifests, his Soul moving through it and extending limbs of shadowed, rustling leaves sharp enough to cut stone-

The Aspirant dodges for the first time, stepping back, aside, ducking, moving without wasted energy or stumbles. It’s artful, watching them move and twirl and absolutely dance against untold violence. For all his power, Feng Gao’s strength is in his speed, in the whirling, endless danger of his inner world made manifest, and of whatever techniques he yet hides; the Aspirant uses none.

Raika realizes, belatedly, that she doesn’t smell even a drop of Qi from him.

She lets them dance, and begins trying to stand.

Retreat is the better part of valor, it is said. To live to fight another day is the greatest victory that many can achieve.

But this is the most aware, the most herself that Raika has felt in days, and forsaking it now would do nothing more than drag her back to the fugue state she was in. If she runs now, it’ll leave her at its mercy again. A parasite is in her, and it squirms and writhes and hides deep in her guts lest it be torn apart by the madness all around- and in the meantime, she can think again.

She has to nearly drag herself to it, but she finds what’s left of her tail, forcing armor plates to hold it in place like with her torso. Her arm, held like a cudgel, she can reattach fairly easily, as it wasn’t Feng Gao that tore it off but her own improvisation- and with that, she has two arms again. Both on the same side of her body, which is inconvenient, but it is what it is.

She hears something mewl. Not like a mewling sound; something says a sound that means the word mewl, and never comes close to it or the noise it indicates.

She turns, and finds, dripping in multi-hued ooze that seems to take the place of fur or skin, one of the bloated maggot-felines of the divine beast.

It mewls again, that same impossibility made into manifest reality… and rolls over. It squirms, like a plump little infant, and rolls itself into the nearest batch of True Flame.

For all the fact that its impossible presence literally weighs on the world and makes her brain hurt to look at it… it seems like a bumbling idiot.

But it does make her think.

The worm-kitten squirms and emits a strange sound as it cooks, like a hissing teakettle, but warbling and weirdly deep, and she watches it begin to come apart, melting into rainbow-colored goop and tinting the Flame strange colors.

The last time she was almost dead in an arena, she… ate some fire. She consumed some of Shin Ren’s flame. Hard to remember the end of that fight, but that much she knows, she felt, as it burned her all the way down into her gut. Why not try it again?

Not on the weirdly colored one with dead worm-kitten in it. Those things… whatever they are, the divine beast summoned them, which means they’re dangerous. Better to start smaller. By trying to eat pure True Flame, which can burn anything and everything but especially souls and Qi. Obviously.

She smiles, the form of it misshapen and strange on her new face. It feels good to be herself again.

She’s missing some of her teeth, ripped out or broken in the battle with Feng Gao, but she has enough for a set of jaws still, if a bit of a gap-toothed one. She walks over to the nearest flame, half-dragging her still barely connected body parts… and bites down.

It hurts. Obviously.

But as she swallows it down, feels it hit her stomach… oh, that’s something else.

She can’t help but be glad for her smoking habit. Better the numbing smog than the sheer thrill of this. When everything hurts, something that brings joy, that brings happiness and power and awakening- it’s like a shot of ecstacy, and she feels it shoot through her. Her throat is scorched, the smell of burning flesh filling her airways, but the Flame…

It hurts, even in her stomach, but the burn is so, so good.

Whatever her new biology is, it demands food, has for a long time. With how she’s forced herself to adapt to Qi, absorbing it biologically rather than spiritually, it should have been obvious sooner, but faced with the rush of energy that hits her, like the first bite of a home-cooked meal after months on the road, she cannot find it in herself to care about how long it’s taken to realize.

It tastes like pain. Like satisfaction. Like tasting food for the first time.

She throws her face into the Flame again, burning her eyes and armor and not caring as teeth touched by entropic void tear apart the immaterial and shovel it down her throat. The Flame still burns all around, the arena deactivated but the Qi flying all around and saturating the air more than enough to keep each blaze fed, and there is so much to consume.

There is a distant sense of panic as the heat lands in her gut, a glimpse of a smiling thing screaming, flailing, getting smaller- and then it is gone, into the void where thoughts in that direction always go, and she keeps eating.

Something cuts into her, and she keeps eating.

There are screams, and the yowling of an outer beast, and the sound of blades and Cuts crossing- and she keeps eating.

She goes to bite more, and finds her teeth cutting into stone. She pauses, taking the time to grow new eyes from the carbon-cracked thing that is her face-

It’s not much, but a small section of the arena around her is soaked in her blood all anew, and bereft of flame. A few embers flicker here and there, smoldering in the saturation of her blood, but there is not enough room or Qi for it to relight just yet.

Her stomach is… full. Not stuffed, not quite, but…

How long has it been since satisfaction? How long has it been since a need was truly met? How long, in agonies of flesh and mind, unable to fix anything she touches?

The taste of her own burnt flesh on her tongue, mingling with the flavor of consumption, of purity, of flame…

A cultivator’s work is to defy the heavens, and take ownership of the self. To believe oneself can be equal to that which is divine. So Raika doesn’t pray.

But it feels like communion.

And in response to a genuine meal, her stomach finally shows her what it can truly do.

She feels the flame be digested, the concept of consumption turning in on itself and the resulting energy flooding out from her. The slow, gradual saturation of Qi into her cells is replaced with something altogether new; rather than forcing her body to absorb it, her stomach, long since transformed by tribulation, drinks it deep, turns it to something purer, something designed to be used rather than forced.

It reminds her of what little she knows of bestial cultivation. Consuming and absorbing the qualities of a thing, but rather than requiring flesh and blood, her body turns to consume Qi itself, drinking in the Flame and remolding her along its same lines. An acquired mutation from the spirit beasts she ate in the beast tide? A new evolution, something distinct?

It doesn’t matter. Her regeneration, already impressive, comes alight.

Flesh and bone catch flame and rather than being consumed, grow and spawn from the flame, burning away the Severance that keeps her body from rejoining as it wants to. It’s not True Flame anymore; whatever she is now, that would still consume her just fine. Digested by impossible organs, it’s purified Qi, manifesting as flame as a reflection of herself. In flame, she is renewed, reborn, and as her left side begins to regrow amid blood and squelching joints and glowing, burning heat, she laughs.

It is not a human sound. No human sound can come from a body twice a human’s size, with lungs so very vast, with so many throats and such a strange mouth through which they exhale. But she laughs anyways.

She takes a long, deep breath, feeling the effects of damage and techniques to sever space eaten away by her flesh and now her very soul, and roars. It warbles, screams, shatters glass across the arena, a thing of glory and triumph and impossible, genuine joy.

The roar is matched by an even louder one from the Not-Tiger, and the world warbles along strange contours and impossible lines, but she doesn’t care. Raika comes awake, smiling with too many teeth and too many jaws, and turns to look for her friends. The arena is in chaos, and saving them will almost certainly guide her to something to kill. Two birds, one stone, as the saying goes.