Raika hits the stands at a dead sprint, and it is a ferocious and joyous thing. She is feral and hungry and not in pain for the first time in months, the satiation and weight in her stomach pushing back the agony of overstimulation. She feels her body adjusting in minute increments, small inconsistencies or design flaws in her muscles correcting in spurts of glowing heat. Already, she is starting to feel a bit peckish, but for now, her biology drinks happily of a fuel she did not know she needed, making unconscious changes as needed. A stunted tree, drinking deep of fresh waters.
It is a joyous thing, and she cannot help but scream.
Several dozens of the worm-kittens turn towards her and waddle awkwardly (or adorably?) through the air, chewing at existence on their way to her, and she dodges past almost all of them easily. One, directly in front of her, she simply grabs, taloned, exoskeleton-covered hand shooting out to grab it and tear it in half, biting and eating and consuming the flesh and guts and iridescent oils that flood from it.
So, admittedly, she can’t quite fault some of the cultivators who see her turning to fight her as she approaches.
The worm-kittens die in droves, but there always seem to be more, and the sound of clashing swords behind her makes it clear that that’s still going on. The divine beast moves in skittering, impossible movements, like it stutters forward in time, like its made of a million pictures and sometimes the pictures just sort of vanish between where it is and where it will be, but she can see cuts and burns along its body from the battle. The ax-wielding cultivator is struggling his way out of a crater, the young cultivator with the solar radiance bit in half not far from him, but the beast-tamers creatures seem to understand instinctively how to fight the predator before them, always darting away before a frame-stutter moves the beast’s jaws or claws into where they just were. Dozens of techniques warp the world, shadow and flowing waters and blood-lightning and flames of every shade flying through the air, but the divine beast barely seems to care.
One of her eyes finds her target, and a half-second later she crushes the stone of the seats next to Taran and Jun Vral to powder on her landing.
Guns and serpentine fangs turn to her almost faster than she can react, but two of four limbs shoot out, collecting both and holding them away.
Taran blinks up at her, his pupils aflutter with a dozen colors, more than half the weapons on his body smoking and tainting the air with dozens of scents and the smell of alchemical preservatives.
“Raika? Is that you?”
She smiles, or does as close as she can without lips. It mostly consists of exposing a few more of her fangs.
She lets her jaws fall, blooming a path down her throat, and shapes a pair of more human lips beneath it. Even Jun Vral, his body serpentine and a fusion of biologies, winces a bit at the human mouth growing in her gaping maw.
“It’s me,” she manages, the sound not quite right and vibrating with her strange vocal cords. She doesn’t bother to control it, letting it ring free, and smiling wider as she does. “It’s me.”
“All well and good, sister,” Jun Vral says, wincing and sending a fresh wave of serpents to tear apart a worm-kitten, “but what does that mean? You don’t look much yourself.”
She grins, a pulse of exquisite mania pumping right alongside her hearts, and lets her joints and veins and the edges of her armor-plates glow with the heat of her becoming for a moment.
“I Am Me,” she says, imperfect but thrumming Truth coloring her words. “That remains. That Feng family cultivator over there is like as not going to survive his fight, Aspirant or not, and when he does, he’ll be coming after Yun Ka. He mentioned paying a weregild to her parents, so best case he intends to cripple her. He hurt both her and Kaena, and I think we need to get them both somewhere safe. I’ll run interference, and while they focus on me, you focus on getting them out of here. Can I count on you?”
Upon hearing that Kaena was hurt, Taran turns his eyes to the fight behind her, looking to Feng Gao- but for as much as he clenches his fists hard enough to make the pistols he holds creak, he nods.
“Fine. I’ll find Kaena. Jun Vral, can you-”
“Done, junior brother.”
She smiles, laughing. “Have I told you guys I think you’re great? For completely different reasons, but Gods, y’all are great. Good luck!”
She turns, cracking more of the terrain beneath her weight as she goes to leap towards a cluster of the worm-kittens-
And stumbles to an awkward stop as the colosseum rumbles.
A dome, not unlike the one in the arena proper, shimmers into being, crawling into being along the lines of mathematical angles and well-ordered formulae that manifest in the air. Before long, the sky is tinted gold as the entire battlefield is enclosed in a perfect sphere of glowing power.
Floating above it, well in view, golden armored beings come into view.
The announcer, Jin Nara, the cultivator with sound-style techniques is up there, hovering respectful beneath them all, but she sees several other Imperial insignias. Dozens of cultivators are arriving, both the Stone Divers sect and the Unearthly Depths sects returning after taking away their most vulnerable, but besides the elders already trapped in the dome, none of them are allowed entry beyond the power-armored guards and the figure at the center of them.
In the midst of what looks like nearly a full garrison of Imperial Soldiers, the Imperial Scion of Cragend looks down at the melee.
Their lips move, but for some reason its… difficult for Raika to hear them? Other sounds slip through the barrier, other voices muffled but audible, but when the Scion speaks, there is a strange sort of ripple. The Not-Tiger yowls, one of its back legs rotating on joints it should not have to claw at the barrier, and a rush of golden sparks and lightning slap the paw away without much effort. Several of the cultivators look around, many of the independents confused and some even trying their own luck to push past the barrier, before being met with the same golden lightning.
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“Fuck,” Taran hisses. “Gods damned politics.”
She looks to him, realizes she doesn’t have an eyebrow to cock or facial expressions to show confusion, and hums at him. “What do you mean? Did you hear what they said?”
He looks at her in confusion. “Yes, they projected their voice into the shield. I thought your senses were enhanced?”
She nods. “They are. It sounded like… warbling, kind of.”
Taran tilts their head, a dozen iris colors flickering past as something in his mind seems to confer with itself- but before he can say anything else, Jun Vral just hisses. His eyes are wide, looking all about.
“He said we’re quarantined. The arena is blocked off until the violence ceases, and none shall enter or leave until all is in peace.”
She hisses, growling right behind it in a weird verbal tic of her new throat. “That’s insane. What of the wounded, or the cultivators that have to retreat?”
Jun Vral laughs, his voice harsh. “Who cares? The Scion made a proclamation. It’s fact now, or good as. You said that Feng Gao there will come for you if he survives the battle?”
She nods. “Myself first, but he seemed like he was going to kill Yun Ka. You both find her, get Kaena, see if she can think of a way out of this. Where’s Maen?”
Taran shakes his head. “Off visiting your old friends. She left last night, hasn’t come back yet. If I had to guess, this particular commotion is going to draw her back soon enough. She’s clear for now, focus on that.”
Raika nods, growling but trapped in a smile nonetheless. She just feels too good to be properly worried, even as she tries to think of ways to get her allies out of danger.
The plan comes pretty easily, though, which just makes her smile wider.
“Feng Gao is Imperial, and high up the ladder besides. Taurus said Feng Gui’s whole family work for the Empire, so this one probably has connections of his own. The cultivators here won’t face him, especially with none of us past the Nascent Soul realm, and the sect elders are likely to jump in and help him.”
Taran laughs, harsh but surprisingly light. “True enough. You do tend to find the worst case sort of scenarios, beastie.”
She laughs, inhuman and warbling and more than a little manic, and doesn’t even care enough to make it sound normal when she sees Jun Vral and Taran both giving her worried looks.
“Truer words are rarely spoken, oh corpse-brother of mine. But there is one thing in this arena that can and would happily fight Feng Gao, whose Qi has maybe even higher weight than he. All we have to do is cut away the flies which buzz around its muzzle.”
Jun Vral looks at her, eyes wide, but Taran accepts it quickly with a nod. “If you can get me a sniper vantage, I can-”
She shakes her head. “No. This is already fucked, the last thing I need is you all getting labelled criminals alongside. I’ve already got the Imperial big-shot down there after me, while you all are at worst damned by acquaintance. Get Kaena, they’ll figure out a way out of this, will know who to speak to or how to present things. As for me, I’m a fool whether I dance or not, so I might as well dance. Keep the others safe. I’ll see if I can’t find a way to get the royal shithead to forget about them in the meantime. I hear I can be very distracting.”
Before either can protest (and before she can properly laugh at or be hurt by Jun Vral’s relief that he need not betray greater powers to help the others), she has already moved again.
Besides tracking the occasional sound of blades crashing, or dodging the occasional Cut that flies from the central arena, she puts the fight between swordsmen out of her mind. Her focus heightens as she feels a flush of her last snack be sucked up into her system, her eyes and ears sharpening, her nose partially closing to limit overstimulation by Qi, and she sprints into the larger stands towards the divine beast and all those harrying it.
Adrenal glands, flash-grown and flush with the hormonal instructions for violence, flush her system with their contents and drive her into a fresh new fit of laughter.
It’s a bit unprofessional, but as she shatters stone beneath every step and moves quickly enough that she has to grow membranes over her eyes to see, she simply can’t find it in herself to care.
She is home in the violence, pursuing self-destruction for the sake of others, growing and healing and empowered, and for once, however briefly, free of pain. Contradictions and all, she feels so entirely herself that she cannot help but cackle as she runs.
It almost gives the ax-wielding warrior enough time to react.
He sees her, begins to move, ax flying through the air back to his hand as he finishes digging himself free of the rubble he was smacked into-
And her hand is wrapped around his head, all the momentum of a thousand pound ten-foot warform transferred into a beautiful arc that leads his skull directly into the floor.
He is shockingly durable, and takes six more blows before he even pauses in his flailing, but unluckily for her, the seventh sees a second ax manifest in the air and fling itself towards her.
She blocks it with one of her new limbs, and it cuts nearly through the hyper-dense muscle weave and fractal shell-armor, and its enough that he slips from her grip and cuts her hand off at the wrist.
She just laughs, angry and yet strangely affectionate at the pain of severance, and throws the stump’s blood into his eyes.
He calls for his other ax, sputtering and wiping at his eyes, but she disconnects part of the bone so it flies free without pulling her, and switches to an easier target.
None of these people have done her wrong, and even in blind, glorious battle-joy, she doesn’t want them dead, just out of the way. Rather than duel them one by one, the best thing she can do is eliminate as many as she can as fast as she can.
And, on a whim, she decides to take a bite of one of the mewling worm-kittens as she goes by.
The taste of something predatory and squirming, wet and twisted and wriggling in the corpse-flesh of the world, slides down her gullet. It smells like it eats carrion, like its wet and juicy and furry at the same time, like something feral and hungry and powerless and all-consuming, and it’s delicious. It hits her stomach smoothly, swallowed with barely a chew, and the organ reawakens again, tearing it apart for Qi and dropping the digested energy into her body like an engine tasting coal after burning on only wet reeds its whole life.
Perhaps she might still technically only be around Core Formation realm in terms of raw Qi in her body, in terms of experience, in terms of how limited her powers are- but versatility means a lot, and there’s something to be said for specializing. Her muscles burn, her flesh quivers and grows and burns with impossible heat, and with every step, she gets closer to the divine beast above, dodging Cuts across reality, squirming things that eat at the world, and concussing or stabbing into nearly every body she can find on the way.
A dozen cultivators fall, Qi cycling to their wounds to heal torn-open guts or bleeding head wounds, screams emerging as she snaps arms and legs like kindling. Everyone that manages to react in time or put up a defense she leaves alone, not wasting time fighting with any who might be strong enough to slow her progress, but there are plenty of cultivators standing far back and casting techniques into the melee, or focused on fighting the mewling worm-kittens, and most of them take these roles because they are not strong enough to fight alongside the truly strong against the main body of the divine beast, and they start to fall, one by one.
She dimly notices Taran carrying Yun Ka away, ignoring her protests that she’s fine, that this is a great opportunity, that they should help, and smiles.
Raika crashes against the defenses of her fellow cultivators to the aid of a divine beast, and marvels at how beautifully everything is going.