The plan, inasmuch as there is one, is going perfectly.
Rebuilding her limbs, struggling with the incomprehensible equivalent of indigestion, she sprints away on six different limbs as an incarnation of devouring color swims through space after her. Ahead, two monsters capable of cutting her to mincemeat weave between each others attacks, splintering the air and cutting apart centuries-old architecture.
And, caught between the two, she can’t help but grin.
Bursting forth from under the cover of dust, she throws herself at the Aspirant.
He has an expression of rapture on his face, sliced to ribbons though it may be, and doesn’t even notice her arrival until she’s closed a hand around his head and launched him away from the battle as hard as she can.
As useful as he might be, he’s too unpredictable, and the chance of him interfering in the upcoming fight is too great. With most of the cultivators trapped in the dome distracted fighting the gradually evolving spawn of the divine beast and weakened by her interference, this is the best chance she’ll have to take out the two very big, very scary monsters who very specifically want her dead.
What a joy it is to be alive.
The Aspirant impacts against the opposite stands nearly a half-mile away, and Feng Gao has already turned to her, teeth gritted, eyes bulging, the world around him warping and transforming into a true Domain as he unleashes his frustration-
And is batted aside by a massive paw.
The impact of it is enough to physically deafen Raika, her eardrums bursting violently from the force of it. Feng Gao is launched away, hitting the stands hard enough that they shatter, millenia-old stone almost a hundred meters thick cratering around his body and throwing up a massive cloud of shrapnel.
Half a dozen pieces of stone and stray twigs (that are harder than the gods-damned stones are) cut through her in a dozen places, one coming dangerously close to cutting into her skull, and she’s launched backwards and away.
The Not-Tiger is there, above her.
She coughs up a bit of blood, smiling up at it.
“If. This. Were. Proper,” it says, “I Would. Hunt. You. We. Would. Fight. Tooth. And Claw. To Consume. Or Be. Consumed.”
It hesitates a moment, as if genuinely saddened… but then performs the disturbingly human gesture of shrugging one of its sets of shoulders.
“But. Too. Tasty. Not. To Eat.”
Its spiral maw eclipses her view of everything else as it descends.
Raika tries to move, taking every trick she has, burning Qi to regenerate faster, to move-
And just barely ducks back in time to avoid being cut open on a blade made of leaves.
The Not-Tiger yowls, Qi-rich blood splattering the arena as the blade slices into its cheek and up its neck, severing part of the knot of eyes atop it. It snarls, the giggling noise coming out violent and garbled, and it, alongside a good half-dozen of its spawn, turn towards its aggressor.
“You are not free to act as you please, vermin.”
Feng Gao stands at the opposite end of the stands, and where once there was stone, now there is woodland. It is not the forest of natural balance, of growth, a home for many beings; the forest that grows from him, like a shadow that warps the world under its shade, is an empty thing, artificial and clustered tightly, like the bars of a cage. A good quarter of the arena warps, the stone at the edges of the effect beginning to crack and bend under the weight of the impossible grove, its roots decaying and spreading through all they touch-
And behind him, mirroring his movements, like a shadow or a puppeteer in equal measure, is an arm. There are dozens behind it, all made up entirely of moving leaves, like the rustling of the branches gives them form and definition, but one is extended, copying Feng Gao’s stance. It holds a sapling whose greenery has warped, until it disappears when viewed straight on, forming an impossible blade nearly a hundred feet long.
“You have struck a member of an Imperial house. A noble bloodline which has enacted the will and authority of Empire for millenia. We have slain countless things like you, verminous dog, and this Feng Gao will be happy to teach you exactly what-”
One of the spawn launches itself at Feng Gao, neatly bisected an instant after. Both its severed halves squirm and liquify, each one forming new limbs in new configurations and spiral maws to mirror their parent’s.
The Not-Tiger is smiling, in its own nightmare way.
“Boring. Come. To Kill. And. Die. Ape.”
Raika takes explicit pleasure in seeing Feng Gao’s eye tick at that.
The Not-Tiger launches itself at the Warrior Realm cultivator, wielding every ounce of his awoken Soul and Domain against a sprawling chaos of form and physics, of teeth and all-consuming, all-spawning hunger and impossible flesh-
The Aspirant gives a relieved sigh as he takes a seat next to the hole Raika’s currently embedded in.
She tenses up immediately. She didn’t sense him. Even with her hearing only half-healed, she didn’t feel him walking, smell him come close or-
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He waves a hand at her, as if brushing away her concerns. He sighs, looking exhausted, and takes a jug out from… somewhere, probably a spatial ring.
“It’s fine,” he mumbles, his lips and face still cut and bleeding. “All good. Good fight.”
“Didn’t know you talked.”
He huffs at that, and says nothing. He pops the cork of the jug, taking a long, steady drink of its contents. Some of it trickles past the cuts in his lips and making it dribble down his throat and chest, but he doesn’t seem to mind, even as the scent of strong alcohol makes it to Raika’s nose.
He hisses and sighs when he’s done, letting the gourd hang by a string tied around its middle. He hands it over to Raika.
Across from them, the world ends. Dozens of warriors that, together, could more than equal any mortal army struggle to recover their balance and fight against the still-growing worm-kittens (now a disturbing mix of eels, glittering molten metals and crystals, and felinid features). Opposite where she’s trapped, a forest that whispers only of death and violent-edged madness, of life turned to the purpose of violence, faces against an impossible beast of the wilds. The divine beasts swims and leaps through space, appearing and disappearing as if from behind the folds of a curtain, its many legs and drooling, starlight-bleeding maw flashing out at impossible angles to rip apart all it touches, even as its spawn harass and hold the attention of Feng Gao whenever he tries for a decisive blow.
Raika takes the jug, taking a swig.
Immediately she coughs, choking on possibly the worst rice wine she’s ever tasted.
“Gods and Hells, what the fuck is in this?”
The Aspirant simply leans back against the seats and rubble, contented. She takes a deeper swig.
It’s swill, but it’s still a drink.
They sit and watch the colosseum, tainted gold by the bubble surrounding them, turn to rubble and ruin.
“You going to fight the beast?” she asks.
He opens one eye, looks at her, and closes it again.
“I’d… appreciate it if you didn’t. Feng Gao made some threats on a friend of mine.”
He continues to say nothing.
She takes another drink of the wine, indulging in its awfulness, and passes him back the jug.
He drinks long and deep, and doesn’t stop even when a Soul-enhanced cut Severs some of the stands less than a foot away from him.
And then, he lets out a long sigh.
“Learned what I wanted,” he says. “Was a good fight. When I am more of a sword, perhaps I will end every battle with my blade through my enemy. As it stands- I’d rather live, for now.”
She nods. “Got a name?”
“Jin.”
She nods. “Thanks for the wine, Jin.”
She digs herself out of the stone and goes to look for her friends.
It’s not hard to find Taran. The sound of gunfire has been near-constant since the battle began, and she finds him holding back two of the divine beast’s spawn on his own, whirling between them and leaving shells and gunpowder behind him like rain. She lands atop one of them, tearing into its spine (and finding out that the spine has a bunch of wriggling humanoid fingers coming out of it). It flails, its focus shifting to her as she starts to dig her hands into it, and Taran flips to focus on the other one, taking out a flintlock.
There is a sound like the shattering of porcelain, and the world briefly turns monochrome as he fires.
The spawn he is facing falls, lifeless, and he falls to his knees a moment after.
Rather than waste time trying to fully subdue the beast, her abilities ill-suited to killing something so abstract, she takes out its eyes as it writhes and bucks beneath her. Blinded, she manages to take out a chunk of its throat and shove it hard enough to send it falling down the stand as she goes to her friend.
Taran looks up at her as she kneels next to him. He goes to wave… and the hand falls limp.
“Sorry,” he rasps. “Drained. Killed… two of em, now. Not supposed to… use this much.”
“I got you, corpse-crowd,” she tells him, picking him up. “Come on. Where are the others?”
“Inside. Kaena… had a plan. Get us out. The others-”
“I can sniff them out. Come on, we need to move, it’s getting-”
The arena shudders.
From beneath the arena floor, shattering the mile-long tract of carefully engineered arcanotech, grows a tree.
It’s surprisingly short and squat, but as it grows it blossoms out, thousands upon thousands of branches spiraling forth from it and weaving a dome of bright, sharp green. The light of the dome is eclipsed, filtered into chaotic shadow from the ever-moving leaves, and in their movements, a shape forms.
It has a face like an owl, all empty, all eyes, a line where a beak might be but flat like a mask, and it seems to have only arms, each one ending in a series of fluttering loose leaves made into impossible swords. The world warps in its presence, and the roots that it emits rapidly expand and eat through stone, metal, formations and the bodies of the fallen. Several of the spawn assisting their parent are skewered and drained in moments as the fire that dominated the main arena is smothered beneath a far greater, far more impossible manifestation of power concept.
The Not-Tiger roars in return, and even as its dripping, sloughing body starts making more of its worm-kitten spawn it begins to vomit from that maw a black, tarry liquid, both gold and starlight, both void and velvet. The numbers of its kits multiply until they are like foaming bubbles of impossible radiance flooding around it, until it is half-buried in a semi-liquid sea of bodies, and a perfectly circular pool of whatever leaked from it forms in front of it. It bends, losing form, even the hints of musculature and anatomy losing coherence to bubbling, oozing radiance, and-
Raika holds Taran close, sprinting away, joining a crowd of cultivators who elect to simply retreat towards the far end of the arena and set up defenses and improvised formations-
She deviates, tracking the scent of peaches and mercury away from the crowd, towards some of the interior rooms. If she can at least get Taran to the others-
She hears Feng Gao scream something and-
The world goes dark.
In an instant, the dome is consumed in inky black. It engulfs it entirely, blocking out any view of the outside, turning the sky dark.
And then the eyes open.
A million, million, eyes, some of them large enough to swim in, blink open in the pitch darkness of the dome, and a voice rings out through the chaos.
“Beast and bastard,” it says, slithering and crawling through the shadows. “It isn’t polite to ruin someone’s home when you haven’t even been invited.”
Feng Gao does not hesitate. Every limb of his Soul swings out, his Domain turned to a literal weapon of universal severance-
The divine beast screams like a wind tortured into being sound, and its bubbling, radiant infinity oozes and spawns and grows up and brings with it a pool of iridescent black-
And the eyes burst messily as black blood and shadow and glowing blue waters blast forth-
And then-
Impact.
The world vanishes, and all Raika can do is wrap her body around her friend and brace.