“I can sense them ahead,” Shi Cho says. “Some of my bugs have reached them. I… there’s blood.”

The Flesh takes control.

They need food. They need healing. They need their pack.

The blood, by all signs, is the direction where all those objectives are. The Mask agrees, and decides it’s better to get things done quickly.

Shapefixit hisses, and Yun Ka looks confused, but time in the dark of the tunnels will do that to a person. Shi Cho doesn’t even have proper time to understand the reaction, the slight shifts in morphology that Raika adopts as she moves.

Taran rests, placed gently on the floor behind her. And she runs.

There is a rush she has kept herself from feeling. Disconnection from her body left it alien, discomfort and a tool to be used but nothing more, but as adrenal glands open up and muscles flex and shift and burn and it feels good. Like running on a cool day. Like the burn at the end of a long walk, or a comfortable workout.

The Flesh glories in what it is, for it is all it is, and it sends them into the fray.

The tunnel ends around a sloping corner and opens up into a mess.

The chamber beyond is a few hundred meters tall and wide, so vast even her enhanced eyesight can’t pick everything apart in the dark, and there are perhaps hundreds of tunnel entrances sprouting all along it, like walking into a den of worms. Each tunnel is a dark maw, some of them directly vertical, and then-

No. Not vertical. The Flesh notices before the Mask; every way is the way out. Every way is the way in. In the excavated hole they emerge into, every tunnel is somehow, simultaneously, horizontal. The sensation begins to give her a headache… but then stops. The Flesh can track the changes, feel the movement of strange axis and spatial warping, and the Mask doesn’t need to track it. They just need to track all the targets in it.

And there is much to track.

She emerges out into the warped space, falling in a spectrum of directions, and counts the bodies.

Blue and orange robes decorate the ground, but are outnumbered by the independents. She sees the beast-tamer sitting with her legs dangling from one of the tunnels, her pack surrounding her, on edge but out of the fight. She sees the ax-wielder, one arm missing, three of his halberd-axes orbiting him, sweating violently and breathing hard. She sees the wielder of blood-lightning, his Qi evaporating into arcing branches of crimson as his guts spiral out from the wound where his stomach used to be.

She doesn’t see Kaena. She doesn’t see Jun Vral.

But she smells peaches and serpents.

Priorities, then.

There are a dozen cultivators here, the majority of what remained from the arena, and the majority of them are dressed in Sect robes. The Unearthly Depths and Stone Divers sect sit at opposite ends of the impromptu gravity dome, each holding two or three tunnels, but between them, the ax-wielder, growling sharply at her arrival, and another cultivator, the one who used shadow and radiance in equal measure.

She twists her body and falls to the “ceiling” of the chamber, anchoring her claws into the stone to drag herself up the last few meters as gravity shifts with the angles of the chamber. Looking down, perched there, she unfurls her snout and lets her human face look down at the crowd, tracking the corpses and the bloody cultivators in the center of it all, watched dispassionately by the sects to either side.

“Is this what the noble clans of Cragend call honor?” The Mask asks, voice dissonant and echoing strangely. “Bullying the weak? Forcing fights to continue, even after our fall into this place? Ignoring the greater threats around us for the sake of a bloody show?”

Even as she speaks, she tracks them, looking across a dozen faces. They look… drawn. Hungry. Cultivators can go for weeks without eating if need be, depending on their realm, but everyone here, with the exception of a few of the lesser elders of the sects, look tired, malnourished. Their robes hang on them, and the looks in their eyes… they look empty, almost all. She sees only flickers of shame in some.

“Jin Rou,” she says, singling out the Stone Diver beside the older, wizened elder he stands behind. “All your claims of the pursuit of justice, of good. Is this what it comes to? A little time in the dark, and you join in on death games?”

He shrugs, the movement listless. “I’m-”

And stops as the elder puts a hand out, glaring up at her.

“Who are you to question my junior?” he asks, his voice a bit raspy but strong. “A little time in the dark, you claim- perhaps for monstrous things like you, such is an easy sin to bear. But there is not enough in resources to support us all here as we pursue an exit, and we will not stand traitors in our midst.”

“Traitors? I see. What a curious thing, that so many of the traitors I see fallen here owe no allegiance to you.”

Stolen novel; please report.

The fighters, both pausing, facing each other across the tunnels, both look down. The ax-wielder isn’t looking great, his physique compromised by what looks like a very recent loss of a limb (yeah, off to the right, diagonal-down, there it is).

“Days in the dark,” says one of the Unearthly Depths sect members. “They went mad. Demanded…”

“Only the unreasonable, I’m sure,” Raika says.

Something stirs in her. Her core. Already a day of work into healing, but not gone, not absent, just refocused. But the moment… calls to her.

“Ask your whore,” one of the Stone Divers snarls. “They are the one that-”

“They,” Kaena says, stepping past one of the Unearthly Depths members, “simply pointed out we don’t have the resources to support us all. And that some among us are more a threat to the whole than others.”

Their eyes look up and meet Raika’s.

Kaena… they haven’t suffered as much as the others, visibly, less starved or perhaps better at covering it up. Their Qi smells… weak. Barely a whiff, where usually it would be a thick and fragrant thing. They don’t seem particularly healthy.

And Raika knows, better than anyone, that they didn’t just do anything.

The core of who she is awakens.

“Enough,” she whispers in a voice that thrums.

“There are greater beasts here,” she whispers. “Screaming things in the dark. Eyes that whisper and feed on the stone that sups your blood and drinks your strength. And you spend your time on this.”

She feels hackles being raised, Qi beginning to circulate, but-

Not fast enough.

She launches from the wall and lands between the Jin Rou and the Stone Divers elder. They both react near-instantly, already moving to respond before she had leapt, but she is shaped unlike a human, and they do not know her. Stone rises from the walls around them, manifest in a rich orange texture from the elder’s Qi-

She warps her spine, cracks into her bones, controls all that needs to be controlled even as the Flesh protests, to put her claws into the elder cheek.

His face goes pale, his eyes wide, the voices around them begin to yell- and she just sort of looks at him.

It is… easy. Like pulling apart wood. Tough, but doable. She feels his Qi move in response, locking up his blood flow to the wound… but it’s small. He’s just… weakened. An old man, watching people kill each other and calling it proper.

Before the blood has hit the wall, she has moved again. Left their tunnel entirely, leaving the five Stone Divers to scramble towards their elder and begin to raise stone and reshape it into defenses- but she’s already left them behind, sprinting and ripping through stone all the way to where the fighters stand, confused and on edge (and, in the case of the ax-wielder, near bleeding out). They both react defensively, expecting her attack, Qi beginning to circulate-

She launches herself again, at a new angle, into the Unearthly Depths members.

She doesn’t bother looking for the eldest this time. Many of them look similar ages, and it’s always hard to tell with cultivators.

She makes eye contact with Kaena for a moment before she slashes a clawmark into the face of the one with the strongest-smelling Qi in the bunch.

Before they can retaliate she’s left their tunnel again, anchoring herself to the stone and making her walk look almost languid as she starts back up to the “ceiling”.

“Shame. Like fucking children. Scared, in the dark. You don’t get to start making bad choices just because something hurts. You move forward if you can, and wait if you can’t. You don’t do… this.”

She looks down at them all, most of them on edge, weakened but ready to attack… and laughs.

Long. Slow. Loud, in the echoing space.

Fuck. That… that felt right to say. It felt true, deep down.

“There are greater horrors here. I intend to find them and leave this place, over their blood if need be. You’re free to join me. You are not free to waste lives telling your ‘lessers’ to kill each other for whatever bullshit reason you might have. Walk forward, now… or I aim for the throat next time.”

A dozen cultivators. Two sects, one adept at shaping stone. If they fought her, her best chance would be to escape, not to stay and fight.

But fuck, if the challenge doesn’t feel right to put into place.

She feels her core turn to rest. It feels larger now, better, like there’s less strain in her self-image, but it’s not needed anymore. The Mask watches for reactions, tracks their movements and subtle changes.

Kaena is first to move. They step forward, walking past the others-

And is stopped by a hand on their arm.

“We’re not done here. The truth remains.”

Raika turns her head to face the Unearthly Depths sect member who spoke, someone who’s name she hasn’t bothered to learn. Her armor ripples, a chittering sound coming low and quiet from it.

“We-” the cultivator gulps, his dark blue robes highlighting how pale he looks. “Honorable Kaena has spoken true to us, and we have kept our oaths of alliance to the Empire, even here. This place, it’s… it’s eating away at us. We can’t stop moving, can’t rest. We don’t have enough food or resources to keep all of us strong, and we need to-”

“I am yet to hear something other than an excuse,” Raika says, quiet. “You have exactly one breath to take your hand off my friend.”

She leaves the threat hanging.

A second passes, and the Flesh ripples in hunger and rage and…

And the cultivator lets go.

“Good boy,” she whispers, and laughs a bit at his face when she says it.

Kaena steps out of the tunnel they’re in, their cultivation more than enough to ensure they can leap “down”, and Raika reaches out. She catches them in her claws, and pulls them close.

She looks down at her ally. Kaena looks back at her, and for once, their face… they’re not smiling. They look up at her, and Raika sees a soft mixture of concern and relief.

“Didn’t know how… together you’d be,” Kaena says, quietly.

“We’ll talk about it later,” Raika whispers. “We’ll talk about this later, too.”

Kaena’s expression closes, but they nod anyways.

She places them in one of the tunnel, and extends her hands wide.

Hmm. Interesting. She’d thought to guide them, maybe, use them as tools to push forward…

But it’s not clear if she can. The Mask, for all her talents, isn’t ignorant of her faults, and managing this many strings of relationships at once, this complex a weave of fear and politics… it’s not in their current skillset.

They notice the hesitation. They can’t not. She hears her allies walking down the hallways towards her, and comes to a different conclusion.

“I’m going on a hunt. There are monsters in this place, and I do not believe this trap cannot be escaped. I’m taking the ones I can use. So tell me, right here and now, why I should bother dragging any of you out of the dark.”

Shi Cho, Yun Ka and Shapefixit arrive maybe a moment after and look around, getting a feel for the chaos.

“It would seem we missed the excitement!” Yun Ka says.

“Not quite,” whisper the shadows, as eyes begin to open.