“Well, well, well,” whisper the shadows. “What a joy. I knew you’d lived, wolf. What a joy it is to be right.”
“As for the rest of you!”
A dozen, then a hundred, then double that number of eyes blink open wetly from the dark.
“Hello! So good to see you all again. We have all our players in place! And already killing each other! It’s a joy. This has been a good month for me, goodness. So many trapped little rats.”
Raika growls, the Flesh snapping out and clawing out one of the eyes… and swimming through it, touching nothing but shadow.
“Haha! None of that, dearie. I’ll be out of all your hair in a moment, I promise. I just came to make an offer!”
At this, the cultivators all turn to each other, immediately on edge, looking for who might take an offered deal- or wondering if they would themselves.
Quietly, she hears Rei Ji mumble something along the lines of “that absolute bitch”.
“It’s quite simple. In lieu of more boring minds prevailing, I’ll give… say, five spots. That should motivate you little sect fellows properly. Five tickets out of the tunnels, into the freedom of open air.
“The five in question just need to kill at least one other person.”
The silence gets louder in the space.
“Anyone, really! Friend, foe, doesn’t matter to me. Kill someone, and be one of the last surviving five, and you get to go free. Ooooor… follow the murderous monster that I’m a huge fan of into the dark, hunting for me, and try your luck. Either way I win, so honestly, do what you please. I am the dark, here. You are the bugs trapped in my shadows. Squirm for me, and I let my new favorites go.”
And then the eyes close.
The chamber is quiet for a while. No one says anything.
Raika nods.
“Alright. Fuck this, then.”
Leaping, she throws herself to her allies, leaving Kaena temporarily on their own.
She scoops Taran out of Yun Ka’s arms, nodding to the tunnel she was just at. “Meet up with Kaena. Grabbing two more. Shi Cho, smokescreen, keep attacks at arms length, Shapefixit, guide the other when they need help moving. Go.”
She turns just in time to block the growing scent of aquatic Qi rushing at her.
It’s what’s-his-face, the one she cut the cheek of to shame. He moves fast and hard, stronger than the others though weakened, a fist coming for her face-
She closes her maw back over her “face”, five different eyes swiveling to look into his and blacksteel fangs closing over the incoming blow.
Before he can pull back she has his hand, severed and bleeding, and he screams, the sound echoing through the tunnels and agonizing on the ears of even regular cultivators. She’s barely swallowed (it tastes of deep water and algae blooms, of joyous life and encroaching death, it tastes delicious) before he tries to pull back, still screaming, his Qi cycling- and she digs her claws into his stomach, ripping and tearing.
An orthodox cultivator needs Qi to empower their body. As the realms grow, the body grows with them, but it’s often a secondary thing, absorbing ambient Qi and strengthened by its improved quality as its inhabitant grows and learns higher skill and techniques.
Raika’s Flesh has drunk from it, raw and bloody, screaming and burning and scraping against reality in her veins and bones and lungs.
He doesn’t enhance his stomach’s durability in time before she rips out a long, dangling string of intestines.
“One down!” the shadows cheer, like a quiet and strange gaggle of children echoing down the tunnels.
As good a confirmation as any, but… Raika chooses to bite out the throat of the gurgling cultivator anyways.
To the Mask, it’s faster that way. To the Flesh, it’s tasty. To the part of her that goes deeper… there is something a bit insulting about letting the Witch lay claim to anything. And leaving the cultivator to choke on his own blood is… unappealing. Something in her prefers that the end come quicker for him.
Important to note. It adds to the core of her, swirling about reforming identity.
The rest of the chamber, of course, goes fucking insane.
Three of the Unearthly Depths sect fly at her, all three roaring and yelling and saying all sorts of honorable things, but she’s hardly paying attention. They can hurt her, or- no, the Flesh won’t let that happen, it’s just that the Mask can spend time focusing elsewhere.
She sees Jin Rou pulling some of his sect members away, sees the independent cultivator facing down the wounded ax-wielder, sees the beast tamer just smiling and watching, even as the last members of the Unearthly Depths and two Stone Divers sprint for Yun Ka, Shapefixit and Shi Cho-
Priorities.
The Flesh dodges, moves itself away and apart and around, tracking instinct and experience in equal measure used without conscious thought to avoid the attacks. It’s imperfect, an occasional hit coming through, but she turns away from the impacts, armored plating taking up a large chunk of the damage. They’re weak, disoriented, but they work in tandem, but for the moment they hold her back, martial arts flowing from one blow to another and leaving just enough room for a fellow to move in and strike. She blocks, weaves, turning armored edges and bony spikes against the blows so they cut themselves when they do hit her, and tries to see how her allies are doing.
Kaena is still, lips pressed in a line, concern and frustration warring for supremacy on their features, but the others are doing fairly well. Yun Ka, still wounded from the arena fight and carrying Taran, focuses on using her many mechanical limbs to carry her across the chamber’s weird spatial rules towards Kaena, but Shapefixit, burning into what smells like a decent chunk of her reserves, almost swims through the stone. More like skimming over mud, truth be told, but she doesn’t seem nearly as disoriented as any of the others, and is managing to throw off waves of stone that mess with the Stone Divers techniques, and Shi Cho covers them in a field of glowing bugs that make their defense more effective. They might need help finishing off their opponents, but she-
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
Fuck. The ax-wielder is struggling, blood loss slowing him, and Jin Rou is moving away, deeper into the tunnels. She needs to hurry. She turns to the cultivators, tries to-
Mmh. Something in her doesn’t want to kill them. Any wound, here, would probably leave them crippled and dying, fresh meat for the tunnels, leaving her minimal options. She tries to keep dodging, wondering how long it will take for them to tire-
But her allies are in trouble, too. Outside Shi Cho, who has his hands full blocking off attacks and coordinating his swarm, they’re not fighters, and Shapefixit is at a disadvantage in this strange material. She needs to hurry.
So… she takes a step back.
The Flesh doesn’t care, reacting to danger and aggression and moving them away from the strikes- but the Mask and her inner self turn to each other.
There’s no time for words. Just thought, transferred between different parts of the whole.
She doesn’t want to kill them. Killing them is, other than the most efficient possible result, incredibly difficult to avoid. Her allies need help. Her enemies, at this point, aren’t exactly willing to surrender to her. And these are cultivators, not peasants. But their conditions aren’t much better, trapped and afraid.
A moral judgment would take too long, the part of her that is her Mask says. Too complicated. Too… impossible to know. Too much exists in each and every person to truly know if they’re good or bad, deserving or not.
But it’s a personal failing to disregard others because it’s hard. They didn’t ask to be stuck in the tunnels, didn’t… didn’t step forward to stop the fighting. Or maybe did, before she arrived.
It’s too much.
They’re attacking her. They attacked her first. Claims of honor, or fear, or what have you, are secondary to that. And their friends are attacking her allies, one of whom is carrying an unconscious, powerless person. Whatever reason they decide for that… that’s a solid moral damnation there.
And, the Mask ‘says’, more importantly than morality, they’re keeping her from helping the people who need her. Who she brought here. Who she’s trying to protect.
Yes. That part is true.
It is not a comfortable conclusion… but it doesn’t rest heavy, either. A part of her remembers glimpses of pitchforks and masks, of scarves and soft flesh that yielded so, so easy… but this doesn’t feel the same as whatever that memory might be. There’s unjust death, there’s murder, and then there’s death which is chosen, established, and affirmed. She doesn’t want to kill them, but she will. She chooses to. She’s not blameless in their aggression, isn’t blameless in their fear or circumstances… but she can choose to do better next time, and not be trapped in indecision now.
She rises from the near-animalistic dodges she’s been using, steps forward from the tunnel they were pushing her into, and whips an arm forward, the longest claw on it cutting cleanly through the jugular of the closest of the three. One of the two behind him yells, eyes wide, screaming in fear or outrage, and grabs hold of the falling cultivator, but his fellow simply firms her jaw and throws herself forward. Her next blow slams into Raika’s stomach, pushing Qi into her- and stopping, the technique hitting a wall of saturated flesh and cursed skin that blunts it to nothing.
Two arms extend through her rib cage, and two more come over Raika’s shoulders to pierce the soft matter behind her eyes.
“Hardly leaving room for anyone else!” the Witch’s voice laughs, the air rippling with her mirth.
The third cultivator screams, his Qi exploding forth into a stream of water so dark it looks like blood, refined into a diamond-cutting edge by pressure and rage-
He manages to cut a solid chunk out of one shoulder before she reaches him, weaving through the tunnel and stepping past him as a claw takes his head off his shoulders.
Was she always this strong? Was it always this easy?
The Flesh whispers of faint hunger, and before the Mask thinks to stop it, opens her arm like a flower, pulling the severed head into it and crushing it beneath armor, bone and muscle, until slurry is all that remains, dragged by an ever-Changing anatomy into her stomach.
It tastes of fear, of crushing deep, of overwhelming dark beneath oceans. It takes genuine effort not to turn back and take another bite.
Her pack needs them.
She sprints out of the tunnel. One of the Stone Divers is screaming, his flesh crawling with swarming, biting things, and Shapefixit seems to be just barely holding back the second Diver and the Unearthly Sects cultivator. They have a moment.
Raika alters her momentum harshly enough that she feels her spine strain at the movement and launches herself along strange angles into the fight ‘below’.
The ax-wielder is struggling, two of his glowing weapons gone inert and embedded into stone, the last one held in his hands. The radiant-shadow cultivator is advancing, his face set, his scent grim and determined-
He doesn’t quite react in time when she grabs his skull.
In a copy of the move she used on the ax wielder, she transfers all her inertia on an arc, anchoring her claw into the "ground" and crushing the cultivator’s skull against the stone.
He’s not as physically tough as the ax-cultivator. He attacked a weakened enemy immediately. She doesn’t like him. It’s not the best set of reasons to kill someone, and she knows it, but the danger of leaving him alive behind her or the possibility that he might die slow from brain damage or being used by one of the other cultivators… well. It’s enough reason.
She can find out how she feels about it after.
She lifts him up one more time, and this time when she brings his head down, it cracks open messily.
The Flesh lifts her hand, and licks some of the matter of its edges.
She turns to look at the the ax-wielder, the Mask’s face bloodied, a long, sinuous tongue reaching out beneath and past it and licking the brain down a throat behind it.
“You look good at carrying things,” the Mask says, her lips moving even as the Flesh drinks down its prey. “Interested in a job?”
He’s pale, his missing arm bandaged with torn robes and tourniqueted poorly… but his eyes are clear as he looks at her, angled nightmarishly over the radiant-shadow cultivator’s corpse.
“Will you eat me if I say no?” he asks, his voice deep and resonant.
She frowns, looking down into her own maw and ‘tsk’ing at it to get it back under control. The Flesh grumbles, but, sated, calms, until it looks more like her face is a face, and not… well, not a flesh-Mask in the back of her throat.
“No. I have other things to be doing. You fought well, and don’t seem a total asshole. And you’re not a threat. Good combination right now.”
He says nothing… and eventually laughs, his eyes a little hysterical.
“Sure. Why not.”
She nods. “Good. Go to the others. Pick up your arm on the way. I could use a snack.”
He pales further, and she wonders if he got the joke.
The Flesh complains that it definitely shouldn’t be a joke, and he isn’t using it anyways.
She doesn’t bother to see if he listens, taking off along the curve of the charnel house towards the Stone Divers.
Some of them have retreated further, but a few are only moving now, watching the fights to get a feel for what’s occurring. In the oppressive Qi presence and vitality-draining environment they’ve been in, it’s likely they found it more reliable to see things themselves than sense the results of the battle from afar. Still, with nearly all of the Unearthly Depths members wiped out, an independent clearly recruited or left unbothered, and the fight still ongoing with the two members that went for Yun Ka, Shapefixit and Shi Cho…
Well. They’re trying to retreat pretty quick.
Jin Rou and his two remaining sect-siblings back away from the entrance to the tunnel they’ve chosen, and start to close it off- and she stabs a hand through one of the still-reforming stone blocks, aim for where its thinnest and reaching an arm through it, Mask staring through the hole she’s made.
“Jin Rou!” she snarls, letting her voice echo. “Come with me, and I let your sect-siblings live. Run, now, and if you make it out of this place, I will hunt you down.”
“Fuck you!” he roars. “All this fucking mess is as much on you as it is on the Witch. If you hadn’t-”
“You guide me to the Witch, and we all leave. You stay in there, and your best chance is to kill each other and hope my group dies before this place drinks you dry.”
The stone forming around the entrance slows, and she takes the opportunity to rip her arm free again, widening the hole. The Mask looks into the widened gap, smiling very humanly, showing very little teeth.
“Five spots. And I’ve got six teammates. Do the math.”
The two Stone Divers turn to Rei Ji. Look to each other. Back to him.
He stays very still, eyes locked onto her through the gap.
“Fucking Imperials,” he hisses.
“Chin up, honorable Jin Rou. If we get back before my friends kill your sect members, you can even keep them.”