Raika coughs, violently, and long-quiet instincts rear up to celebrate that fact; if she’s coughing, she’s still alive, and you can do things if you’re alive.
She mostly smells exploded brick and burning wood, but the smell of Li Shu comes in loud and clear, almost oppressive like a blanket around them. She can see why; it’s not a shielding technique or anything of the sort, but the healer still extended an aura of her Qi out around her, like a proto-cushion, pushing away the debris. The smell of flowers and sterile metal is strong enough to make her sneeze mid-cough, which is not much fun at all, but somehow even without a shielding skill or a high realm to her name Raika can tell it somehow kept her from getting hurt.
Is the smell more than just personality? Does amount of Qi influence it? Does the smell indicate qualities?
She shakes her head, an action that almost blinds her with how bad it hurts; between a burst eardrum from the explosion and a concussion from the blast, she’s lucky to be awake. She blinks away the pain and tries to find Li Shu in the haze, first instinct being to make sure she’s alright. The girl’s an idiot and Raika wouldn’t put it past her to protect the cripple first, and she refuses to believe that she’s not ok but she needs to know.
She’s inside the remains of a building, one entire half of it collapsed and the other with a gaping hole through the middle of it, through which she can smell that magnesium and ozone fire smell. All around her is what remains of a well to-do restaurant, tables overturned, a fire in the kitchen and the smell of hot oil spreading, and throughout all the wood debris and smoke and dust, she can see crimson points spread throughout. There were people in this place, those who came in from the front door and were sitting here enjoying a meal on a lovely day, and while her brain puts their deaths somewhere far less important than the fact she has to find Li Shu and whatever hit them, she’s still glad she can’t see the bodies clearly.
“Li Shu!” she croaks, coughing violently as she does. Cries of alarm and distress are sounding out through the hole behind her, but she doesn’t hear nearly as many voices as she thinks there should be. “Li Shu!”
“Here!” a voice coughs weakly, far too soft and disoriented for Raika not to turn to the sound and move. Her crutch is lost somewhere, thrown clear in the blast, but she manages to limp heavily for a few steps long enough to grab a chair. It isn’t exactly convenient, but she staggers from one bit of rubble to the other, heading towards the back wall where she heard the voice.
“Here!” she hears again, when she almost steps over a piece of what she thought was snow blasted into the building. She’s more grey than white now, her robes sullied in the blast even with her Qi shielding them. She’s standing over someone, and it doesn’t take weird senses or years of battle to recognize the fact that the body is smaller than it should be, and the ropey blur leaking out their middle smells more like rot and offal already than fresh, living blood.
Li Shu crouches over them anyways, breathing hard, eyes unfocused, a mix of panic and effort in her face, her arms stained red up past the elbows. Raika doesn’t think that this is the first body she’s tried to save, but… the restaurant is quiet, if not for the crumbling of debris and falling stones.
“Go back,” Raika rasps, the dust making it hard for her to even breathe. “Back to courtyard-” cough cough- “more people. Open. More might need help. Here it’s- (cough) too late. Go.”
Li Shu just sits there, hands dripping bright red. A dollop of crimson falls from her, and the sound of it is loud enough that she seems to shiver and start a bit in surprise. She looks down at her hands, eyes wide, and slowly, they start to tremble. She starts breathing hard, harder, panting, hyperventilating, hands shaking-
Raika hits her in the back of the head with a chair.
It’s mostly disintegrated, to be fair, and she can’t exactly swing the damn thing, but she manages to lift and pivot, at least. It shatters on impact, splinters falling all around her. She’s a cultivator, of course; entry as a healer into a Sect requires no less, and working as a healer almost entirely depends on having at least a slightly higher than normal amount of Qi. What’s a fragile wooden chair to a cultivator?
Exactly what this one needs to be shocked back to her senses, it would seem.
She blinks, eyes owlishly wide, mouth open in shock. “Move!” Raika snarls, waving her arm back at the collapsed wall through which the too-quiet courtyard can be heard. “Get off your ass and move, Li Shu!”
The healer almost bounces to her feet, more used to following orders especially in times of crises. Raika can’t help but offer up a prayer of thanks to Rui Ka for putting some spine in the girl, even if she still needs a firm hand. She nods, still blinking in a daze, but a shove from Raika, even weak as a child, is enough to get her running back towards the impact crater, towards where the most people who need help will be.
Raika turns out towards the hole where she can smell Qen Hou instead.
Barely any medical training, no Qi, and minimal mobility do not make a useful healer’s aide, and she’d be less than useless even if she did hobble out there. She’s not a healer, simple as that, but maybe she can get Qen Hou back on his feet and into the fight. Best case scenario, she can distract whatever he’s fighting enough to get him to land a solid hit.
And even with a burst eardrum, the sounds of the fight remain.
Through the hole in the side of the restaurant, she hears an impact, the sound of another wall of wood and stone shattering and spraying debris everywhere, the sounds of screaming following a moment after. She steps through after the smell of the magnesium fire, and something… slimier, like old, spoilt algae and something not unlike the smell of a cold, freezing cold evening.
It takes a minute of stumbling, and crawling over wreckage, and outright dragging herself one-armed through parts of the restaurant, but she makes it to the wall in time to see what’s happening. The stars above still dance, streamers of celestial tears wrapping the night sky tight, but in the light of the fires below their colors seem almost a bit muted, as if earthly horrors are reflecting light against them. Between the dancing fairy lights and the fluttering, ash-cloaked flags still fluttering, the sight looks like a parody of only moments before, people in clothes colored purely in red, ash white and soot black cowering and running for their lives, trying to drag each other to safety as two impossible, inhuman things try to rip each other apart in the streets, every unblocked blow sending more devastation through walls and homes and soft, squishy bodies like balloons made of blood.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
She can’t follow their movements. Even if her eyes were perfect, without any cultivation there’s simply no way for a mortal to follow a fight between cultivators going all out, and Qen Hou, arrogant shithead or not, is someone that she might have had to take seriously back in her prime. In the center of the street, going back and forth, neither giving an inch, are two impossible blurs of color and violence. One is launched through a small shrine and flies back fast enough to shove the other back a good ten feet, only to have the same movement returned, only for them to blur together and leave a crater on the side of the road, then on the other side, and-
Again that smell, like an empty puppet with a rock inside, filled with mold and mildew and slimy wet rot. It burns wrong, the smell of the ozone and fire matching it and coming off muted and full of must. A moment later, she’s able to follow the fight again, because Qen Hou makes a crater not ten feet from her when he lands.
“You dare!” he howls, scrambling back to his feet. “Worthless fool, who are you to-”
He doesn’t finish before something has him by the throat.
It is dressed in robes, but they’re purely black, edges outlined in stark, painfully bright white. It’s face and hands, every inch of exposed skin, is covered entirely by pitch-black bandages, the upper half of its head covered in a crown of metal thorns and screws that leak black droplets from insertion points. Every other detail blends together, a mix of bad eyesight and how quickly it crushes Qen Hou into the ground. It uses barely any Qi to do it, the smell of it a flat constant the entire time she’s been feeling it, but it’s still strong enough that the late Formation stage cultivator has his words completely choked off.
His Qi roars up in a conflagration, a vicious burst of magenta flame that scorches the air in every direction and detonates against the ground, launching the bandaged figure away. He roars, getting to his feet in an instant as he grabs hold of the roaring flame. He grips it like a cloak, throwing it about himself until he is clad in robes of burning violet and red, his eyes glowing with power, the remnants of loose Qi gathered finally into something akin to a spear or a staff of some sort.
The bandaged figure does not seem intimidated. If anything, the sight of qi gets it moving even faster, that impossibly musty, rotten-plant smell wrapped around… a block of ice? Salt? Moving from the far end of the street where it was thrown to right up in Qen Hou’s face in less time than it takes for her to blink. A flurry of blows and movement, a wave of concussive shocks that might be individual impacts rings out through the space, glass shattering, paper blown apart and away, the few eardrums unbroken shattering with bursts of blood and silent screams.
Qen Hou comes out on top, barely, the staff of fire scoring a burning cut a few inches deep into the figure’s shoulder. It stumbles back but does not cry out, arm going limp.
But not at the depth of the cut, Raika realizes; the bandage, burnt and cut off the surface of the shoulder, snaps with a burst of the mildew smell, going entirely still. Qen Hou notices too, a burst of movement that warps the air and sends embers to catch alight on paper and wood all around. Staff first, he shifts half an inch down, the bandaged figure’s other hand swinging and missing by millimeters, and then light flares, and the figure is catching aflame entirely, the center of its body now a gaping hole dripping molten bone and metal and-
The smell. The mildew is burnt, lit into ozone and heat, evaporating moment by moment, but the smell behind it, the smell it was wrapped around, it comes across so fucking strong, a moment of something like bright, violently clear water, like ice water just beginning to steam, like freshly chiseled stone washed in a spring that has never seen light. It makes no sense, half of these things aren’t smells for fucks sake, but it’s so goddamn loud somehow.
Qen Hou is saying something, but she’s not listening, eardrums broken or not. His mouth is moving, trying to say something, and he even catches her eye as she walks closer, coming out of the hole he originally got blasted through and limping out into the street. He crows something, as arrogant as ever, head to the heavens like he doesn’t even need to look at his fallen foe. He doesn’t look at it, isn’t paying attention, how can he not smell that, it’s like it’s been shoved six inches up her fucking nose-
The thing shifts beneath him. In the fading light of the stars and the crackling magenta fires all around, she sees the bandages swirl like snakes, the flesh beneath pale and bloated and ringed with metal inserts, like coins with holes in them, spikes implanted through them like acupuncture. The bandages writhe like worms and snakes, slowly getting slower, but whatever is beneath, whatever might once have been human but now looks like black metal and iron and silver veins and spongy, snow-white flesh that is rippling, in waves, in pulses, like a puddle with something beneath it ready to rise-
Qen Hou notices too late. It’s lucky for him, then, that she is already there.
It’s like it was using the body like an egg or a cocoon, and the soft flesh falls apart around it like a flower, blossoming open so that what served temporarily as bones can emerge. It looks like a squid, a crab, and a sword, all in one, all sharp edges and black steel and at the center of it, like an eye or an anchor or shrapnel, is a single piece of perfect white marble.
And then she has her fucking hand around it.
She feels something drain, immediately, like someone has slit open a vein and let it gush. Qen Hou says something, loudly enough and with enough Qi that she can feel the vibrations and the waves of the smell coming off his words, even if she can’t hear the words themselves, but she doesn’t care.
The drain isn’t enough to kill her. She feels empty, like her heart is stuttering, like her lungs are fluttering and barely able to draw breath, like everything down to her bones is turning molten and weak, but she does not let go because it is not enough to kill her.
“You knocked me through a wall,” she snarls, feeling the words, feeling the heat in them and the breath in them and the flow of them through her system, dying little wisps of nothing that she’s grown used to living on swirling and too small to be pulled by the draining thing of black and steel and perfect white. “No one knocks me through a wall without paying, squid-cunt.”
And it squirms, and it writhes, and it is cutting pieces off her and off her hand and she still has fingers so she does not let go, and she is not dead so she does not let go, and Qen Hou is screaming and the air is warm around her and she does not let go and-
And it’s slowing. In the edges of her sight, she can see it’s tendrils still squirming, drinking the fire and the ozone and the color and the heat, but where she is, in her hand, it has nothing to drink, and the smell of the cold and the marble is not a smell of substance it is a smell of solid absence and this thing is not that eye, it cannot live off it. But it is still fighting back and cutting her and she is not about to hold onto something squirming just to hold it, and she only has one hand, and Qen Hou is no fucking help considering he’s still blasting fire at the thing even as it makes it more active.
So she drags it to her face, right at the point where the thin stilettos of metal latch onto the white stone, and grabs it with her teeth. She pulls her head back, straining hard, pulling on it with her whole body, twisted spine tensed, hand pushing the thing away even as her blood makes her grip slippery… but it’s enough, and she hears something go tink as it breaks.
And then the whole thing goes limp as the white stone shifts out of place, half-dozen tendrils of metal razors simply falling quiet.
The heat is enough that she can literally feel her hair crisping and her skin burning, but she still turns, head tall, to stare at the magenta-red clad figure off to the side, his eyes wide.
She spits on the ground off to one side. “Told you,” she rasps, throat heavy, body limp and heavy; “too tough to kill.”
Then she passes out for the second time in ten minutes.