The monsters are… they don’t look alive. Spirit beasts, corpse-constructs, even golems that Raika has seen all at least seemed to have functional pieces, logic behind their construction, sense behind their makeup, abstract thought it may have been. These things hold no such limitations.
She sees faces that are only a single, gaping, cyclopean eye, and watches as that eye literally drinks in a smaller creature, a bundle of mismatched limbs- and then grows a version of those same limbs, massive eyes on a vaguely canine body with a dozen human legs spawning from it in random angles. Another moves like a poorly-tied bundle of eels, spasming across the floor, writhing and squirming like a rat-king made entirely of oil-slick flesh. One looks like a bundle of hair or webbing surrounding a wet, jiggling bundle of eyes, slick jelly dripping viscously onto the ground as the hair cuts into and through them bloodlessly.
Ax stands back, seeming to focus on keeping his cargo of Yun Ka, Taran and Kaena safe- but his ax starts to shine, its sibling emerging from his spatial ring and beginning to orbit him as Yun Ka shakes herself awake and puts her mechanical limbs back to good use. Shi Cho has his swarm rising in a cloud, Shapefixit crouches in the backline, her hands digging wetly into the stone, and Raika, of course, stands on the frontline, claws out, edges ready.
The first line of abominations reaches her, the sounds of footsteps and squelching the only noise they make- and cuts right through, feeling absolutely nothing as her claws pass through them like air.
And then one of them touches her, and she feels part of her flesh turn to shadow. Literally.
Part of her armor plating literally falls into ooze, collapsed into shadowy matter that adds to its host- but only a piece. It doesn’t dig down into the muscle, her Qi density possibly getting in the way- but it still took a chunk out of her without even really trying.
Raika is getting fucking tired of shit that can just cut through her body like its nothing.
The others fare a bit better as Yun Ka’s diagram flares back into life, and many of the closest monsters start to fall limp or even begin to evaporate in the jade light- but many more simply consume the weakest of those and struggle onwards, crawling, spiraling, squelching forward. They’re not powerful, not fast, but Ax demonstrates the issue beautifully- in Yun Ka’s formation, with his Qi-infused and glowing ax, he cuts through one of them, the air squealing out from its severed pieces. A second blow comes around with the ax in his hand, not infused by technique- and barely slices one of the creatures, the light from the formation pushing a bit further into it but no more.
Is that it? Light? Or Qi? Maybe both, but-
Another wave approaches rolls and slithers and coils and crawls from the dark, and nearly all of them avoid Raika entirely. She tries again, even as they roll past, to cut into one- and gets the experience of part of her claws dissolving into the same black ooze that makes up their bodies, utterly undamaged.
They’re slow, maneuver poorly, and those that are getting struck by attacks with any sort of light to them are falling quickly (Shi Cho’s fireflies are absolutely burning through them on the side he’s defending, weaving through them and leaving them full of holes). In an open field, they’d be borderline useless, and against someone with a light-based or Qi-centric defensive artifact, they might be entirely powerless.
But here, now? With both the side tunnels swarming with them and their entry point gone? Their numbers and the lethality of their touch is all that’s needed to cause problems.
Alright then. Time to try something else.
Raika flexes her jaws, deploying out her set of blacksteel fangs, and with a thought, the Flesh moves them onto her hand as replacements for the claws, leaving one limb festooned with black, barbed metal. She swipes her hand through one of the creatures, preparing to rip it apart-
It does fall apart. Messily. She swipes through it and leaves a spatter-pattern against the back wall- and loses half her hand in the process, the blacksteel remaining intact while the flesh on the back of her hand and palm all simply fall apart into more shadow. It doesn’t even hurt when it happens; the transformation is instantaneous, and only after it’s gone is there a sharp spike of pain as the Flesh recognizes the parts that are missing.
So. Partial success. She doesn’t have the Qi to be regrowing herself from scratch this time, though.
But… does she need to?
She thinks back to the Truth she swallowed, so very long ago. Her blacksteel teeth didn’t just happen as if by magic; she took part of a dangerous, abstract idea into herself, and then adapted her body and soul to it and vice versa. From the concept of entropy and death, she shaped the concepts of ending-by-predation, of the moment where life becomes food. Only from there did it manifest into the blacksteel, her body latching to the idea of the final bite of the hunt and growing in response.
But she hasn’t touched it much since. Months, trapped in the Imperial Palace, unable to do much at all… was it Zhoulong? His influence, severing from her her own thoughts, especially one relating to her ability to “eat” things? Or was it simply her, overwhelmed, focusing on what she felt she could and letting the rest be put aside where difficult things go? She’d thought of her strengths, of her lacks, but not of what needed to change, not really. Not quite content, but close in a painful way, a sort of pain that can become comfortable. She sparred. She schemed for freedom, never thinking it would properly be, because she didn’t deserve it. She grew stronger, but only in the ways she already knew she could.
She didn’t think about how good his flesh had tasted. Hadn’t reflected on what it meant. But people can’t eat people, usually. Madness disease from poorly tended human flesh is well recorded, and drinking too much blood makes most humans vomit… but she’d felt only ecstasy after that first bite. Had she avoided the thought? Feared losing more of herself, feared a loss of control to hunger?
Does it matter? She lost herself plenty to worse things by now.
She’s not human anymore.
The Flesh seems to release a slight note of tension, a seed of frustration finally falling away. The Mask couldn’t agree more, satisfaction at the realization and the practical opportunities it generates ringing clear through their shared mind. She is a predatory thing whose stomach can hold and digest souls. She has fangs of death itself. She can survive being cut to so many pieces that none held more weight than two fists. She currently has four arms, half of a tail, and a chitinous exoskeleton, nevermind her head-shape and all its many jaws and eyes. She is a predator, not because she must be, or because it was inevitable, but because she accepted the violence of the beast tide, because she chose to pursue strength and sharp-edged violence at every turn, because… because she let herself be shaped into a weapon.
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She is not a weapon. She is not a beast.
She remembers what she said to Kaena.
She is a monster, a hungry thing of teeth and claw and flaming blood, and she is hers. And… that’s ok.
It hits on her guilt, her shame, her self-loathing… but it doesn’t quite latch to them. The idea of herself as a monster is… it’s not an excuse to let herself be hurt, now. It’s not-
A memory resurfaces. Grasped from the chaos, dragged back from oblivion. She remembers when Taurus offered her his plan. Offered her what would happen. Had told her that he’d shape her into a weapon that could kill him, too, when the time was right. It had been the right words, at the right moment. Making lemonade from lemons, he’d taken the trauma he’d placed in her and gave it an outlet, a way for the self-loathing to fuel her change into something violent.
But… there had been comfort in that. That she could stop being a person, could just accept the guilt, could accept, in a way, that… that the kid’s death had been inevitable, because of course it was, she was a weapon. This isn’t that, not really.
She is not his weapon. She is not even her own weapon.
Raika looks down at her hand, festooned with black barbs and fangs, listens to the sounds fo combat behind her, of her allies retreating to a smaller and smaller spot, looking out at her and wondering what’s happening-
She turns and swipes a clawed hand through one of the creatures, unmaking it into fileted slices of shadow. And looks down at the limb, intact and whole.
She raises her other hand, the one she didn’t use, and begins to shift the fangs back into her mouth from it. Beneath it, reflected on all her hands, is a fine, razor-thin edge of perfect black.
She feels something stirring- not her molar, not the thought-construct she made to frame the piece of infinity she tore free. No, she feels it in her bones, deeper than before, reshaping something at the core of her.
“If you’re not killing,” the Witch had said, “what’s the point of living, right?”
And there, in the dark, looking out at the squirming, malformed horrors of eyes and shadow, Raika smiles.
The point, she realizes, is whatever the fuck one chooses. How could it be anything else?
She feels the blacksteel grow. Out from her bones, up through her meat, reshaping its edges into barbed, razor-sharp edges. From the white of chitin and bone-armor, she festoons herself with black, violent edges, grows them to her will because if she can Change then why can’t something that is a part of her? Why can a predatory bite not be matched with claws, with hard edges, with the tools of the hunt and of chosen death?
She hears Yun Ka gasp. Turns to look at her, and smiles with too many jaws at the look on the researcher’s face.
“Hello,” she says. And the tunnels listen.
Simultaneously the abominations turn to her, eyes opening in the dark, things changing and turning and-
They still hurt when she cuts them if their flesh or blood turns her armor or muscles, but there is a pattern to it. She swings out an arm, and steps back out of the way of the splash zone even as a clawed foot casually severs something like a neck, turning from that into a bladed elbow that splits a tumbling mass of hair and whimpering orifices in half.
The shadows respond.
A fresh flood of the abominations comes forth, this time even falling from the tunnel above, filling the space entirely with black and writhing flesh. She has to be careful, every movement either touching shadow or severing it, and-
It isn’t a winning formula. Even with her awakening, it’s not enough.
She steps back and closer to the formation, taking a breath free of the dark for the first time in minutes and enjoying the line it makes. Between her claws and the light, they establish a perimeter, pushing the shadows back, back-
The Eyes rolling in the tunnel begin to blink. They begin to cry. They cry black tears of perfect lightlessness and begin to flood the floor of the chamber, the liquid flowing around the well-tunnel and oozing towards them.
“We can’t win like this,” Raika hears. She turns back, looking to the others, looking to-
It’s Taran.
He looks down at her, his eyes showing a new color she’s never seen from him before. They step off Ax’s improvised scaffolding and land quietly on the floor.
“Good to see you awake,” she says. “Got a plan?”
Taran’s head tilts as they (she’s not sure it’s “Taran” in charge right now) look at her. They smile, softly.
“You really are something new, aren’t you? I’d heard you were going through some things. Imagine my surprise to see a brand new face to that name.”
Ax’s glowing weapon cuts through the front line of the abominations, snarling. “Are all of you this fucking weird? Seriously?”
“Seriously,” ‘Taran’ says. “Kaena? Conditions?”
Kaena, who hasn’t managed to do much in this kind of battle, just laughs, a bit crazed. “Starving to death in hungry tunnels. Monsters that make you shadow when they touch you. Witch down the well, I think.”
“Most likely!” Yun Ka says. “I’m detecting a bit of fluctuation in-”
“It’s there,” Shapefixit interrupts, still crouched on the stone, letting it drink her energy even as she reshapes it, bit by bit, raising a platform to bring them above the oozing dark. “Can tell. The heart beats below.”
“What she said!” Yun Ka agrees.
“Any ideas as to how we get down there?” Shi Cho asks, his ever-diminishing swarm still by far the most effective weapon they have against the dark, though it looks almost physically painful as more and more of them are consumed by the shadows.
“Easy!” the Witch’s voice comes again, squelching wetly out of the blinking of eyes from a thousand orifices. “I already told you! Kill each other a bit. Or see how long you last against my darlings! I’m sure it’ll work out!”
“Hmm,” ‘Taran’ says. “No.”
They reach for their lower back, obscured by the coat and holsters all around… and pull out a revolving gun.
This one has six chambers, rather than the four-chamber Taran usually uses. It gleams, a dark copper-and-brass color emerging from a grip that is nearly black in color, the barest hints of it indicating wood rather than stone.
‘Taran’ turns to Raika. “You gonna bite me if I stop looking?”
Raika huffs, the Mask adding the right elements of humor to the sound. “I prefer fresher fare. You have a plan?”
“I won’t last long,” they say. “Barely awake as it is, and barely enough fuel for just me. Can’t do a siege. Yun Ka? Estimates on survival time?”
“Approximately seventeen minutes, barring new manifestation from the Witch!” she says, mechanical arms straining and Jade pushing green energy into more than a dozen of them to sustain the formation and click at several other tablets, carving out new formulae. “If I can manage to-”
“Take Shapefixit,” Kaena interrupts. “She’ll be more useful as a guide than here.”
Shapefixit looks up, eyes wide, ears flared. “Huh wha?”
‘Taran’ just nods. “Heard. Raika, on my count, go for the well.”
She wants to ask questions, but- well, actually she doesn’t. The Mask nods instead, focusing on the present and the chance for any plan that doesn’t involve slowly dying to waves of fucked up eyeball goop, and the Flesh simply primes itself, shifting its blacksteel thorns and claws to a more forward-facing and aggressive formation.
“Wait!” Shi Cho says. “Take a beetle. If we need to find each other-”
“Makes sense,” Raika interrupts. “Do it.”
A familiar scent lands on her, and she immediately reforms the alcove that this same beetle occupied before she found Shi Cho.
“Ready?” ‘Taran’ asks.
“Yes.”
“Good. I’ll take the goblin. On my mark…”
“Is no one going to explain to me what the hell the plan is?” Ax complains, looking back and forth across the group even as he keeps his axes swinging, cutting through the horde of shadows.
“Mark,” ‘Taran’ says.
The room is filled with thunder. The gun roars, and-
And the roar of it is immediately washed away by the sound of shattering rain, or sharp-edged notes of high-pitched violence as all six shots begin to ricochet. And don’t stop.
The sound is enough to stun even a cultivator’s ears, Raika’s senses literally clapping shut her ear-holes rather than try to endure the hypersensitive auditory violence. The horde, however, fares worse, the bullets glowing with a firey Qi that literally rips through them, blasting craters into and through the soft ooze and eye-jelly that makes up their bodies only to ricochet off the stone again.
Raika sprints forward, cracking the stone beneath her, a blur of moving blades and hungry black steel edges and monstrous armor, and what little remains intact to get in her way is transformed to severed meat.
And then she’s down the well, her senses telling her that Taran and Shapefixit are right behind her. They fall away from the others, even as the sounds of ricocheting violence continue and the glow of the formation slowly disappears behind them.
She just has to believe they’ll last long enough for them to kill the Witch.