Raika… considers it.

The Mask points out a lot of the possible benefits. There’s a lot to see, here, a lot to potentially do… but it’s not all positives. The Flesh, of course, doesn’t particularly care for the options, but she’s not exactly a long term planner. The Mask, much more comfortable in that area, highlights what it can see.

Nearly everyone she cares about is here, in the city. If the Witch can manage to find them, admittedly amidst the chaos of an attack… there’s a chance they’d be out of the Empire’s clutches. They could forge new identities if need be, escape before the retaliatory strikes came down. And the death of an Imperial Scion… it would be something legendary. A blow the Divisions themselves would need to mobilize and respond to. And it would net her a direct ally powerful enough to imprison and apparently transmute two Warrior Realm level entities, one of which has direct ties to Feng Gui. Enough to potentially bring him running, and certainly enough to get revenge on Taurus along the way. But…

“No.”

The Witch sighs, long and slow. “Why, pray tell?”

It takes a little longer for the Mask to speak. There is a… disconnection. Not all of her is in alignment, even after deliberating, and some of the fluency is lost in translation.

“That Core you’re… using. It didn’t ask for this. Neither will the people who die in the city when you attack. You have your cults in the sects, and they’d be willing to work with you. You’ve had… a few centuries? Millenia? To come up with a plan. You have a power that few can recognize or understand… but you’re simply fighting. Going up to kill and break and then hoping that after… what?”

“It will free this place for a while. Provide a chance that things might change. Isn’t that enough?”

“...No. It isn’t. I… I don’t know that it’s the right way.”

“And what might that better way be, Wolf?” the Witch asks. Her voice is level, calm, but there is an undercurrent there, and the dark roils around them like disturbed smoke. “Should I forget what I have suffered? Should I choose peace with those who seek to eradicate or control me? What is your solution, then?”

Raika shakes her head. “I don’t have one. I doubt I could come up with anything better. Maybe you’re right, even. I just… it wouldn’t stop, after. They’d come back. It wouldn’t end anything, just start a new fight, for new people to die in. And you have nothing beyond that?

“I’ve been… ever since I got hurt, I’ve been fighting. Before that, even. As my… my focus, my way of seeing the world. But lately… I’ve been wondering. Violence, untamed, chaotic, just breeds more of itself. It doesn’t end anything on its own.

“It needs to be more. I need to be more?”

And then… a click. An alignment, a full alignment at last, as a new thought enters her mind.

“I’m sick of masters,” she whispers. “I am my own monster, and I choose what I eat. Not you.”

There is silence in the chamber for a time. And then… the Witch sighs.

“You are a strange thing, sister. I think I would have liked you better before the war.”

Silence, again. Raika tenses her joints, gets ready to move, to cut, to enact a plan that is in the background, formulating-

“I am no slave master,” the Witch says, shaking her head. “Monsters we may be, but I have no desire to bring a sister to chains. Leave. Go where you want. I’ll open the door for you.”

Raika nods. Fair. She’s no more eager to throw herself into some millenia-old foreverwar to stop it than she is to reignite it. Besides, if there’s one thing abundantly clear, it’s that she’s got her own shit to deal with, her own people to protect… and that comes first.

“Will you stop attacking my allies?” the Mask asks. “The ones above.”

The Witch looks down at her, the act even more impressive by her lack of eyes, though it still rings hollow. The movement, like all the Witch’s motions, is just a bit off, like she’s remembering how to do them but out of practice.

“Come now, sister. Some familiarity in our pain and our power there may be, but there’s only so much mercy that can buy. I am not in the business of negotiating for the lives of cultivators. I’m hardly going to offer the same kindness I do you just because you like a few of them.”

Raika nods. The Mask nods a second time. “I figured. It’s a pity. I think we would have preferred it if things ended peacefully.”

Leaning far to the left, she taps her claw against the floor three times, hard enough to make a clicking sound against the stone.

A gunshot echoes in the chamber, and the Witch falls backward against the pillar as a bullet hole opens up in her sternum.

“Very glad that worked,” Raika says. “Would have been embarrassing otherwise.”

The Witch howls, and the chamber all around them begins to shake and tremble, literally quivering like flesh. The dark roils, and there is a resounding, screeching scream from the Not Tiger as part of it breaks from its binds.

Raika wasn’t sure if the signal would be clear enough, but clearly ‘Taran’ (whichever part of them is currently fronting) picked up on the cue. Laying there, limp, their Qi barely above that of a corpse or alchemical construct on the best of days, Raika assumed that the Witch would forget all about the weak little cultivator that fell. The sound was both a signal and a guide to help them aim, and that was all they needed to land a killshot.

This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

Well. On a mortal, anyways.

The Witch screeches again, and this time every one of the strange strands of hair woven through the room quivers in turn, and an endless sea of eyes blossoms into being in all directions. They begin to weep, each tear black and viscous, and to each drop the dark writhes, coalesces, comes together- and flows towards Raika and the disgusting fusion of flesh that the Witch has made of Feng Gao and the Not-Tiger.

Raika leaps back, ducks, turns, every movement perfectly controlled as Mask and Flesh work in unison, listening to their instincts and commands to avoid every drop. Still, it is so overwhelming, so total the surrounding dripping dark, that it is almost impossible to go unscathed, and even with her nervous system practically twitching with strain several droplets land on her and Shapefixit, turning parts of their bodies to shadow. Shapefixit emits a painfully loud chirp as a larger droplet lands on her shoulder and-

Bum-bum-boom.

The Heart beats. As if in response to Shapefixit’s cry, it writhes, its valves once again pulsing weakly- and as the Witch divides her attention to killing Raika, Taran and Shapefixit and containing her would-be superweapon, for a moment, her bindings on it are weakened. Its strange anatomy makes for its beat to hit three times, different valves pulling in and pushing out from different chambers- and the entire chamber once again shudders in a mix of agony and transformation.

“You bitch!” The Witch shrieks. “After everything I- oh, sister, that was a foul fucking thing.” She pauses, coughing violently as blood, as crimson and bright as most humanoids, seeps out of the bullet wound and her lips, even as the shadows coil inwards around the wound.

“As for you-” she rounds on the heart, and-

Raika takes the opportunity to sacrifice a hand, disjointing and extending the bladed limb and its end-blessed claws through the shadows and into the Witch’s back.

“Haven’t fought much recently, have you?” Raika asked. “Poor instincts.”

The Witch screams again, the shadows pooling back closer, abandoning some of the offensive to focus on their wounded master and the writhing beast of shadow and flesh she is forming in the inky lake behind her- and again.

Bum-bum-boom.

The weakened shadows strain nearly to the point of breaking as the walls shift and Raika’s instincts scream in disorientation as space warps and shifts again-

The world reorients itself, and the shadows are dragged out to the furthest reaches of the room, clearing an area around the Heart, the Witch, Raika and Shapefixit, even as threads of hair and darkness still weave through the organ. In that newfound space, pulling apart time and matter itself, two tunnels open from the ceiling above.

From one, Yun Ka’s glowing formation falls through, carrying in it a bedraggled looking Shi Cho, Kaena, Yun Ka and Ax. they look wounded, weary, half the formation barely functioning and glowing only weakly, but they’re alive, despite the clear signs of battle and strange forms of shadow-decay on their bodies.

From the other, the last people in the world that Raika expected fall down into the chamber.

Maen falls first, covered in blood and shadowy fluids, her claws extended and glowing yuzu-yellow and one hand holding a sword blade, coated in blood. Behind her, Raika sees Qen Hou, Li Shu- and someone she hasn’t met, a rugged looking individual wrapped in robes of fur.

And then, at the final moment, wrapped in chains covered in runes and formation sigils, falls a thing of meat and metal and pain.

Something in her gut stirs. Rears its ugly head, and connects a thought that-

Project 13.

She’d forgotten them. It. Him. Had neglected to check on him, even when it had seemed right to. She feels the edges of the memory and sees the cuts, the way parts of it are still vague, still unknown- but why are they here?

“Maen?” she yells.

Maen looks at her and breaks out into the widest, most feral smile Raika has seen from her. “Hey beastie!” she yells back. “I came to find you! And I brought help!”

“I can fucking see that!” Raika says, the Mask cracking as her pieces come together in confusion and relief and fear. “Why-”

Maen steps once, crossing nearly the breadth of the chamber and reaching a hand as high as she can to put a single finger to Raika’s fangs.

“Shhh.”

She hugs Raika, avoiding the spikes and edges of her armor, and squeezes tight.

She looks up at Shapefixit, cradled a few inches over her head. “Hello, Shapefixit! It’s good to see you alive! Fuck, it’s so good to see you both alive.”

Raika… lets herself enjoy the hug.

“Raika?” someone asks.

She looks up and meets Li Shu’s two eyes with her own set of five, and then Qen Hou’s… and then smiles, monstrous and horrifying but for once true.

“Hey, honored healer,” she says. “It’s good to see you again.”

“Would that it were under better circumstances,” Qen Hou says, rolling his eyes. Li Shu elbows him in the ribs, before turning to Raika, smiling back at her.

“Circumstances be damned. You look… better.”

“That’s your takeaway?” the third member of their party asks.

“Yes, it is. Hao Nera, this is Raika. Raika, this is… a friend.”

Raika looks down at Maen.

“They’re fucking,” she says.

“Well I could smell that,” Raika replies.

Qen Hou and Li Shu both blush, the former turning scarlet compared to the latter’s cherry-red- but Hao Nera just gives a big smile. “What can I say, they have good taste for finding the interesting ones.”

“Alright,” the Witch says. “That’s enough of that.”

The heart goes to beat a third time- and is strangled.

The dark screams, shivers, the sound wet and mucousy and strange, and the eyes leak through the dark and the space and the hair strands, further strands spiraling out from the pupils and pooling in the viscous shadow on the ground. The Witch is standing, leaning against the pedestal of the Core, a band of hair and shadow wrapping around and bandaging over the cuts in her back and gunshot. She’s still leaking blood, still dripping crimson from her chin- but she’s standing.

“I understand. I do. It’s hard not to hate someone who hurts those you care for. Harder still not to fight them. Clever about it, sister, clever as a fox. More clever than I. I suppose I was too hopeful, hmm? That another might share the burden. Might join my rebellion.”

She stands further upright, her body stiff as if she is not used to being upright after so long seated. She smiles, sad and bloody.

Raika shrugs, careful not to cut Maen. “I prefer rebellion that doesn’t get everyone killed in a week. You’ve had longer than I to find a way, and you chose to keep that burden for yourself.”

“Ha! So wise, all of a sudden. What happened to that familiar little Wolf, sister? Ah… exceeded my expectations and failed them entirely.

“So be it. I’ve waited long enough. I don’t have it in me to give up, no matter your words. If I’m to die… let me die vicious and violent.”

Raika nods. “So be it… sister.”

Maen lets go of the hug, looking up at Raika… and then takes her blade and claws, and turns to face the Witch. Silently, Li Shu, Qen Hou, and the bedraggled, wounded core of the cultivators that wandered the tunnels all come closer together. Hao Nera takes a moment longer, apparently familiar with hefting up the chains binding Project 13.

“Yun Ka, Kaena, Li Shu,” Raika says, “check on Taran. Ax, stay with them, you’re our backline. Shi Cho, any light you can provide, do so. Hao Nera-”

A line of pure black ichor whips across the chamber, grabbing Project 13 and hefting it up into the shadows before Hao Nera can do so much as stumble back and gain new cuts from trying to grab onto his cargo.

“None of that,” the Witch says. “I won’t have the Empire’s tortured weapons here.”

“Just your own?” Li Shu asks, hissing and staring back at what’s become of Feng Gao and the Not-Tiger.

The Witch smiles sadly. “The one and only.”

And then the darkness erupts, the Witch standing there, unsteady, bleeding, as the thing in the perfectly still black lake rears up on black puppet-strings and launches itself forward.