Raika has them walk for a good few hours before they stop. By that point Jin is exhausted, even with his hard-won experience living and walking out in the woods, and they’re far enough away that she can just about guarantee even the most sensitive people in town won’t be able to tell anything that’s happening. Of course, she walked perpendicular to her cabin and her allies, so she’s plenty far from them too, but they might notice, especially Hao Nera. For being the weakest in the group by the metrics of the amount of Qi he has, he’s got a solid advantage when it comes to a few traits, chief among them his instincts.

“So… Ru Lou, was it? How long you been around town?”

“Quiet. We’ve been walking for hours, and now you choose to talk? Just show me where the beast bones are.”

She smiles and shrugs. “Ok. Hey, Jin? You should head back a bit.”

He gives her a look of alarm, even as he looks ready to fall over. “It’s…”

“I know, I know. Don’t worry. You’ll be fine. I’m keeping an eye out.”

He still hesitates, but… she smiles with sharper teeth, and gives him a nod and look that successfully sends to him that he’ll be in much more danger by staying close than he is by stepping back.

“I have no interest in hurting the boy, but you should not have brought him anyways.”

“Maybe not, but I’m trying to learn from my mistakes,” she says, setting her rug and bundle off to one side on a little rock. “See, last time I had someone I was trying to help, I underestimated my problems, didn’t have my guard up. Now, I’m balancing things. Trying to, anyways. Embracing my strengths while making sure I keep an eye on the things I need to.”

At this point, Ru Lou has figured out that he may have missed a step somewhere down the line.

He takes two steps back, the Qi he waves around himself finally pulling in tight as he focuses. The scent is a mix of factors, something like wilting plants and sand, his cultivation a mixed bag that doesn’t seem to fit him. Explains some of why he’s the one in the vicinity of a little place like Wuyan village, and some amount of the arrogance being shown. Someone just strong enough to realize how weak he is, and weaker still to decide that the best use of his time is not bettering himself genuinely but to bully the weak and try to find some ideal opportunity.

“So. I’m gonna give you one last chance,” she says, cracking her neck loud enough that it almost echoes between the trees. “I’d rather not kill you, but I’m also not going to keep looking over my fucking shoulder and avoiding town over you. So, you can swear to me on your Qi, cultivation, and the name of your sect to leave me alone and tell no one anything about my appearance, location, or those bones… or we get to stepping.”

He laughs. “What kind of trade is that? You’re no hidden master. If you were, we wouldn’t have walked all the way out here, you could’ve just erased me. I can sense your Qi, I’m a trained cultivator, I know how weak it is. Just because you have a strong constitution doesn’t mean anything. Technique overcomes all!”

She smiles as she disrobes her upper torso, letting her outer clothes fall to the side so it’s just her chest bindings, flesh… and arm, made entirely of Blacksteel and obsidian angles.

She watches Ru Lou’s eyes widen, his stance deepen, his heartbeat tremble for just a second. Confused more than afraid, but afraid indeed.

“No, dumbass. Power overcomes all. Technique is just one form of it. A force multiplier for Mind, Body, and Soul.

“And I’m damn sure I’ve got you beat on every one and then some.”

Jin is a good distance away by now. The village is pretty far. She could use this opportunity to test out her new core and its Flames, but… well, no need to be too drastic with something too experimental. Not with this.

Better to keep things simple.

Before Ru Lou understands exactly how badly he’s fucked himself, her arm is around his throat. No need for any fancy transformation: four hundreds pounds of seven foot tall muscle and violence explodes from where she was standing before he even realizes she’s moved. If she were a cultivator, mastery over Qi could have left the ground undisturbed, physics unbothered even as she hits a hundred miles of acceleration in under a second.

As it is, her power isn’t quite so neat.

The ground where she was standing craters, bits of dirt and stone blasting into the trees behind her hard enough to scrape bark off many of them. She’s minimized the impact, left it directed by her inner hydraulics and musculature to waste as little force as possible, to use it to its extreme, and even still the sound of that first step still thunders.

Ru Lou has enough time to start to scream before she hits him. His eyes go wide as her hands closes all the way around his neck, as he is moved backwards hard enough that his spine screams from the whiplash. He chokes, garbles out some kind of sound and tries to retreat, but there’s nothing for him to stand on, no way for his neck to support true movement, even with his cultivation. He feels his Qi firing, and-

Oh. Oh that’s interesting.

She feels his meridians moving. Under the skin. Meridians are soul organs, not physically real the way veins are, but… she can feel them nonetheless, on her skin.

Well that opens up possibilities.

His Qi tries to detonate, tries to pulse and push her away with his aura- and it’s almost nothing compared to her allies, to the Not-Tiger, to Feng Gao. It feels like a stiff breeze. It’s almost funny, honestly, how his Qi flails, how his energy tries to grow and struggle. In fact, there’s a cute little thing to it, like she can almost smell his control and energy improving. He’s clearly not had to deal with the threat of death much, and there’s a moment where his energy spikes, the leaves of his Qi no longer smelling quite so wilted.

And then she throws him.

There is almost a sound like a scream as he goes through two different trees, but she’s not sure how awake he is.

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

Interestingly, a shield manifests around him, a sudden and much more competent manipulation of Qi spawning as he flies. A defensive artifact, probably, something that smells nothing like his own Qi. She wonders how much he spent to acquire that, if it’s what gave him the confidence to act the way he does.

Good chance to try something new.

With Li Shu’s help, Raika’s been thinking of new ways of doing things. Li Shu tends to focus exclusively on the biological, but there’s something about the flesh that just speaks to Raika as… too orderly. Or like it could be made orderly. Sometimes it reminds her of a clock, full of infinite little pieces that all mesh together to work, like the rarer mechanical artifacts she’s seen. And if all those pieces all move at once, faster than normal…

It’s a little silly, but she’s started working on something she likes to call “overclocking”. The theory clicked into place with how her new “core” works, how it let her see all the little parts of herself, and now… well. Good to try at least a few new things, no?

She could most certainly break through the artifact without it, especially if she used her Blacksteel. Hell, she could probably carve right through it, and the person behind it, if she used said tool, but… well. Why bother? When she could do more?

So, rather than modifying her existing flesh, or using Blacksteel, or lighting the forest aflame, she reaches into herself, into her reserves, and multiplies.

It’s incredibly hard to do. Immediately the Mask switches off, the processing power usually used for her ability to socially manipulate vanishing into the Flesh. Her entire body lights up, and there’s a thrilling sensation she’s never felt; it’s not like adrenaline, not a chemical or Qi-based high. Instead it’s like her entire body is burning every ounce of its stored fuel at once, moving at three or four times its normal limits. Some muscles strain, but her body holds, and it’s so hard to maintain that so much of her needs to focus, stimulating everywhere at once-

No. She doesn’t need to use everywhere at once.

She switches track, overclocking a few specific muscle groups. Before, she created and rebuilt systems as needed, but… what a waste, when she can just take the specific parts she needs and boost them, magnify them with what already exists. Rather than building and destroying new muscles to reach superhuman levels temporarily, she takes her much upgraded system and boosts it.

It’s not perfect; she can feel how it taxes her system, demands more from her body than can be sustained long term- maybe an hour? Besides, nothing is perfect.

It’s more than enough.

Ru Lou has at this point started to move again, his stunned state surrounded by glowing golden armor that looks similar to an Imperial artifact, though much more dull and yellow. His eyes are wide, terrified, and he manifests some of his technique. It looks half-formed, a thing of shifting greenery and dull, flowing sand, like a technique badly formed between the spiraling knots in wood and sandstone-

First strike impacts. There’s a sound like thunder, like a shrieking of lightning splashing against conductive metals, as her fist deforms the armor around him, makes it bend and dent and break. His eyes widen further, and she lands the second strike, watching as a brilliant yellow crack spasms through the glowing defensive array. Third strike, and the cracks spread, wide and far, like glass deforming under pressure-

“Please! I’ll do-”

She doesn’t listen.

She gave him a chance. An asshole cultivator abusing his power, who threatens her and all her allies with his knowledge, and who had a couple real clear offramps to this whole situation.

The fourth through eight punches happen so fast they literally blur, her body moving so fast that it sounds like a half-dozen gunshots ringing out back to back to back.

By the fourth, the defensive artifact had broken. By the eighth, the head and face of the body behind it are mixed with powdered dirt and stone from the ground beneath it.

Better to be sure. Hard to hold back, too, so that’s something to watch out for.

She stands up, her upper body and right arm drenched in blood, dripping remains onto the ground. With her bloody hand, she picks the body up by the collar and hefts it, like a bag of potatoes, so that it doesn’t drag on the ground.

“Hey Jin!” she yells out to the woods. “Good news, the guy is super dead. We’re going back to the cabin.”

Jin comes out of the woods maybe thirty seconds later. In one arm, she now has a slightly wet rug wrapped around a body, obscuring it from view, while she holds the bundle with her bone trinkets under her other arm. Jin’s eyes look at her, very, very wide.

“Did… did you kill him?” he asks, his voice quiet, hesitant.

Ah. Ok. Delicate touch required. She’s doubly happy now that she’s got the body wrapped up, though she figured this would be the case. Part of the reason she ordered him away, and clearly the right choice, even though it had to balance with making sure he didn’t see.

“I did.”

“...was he going to hurt you?”

“Not directly, no. Pretty sure every ghost we scrounged up last night was stronger than he was. But if I let him go, he’d have told people things I didn’t want him to tell, and maybe gotten us killed if the wrong people heard it. So I killed him.”

“Was there no other way?” he asks, low and quiet.

She goes quiet. Then sighs.

“Yeah. There probably was. But not for me. There’s no way to establish trust, and keeping him prisoner wouldn’t end well at best. That’s… killing shouldn’t really be your first pick of choices, but if you look at it and decide the alternative is worse, then that choice is yours to make.”

“And you were stronger…”

She takes a step toward the kid, kneeling down a bit so that he’s closer to eye level even as he flinches away.

“No. Strength doesn’t decide killing. Power decides what choices you have, but I’ve killed things stronger than me, and I could die from something weaker. Strength is subjective, and power can be anything.”

“But… but you’re stronger than he was, and you wanted him to die. So he died.”

“And if he’d been smarter, or luckier, or more aware, or wiser about what he had, then he would be alive. If he’d learned more techniques, or a way to escape, or gone far away, or simply not threatened people he thought to be powerless, he’d be alive. Strength did not decide his death, strength decided only this fight and the few seconds it lasted. Power, on the other hand, defined every choice he made, whether that was the power of common sense, of Qi, of technique, of resources… or the lack thereof. Do you understand? Power is choice, and he exercised the little power he had on strength that he had even less of. That, and because he was a danger to me I could not end any other way, is why he died. Do you understand?”

Jin nods. His heart flutters lightly, his pupils dilated, his sweat holding the scent of stress and anxiety… yeah. He doesn’t get it.

But he’s young, and this wasn’t exactly an ideally formatted lesson.

But he’ll remember it. And maybe someday, he’ll learn.

“Come on, kid. It’s getting late, and I think we could use some time to rest at home, hmm?”

Jin’s fear is briefly altered as the thought of the hours walking ahead of them is realized.

She sighs, then kneels down all the way, turning her back to him.

“Hop on. I’ll cary you. Hold tight, though. We’ll get there quick.”

And they do. Jin is silent at first, petrified, but eventually he lets out a whoop as air rushes past and the world blurs beneath her steps. It’s maybe twenty five minutes before they arrive back at the cabin, despite the many miles separating them. By the time they arrive, the mix of blood-curdling adrenaline, stress, and probably even hunger have done their work to put Jin right to sleep.

It would be a lot more adorable if he wasn’t drooling on her shoulder. Even if it is a sign that she’s managing to keep a very smooth even keel on her run.

She does stutter a bit and leave the kid half-awake, blinking blearily, as she pulls up a bit more abruptly than she expected.

Standing on the grass, talking to Qen Hou, with Li Shu and Hao Nera both near the cabin watching him closely, is a figure she recognizes.

He looks at her, his gaze, as always, a mix of recognition and discomfort. In his eyes, in his heartbeat, she can see that strange mix of elation to see her, alive and well… and fear at what has changed from that aforementioned recognition.

“Hey, Raika,” Hisheng says, his voice soft. “I… uh. See you picked up a kid?”