It feels like it’s been a long time since she’s faced real one-on-one combat. Maybe since the last time she fought spirit beasts, all the way back in the woods. There was the claustrophobic, chaotic fighting of the mines with the corpse-smith- dangerous, almost as much as the “beast tide” had been, but more chaotic, more cramped. There was the training with Jun Vral, and the tournament not long after… but a tournament isn’t quite the same as a true battle, out in the wilds, no holds barred.
She is both faintly disturbed and a little pleased to find that she’s missed it.
She sets the Want to examining that, while the rest of her turns to the act of keeping herself alive.
The Boar moves like something out of a nightmare, a plodding gait that almost wobbles, but is also somehow impossibly sure. It walks, and where it steps the earth bends to accommodate it and the trees are brushed aside and crack under its weight. It isn’t particularly fast, but it’s fast enough to be a problem, especially considering it doesn’t need to bother with shifting its paths or obstacles in its way. It reminds her of Project 13’s Truths: when its forest of tusks touch something, it simply breaks through.
If it catches her in that mess of bone, it’ll just grind her into paste. No grand techniques, no special moves- just an implacable march, and a meat grinder at the front of it.
The smart thing would be to move. Shift out of the way, and start a series of flanking attacks.
The Flesh sends a rush of endorphins through her, their biology shifting in response, and she decides to do something more fun.
The last time she used her Engine, a spirit beast of the fourth ring found her through her defenses. No reason to broadcast her location across the region.
But she’s got plenty of Qi stored, and more than a few ideas she can put into action.
Her arms reach out and grab two of the tusks before her, her legs gaining a third joint and slamming clawed feet against the ground. The dirt and stone break apart in equal measure as the Boar pushes against her, looking to mash her to nothing- but she stands firm, even as she slides backward through ground weaker than either of them.
And then, with a smile as feral as it is joyful, she blossoms.
Supreme Body Art is a lofty ideal, and there’s a lot in the manual she still doesn’t understand. Li Shu is, in her humble opinion, a fucking genius. Even when she actually comprehends all they’ve talked about or put into the manual, implementing it all together will be another larger project.
But synthesis is what she excels at, and she Can Change. The earlier inefficiencies of her transformations are fresh in her mind, the wasted Qi and mental effort in transforming everything in a constant flow. Powerful? Absolutely. But a drain like no other on her focus and supplies. There’s a time and place for that constant mutability, but there’s also a lot to be said for having a strong foundation for her body to use.
So Raika built a few.
This one is called Supreme Body Art: Gigant.
Her body balloons out to massive proportions. In seconds, she grows from ten feet to twelve, fifteen, twenty, thirty- capping out at almost thirty five feet tall, tall enough that the lowest branches of the colossal trees are almost in reach. Her eyes multiply, spawning into compound eyes bigger than her entire head in her “human” form blinking wetly above a maw full of massive teeth, and massive plates of bone begin to overlap around her, forming a shell as insectile as it is artificial-looking.
She stomps a foot into the ground, denting the soft earth as a massive armored tail swishes behind her, cutting into the ground and trees where it swings. There is a brief sound of a snort from the Boar, a moment of surprise-
And her grip on its tusks, cracking bone in a dozen ways as she grows her new hands, lifts the beast near-upright.
Even at this size, the beast outweighs her by a lot. It weighs significantly more than anything of its size should be able to, and she has no idea how its bones are withstanding the pressure of all that weight- but she lifts it nonetheless. Latticed bone support pillars interlock into functional architecture inside her and Qi-enriched muscle grows like grass all through her, filling out the impossible frame that even now threatens to fall in on itself. Her lungs expand, drinking in air in massive bellows and at last using the entirety of their capacity to fuel her, even as she grows a fourth heart- and then a fifth, and sixth, and an eighth, all of them intersped through her new frame to pump blood all throughout her system.
She and Li Shu spent a week planning out the vein patterns and muscle structures, to ensure no nerves would be crushed, that no blood vessels would spontaneously burst, or some other nightmare of altered biology. Her Qi saturation helps, as does her Truth as she commands her body to change and to endure.
She roars, and the forest shakes.
Fuck, it feels good to be strong.
The Boar snorts, then roars right back at her, a surprisingly high-pitched squeal that makes the very ground tremble. For all her growth, she still can’t match its physical strength, and her many eyes widen as she feels some of the beast’s Qi begin to burn.
It shoves her back another foot. Then another, its muscles straining, overpowering her largest current frame.
And she grins with more teeth than any shark.
She coils for a second, tensing, and bio-engineered pistons shove against the beast’s progress. Not back, but up. She wouldn’t be surprised if the creature had some Truth about continuing to plod forward, and she doesn’t need to deal with that.
She shoves the Boar’s head back until she can feel its neck strain, a spear-wall of tusks taking up her entire vision- and then she ducks under it, compensating with her Truths for how slow her reactions are. Her nerves only fire so quickly, her body only responding so soon at this size- but with her will, I Am Me, I Am Mine pushes through that, commanding all that she is as one.
Massive arms of corded muscle and disturbingly biological plates of armor wrap around the Boar’s neck as she steps into it, grunting as a kicking hoof breaks part of her armor. With a roaring breath that reeks of dark earth and crawling lightning, she pulls in air- and then roars a second time as she steps past the beast and forces its head further back. The Boar squeals, in pain and surprise, and she gives one final shove.
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
With a screaming effort that tears through her Gigant form, she lariats the big fucking pig so hard it flips its multi-ton mass ass up.
The beast kicks and squeals, moving much faster than it was previously, but she takes the moment of free space to strike. She doesn’t have hands in the Gigant form: she has blades. Where fingers once were, spikes and claws of bone and Blacksteel have formed on both limbs, each one like a pillar of bone and chitin. All she needs to do is punch forward, rip and tear against its frame, and it penetrates.
The Boar squeals again, and inside their mind, the Mask frowns. With her current weight and momentum, the Blacksteel should have punched through the Boar entirely- instead, it is stopped by incredibly dense musculature and an incredibly rich Qi signature. The beast is equivalent to a Nascent Soul realm cultivator at least, and it would seem all of that prowess has gone to its body.
Well… not quite all of it.
The ground shudders, turning soft and loamy, and before she can react she has sunk into it to her first knee-joint.
Immediately, an electric current strikes, like a snake or worm beneath the earth. It screeches as it runs into her body, as it burns through her-
And she ignores it.
She expands her legs slightly, adding packs of thick fat to the inside of her armor- and what little lightning manages to bite its way past her cursed skin is absorbed and nullified, leaving only a mild scent of burning flesh.
She’s not quite fast enough to pull out of the earth to dodge, though.
The Boar swings its head, and the sea of tusks rips a chunk out of her lower stomach.
She immediately has to divert her blood to transmute into new flesh, her reinforced spine straining without the core muscles to support it. A trickle of blood runs through her maw, but her many eyes start at the beast with unbridled joy.
Those tusks shouldn’t have cut through her. She broke some with her transformation, they’re normal bone. Reinforced with Qi, sure, but nowhere near as much as her own, nor rebuilt into a reinforced lattice. Her armor should have held up.
Does it have a Truth? Or is it a Dao?
She sets the Mask to examining the wound, their sub-processor brain overheating from keeping track of so many details in her body at once, and lets the Flesh take over.
Raika subdivides herself, delegates the work of analysis, and the Flesh is there to roar out its joy and hatred. To scream into existence with straining, impossible lungs that she is here, and she is alive, and she is hungry.
She explodes from the ground in time for the return swipe of the tusks, several of them tearing through her arm like a high-impact wreck- but her left arm, still intact, swings into the nest of malformed teeth. With ease, she breaks off a half-dozen, the clawed impact making an explosive sound as it hits and sending a spattering of blood and bone across the forest
The Boar squeals, and she can sense as it shifts gears, turning from a simpler battle to a fight for its survival. She matches its sound, her roar both strangely lyrical and utterly vibrant. She can feel Dink, safely ensconced in a shell of bone, vibrate in tune with her, magnifying the sound into a true battle cry that will likely ring for miles.
They clash, and the impacts make the forest tremble.
Even in this state, she still couldn’t fully wrap her arms around one of the massive trunks. Whole swathes of thick moss and underground burrows are thrown into the air as she is tossed about, dodging and striking in equal measure against the Boar’s behemoth nature. Birds scream and take off in waves all across the woods, and she can hear and sense the scurrying of the few animals not scared away by the Boar sprinting for safety.
But here, there is joy.
Before, it was the joy of self-flagellation. The idea that only in battle could she be worthwhile, only in life-or-death struggle could her continued existence be justified. Every fight was an excuse to look away from her thoughts, even as they drove her to self harm.
It doesn’t feel like that anymore.
It doesn’t feel like that anymore.
It’s fun.
Why do the Boar’s tusks hit so much harder than they should? How much can she really control and change at once? What are the mechanics of movement now as she changes? Will she win? Will she lose? How equally can she match this challenge?
The Want returns to the whole, delivering its verdict.
This is good.
Ok, maybe an ideal warrior would dread combat. Maybe she should see it as a chore, or as a stepping stone to greater things. And she does… a bit. But deeper than that, there’s the joy of growing in adversity. Of being and feeling strong, and having that strength mean she can experience incredible new things. She stands taller than the buildings of a third-ring Imperial city and slams a barbed tail into the side of a spirit beast whose existence is, by its very nature, unique, strange and incredible.
If she were weak, she would have to hide and run, leaving behind a chance to experience something new, and to grow through that experience.
If she were the same broken thing she once was, she would feel nothing but a self-destructive joy, overriding the curiosity she feels as the ground shifts impossibly, as the Boar’s multi-ton body moves with a lightness it should not possess. She wouldn’t feel the sense of accomplishment and growth that comes from taking what was once a flailing abomination of regeneration and wild mutation and turning it to a controlled, magnified juggernaut of a body like nothing she could have imagined before.
Damn, if Li Shu doesn’t have good fucking ideas.
Despite it all… she’s still her.
But she’s better now. The fight isn’t a distraction. It isn’t an opportunity to prove herself to someone. It isn’t a desperate struggle to breathe in.
She’s scared, yes. She could die, sure.
But she’s here. And she is growing. She is learning. And she feels a moment of violent, almost erotic joy at being who she once was, but better.
And yes, incredibly weirder.
The Boar roars, once again starting to charge against her. Once again, she slams her limbs forward into its mouth, forcing the creature to slow and shove her back step by slow step.
It doesn’t feel like a Truth, some inviolable strangeness that makes reality something new. The tusks just have more of something that already exists. She breathes in with massive lungs and many noses, sniffing the Boar up close even as her arms are gouged and bleeding.
It’s not a Cut, not like she saw in the arena or with Zhoulong. It’s more brutish than that, wider, somehow deeper and shallower.
It is a Gouge.
She laughs, then. She laughs long and loud, and it sounds incredibly alien coming from lungs the size of bulls and a fanged maw wide enough to swallow a man whole.
The Boar roars, the scent of the gougy-ness of its tusks increasing again. The Dao of Gouging roars through its impossible maw, and her arms are immediately shredded apart beneath the malformed teeth. The Flesh winces, pulls back, and just barely manages to move aside in time as the Boar’s charge rips through part of her ribcage.
She slashes at its passing flank, opening up a new cut along its side. Then, even as she regrows her massive arms, she has an idea.
The Flesh dances in delight in their mind as she reaches out and bites.
A chunk is ripped out of the back leg of the pig, a snort of pain coming shortly after, and she barely has time to swallow before it has turned back around for another charge.
It tastes…
Monstrous gods and crawling hells.
It tastes good.
It tastes like pork that somehow has lightning inside it, has the earthiness and richness and herbal flavor of deep, vibrant earth. Every time she eats a bite of something with Qi in it, it feels like something transcendent, and this is no exception.
At this size, she needs a lot of Qi to regrow things. The Boar’s meat is barely a drop in the bucket. It will take her a week, minimum, to recover the amount she’s using here, and that’s with creating and consuming more True Flame.
But for the taste alone, it’s worth it.
The Boar roars its denial, its remaining tusks wet with her blood and bits of bone- and she sings back to it in a voice like thunder, Dink humming in tune.
Deep in the dark of the woods, two impossible creatures rip and tear at each other, as the distant villagers all shiver at the sounds.