Shakes-Wet-Earth-Eats-Crackling-Flesh is rarely afraid. Some spirit beasts are born, while others are made, and in either case, he has the bloodline of what mortals call a Boar. They are noble and vicious beasts, beings of implacable will and impossible rage. It has heard that its ancestors and lesser formed fellows can be gored, torn apart and disemboweled and still kill their way through all who dare to harm them, and it sees this as only reasonable.

Shakes-Wet-Earth-Eats-Crackling-Flesh has never needed this fortitude before, but he has felt it writhe deep within. That screaming, hateful fury that does not care how wounded he is- only how much of those who dare to hurt him he can gore and break and tear apart as he dies. He has felt it when he protected his first mate, back before the lust faded and he ate her and the squalling things that came from their union. He felt it again when one of the few survivors came to challenge him for territory, daring to think that they were worthy of his lands and his females. He felt it even as the great pack leader, one of the new lords of the Tides, came and broke him into submission, and if not for how overwhelming the power it showed was, he knows he would have ripped off his own tusks and spit them at it with his last breath.

He feels it again now, as this impossible behemoth tears into him.

He gives back as good as he gets, better even. His tusks, grown to such fine and mighty lengths, rip and tear through the body of the behemoth, and yet they fail to deliver lasting impact. Even as he feels it get harder to tear the monster apart as it adapts, changing to better suit his attacks, he never once fails to tear through its armor into the flesh beneath.

And those same wounds never fail to close themselves again. Moments after a blow, flesh and armor regrow through each other, similar but different from before. Sometimes it seems as if blood is flowing into the gaps and simply transforming into the flesh, while at other times, hidden reserves of meat and armor are being deployed from where they were hidden, like there are redundant bits of it that only move when needed.

It doesn’t move like an animal. Not in truth. Parts of it are bestial, recognizably predatory and aggressive, but other parts of it move methodically. There is a coldness to its violence, even as it bites and claws, kicks and dodges and rips parts off of him. And the moving of its biology, of its pieces… they’re not like flesh should be. Flesh should be soft and quivering, strong only united as great threads- but this monster, its body moves like the cold things of the humans. Bone builds like the webs of a spider, like trees in a forest, and the flesh crawls over it like vines or plant life blooming in real time.

It is distinctly not beast, even as its fanged maw rips a chunk out of his shoulder for the second time and its massive body shivers in clear, animalistic delight.

It roars, and Shakes-Wet-Earth-Eats-Crackling-Flesh feels it hurt him. Something inside the beast vibrates, a sound that might be beautiful on its own but instead magnifies every sound the monster makes. With each roar, he feels his bones ache, his blood shiver and his heart hurts as he fights against it. Its the violence of vibration, magnified by some kind of trick or technique, and all he can do is roar right back. His lungs burn with enough breath to strip the leaves off any tree in this forest, and he bellows loud enough that his tusks magnify the sound rather than diminish it.

And still, they battle.

He charges forward, discarding the implacable, plodding pace he usually sets. There is something deeper in that movement, in how All He Walks Over Is Crushed, but it’s simply not fast enough to keep up with the monster. Even when it grew from a large, tasty-sized human snack into something almost like a true spirit beast, like a true wild thing from beyond the fortress-hives of the humans, its faster than it should be for its size. Shakes-Wet-Earth-Eats-Crackling-Flesh feels the impossible strength of its Gouging tear into it, and he watches as strange machine-like bits of meat and shifting patterns of flesh shift its form much faster than what it naturally should. He cannot track its Qi, cannot feel its lifeblood shifting inside of it or speaking to the world; at its size, it should not be faster than he is.

And yet it dodges. And yet it strikes. And yet as his wounds grow, the monster’s still close themselves, rebuilding patterns that make it dodge faster, that slow down his Gouge further.

It hits again with one of those strange arms, and it digs deep enough that he feels it punch close to his organs. His guts roil as he feels his stomach nearly get pierced, and in the next moment, he feels it overtake him.

The rage. The screaming, endless squeal that is the core of a Boar’s soul. The belief, unshakable and unbroken, that if he cannot kill everything in the world, then he can certainly survive long enough to kill any of it he can reach.

Shakes-Wet-Earth-Eats-Crackling-Flesh, for the first time since it entered its new pack, discards the rules enforced upon it. He tosses aside the impossible pressure of the mountains themselves telling him to obey, lest he be broken, and draws on his Qi.

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Raika smells the change in air quality the moment it happens. Synesthesia lets her see the patterns of Qi inside the Boar’s body, flaring to life and flowing in new patterns even as she feels the weight of it press on her skin.

It’s time.

The beast is strong, but their compatibility is bad. Right now, she’s using only her body to fight, with hints of Blacksteel. That’s fine and good. In this state, if not for her regeneration, the beast would have won handily. Even now, her Qi reserves are low, and if the battle doesn’t end in the next few minutes, she’ll likely end up stuck in this form, struggling to breathe or force her hearts to beat, until she can generate a bit more.

But that’s ok. It was worth it.

So many little flaws. So many untested features. Li Shu is an absolute genius when it comes to theoreticals-

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But Raika is a genius when it comes to application.

Every tool optimized. Every weapon sharpened. Every muscle pushed to its absolute utmost. Every thought reshaped into something useful.

The Want, the Mask and the Flesh, all aligned under a single guiding core, a mix of belief and memory and will.

I Am Me, I Am Mine.

And what she chooses to do with herself is become stronger.

It’s there again. That savage joy. That thoughtless emotion, vibrant and bleeding and wet.

If she gets stronger, she can fight better.

If she fights better, the fights mean more.

If they mean more, she can Change more.

The stronger she gets, the freer she is to change and experience what she chooses.

And it feels good.

There were a dozen inefficiencies in her blood distribution and muscle patterning that she’s changed in the fight. Several overlapping and extraneous armor plates were removed, nanoscale subdermal plating making up for any deficit. Redundant systems are optimized, ensuring that even without regeneration she can fight through worse and worse blows.

Under the screaming whetstone of violence, Supreme Body Art: Gigant is optimized closer to perfection.

It’s limited. Too bulky to be her strongest form, that’s for damn sure. But for fighting beasts, for carrying allies, for blocking attacks and more, it’s a powerful tool. And now, in bloodshed and pain, she’s reforged it.

Hundreds of rolling eyes smile as her maw stretches into a grin.

The Boar’s Qi roars to life. For whatever reason, it held itself back nearly the whole fight, using Dao and Truth over any Qi techniques, but it’s discarded that now. Desperation or bloodlust have set it free to destroy her and itself.

She feels the crackling of lightning in the air, the feeling like the atmosphere is becoming thick and wet like loam, but she also feels how her cursed skin blocks its flow, keeps her body intact and uncontaminated even without the ability to control Qi. She stands there, her form optimized, sleeker than before yet still colossal, and marvels at the technique the Boar creates.

It looks like a mud ball, but darker. Like a floating island of dirt so deep and so rich, so full of the dead and the crawling things that feed on them- and those crawling things are not worms. They crackle and flow, they mutate and spasm and rip through reality from building block to building block. Within that pitch-dark orb of earth the Boar forms and infuses from the dirt around them, eels of violent light devour death itself.

She’s pretty sure she’d survive it. Probably. She could probably heal back from just a head, if given the opportunity. But her cursed skin is an armor, not an inviolable barrier. The attack has enough Qi in it that she wonders if the Divine Beast she “fought” months ago would have been able to tank a direct hit. The Boar is weaker than it was… but not by much, and clearly more due to technique than Qi reserves.

But then again… she’s learned what she needed. She has grown and evolved from the fight, from being torn apart by a Dao, and taking that sort of damage intentionally just… isn’t needed. Isn’t wanted.

Ain’t that something.

The whole of her feels a sense of quiet relief that it doesn’t feel right to let herself be hurt.

Qi reserves at about 23%. She needs around 10% to rebuild her body, and she can re-absorb some of Gigant form to make up for that… so that leaves a decent number to play around with. Not enough to do anything crazy, though.

She briefly wonders about activating her Engine (or “Reactor?” Li Shu mentioned something about that), but… nah. The same rules still apply. Giant beasts fighting is fine, but clearly whatever she generates in her new core can be sensed pretty easily. And… she doesn’t need it.

Her body shrinks a bit, Gigant form compressing itself with a symphony of stretching tendons and crackling bones. Down from thirty five feet tall to twenty-eight, give or take-

But she keeps all eight hearts. She pushes them harder, burning her reserves and her Truth to make her blood flow faster, faster, faster-

She lets one of her arms fall limp as she focuses every ounce of muscle she has on keeping the other one upright and on-target. Her “hand” tightens further, falling into a point, like a spiral shell of a conch but of chitin and flesh. She tightens it further.

Li Shu brought up the idea of high-pressure explosions possibly killing her if she can’t control her blood pressure properly. But what’s an explosion except an undirected weapon?

Her hearts pump harder, until she can feel blood vessels across her Gigant frame begin to break and burst- but her limb, spiraled and inhuman, stays on target.

The technique requires pressure.

The Boar squeals again. It’s taken a single full second for its technique to form and for her to think through her actions.

The ground shifts, as if gravity is pulling in towards the beast’s orb, but it’s wasteful. Poorly made. She can smell the mess that is how the orb is built, no matter how beautifully it breaks the world.

An instant before it fires at her, she opens up a tiny, miniscule gap in her armor and lets her blood explode from it.

Pressurized liquid, infused with Qi, pumped by eight altered hearts through a gap about a centimeter wide.

A thin line of red flashes into existence for a moment.

The Boar lets out a sound like an exhale.

The orb detonates.

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Even without a direct hit, the Boar’s technique devastated the whole terrain. A hundred meters in every direction is overturned earth and flickering electricity, the smell of ozone and rot rife in the air. Trees thicker across than the town center of a village are pulped to wet mulch by its impact on the world.

It takes Raika almost thirty minutes to rebuild herself.

She’d expected the technique to backlash or fall apart after she hit the Boar. Instead, it seemed to take a life of its own, drinking deep of the beast’s remaining Qi and violently detonating. A true explosion, rather than a directed hit.

She was right not to take the chance. It wouldn’t have been an immediate kill, but considering how little worms made of lightning still crackle in the soil, it would’ve consumed her after it blew through her armor and out the other side.

She detaches herself from the remains of her Gigant form. The head alone is nearly as big as she was as a human, and it’s from there that she re-emerges, reabsorbing her “Engine”, lungs and distorted bits of brain matter from the half-rotted corpse that remains. The attack held elements of Dao, maybe, enough that it punched above an already considerable weight class.

She comes out of her altered form with 7% of her Qi reserves intact. It’ll take well over a week at least to build back towards what she considers her “full” amount; not quite enough to start damaging her again and causing Qi poison, but enough that she feels “full”.

The Boar, on the other hand, is quite dead.

There is a thin line of still-glowing blood on it. It makes for a semi-circular pattern, severing the limbs from the body and spiraling in through the central torso, severing it incredibly neatly.

Supreme Body Art: Pressurized Crimson Cut is a resounding success.

In spite of her soreness and the strangely empty feeling she has without pockets of Qi tingling through her blood, Raika grins wide.

She stares at the spirit beast from the fourth ring she just killed. It might not have been nearly as strong or versatile as the Not-Tiger, which could easily match a Warrior realm master… but it was strong.

And she didn’t even need to go all out.

The Mask complains a bit as the Flesh, flushed with adrenal joy, starts to hurt their face with the smile.

It does, however, begin to fade.

She looks at the massive, multi-ton beast, its flesh so dense as to rival or surpass stone. Even dead, even severed and steaming into the air, lying on its side, the beast is larger than most buildings.

How the fuck is she going to get this whole thing back home?