She hadn’t forgotten.

Since altering her brain(s), she’s found it rather difficult to forget anything, actually. Near-perfect recall, though it’s still muddled by the mechanics of neurology. But this is older, and has stood firm in her mind for many, many months.

Perfect honesty.

She couldn’t be sure, not at the time. All she knew was that they got tacit consent from Taurus to do the tournament, told to explore the possibilities of connecting with the Witch beneath the city- and then he’d asked her a question.

And she’d answered honestly.

Completely, without reservation. Perfect honesty. At the time, the Mask had been a constant coping mechanism, a way of masking any and all true emotion- and when he’d asked that question, it had just gone away. Vanished, like it was never there.

That moment stuck.

Taurus, for all his talk of alliances, had set a command phrase. Some kind of implanted suggestion, some technique to cut to the heart of her and make it obey, even if only gently. She can’t even fault him for it, not really, considering his goals and how bad their dynamic... well, is. If she hadn’t been masking so very violently at the time, she might not even have noticed except as a bit of confusion or disorientation. But as it was, altered psychology landed face-first against implanted commands, and she remembered.

Took her a while to recall it fully after Zhoulong’s damage, he was very thorough on that memory- but the discomfort, the disorientation, the fear, it made for a strong fucking anchor. Taurus has some kind of control over her. It explains so much; his trust in what she tells him, his confidence that he could get her back under control even with how loose of a leash he gave her, it all clicks.

But how to find it? How to identify it? How to find out how deep it runs, what it can do? How to reshape herself around it, if she can’t feel or even know what the triggers are, the mechanics of it?

Months and months of preparation, all leading to this.

She had to get Taurus here, and she had to do it in a way that would piss him off. She had to do it in a way that made it clear she wasn’t in his control, wasn’t growing or progressing according to his plan, but not so much that he’d decide to just kill her outright. Attacking him right away, or starting to wreak havoc, were both out; one would just lead to a swift defeat, the other, to some new angle he could exploit. No, she had to bring him to a place without witnesses, where he’d feel more comfortable speaking freely and leveraging his control, and then force him to exercise that same control.

And now, as half or more of her mind is shunted to submission, as what’s left is forced into a deeply human and deeply simplistic framework, she’s ready.

The Mask is broken, complex processing and conscious choices subverted or shut down, and the Flesh is made separate, her needs and wants kept separate from the majority- but she still prepared for it. She’s still ready enough to follow through on the plan.

Currently, Raika has four sub-minds. Two are dedicated to managing additional limbs and organ functions, both simple, small; one is fused into a larger mass to enhance and better understand her senses, creating her synesthesia and allowing her to remove the screaming overstimulation; and one, slightly closer to her original brain, the largest of the four, is a tool for processing all that new input and output from all angles.

A processor, dedicated entirely to intaking data, outputting results, and analyzing information at a pace that a normal brain, burdened with messy, instinct-made neural architecture and clumsy learned patterns can’t match.

And now, it wakes up.

She doesn’t need a Mask. A Mask is a simpler tool, something made to process and obfuscate emotion and social stimuli. It had been growing for some time already, changing bit by bit, and now, its old role shattered entirely, the part of her that was a Mask casts its broken pieces down into a new home.

Raika’s awareness lights back up as the part of her that is Mind is at last forged into being.

Almost as if waiting for the starting gun, her other parts rearrange themselves to fall neatly into place inside her new structure of self.

Mind, Soul, Body.

Flesh is reductive, simplistic, only a facet of a truly complex Body. To self-identify with a capital S Soul is perhaps a bit arrogant, but it fits; her animus, her wants, her desires and goals and ideals.

And her Mind, a complex, ever-shifting thing of thought and connection, action and reaction, of compounding patterns and systems of understanding and perspective.

It fills the space of the Want, previously the “largest” of the parts of Raika- but for all that the sections of herself feel grander, more whole, their dynamics are not the same. Her Mind is no more emotionless than her Soul is thoughtless, her Body no less aware than either. The old roles are unmade, and new ones put into place.

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She grins as she feels the tiny, squirming little part of herself that flicked the switch to obey, that fell to trickery and command- and cuts it out.

“TO. BE. PERFECTLY. HONEST,” she rumbles, “I. AM. VERY. GLAD. THAT. WORKED.”

Taurus blinks, and takes a single step back.

With a sound like falling glass and shifting tectonics, Raika raises herself a bit taller, opens her maw wide, a human-sized maw of Blacksteel teeth and lashing tongues and burbling acids and Flame-

And takes a bite.

That’s the thing about Mountains, see; for all that they think they’re immovable, they’re really not. And no one, especially not big rocks, expects to get fucking eaten.

For all its weight, for all its mass and the concept behind it, for all that Taurus’ control of Qi and the aspects of his Domain that have manifested far earlier and more completely than almost any in his realm can boast… she’s eaten rocks before.

In an instant, the quasi-Domain shatters, pulled back into Taurus’ mind and soul like it was never there. The only sign that it existed is the circle of flattened earth surrounding Raika, almost three inches deeper than the terrain around it…

And the taste of stone, mountain air, and self-loathing slipping down her gullet.

She smiles, far too wide, and turns many, many eyes at Taurus.

There is a moment where his Qi begins to stir, the incredibly well-controlled energy slipping out of his grip in droplets as he prepares for violence-

And she transforms.

Her head, an amalgamation of armor and Blacksteel and teeth and eyes (etc etc) collapses into a shape that looks human, naked and dark-skinned and slowly growing a head of bright red and orange hair like sunset. Her feet touch the ground and there’s a distressingly crunchy, squelchy sound as the leviathan body she spawned to stand under his Mountain is absorbed back into her new “main” body. She converts it, cell by cell, to blood and undifferentiated meat, absorbing it straight into her bigger-on-the-inside stomach. She can digest it for a moderate return on investment, and it’s better than just severing her connection and leaving it to rot.

Taurus meets her eyes, the weight of him bending the world around him in preparation- and she raises her hands in mocking surrender.

“Relax, big guy. I was being… perfectly honest. I asked you here to talk.”

He frowns, the world around him swirling. With synesthesia, what little Qi isn’t kept under perfect control manifest around him as little floating droplets on the wind, bits of wind and stone orbiting through the air. Despite her growth…

Hmm. She’d probably still lose.

Oh, it would be a tough fight, that’s for damn sure. She’s fairly certain that, especially with her Reactor, she’d put up a hell of a struggle.

But for all that she’s pushed him here, she still doesn’t know the depths of his cultivation. His Soul is, if not fully formed, then barely a heartbeat away from it, and his Qi seems deep. Beyond that, he remains a master of arrays and formations, enough to have it in one of his Empire-given names, and she hasn’t seen any of the techniques he might have, just his Domain and base Qi manipulation.

He’d hold himself back for a bit, try not to leave himself exposed or leave traces of himself… but he’d also try his best to kill her fast. The longer the fight lasts, the more she costs him. But without knowing his techniques, his arrays, his potential artifacts…

Yeah. She’d lose.

For now.

And instead of pushing the issue, she lets him stew as she digs through the compressed earth and pulls out her pipe.

Which is broken into pieces. Of course.

She sighs, turning to look at him. “You know I carved this by hand? Absolutely rude.”

His eyes widen, his nostrils flare… and he snorts.

“Not nearly as much as you.”

She nods. “True. This lowly disciple acknowledges her disrespect.”

Another snort. “And does not apologize for it, I see.”

“No.”

She grows her hair out long enough, and out into braids, that it covers most of her “modesty”, falling down all the way to her calves. With a little bit of intent and a little bit of Truth, she starts to shape a new pipe from out of a bone in her wrist.

“I did this to make something perfectly clear, Senior Researcher. Your leash on me? That’s done. Fucked off home. Your threats about my loved ones? Not nearly so threatening when I know just how valuable so many of them are to you, and am right beside the ones that remain.

“You killed a young man I owed my life to right in front of my eyes. Because you were scared. Because I slipped your control, and the thought of that getting out was enough of a threat that an innocent life had to be thrown away, just like how today it made you run all the way here. We are not friends, Taurus, and we never will be- but I think we’ll both be much more comfortable within killing range of each other than not.”

Taurus grunts once, setting his stance a bit wider.

“I find very little about your existence comfortable. You are… quite the needle in the pillow, as it were.”

She shrugs. “I’m not exactly happy with sticking close to you either. But unless you kill me right now, right this second, I am going to continue to try new things that almost kill me, survive them, and get stronger. And unless I cripple or wound you enough to truly fuck your shit up, your plans will still go off, and you’ll still get what you want.

“So. Same deal. You get to keep plotting your coup, or whatever this is. You get to point me in a direction when the time comes, and sort the wreckage behind me for whatever’s left when I’m done or dead… and in turn, you clear the way to Feng Gao. Clear the way to the broken, terrible, no-good monsters of the world, entrenched and calcified into the gears of an Empire that makes weapons and pain above all else.

“And when it’s time… clear the way to you.”

She shrugs. “Or don’t. Either way, it’ll be easier to take from you what you owe me if I know where you are and at least part of your plans.

“But you don’t get to put chains on me.”

“Because I’ll kill myself before I let you put a collar on me again.”

There’s a moment where she’s not sure what he’s going to say. She’s willing to fight him on this, despite everything. If it’s between bowing the knee and taking as many pieces out of him as she can on the way out, she’ll opt for the latter. She knows it, deep, deep down at the core of who she has chosen to be.

But then his hormones twitch, and the messy physicality of flesh gives away the minute change of the moment he makes a decision.

“Fine. No more chains, save the ones we put on ourselves.”

She grins.

“Deal.”

Taurus raises an eyebrow, looking around. “Is that it? Or do you have some other obscene waste of time and resources to throw onto my plate.”

She smiles, a cheeky thing accompanied by the sound of snapping bone as she breaks her new pipe off from her wrist.

“Oh, just the fact that I’ll actually be headed to the fourth ring for a while. That’s no problem, right?”

Taurus actually cocks his head at that, his right horn almost touching his shoulder.

“Ah. Well… I suppose that actually does make a few things potentially much easier. Never expected that from you.”