Nothing about her speaks of humanity.

And why would it? What use is there in chaining oneself to an ideal you don’t believe in? Humanity is not an apex of existence. Neither is any beast or spirit. They are simply manifestations of the way things are, and their ability to change and create new possibilities comes not from humanity, but consciousness. To cultivate is, in and of itself, a way to eclipse humanity, to remake one’s fundamental nature.

Just because most people think their body is just fine doesn’t mean she’s wrong to know that hers isn’t.

The thing that emerges from beneath the crumpled metal pulping her flesh does not look human.

And it stands up.

The Sevenfold Existential Mass array is a startling thing, and it speaks true to its name. Rather than enact a property from itself to another, it reaches into an assigned space, touches the mass of all inside it, and multiplies the effects of that mass, existentially, by sevenfold. Without Qi, there is nothing that lives which can survive seven times its own weight suddenly crashing onto its internal organs.

She stands anyways.

The shriek of bending metal is met by a cracking of stone as her foot lands on the ground and accommodates her multiplied weight. Digitigrade limbs, ending in a set of massive claws, penetrate the earth beneath her. From beneath the ruins of the traincar, she emerges.

She’s smaller this time around. Only about fifteen feet tall, maybe half the height of the star-skinned cultivator’s technique, but still over double the height of your average humanoid. Her entire body is a glistening black of Blacksteel-crafted armored scales, shifting like a ferrofluid to reduce the effects of the array. There are strains like scar tissue or coral veins reinforcing along joints and seams, decorating obsidian-black with a red so dark it becomes blue. Crowned above her head are a new set of horns, thick and curling things that arch back and begin to branch out like antlers, made of a startling white and glowing with iridescent, multi-hued radiation, eyes blinking in and out of existence from within the bio-thaumic crown.

Her face is not a face. It is a skull, and it is not one meant for human beings. Three eye-sockets glimmering with arcane power mark her as something beyond, when she breathes, it ripples, opening along seams that show how it might bloom like a flower into ever so many jaws.

What a day to be alive.

She smiles with a face that recurses like a fractal maw and a holy relic, and marvels at just how good she feels.

Why hold back?

She takes two steps forward, her movements casual even as the array makes her weight shatter the ground she walks on with loud cracking sounds. She looks to the array-wielder, and smiles wide at him, lips that cover only part of the structure of her fangs showing him a moment of respect.

And then she leaps forward.

The distortion effect of the gravitational array vanishes the instant she leaves its range, but by that point it doesn’t matter. The strength needed to launch herself under that much mass was already enough to guarantee her a speed that defies perception, and the star-skinned cultivator only barely blocks in time to stop her from shooting through her like a bullet.

Both of her arms break as Raika collides with them.

The star-skin cultivator cries out, eyes wide, as blood the color of starlight explodes out of her forearms alongside shards of bone. She tries to back away, tries to take a step back, and-

Raika is already gone, one of her hands sticking out of the back of the crystalline cultivator.

He coughs up blood, his stomach punctured, but he does not retreat. He grabs onto her arm, quartz growths blooming from his hand onto her armored skin-

And finding no purchase as Blacksteel scales ripple and flow like water, no more irritated by the chunks of gem-growth than they would be by sand on a beach.

She stares him in the eyes as he shoves his Qi against her, tries to infect her with the unliving growth that he champions… and she smiles.

Humanoid lips disappear as her face folds open and a dozen different maws bloom wide-

The lightning cultivator at last overcomes his surprise and strikes at her, a spear wielded by electricity itself slamming into her side and forcing her away.

The blast is strong enough that the crystal cultivator is sent flying, power crackling over his flesh and burning him even as he grabs a pill to try to heal himself. But that’s fine. Her Soul feels grief and joy as the Mind happily accepts that there’s someone more important to prioritize here.

The lightning cultivator stops holding back. Rather than turning to a bolt of lightning and back to strike and retreat, he pushes relentlessly forward, blending between electricity and flesh to cut away any hitches in his movement or need to reset his attacks.

His spear clashes into her again and again, its edge glowing white even as multi-hued Lightning Dao dances across it, ripping into her to give his allies time to recover.

She smiles.

Supreme Body Art: Overclocking.

Supreme Body Art: Gigant.

And the latest addition- Supreme Body Art: Full Body Transmutation.

Gigant isn’t actually a technique for growing larger, that part’s easy. Gigant is a technique to ensure that when you get larger, you can still move and operate without dying under your own weight.

So what happens when you apply its principles to something that isn’t worried about that?

The world slows down by half, and then again, as Raika overclocks her brains and sensory abilities. The Lightning-wielder goes from a glowing blur of violence to a flickering humanoid shape, dancing between light and flesh, his attacks incredibly fast but now visible. Overclocking fuses with Gigant to activate the series of lattices, support structures and hyper-dense muscle-fibers needed to move an incredibly heavy body at impossible speeds.

And Full Body Transmutation ensures that, even as she moves like she’s still flesh and bone, the Blacksteel, Radiant Metal, and fibrous carbon that make up her body remain intact and functional.

I Can Change, says her Truth. Nowhere in it is that she can only change into meat.

The spear strikes against her- and two of her six arms grab it with clawed, grasping hands, halting it entirely.

The cultivator flickers, his pattern broken, and four other arms of her six total stab into him.

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Four holes emerge, opening up his throat, his eye, his stomach and his ribcage, and only a mid-second transition into lightning stops her from turning him from man into corpse.

She laughs.

She laughs.

“COME ON THEN!” she roars, her true voice resonating with Dink and magnifying itself to be heard across the chamber. It rings like music and like a thrumming engine at once, Truespeak from vocal cords drowning in Qi forcing her words to carry impossible weight. “Unleash your Nascent Souls! Mantle your Transcendent forms! Bind me within your Domains! Pull out all the stops and show me EVERYTHING YOU’VE GOT!”

She twirls her looted spear, ferrofluid shards of Blacksteel flowing over it to turn it from resplendent white and gold to a lance black as midnight. She smiles wide at her enemies, her crown of horns, antlers and eyes glowing like an impossible sunrise as eyes flicker in and out of existence within, and six arms on a body of all-black death and glorious navy-indigo lifeblood.

This is it.

This is her.

Not just blood. Not just human. Not just monstrous. Not just sharpness. Not just beast. Not just tool.

She is.

And her opponents rise to meet her.

The array-wielding cultivator is busy healing what’s left of the lightning-warrior, who is barely clinging to life even with his Nascent Soul vitality, but he still transforms the ground, warps space to bring more arrays into sequence around her. The star-skinned cultivator is glowing, her ruined arms warping like a spatial distortion as she grows another few feet, her Core alight and her eyes deep as void. The crystal cultivator has dozens of new ones breaching his skin, tearing through his flesh violently as he begins to glow with an off-white radiance and the ground around him begins to transmute.

All of them or all of her are going to die here, but she refuses both until they have shown all that they are.

It is all the honor she can offer them, here on the killing floor.

The crystalline cultivator explodes.

It’s nothing like the last Domain she saw, that of Feng Gao. That was a whole and alien thing, a world in and of itself bound by his own vision. What extends from her enemy out towards her is a desolate field, ideas and functions of it missing- but hinted at, and held together enough that the whole remains. The air and ground around him warp, and what was once air, what was once ground, what was once space and flesh- all begins to blossom into pillars of messy, fractal quartz. The world around and about him becomes a place of ever-growing dead radiance, beautiful, alien and harsh, such that even the air one breathes is just a vector for more crystalline transformation.

The star-skinned cultivator roars out a battle cry as she launches at Raika, spatially-distorted proportions warping as something from within her writhes. From within the scent of a burning Core, Raika glimpses a thing of infinite arms and legs, of fathomless scale, glowing with all the eyes of the gods above, and feels it begin to reach out towards her through the warrior’s will.

[Domain Of Growing Resplendence From All] turns the world to cold, sharp crystal.

[Divine Will From Starry Eyes] reaches out from within a warrior nearly fifty feet tall and moving at the speed of a bullet.

Glory be.

Supreme Body Art, New Form: Pressurized Indigo.

Blood isn’t as useful in a high-gravity environment. Too light. What’s inside her is more like a jelly or ooze, the thickness and strength of her veins and transformed hearts strong enough to force it to circulate anyways. Blood, refined with a hundred times as much oxygen, Qi, and materials as it could normally hold, transmuted into something more like hemocyanin rather than hemoglobin, feeds into a body whose energy demands are astronomical.

But the results are equally so. Thicker blood, too, can be pressurized.

She swings her newfound obsidian spear in a wide arc, cutting across both her opponents.

Blood vessels and Qi circuits to enhance them, all along the edge of the blade, open wide.

Radiant CHANGE, indigo hyperfluid and pressurized Blacksteel sand blasts out in a sweeping flash of color and the screaming sound of ground and flesh being unmade.

Deep inside her, a tree of naked swords and glowing [DIVISION] changes hue, ever so slightly, and begins to drip indigo sap from its sharp-edged leaves.

And two cultivators fall into pieces before her.

[Domain Of Growing Resplendence From All] falls to nothing, the Heavens and Dao reasserting themselves on the transformed landscape. All that’s left is quartz dust, drifting on the wind. Behind it, at its source, the crystal cultivator comes apart, his arms, torso and waist all falling in slightly different directions from each other.

[Divine Will From Starry Eyes] breathes, recedes, begins to fall into itself. To slay a cultivator with a true Soul is to have that Soul flee freely, to regrow its original body as it pleases. To slay a Nascent Soul cultivator, to cut across them and turn flesh, dantian and Core into disparate pieces, is more akin to slitting the throat of a mortal.

She could feel meridians already, her touch gifting them to her synesthesia. Why not do more?

She sighs, softly, as the bodies hit the floor.

“Next.”

The word is barely out of her mouth before a sword, covered in enough Qi and lightning that it’s barely visible, shatters its way through her armor and into her shoulder.

It’s a long blade, wielded one-handed in spite of its size due to the strength of its master- but there is a look of surprise on his face as she lets it sink in to the hilt and still not emerge from her back. Seven feet of sword disappears into a four-foot-wide body, and just sinks away.

“A good strike. You’re fast.”

He is not fast enough to stop her from breaking the arm holding the sword and striking him with three fists at the same point of impact, shattering his ribcage and sending him flying.

Slowly, one of her arms extending out and out like a telescoping rod, she drags the blade out from her shoulder. Mere moments later, iridescent radiation and Blacksteel scales flow over it, transforming it to another obsidian weapon.

“The Emperor in the High Plane of Asura Opposing Heaven and the Spirits of the World met in the heavenly perfect mountain and discussed the transfer of the rule of the world from the great Will of the Heavens to-”

She turns, the mumbling prayer happening at an incredible pace, and faces the array cultivator barely in time for her eyes to see what he’s holding.

There’s a new artifact in his hands, shaped like a dozen prayer beads drowned in Qi, and from his words to them and to the space around him, the world has transformed.

What was once a defensive artifact hovering around him has migrated above him, recombining and transforming into something approaching the shape of a rifle. Dozens of arrays are moving as the godflesh of the fortress city bows to his prayer and begins to envelop him, making a cocoon of concrete around his body and growing glowing veins of power into the artifact.

It takes him approximately one half-second to complete the prayer. One half-second that his friend couldn’t grant him, even as she hears his ribcage reknitting itself just off to the side. One half second in which she could have shot or crushed or severed him into pieces.

She waits.

Honor on the killing floor.

Lightning, gravitational manipulation, godflesh and raw, purified Qi all flow into a singular point at the back of the rifle.

There is a sound like the air breaking.

A thin piece of metal, about the size of a human finger, fires through the middle of her chest and- and keeps going.

There is whining, screaming sound of flesh and matter being torn apart- and then, almost a full second later, the railgun bullet falls out of her back, almost thirty degrees off from the angle it entered.

She looks at the array cultivator, already furiously whispering into his prayer beads for another shot, even as blood is gushing from his eyes, nose, mouth and ears. Even as she knows he doesn’t have the energy in him for another blast as strong as the one that just didn’t kill her.

Honor on the killing floor.

Judging from how insensate he is, how flooded with blood all his senses are, she’s fairly certain he doesn’t even feel it when she severs his head and pierces his Dantian. He dies without noticing, and it takes a full extra second for the prayer beads to fall from his hands.

“What are you?” ask the last of opponents.

She sighs, low and slow.

“Something new. And someone willing to kill more, if it means I get where we need to go.”

The lightning-wielder grimaces, then growls. His Qi begins to grow, further and further, higher and higher, cycling through him so, so fast. His comprehension of Dao trembles in the air, four-colored Lightning manifesting in agonizingly bright rays across the chamber.

“You won’t find me such easy prey!” he screams as he begins to manifest.

[Perfect Strike Of Tribulation] rears its head, a thing of beautiful spears and gorgeous electrified violence, missing pieces but still so utterly beautiful, so utterly dedicated to itself and to the perfect instant of-

[INFUSION].

The top half of the lightning cultivator’s head falls to the ground. It lands with the sound of breaking glass and crumbling stone.

She drops her sword, the top half of it a violently shattering mess of glass, bone, grass, fire and copper. The glow of CHANGE dims from it only slowly as the radiation of her Reactor turns back from weapon into fuel.

She sighs.

Four cultivators and over a hundred more, dead. Living beings, awake and aware, capable of making choices, of Changing, turned into so much meat and Qi. Soldiers of an Empire that honors that title. They willingly stood by as their fellows killed and culled those they deemed useless alive, so they might make use of her death. They fought in a war that she can hear the edges of, even now, waging like a nightmare eternal.

And now they’re dead.

Honor on the killing floor.

We Are What We Eat.