She hears him. What a strange, cathartic thrill it is, to see and feel and know him. She can feel his heart pumping, smell the violence in his veins, taste his center of gravity, see the shape of his every twitching muscle. He is here, and she knows him, and here he is, reflected onto her once again.

Shin Ren. Shin Ren, young master of the Purple Flame Burning Lotus sect. The second man to ever mutilate her, however short-lived it might have been.

He doesn’t recognize her.

That’s hardly his fault, but it does send a sharp-toothed thrill through her. He doesn’t recognize her. Clad in metallic death that moves as if fluid, wielding six arms, a spear of obsidian midnight, towering over any other humanoid she’s yet to meet, she does not appear human. She turns to him, a crown of horns, eyes, and iridescent radiation framing a face whose three sockets glow with inner fire and whose mouth is a blossoming thing of many jaws.

He is standing steady, his stance firm and his will resolved despite her appearance. Half monster, half god, and more nightmarish than she’d prefer, ideally, but she is bared in all her glory, and he stands resolute.

And… and yet, he doesn’t attack right away.

He holds out a hand, and his fellow cultivators don’t advance. One of them, who smells of the beauty of open sky and a staircase towards it, stands close to him, providing distinctive backup. The other two branch off, with one of them, stinking of ozone-rich clouds and oversaturated rain, taking a position off on his own, a bit too far to properly support the others without a movement technique. The last one, who smells of incense smoke and mirrors, of a drifting haze and sharp, glittering color-

Hmm. Well she’s actually gone. The scent holds fast, saturating the air more and more, and-

Ah. Obvious enough. Illusion wielder of some kind. Raika sets one of her subminds to decoding the particulars of the technique as best she can, before the inevitable fight.

And still, Shin Ren does not attack.

“This one apologizes, honored warrior, but I’m afraid that I do not recognize you. Forgive my unworthy eyes that have not recorded your visage properly. Might I ask where we last met?”

Oh.

Oh! Oh he really doesn’t recognize her!

Does he think she’s some sort of old master, hiding her cultivation even in this form? The radiation of her inner concept, CHANGE, isn’t Qi in and of itself; in fact, it feeds off of even as it adds to it. Despite everything, to Qi senses, she still doesn’t radiate that much power, not relative to her size or the weight of her presence. It’s not even a bad guess, in its own way.

She can’t help but smile at that.

“No need to be so polite, pretty-boy. But then, you were pretty polite last time too, and you attacked a lot more readily then.”

He frowns, and she listens to the song of his synapses trying to puzzle out who she is.

“...if you hail from the south-south-eastern rings, then I apologize. My journey through there was… it wasn’t a version of me I would choose to be again. If, in my pursuit of self-destruction, I have hurt you, then I am deeply sorry.”

…He means it.

She can smell it on him. He means it.

Part of her remembers the little speech he did, right before their fight on the executioner’s block. How he’d meant that, too.

No. No, if she can change, so can someone else. She focuses in on him, letting go of what her memory tells her should be there, and-

Ah. He’s not still at the Nascent Soul stage, he’s there again. It’s the only explanation she can think of for so foundational a transformation.

His Qi is richer, purer than it was last time. There’s less of the flowery sort of scent that he had when they last met, replaced instead by a cleaner smell. His scent, now, is that of a pure-burning flame, one that does not waver nor flicker no matter what fuel it is made to feed on… and it has companions. A scent like burning, charred flesh, overcooked meat and blistering eyes, it writhes where his stands tall. It smells of hunger, of explosive, messy existence, and wraps and coils around his own Qi, but it doesn’t feed off it. If anything, it seems symbiotic, matched by a smaller sibling which whispers of strange mirages, of warping metal and softened material, both of them enhancing the whole rather than dividing it.

Not one cultivation, but a blend of three. Three distinct scents, each of them originating from a single body, each fused together into a sort of triumvirate.

She can’t help but smile at the thought.

Mind, Body, Soul.

Purity, Destruction, Transmutation.

And in the silence, as he waits for an answer, he readies no tool. His cultivation does not stir, despite the bursts of would-be detonations she senses from his second source of Qi.

He just… apologizes. And waits.

“We… We met further north. But I don’t blame you for not recognizing me. I’ve changed even more than you have.”

He smiles softly. “I’ve heard before how much I’ve changed, but no one seems to ever tell me how. I am honored to be recognized for my efforts, perhaps.”

“...You’re more sincere. You mean what you say.”

He pauses at that, blinking at her. Then he gives a little half-chuckle. “I… suppose I do. I don’t suppose you might do me the kindness of granting me your name?”

“That’s good. You shouldn’t suppose. I don’t think sharing my name would do either of us any good here, with ever so many eyes, but… maybe someday. It might be nice to see what you think of me now.”

Of her six arms, two of them considerably longer and stronger than her central four, she flexes a part of her scales, Blacksteel flowing like sand to unveil raw flesh. She watches, interested, as one of her subminds flicks a few drops of indigo blood out in an arc towards her left.

Hmm. Nothing visible, but the scent changed slightly, as if caught in a breeze. The illusion wielder, stepping away from the spatter?

“Any chance I can convince you to walk away from this?” she asks.

Shin Ren pauses. Seems to take a moment to genuinely consider it.

“Most likely. I don’t doubt there are all sorts of things you might know, say or do that could convince me. But just asking me to leave won’t do it, I’m afraid. There’s… there’s a lot of blood here, and I do believe you had something to do with shedding it. There are many more lives in this place that have done me no wrong, and who have, indirectly, asked me for help. I don’t think leaving them to be slaughtered would sit right with me.”

She snorts, a little huff of steam coming out of (does she have nostrils? No? Kind of?) some of her air-vents.

“I respect that. Never pictured you as such a stickler for wording, but I respect that, too. Two things I’ll say, then, before we get started. Firstly, surrender remains an option. Drop your weapons, swear an oath of surrender, and I’ll spare you. I don’t know most of you, and seeing as you’re not in Imperial armor, I don’t care enough about your deaths not to offer that much.

“Secondly… ignorance is only bliss for so long, pretty-boy. We’re all just meat and wine to them. The people who make places like this. You should think hard about whether or not you want to stay on their plate.”

Shin Ren nods, dropping into a stance even as a guandao that screams to Raika’s senses of some sort of weirdness manifests from his storage ring.

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

“Good. Feel free to take the first swing.”

In the end, it’s actually not her age-old ‘enemy’ that shoots the metaphorical starter pistol.

It comes from a much less cathartic source, unfortunately.

There is a sense of changing pressure, something that might make a mortal’s ears burst entirely, and some of the steam let out from Raika talking condenses into a cloud no larger than a person. From within it, a brilliant light begins to glow, and it begins to rain.

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The water doesn’t fall to the ground, falling instead as if drawn directly to Raika by gravity, each droplet glowing with Qi in some intricate form-

Unfortunately, she is no longer there.

The rain drops keep falling towards her, but she moves faster than they do, and considering she’s about three times taller than the cultivator wearing Blessed Clouds sect robes, he has to crane his neck up high to see the fist that punches him.

She holds back, though. Doesn’t even break his skull. Well, kind of. Fractures don’t count.

He makes a strangled sound that might have been the start of a chant, his head hitting the ground hard enough that godflesh-made-concrete cracks into a bowl beneath it. Nascent Soul cultivator durability is nothing to scoff at, but in spite of how he interacts with physics, he’s still human. The hit rattles him, which leaves her just in time to turn and block the blow from the cultivator in light blue who was supporting Shin Ren.

“To a worthy climb!” he yells, smiling wide, and she feels his sword dance in between her defenses. It cuts into her Blacksteel and at first, there’s a shriek of obsidian metal on Qi-infused steel- but then the cultivator shifts his step, like a dancer finding his rhythm, and the blade somehow slips into a gap in the flow.

It cuts one of her arms nearly to the bone, and by the time a second arm has come around to strike at him, faster than a human body could move, his blade is somehow just there, the previous move allowing him to flow effortlessly into a parry. It’s like the dance is already partially choreographed to her movements.

That doesn’t mean it’s painless, though.

His robes are already tearing, small cuts forming beneath them. Air pressure from her fist flying past and flecks of Blacksteel shaved off by his parry slash across him, and he stumbles, ever so slightly,

Instead of following up with another punch or swipe, she turns away, pointing her spear towards the space opposite where her submind threw the blood splatter. A tail thicker than a human torso and clad in plates of deadly metallic scales slams into the dancer as she spins, and from the tip of her spear, she opens up the veins and formations at its edge.

Supreme Body Art: Pressurized Indigo cuts across the open floor of the hangar, searing a beautifully cut line into the ground. She smells the scent of Qi briefly strengthen, illusions and censer-smoke flaring to her senses, but there’s a moment where she glimpses the shadow of movement.

And then Shin Ren is there, and things change rather drastically.

He hits her harder than a cannon.

Not quite as badly as the railgun-shot from before, but harder and faster than any of the other bullets she’s faced yet. There is a sound of thunder, like an explosive went off right next to her ears, and then she feels the tip of his Guandao past her armor and cutting into her ribcage.

And then the kinetic energy of the impact is there, and multiple tons of her flesh and armor is launched at the far wall.

He holds firm there, planted against her ribs, the staff of his weapon in hand, and he fills her with fire.

True Flame screams into being, pressurized beneath her scales, and gold-purple fire begins to eat away at her muscle and bone, struggling to make headway against Blacksteel.

Her tail leverages her weight, and she stands, spear and five other arms coming down at the warrior impaling her- but the dancer is there again. With every step, he is somehow elsewhere, every point of contact with the air somehow moving him in and out of exactly where he needs to be, ignoring the distance between them. His blade chips and sparks, his flesh starts to singe, but he refuses to back down, parrying blow after blow.

She roars, letting out wisps of CHANGE with her breath, and they both pull back, Shin Ren’s flames fluctuating between a hundred other elements briefly. Even still, every one of those elements combusts, catches Flame, covering her like pitch or crystals of fire.

Hmm. He couldn’t do that before.

She’s being overconfident. She won the last fight, true, but she won it by going all-out, exercising every technique, and no Nascent Soul cultivator is perfectly equivalent to another.

From her six limbs, she reforms part of her Body’s original arsenal. Through her Heart and Soul, the Dao of the Gun and Dao of the Blade flow down her arms, aligning her muscles, cells, molecules to a pattern of existence, such that one becomes a bio-mechanical cannon and the other manifests into a tree of sharp blades. Two to wield her spear, with one connected to it, and her two largest arms shift, one of them reforming back into a tower shield, and the other into a long, serrated whip of steel and sinew.

Hmm.

No. None of them can hit quite as hard as the last set. She turns the tower shield to another whip, dedicating a submind to each limb to ensure the arcs don’t overlap.

It takes her less than a second to transform. In that time, the cloud cultivator has come back, the droplets he was maintaining once again beginning to fall towards her. Each droplet hits like a ball of lead at terminal velocity, each one staining her scales and beginning to seep between them and force them apart. The dancer takes every opportunity, unheeding of any pain, his blade dancing alongside his steps, the blue of a clear sky guiding every wound to be deeper than the last, every dodge, faster.

And Shin Ren, who seems to be aiming for knockout hits, detonates his movement art at her again.

Then her transformation ends, and the world is filled with razors and the sound of clashing steel.

Her cannon-limb shoots a hole through the cloud, disrupting it with a missile of Blacksteel and shaped bone, while her Blades begin to parry against the dancer, bit by bit. Shin Ren has to abort his charge, dodging between the thrashing lines of serrated death and losing momentum, which puts him in exactly the right spot for her spear to stab forward, thrusting rather than cutting.

Even still, that’s enough for her to keep being creative.

A wall of flame so bright it actually hurts to look at manifest at the exact same time as Pressurized Indigo launches forward from the tip of the spear, extending the danger out-

And then there is crimson blood to match the indigo.

Shin Ren falls, his arm severed at the shoulder, his arms wide.

Still alive. Good. That’s enough. She turns, aiming spear and whips both towards the cloud-cultivator reforming his storm-

She feels her hip and lower back melt off her body.

Her whips redirect immediately, cutting the air and ground both as they slash randomly behind her. New sets of eyes from her crown and her sense of touch tell her everything she needs to know in an instant.

Shin Ren stands behind her, already dodging her attacks again, his guandao glowing cherry-red and both his arms entirely attached.

If she still had human eyelids, she’d squint them at him.

The illusion wielder.

But how? Every illusion wields Qi, she should be able to see through it. Her senses are…

Are higher than the average cultivator, but not alien to them. Every high-level cultivator gains enhanced senses, so there would obviously be techniques to fool them further.

Still, she felt the heat from his shield as it diverted her attack, tasted the blood in the air when he was wounded. How?

The dancer cuts across her throat, and she’s forced to dodge, being more proactive rather than passively tanking the damage. She can survive a lot, but maybe breaking his pace will keep him from somehow finding an even better way to cut against her.

She absorbs the flame along her lower back, reforming the muscles as a sapling of flame sprouts in her inner world. Shin Ren is using the Dao of Flame, but he seems like the only Dao wielder of the lot. The dancer… maybe. Her own comprehension isn’t exactly normal, but no normal sword should be able to block her Blades, not when infused with their own Dao.

She finds herself pleasantly surprised. Barring the cloud-cultivator, they’re actually putting up a hell of a fight.

But it’s one thing to be enough to challenge her. Another to be enough to win.

Twice more she slashes with Pressurized Indigo, forcing the dancer to retreat, her whips keeping Shin Ren at bay for now, and she dashes past both of them.

Supreme Body Art: Overclocking pushes her perception to its absolute maximum, slowing down the battle even as she redirects some of the technique to enhance her tendons. She shoots across the battlefield, her cannon-limb unnaturally angling behind her to fire at the slowed-down targets, and the ground cracks with each impact as she propels herself. She tracks what her subminds feed the whole of her, landing at spot with most open view-lines and furthest from clear signs of damage- and begins to Cut.

A thousand-thousand slashes rip apart the world as her Blade and the serrated edges of her tendrils tear the world apart in a sphere around her, ripping the world into slashes- and slicing through the body of something hardy.

The illusion wielder lands in two parts, covered in cuts. Aristocratic sect robes fall apart and are stained crimson as she falls, and one player is eliminated. Common sense: always go for the support roles in combat.

She hears a noise like the world exploding behind her.

She turns, just barely in time to parry Shin Ren’s strange guandao against her sword-limb.

He hits her with the most Qi she’s ever felt at once.

The world warps as the air is primed into a heat haze, as oxygen is dragged forward and then detonated. Black and Red flame tear the world apart into messy chunks and rip into everything they can reach, as Gold and Purple behind them turn all that they touch into purified ash.

She feels half her face, the front of her torso, and two of her arms that got caught extended out all vanish before the Flame.

She feels it then, in the fire. A Truth.

Everything Burns.

She consumes as much of it as she can, but barely a fraction is taken in before she has to stop, the inside of the strange connection between her Heart and the rest of her beginning to catch flame in some way she can’t understand. It just keeps burning, keeps detonating, and she sees Shin Ren, his eyes wide, teeth bared, completely focused-

She only barely manages to follow the parry through, pushing his blade back just enough to launch as much of the attack’s force as she can straight upward.

The roof of the cavern explodes.

And it keeps going.

Redirected by Blacksteel and Dao, the fire roars, expressing its Truth and eating through centuries-old steel, stone and godflesh, exploding through floor after floor, until with a final eruption of ignition, she hears it break through into open air.

Shin Ren falls, staggering back, the attack having drained nearly half of his Qi. He puts his weapon up, eyes darting back from the moment of weakness, fire beginning to stir again-

But Raika is in no place to rush him. Almost half her body, Blacksteel included, immolated so severely that it nearly evaporated, molten “metal” and indigo blood dripping down the flame-cut edges of what’s left.

Three subminds, three limbs, and most of her upper-layer organs. Partially formed Sword Dao is all that allowed her to maintain that arm in particular, the Blacksteel warped and somehow alien to its original purpose. Everything screams in agony.

And already, she’s started regenerating.

Flesh flows like water, reknitting itself at impossible speed, Blacksteel multiplying under the radiance of CHANGE to cover her once more. She turns to face him, crown of eyes and glowing sockets staring him down.

“You’re almost as scary as you used to be.”

He says nothing. She didn’t smell anything much between them, but he seems to have taken the death of the illusion wielder pretty hard.

She nods. Honor on the killing floor.

They both step forward at the same time, moving faster than the eye can see- and stepping into the moonlight, streaming down from the crater they blasted through the fortress city’s edge.

And they both stop.

And look up.

Something infinitely further away than the sky stares back.

Neither one of them understands what they see. Neither one of them will be able to recall it in detail afterwards. But one thing stands crystalline to both of them.

DISGUST.

Shin Ren’s tribulation, and the attention of something beyond understanding, lands on them both.