The fortress is in panic mode. The chaos of the battle, the screaming of the wounded, the destruction of its structures, there’s nothing that doesn’t seem to be going wrong at least somewhat. Through her Heart, she feels the structure of the fortress-city around her, shifting constantly like a beast in pain. It’s subtle, not something she could pick up easily- there’s a sense of distance between her Heart and the dungeon itself, her body acting as a sort of buffer, but with how loud the transformations are now, some of it still gets through. The hallways remain as they are, but beneath them, the stone and steel are writhing like flesh, twisting and shuddering like a body in its death throes.

And it really can’t be anything else. She can hear, even through the density and shifting of her surroundings, the ongoing devastation ripping through the world around them. The Many-Heron and the War Daemons behind her continue their conflict, but they’re not the only struggle. The sound of blood and the smell of clashing weapons, always a dim background since she arrived, have become thunderous, from every direction , and especially from ahead. Whatever battle-line that the “Wall” is holding back is closer than ever, and she can smell the absolutely overwhelming feeling of Qi from cultivators, beasts, artifacts and arrays saturating the world.

She needs to find the others. Luckily, it’s not that hard. She just has to follow the smell of death and medicine

Turn, turn again, down through winding passages. A brutalist showing of cold concrete and minimalism, military efficiency turning a place that she can sense is brutally, deeply alive into something that seems almost calcified. An old shell, wrapped around anything soft, as alien as the dungeon beneath Cragend, but in a way wholly… forced. Artificial.

The sounds reach her next. The screaming of the wounded, begging, for aid, for relief, some for death. The sounds of flesh being knit back together, oh so similar to the sounds of it being rent and torn. The chattering of voices asking for assistance, requesting supplies, handing out diagnoses and death sentences.

The concept of being trapped in the Hells feels stronger than ever as she wanders concrete arteries towards the sounds of the dead, the dying, and the tormented.

She’s reformed her body again, keeping herself bald for now and shorter than before, and formed a facsimile of clothing from folded skin and feathering. She’s kept her colors muted; easier to make, even if only very marginally, and easier to reabsorb by the same margin- and one reason she’s not seen right away.

The other is that the entire space is flooded with blood and chaos.

The room has dozens of tables, each of them with a body, or what’s left of one, and at least one healer at each of them. She can see the spaces where the manpower is missing, and it’s not hard to find it- there are dozens of soldiers around the room, against the walls, laying on the floors, with healers running between them. Most of them aren’t going to make it, and the healers… they can tell.

But they try anyways. They don’t stop. Most of them are running on fumes, their systems smelling of medicinal supplements to compensate for how empty their Qi reserves are, and many of them are soaked in blood. Exhaustion and sweat tie together almost strongly enough to overcome the scents of fear, pain and blood- but only almost.

She finds Li Shu and Jin easily enough.

There are three areas where there aren’t enough healers for the number of surgical tables. In each one, every table remains full nonetheless.

One of these areas is run by what looks like a flesh sculptor of some sort, with no less than three additional arms and a few additional eyes allowing them to operate on three tables at once. Another has what looks like an older, more experienced veteran dancing between four tables of her own, some sort of movement technique allowing her to step lightly but fast enough that she blurs in motion to get to each one, over and over. It’s a tremendous display of skill, even with her Qi only smelling like peak Core Formation realm.

But one section has six tables, manned by a single woman and a set of thin, bone-white needles.

She’s sitting on a small pillow, eyes lidded and in an almost trance-like state. There are a few thin trails of red coming from her eyes and one from her nose, and she’s sweating profusely, but her breathing is slow and even, and she remains almost perfectly still.

All around her, her Sacrifice dances.

Some of the needles crack and grow new keratin formations, forming hooks, clamps, pliers, whatever’s needed, over and over. They suture, pull together torn meat, stab into and realign bones, pinch against nerves to deaden pain. A hundred different operations, all happening at once, all simultaneous.

Through her gloves, Raika smells blood leaking from where Li Shu’s nails used to be.

She’s pushing herself. Hard. It doesn’t take enhanced senses to tell that there’s barely anything left, in her Dantian or her Sacrifice. She’s at her absolute limit, and likely has been for some time.

But she, too, isn’t stopping.

She turns and finds Jin first.

The kid is sitting, quietly, against the wall, right next to one of the exits. Only two doors down from where she entered. He’s hugging his knees and just staring.

At the dead.

It’s not all wounded and dying. Not everyone can be saved. Not everyone has been. There’s a pile of them, lain alongside each other in the hall through the door Jin is sitting in.

And not just alongside each other. They ran out of easily accessible space for that. Some of the bodies (many of them barely recognizable as such) are placed atop one another, making the bodies closer to the door almost three high.

She gets a few strange and surprised looks as she walks over towards the bodies, but no one stops her. Anyone who has the wherewithal to try to stop her is more useful doing their job of trying to save lives. She gives a grateful nod to them, and in turn, does her very best to ignore the way that her stomach churns at the smell of all that screaming, crying meat and Qi.

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She kneels next to Jin, and gently, but inexorably, turns his head away from the corpses.

The kid is crying, but calm. Tears flow from his eyes, but his heartbeat is almost unnaturally smooth and even. His Qi remains his own: a dark room, full of smoke and quiet voices. But now the voices aren’t so quiet, and at the edge of them, she can smell the sound of spilling blood and the taste of guns. And it smells quite a bit stronger than before.

“Come on. We’re leaving.”

He doesn’t move. Doesn’t even seem to realize she’s there.

She lets out a long, slow sigh.

Nothing about this has gone to plan, but this… this, at least, she could have seen coming. For all the talk of the forever-war at the Wall, she’d always expected it to be… quieter. She never saw it, after all. No one did, except the soldiers sent here to die. Or, she supposes, the “volunteers”, sent here to do much the same.

And sending a kid, barely into adolescence, in as a “healer’s assistant” was always going to have him see nasty things. He’d be with Li Shu, sure. And it couldn’t be worse than the pain in his village, she’d thought. As if that, too, wouldn’t be a source of more trauma.

Her fault. Her fault for trusting in the Empire. Her fault for underestimating the world’s horrors. Her fault for not having backup plans, for not being bold enough to find someplace less complex to try and move through.

She’ll make it up to him. And to Li Shu. Her plan, her responsibility.

Gently, she picks Jin up like a child, cradling him against her shoulder and blooming a patch of tightly-packed fur against his chin. She makes sure that some of the feathers along the back of her biological clothing grow a little taller, partially blocking his view of their surroundings.

His heartbeat stays perfectly steady. Cultivation trance, dissociation, trauma… wherever he is, all she can do for now is get him somewhere safer and try to help him come back from there on his own.

With her senses and the sheer density of her spatially-altered insides, it’s no trouble at all to dodge between the different operating tables on her way to Li Shu. Her minds offer predictive pathing as instinct to let her avoid bumping into anyone, letting her move at a calm pace so as not to disturb Jin without ever getting in anyone’s way.

“We need to go,” she says quietly, letting Truespeak color her words.

Li Shu doesn’t respond. Sixteen total manifestations of her Sacrifice, the keratin of her nails, finish what they’re doing, and Raika doesn’t stop them.

Not all of the people on the tables make it. One dies not long after she arrives. Another two are carted away, unconscious, but stabilized. One of them will require hours more surgery to even resemble a human body, and Raika wonders at how what’s left of them is even alive.

The… person has worms. Their features are indeterminate, unmade by violence, but all throughout what’s left of their body there are worms. Like someone took a hunk of meat, bathed it in acid, and left it for the maggots, except the maggots are long and stringy and glow with a faint hint of something venomous.

It’s amazing they’ve managed to survive this long. A testament to their own will, and certainly to Li Shu’s skill, tens of worms dying per second as pliers pluck them out and a scalpel of semi-clear biomatter cuts them apart.

Raika opens a cut on her own hand, the flesh opening of her will, and lets a few drops of indigo blood ooze out onto her palm.

Almost instantly, a thousand of the stringy things begin to dig their way out of the body of the cultivator, sensing richer fare. Synesthesia makes their hunger and desire to reproduce glow and vibrate from them, and they swim from out of the dying Core Formation realm soldier towards Raika. Instantly, Li Shu adjusts, as if they were executing a planned maneuver, her Sacrifice grabbing cloths, medicinal talismans and powders to start dousing the body and cutting off dead tissue, bandaging at incredible speed.

Raika waits until all of the worms have entered her cut before she cycles her biology, altering the muscles and veins in her arm. Squirming life is thrown into disarray as she liquifies her own flesh, trapping them in a bubble of fat, bone and Blacksteel caltrops. The few that find their way to the edges of their containment find themselves unable to dig through her saturated and altered biology as easily as they did the cultivator.

She goes to compress the prison, squashing them and letting their poisons just dribble out, but… she needs to be stronger.

She keeps them. For now.

Li Shu finishes the last of the patients on her tables, and then goes to stand. She nearly falls immediately, but Raika is there to grab her.

Li Shu sags into her, falling apart at the seams. Her Sacrifice floats back over to her, carefully falling back into a pouch at her side, but not before Raika gets a clearer sense of it. Qi and keratin have… grown. Added to. She remembers how She of Still Waters could create constructs from the gelatin of her eyes, could use shadows as transportation and sight at once- not techniques, per se. That’s not how the Craft works, really. It’s all about transferring or absorbing properties, like in alchemy. It’s not quite Dao, but… it’s close.

The nails, which became keratin, which became tools, now seems to hold some new additional properties. They taste of… something almost technical, like they have patterns woven into them. Right alongside that, the taste of something vaguely medicinal, in a sharp and calm way rather than herbal.

“I… we can’t,” Li Shu says, her voice trembling. It surprises Raika that she’s even awake. “There’s… too many. I still need to help.”

Raika looks around at the wounded. At the healers. At those they’re trying to bring back from horrific pain and death. Noble and brave, defenders of the Wall, supporters of the Empire…

No. No, they don’t need any more help getting healed.

They’re not the enemy. Not the healers, certainly, but not even the soldiers. Not really. They’re just… tools. Cogs in something greater.

That “something greater” spoke to her. Put a new shackle on her, even if it’s not chained to anything so directly. And it… it didn’t care about the deaths. About the horror. About the slaughter. It knew what she’s been through… and it seemed amused.

The people aren’t the enemy. But the thing they’re feeding, protecting, born from, dying for…

Yeah. The Empire’s an enemy. And any one of these people would kill her if given the order and the chance.

“We’re leaving,” she says to Li Shu. Not harshly, barely above a whisper- but without an ounce of give.

Li Shu, to her credit, tries to fight back anyways. She strains, trying to get to her feet, circulating the dregs of her Qi.

“I’m a healer. I heal. They need help.”

“Yes. They do. And you are. But I’m not willing to put their lives over your safety, or over what we came to do. So we’re leaving. Now.”

Li Shu looks like she might say something, keep pushing- but then she lets out a breath, and the last of her energy fails her. Raika has to form an additional arm to hold her up, cradling her to her chest alongside Jin.

By this point, just about every eye in the room not actively involved in surgery is on her.

She looks around at the healers and soldiers all around.

“Good luck,” she wishes upon them.

“Wait.”

She turns, hackles raised. She’s grown another two inches in height already, getting more surface area ready to deploy a weapon if she needs to… but no. One of the healers, in the Core Formation realm, exhausted, and shockingly muscular, holds out a manual.

“New healers are supposed to get one when they join up. Little ritual. We hold it till after the first day.”

Li Shu isn’t an official healer. She’s not in their robes, hasn’t had their training. She’s a volunteer, one they just met.

The healer holds out the book anyways.

Raika goes to take it, and the healer keeps her grip, refusing to let go for a moment. She meets Raika’s eyes.

“She’s a good kid. And an exceptional junior. Don’t hurt her.”

Raika smiles sadly.

“...I’ll do my best.”

And she leaves the tired and the dying and the dead behind.

Honor to us all on the killing floor.