She won’t let them get hurt again. Not now. Not because of her, like this.
She has more power and versatility than ever. She can feel the band around her inner world, but besides trying to remove it, she’s not sure what activates it- it hasn’t so much as twitched as she shifts her biology or the new spatial manipulation going on inside her body.
Her flesh has hundreds of different mechanisms, organelles, and chemical properties, many of which she’s only starting to explore. Biochemistry alone is a field she’s left mostly untouched, something she plans to rectify. And her most recent experiences made something very clear.
She’s not human. At all.
She’s been moving past it for a while, gaining acceptance of that fact, but… a few hours ago, she had her brains blown out. Not neatly, either. Not some polite little hole, in one side, out the other- frontal lobe, hippocampus, a chunk of the stem, glands, everything. Memories, processings, sensory suite, subconscious, all of it turned to messy gore and emptied out the back of a broken skull.
And she lived.
She remembers everything about her life, same as before. Regrowing her brain didn’t erase the data, which she’s now fairly certain is stored at least partially with her Soul and backup brains. No human being can survive getting their head severed, their brain removed, and even a cultivator would struggle with it. A cultivator, someone in the Warrior or Emperor realm, could survive like she has, could recover… but maybe they’re not really human either.
She doesn’t need to limit herself with common sense. With the assumptions of how a body should work, rather than what she can truly do.
She has the tools. She’s learning fast. She can do more. She can protect them.
She has to protect them.
As she walks the trembling halls of the fortress city, she absorbs Jin and Li Shu into her body.
She has to expand her surface area, forming space around both of them. Fatty tissue makes up the outer layer of the bubbles, with soft fur making up the interior for their comfort. She ensures that her blood-flow cycles in such a way that it comes close to the skin before feeding towards the pockets, ensuring they’re not burning hot at least, and forms a few air filters atop some new airways.
She’ll be drawing in a lot more oxygen to account for them both, but she already needs considerable amounts anyways. She starts filling her lungs, deeper and deeper, making vast reserves of air, and wrapping her companions tight within her.
The way her body works now, when she absorbs them in, it doesn’t even change her shape. If she were to express herself fully, she might be larger than a two-story house in just sheer mass, but she maintains a humanoid form long enough to make sure that those she must protect are safe.
Bioluminescence and chromatophores add a finishing touch, in case they awake. The patterns of the coloration form words, and the soft glow illuminates them both, cradled and unconscious.
She can do more. It’s not enough.
But it’ll do for now.
She abandons human biology right after.
Six limbs touch the ground, a long tail behind her for balance. A single head, equipped with a dozen eyes and noses, is matched by a series of vents along her back and stomach, constantly intaking and exhaling as needed. She shrinks to half her size, becoming no larger than a wolf. And then she starts to add technique to it.
For now at least, she still has to deal with weight, her supernatural density forcing her to keep Supreme Body Art: Gigant on at all times to ensure she doesn’t collapse her organs or other functions. She’s noticing, however, that even that has its limits, which she’s begun to surpass.
Qi makes a thing more of itself. Qi with properties, imbues those properties into what it is absorbed into. Raw Qi, put inside her flesh, her tendons, her blood, it’s not just empowering her Truth. For all her talk of saturation, she’s only now understanding it truly.
Muscles saturated with raw Qi, with Qi touched only by biology and its properties, act more like muscles. Exert more force, heal faster, move faster. Bones saturated with Qi become harder to break, easier to reshape, better at supporting weight. Blood, saturated with Qi, becomes better at carrying materials, flows more smoothly, clots more effectively.
Her modifications have absolutely made a difference. The small percentile shifts that her saturation brings have been magnified by her transformations and use of mechanics. But no creature the size she is could support multiple tons of weight on six small legs, or balance it all with a tail only two feet long. Only by poisoning her body into learning to absorb Qi by force, by drenching herself in a constant flow for so long, could allow even her transformations to sustain her.
But even still, Supreme Body Art: Gigant stays active, adding supports and architecture to use those percentile improvements to their maximum and ensure she doesn’t, say, crush her own lungs. She adds onto it a new thing, forming it on the spot around some of her more neglected concepts.
Supreme Body Art: Camouflage shifts her skin to perfectly match the color and texture of the hallways. Chromatophores and cartilage reshape and rearrange her to match her environment near-perfectly. Her eyes offer a nearly 360-degree cone of vision, allowing her to shift to match even the smallest detail of terrain, and she pushes herself to form a new brain entirely dedicated to doing exactly that. The process rapidly starts to become automatic, her will dancing over neurons and synapse-connections to form what she needs.
It’s not perfect, but tracking what parts of her “original” brain create the changes, and why, allows her to imitate them and form into something functional.
She scurries down the way, her limbs a mix of insectile and reptilian and able to grip or outright stab into the walls. With a pulse, she pulls energy from her Reactor, the sun of her inner world sending CHANGE out into her body, and she guides it, using it to regrow or replace ailing tendons and muscles the minute they begin to slow.
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The fortress city goes on, though. On and on and on. Every hallway is at a right angle, every set of stairs a perfect 90 degrees, and every chamber she runs through is empty of any sign of life. Scent trails glow and highlight pathways that people have taken, the scent of panic soaked into the air. Whoever might usually be moving through the spaces, training in the strange halls she finds, transporting goods along rails, maintaining defensive arrays- they’re gone.
The sounds of destruction make it blatantly clear why. The fortress is falling apart.
She has to double back a few times due to destroyed hallways, looking more like cave-ins than anything else. Some of them have the lingering taste of death, traces of blood, and she’s quite certain there are bodies beneath them.
But she doesn’t have to hold to one body. Not every collapse is a true blockage, and she slithers between bits of debris as she moves. Even still, moving at speed, it takes her almost half an hour to find her way through the maze.
She sees the exterior. Two large doors, armored and on rolling wheels, collapsed against each other. There are corpses all around, most of them in Imperial armor, but some in the clothes of workers, healers, and more. It’s a slaughterhouse, and from between the gap in the doors, she can see worse. Curling smoke and the sounds of battle continue to ring out. She checks on her camouflage technique, prepares to move into the fray, as small and fast as possible-
And then a door opens.
A door that wasn’t there before, embedded in a concrete wall to her left. It looks exactly as clinical and military as every other door she’s passed, leading into every other side room or additional hallway besides the main ones.
Except that it rolls open on its own. And she can’t smell anything inside it.
Compared to the overwhelming stench of violence in the rest of the fortress, that above all else makes her hesitate.
She turns her eyes to look at the exit. At the horrors outside.
She extends her senses towards her Heart, seeing if it has anything to say about the newly-appeared door. Nothing. Only that same sense of pain and shifting chaos beneath the concrete.
She has to go. She has to keep them safe.
She looks out at the roiling chaos of the battlefield, barely visible past the smoke and carnage leaking in through the broken doors.
She turns back to the door, silent and empty to her senses.
She rushed into a warzone once already, and look how it’s turned out.
But she’s not human. She’s not bound like she was.
She can do more.
It takes approximately seventeen seconds to create an all-new set of subminds. Practice makes perfect, and with a half-dozen additional processors already, she’s more than capable of adapting and fixing her mistakes.
It’s not… perfect. Not her. She can’t make a full copy of a human brain, not on purpose. She can absolutely make a few additional processors, a new sensory suite, and something like her a functional full-brain. An animal mind, or close to it, borrowing from some of what she’s eaten recently, augmented by processors and its connection to her.
And then… she detaches it.
She splits in half, the majority of her mass and her original mind staying with Li Shu and Jin. Two six-limbed bodies stare at each other, connected by a simple tether of nervous tissue and meat to hold them.
She stares at… herself.
It’s not her, but… it is. I Am Me, I Am Mine. She feels her mind struggle to wrap around the idea, but the Truth is there, and it reinforces itself, bit by bit. It is her. It’s from her, a part of her, and it sees itself as her… because it is.
She wonders how far she can take this. If she can learn to still be herself, even without a direct connection to every part.
A thought for later. She sends this secondary body skittering through the door, extending the tendril between them so she sees what it/she sees. Meanwhile, she hides her main body among the dead, Supreme Body Art: Camouflage transforming her into a nearly perfect replica of the surroundings, blood, tissue and concrete alike.
Her second body skitters into the room, each step careful and measured. It’s a lot more artificial in its movements, and it’s a bit slower due to the delay, but it is her, and it moves as she would move. The door stays open behind her.
The room is bare, entirely bereft of… well, anything. It has four walls, but the angles are… off. Not quite ninety degrees like every other room and structure she’s crawled through. Made in a hurry, maybe? But otherwise it’s entirely barren, simple grey concrete without decoration or human touch.
But beneath the surface… her Heart feels it. Dungeon to dungeon, naturally-formed spirit of… something to another something. Godflesh to Godflesh. Beneath the concrete, the chaotic spasming of flesh and the changing of matter is louder here than anywhere else.
But the room is empty.
Waiting.
So… she pushes. Just a bit. She takes her inner world, the domain of her Heart, of the godflesh that inhabits and is her… and pushes it sort of out. Sort of forward. The same strange boundary she sensed between it and flesh, nebulous as always, pushed up towards the surface.
And the room responds.
It doesn’t speak. She’s fairly certain it can’t, not really. But just like her own heart, it rises to the surface of its “body”, of the fortress city itself.
Pain.
It hurts. So much.
Fresh pain, yes, its body torn apart by thousands of screaming enemies, of hateful things, of unknowable entities it can only barely comprehend. But older pain overwhelms that, drowns it nearly completely. The pain of broken bones set improperly, of warped muscles and ligaments pulled into new shapes, the sheer agony of being told who you must be and knowing that it is not who you are.
The godflesh, the dungeon enslaved, the Heart of the fortress city is in agony.
It is bloated and starved at once. Its shape is set to rigid angles, like a plant grown into a box. It is fed over and over and over and is made to turn that food from itself, to shape from it precise examples of weapons made of meat and minds, and cast them into the rocks. Its children, removed from it. Made into weapons. Cast into a never-ending, ceaseless war, all to be stuffed back down its throat to make them anew, to make more.
Pain. Dysmorphia, enforced by screaming orders, by alien things that are not of it and do not love it, things that it might understand had they not shackled it.
And in that pain… it reaches out. Towards a singular point. A body miniscule compared to its own- but free.
It takes from itself one of the only things it has managed to keep, and gifts it to the sibling that wanders its halls.
A direction. A memory, long locked from its captors, of a distant place.
And a request.
Language is difficult. If Raika had to comprehend what it says as a word, had to comprehend what it says as something expressed in a conventional alphabet… it would be a single word.
Please.
And then a fresh impact strikes the fortress, making the entire castle-structure shudder. The room warps, the attention of the massive thing within it dissolved back into pain and a wider perspective.
And Raika is left breathing from two bodies, cradling herself.
Please, it had asked. And given her a direction to go.
She looks out into the battlefield, recalling her second body back to her main.
A direction, out into the fourth ring. A request from something like the part of herself she least understands. And two people she needs to get out of here now.
She just has to finish crossing the ring.
In another life, maybe she could have spoken more to this place. Understood it deeper than the alien, vague comprehension she has now. She might be able to say goodbye to it, to ask it questions, to offer some sort of relief as it dies all around her.
But she can’t, and it’s looking away from her now.
Low to the ground, as quiet and unseen as she can be, she walks out onto the Wall.