There’s something rather convenient about being able to think in multiple layers at once. Not always. For a description of consecutive events, say, by someone attempting to narrate or describe multiple things at once, it’s an added difficulty, providing the challenge of building a frame around events that happen at the same time, but cannot be written of simultaneously. For an individual attempting to do multiple things at once, on the other hand, it’s an outright joy, a privilege of productivity, and Raika just so happens to be enjoying that privilege quite a bit at the moment.
One mind is busy reviewing, editing, altering the nuances of flesh, coming up with plans and methods to potentially enhance existing techniques and functions. One mind is a kaleidoscope of activity, reviewing past and present events and thinking about what’s to come, what their plans might be. Now there’s a new division between third and fourth- one tracks the movements of the people within her body, enjoying their amazement at the terrain, so much larger on the inside, full of alien sights and pieces of terrain. The other looks out over the horizon, towards the Wall, back the way they came, towards a wave of joyous, playful violence laughing its way towards her.
Li Shu is busy with her own works, and recovering from their exodus besides. Jin is still asleep. Her latest visitors enter a room she has prepared for them, about ten to fifteen meters in from her skin, padded by a layer of fat and reactive mucus and glowing with fruit-like organs that hang from the ceiling, glowing with bioluminescence. As they enter the room, she finishes sculpting it, raising chairs, a wide area for their rug or meditation, and some soft and mossy areas for relaxation. True to her word, she forms another pitcher-organ, taking her blood, her Truth, and the energies of CHANGE burning from the sun of her inner world together for the transformation. She takes the water in her blood as template, and pushes CHANGE such that the blood around it turns into the same, filling the organ with it, a few gallons of water manifested from pure energy and alchemy.
They look around, perhaps trying to find another door or some place where she might emerge from- or alternate exit options, maybe. Good instincts, if the latter is the case, though Many-Grasping seems more than likely to fight to remain if given the option. Still, no need to make them uncomfortable.
Keeping the hallway they came down open to avoid making them feel trapped, she forms another doorway, manifesting a body in the little alcove beyond. She makes it appear to be identical to the other she used, with some slight modifications. It just… feels right, to have her self be a little bit different each time. This body is hers, and who she is is always changing, so why should any avatar of hers not match that? She changes the pattern of her dreads, and subtracts two inches from her height, keeping the left arm absent.
She smiles and bows slightly, just enough to be polite. “Please, make yourselves at ease. Drink, rest, and if you need anything, do let me know. I’ll be back in a few hours, once you’ve had time to get comfortable and I’ve moved us to another spot.”
Ko-es looks up in alarm at that. “Is- honored one, is there a reason we must move without a heading?”
She raises a hand. “Nothing… too bad. Something out there is throwing out some aggressive signs. I can move us quickly, and through the not-so-sleeping sands if need be, so we’ll more than make up for whatever time we divert.”
Ko-es seems troubled, his emotions and biology all amix. On the one hand, there’s a sense of distance to his fear, security born of being very literally protected by the powerful stranger he’s met. On the other, well… there’s not really much in the way of safety in a land like this, and paranoia is more gift than curse.
Kim Ya-ji seems to mostly take her cues from her mentor, and Many-Grasping, of course, just seems rather enamored with the whole experience. They (she?) is wandering around the room, sniffing carefully and peering close at the strange features all around, almost entirely ignoring the words being spoken.
Eventually, Ko-es relents. He nods, bowing a bit further than she did in turn. “We thank you for your hospitality, great one. We shall gladly accept the gift of time to acclimate, and if you need call upon us for aid, please do not hesitate to do so.”
She smiles. “I’ll take you up on that offer, but for now, please. You are my guests. If there’s anything you need or that I may offer, all you need do is speak, and I’ll hear you.”
She walks back through the hallway, melding back into her flesh the moment she’s out of sensing range. She remains there, keeping a close eye on the strangers she’s invited. That’s all she has to do, at least for now.
She’s already dealing with the other problem, after all.
Three minutes ago, at the same time that she began forming her new body for the others to acclimate to, she was turning to face the incoming danger.
One minute ago she finished transforming her main body, ensuring that the rooms and organs inside her are secured and insulated, lengthening limbs, creating pistons and muscle-weave and armor.
And now, even as she leaves the room she’s speaking in, she catches sight of the thing chasing her.
It’s not entirely a surprise to see that she recognizes who it is. It is a surprise to see them here in the first place.
Bounding over a dune some ways away, flickering in and out of space like it’s swimming between viewpoints, refusing to step on the sand, a cyclopean abomination comes towards her.
PLAY! It roars across the wastes, waves of intent streaming from it in waves and waves. In beast-speak, it roars and laughs, radiating excitement in seeing her again, every predatory leap and glint of sharpened claw somehow singing of violence and friendliness in equal measure.
She takes a deeper breath, and takes in the shape of the thing.
Its Qi is a dance between layers, a thing of singular purpose and feline joy. Concepts of sharpness, violence, predation, freedom and more all wind around each other in a whirl of energy, previously kept tame and quiet but now unleashed in the dead wasteland of these sands.
Larger than a house, with six legs, each of them armed with violent scythe-claws that are fractal in nature. A single eye takes up an entire face, without mouth or nose or other features. A mane of wriggling tendrils, each of them razor sharp in and of themselves, turn its body into a haze of wormlike movement over a semi-leonine existence.
It does not have a mouth. It cannot roar, not literally, but the beast speak that she learned, the art of language in movement and context alone, make its proclamation as loud as any screams she’s heard before.
Sibling! Hunter! Alike!
As she finishes dissolving another body, ensuring that one of her brains is stationed to ensure the safety and comfort of the rooms inside her flesh, she raises herself up on ten limbs, each a long and sharp implement of violence. As the cyclopean Divine Beast, the Dancer Between Layers, charges forth, cascading violence as joy and intent, she broadcasts back, in a language of movement and biology and feeling and context.
Happy To Bite Better.
It followed her here, from before the Wall. All the way back from their home, from where she last spoke to it, and she never even noticed.
The beast plants itself into the sand, throwing up a wave of it even as it shifts itself somehow away from the particles, none of the dead sand or the strange things within it managing to so much as touch its “fur”.
Trying To Be Predator = You, it says. Am Happy To Play. Will Bite You And Have Fun.
A clear repetition of their mutual goodbye, but recontextualized. It’s intent carries through the message- joy and hunger, joy as violence, mixed intrinsically together. It’s not asking. It’s telling. She is large now, and predatory, and has arrived at a place where there is no one to stop their fight, no need to hold back. No empire to watch them battle, and make a mess.
All this and more is communicated in a heartbeat, in a single moment of perfect understanding that passes between them.
It’s not… it’s not just body language. It’s not. There’s more there, even if that is it’s source, and she’s seen it before. Somewhere deep inside, she can feel it, beneath memory- she’s felt something like this before.
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And then, in a flash, there it is.
The beast has crossed the intervening space like it was never there at all, slipping between layers to simply emerge at her throat. In an instant, a spine is severed, her cluster of eyes and senses at its peak sent crashing like a stalk of corn cut by a scythe.
Six limbs that are spiked scalpels tear into the body and limbs of the beast, shooting out uninterrupted and unbothered by the loss.
Somehow, each time the point of Raika’s limbs touch the creature’s body, they find no resistance, piercing through them like an illusion. There’s simply nothing there, nothing to cut, despite all evidence of sight, sound and smell speaking to the contrary.
That’s fine.
With a burst of radiant CHANGE, monochrome and iridescent, each of the six limbs stabbing forward turn to branches, blood boiling at the speed and friction of transformation as Raika stabs the ground in front of her a dozen times.
The not-tiger swipes a paw and she feels two of the four limbs she’s balancing on simply fall off, severed so neatly there’s not even any pain. No portal opened, no movement of Qi appeared behind her, but they fall anyways, and she has to rapid-grow new connections to rebind her legs to her body again.
The not-tiger sends forth a teasing smile without a mouth, and Raika growls a bit. That’s two hits from it, 0 from her. First blood to the challenger.
Alright then.
Spatial distortion is a funny thing. She’s holding a few literal tons of flesh and bone in a main mass that’s about ten feet across and thrice that in length, but there’s nothing that says she actually needs to maintain those dimensions. Dink trembles against her interior, sensing her intent (and maybe that’s something to look into as well, as a source of potential study), sending signals to her Heart to reinforce the message she’s transmitting to herself.
Within seconds, her body shifts to be the width of a human arm, a few inches across, and she dissolves into the sharp branches she formed of her limbs. The not-tiger dances as if her limbs aren’t there, appearing in areas it can’t possibly fit in like it’s an optical illusion, chasing after the pearl of existence she’s made of her main body. At this level of spatial dilation there’s a delay, her brains far away from the exterior of her body- there’s room for improvement.
But in the meantime, she’s busy pulling out other abilities.
As she continues forking and branching out jagged limbs, failing to hit the beast even as she sees her body pass through it, it’s clear that biology alone won’t win the day. She can probably outlast the creature, and it’s yet to launch an attack ‘inside’ her body- an interesting potential limit. Still, she won’t win just by wasting energy failing to hit it.
Deep in the center of her being, her Soul and her Heart move in tune. An orchard of strange trees shift in a nonexistent breeze as the incarnation of a person walks through them, letting their patterns whisper and grow to the outside world.
There are three trees that are worthy of the name so far. Many saplings, a couple of shrubs, most of them unidentifiable, a mess of meaning and shifting concepts-, but only three trees, young and thin though they are.
One is a thing of edges, with branches of swords, axes, spears, bladed edges of all kinds, and some of its roots crawl into shrubs of claws and shrapnel- but there, at the trunk, deep in the middle, there’s something beyond blades and edges. Something sharper than that.
She can’t reach it. It’s not on the branches, not really, and to touch it unprepared is to be ruined by it, Divided. But there are branches she can reach, and she follows the inlaid pattern and places it on weapons of her own, manifesting the Dao of the Blade.
Another tree has cherries and fruit of bullets and lead, heavy things ripe with cordite and gunpowder. Smoke wafts from it, from the hundred gunbarrels that make up its trunk, the pistols and magazines that make up its leaves. There’s something in the center of this trunk too, but it’s vague, indeterminate, harder to comprehend than Division, and so it remains untouched- but a single root traces over in the direction of the sword-tree. She reaches for the Dao of the Gun, and feels it grow from within her out into the world.
A third tree is a familiar one. Branches of bone and vein, fruit of plump muscle and organ, roots of nervous systems and gnarls of eyes, ears and snouts- a tree of biology. Of Flesh. This one is always bound to her, an anchor between Heart, Soul and Self, its roots beginning to reach towards grasses and shrubs of plants, fungi, bubbling toxins and more- but it is the largest of the three by far.
There is one more tree worthy of the name. It stands apart from the other three, in its own patch of the garden, even with roots that tie intimately back to the Gun and distantly back to the Flesh.
A crackling, four-hued tree of flickering Flame, scorching the earth around it. It’s undigested, barely taken root, but it stands there, slim and dangerous.
She can hold off on that one for now. Not every Dao is safe to touch unprepared, and even those familiar to her are a risk to wield mindlessly.
But pulling properly from all three of her greater comprehensions? With a shared neural network of multiple minds, that’s a bit of guaranteed damage.
The next time that the not-tiger swipes through a cluster of limbs, she unspools a blade twelve feet long from a branching joint behind it and Slices.
The beast yowls immediately, the pattern of how a Blade must work, according to reality, overcoming its spatial warping at least in part. The cut is shallow, much more shallow than it should be, but it’s a strike nonetheless.
As the beast slips out of view like a mirage, remerging behind the Blade to sever it, it finds itself facing directly into the barrel of a cannon.
Technically, a gun is just something that uses combustion and mechanisms to fire a projectile very fast. So, mechanically speaking, a rifled tube made of Radiant Metal, a Blacksteel bullet like an obsidian arrowhead, and a series of bone structures and tendons absolutely counts as a gun.
The Beast, for the first time in their conflict, actually dodges. Not just a slip through reality, but a genuine flinch and physical movement away as the gunshot thunders loud enough to echo in the wastes. But it’s too late- in its arrogance, the beast has slipped into a net that it thought it could walk free of at any time.
It’s expensive to manifest a Dao. It takes tremendous concentration, versatile comprehension, and waves of Qi to turn it into a malleable material. Her own reserves are vast, and the radiance of CHANGE in her inner world make the process of transformation infinitely cheaper, but manifesting a property in its truer form takes effort.
Raika has had multiple brains managing natural formations of blood and flesh that spawn the size of whole fields. For days. And no one to talk to.
She’s got a lot of energy to spare at the moment.
The forest of limbs that the cyclopean entity cut its way into becomes insanely sharp-edged, each angle and protrusion suddenly hardening into bone or Blacksteel to become a Blade. Suddenly, every angle is a threat, a trap that at least partially makes it through whatever dimensional layering the beast does- it still dodges and moves fluidly, but now there is an ever-growing amount of cuts and blood beginning to leak from its hide. Every time it stops for more than a moment, biomechanical gun barrels sprout like tumors and fire indiscriminately into it, each bullet more of a bullet than it should be, forcing it to move or get another wound.
And yet, the only thing the beast says in the not-language is Joy.
There’s something there, beneath the meaning. A mixture of contexts and intentions. Like… like joy, or affection, is violence. Like a cat that sees nothing wrong with cutting open a mouse to watch it crawl away, because that’s fun.
Despite this, it’s… almost impossible to hate. There’s something so fundamental about this type of communication, this sense of intent, that the lack of malice literally could not be clearer.
Still, no reason to take it easy on the beast.
Half of the limb-branches collapse inward to a central point, moving through every spatial coordinate that the beast can reappear in within the makeshift territory. It reappears a few hundred meters away, its movement impossibly vast and disorienting- but she figured it would do something like that.
Which is why, in the midst of the battle, she reconnected to her panopticon-head, laying severed on the ground. Not nearly as effective while half-eaten by sand and on the floor, but still enough to offer an almost three-hundred and sixty degree view of her surroundings.
The instant the beast reappears, a portal of meat opens in the side of Raika’s reforming central mass.
Unlike a Blade, which requires a sheathe, a Gun can be holstered or stored in many places. Hidden in an alcove, for example. There’s no rule saying she has to build the entire thing outside her body for it to work.
Since she began using her Dao comprehensions, she has been forming the weapon inside her body. Spatially warped interiors to her meat makes it so it’s invisible, undetectable while hidden, and while only seconds of conflict have passed, that’s enough time to form something… interesting.
The Gun, if manifested in open air, would be approximately twenty feet long.
Supreme Body Art: Pressurized Indigo.
Even using Blacksteel, too much of Pressurized Indigo would simply destroy the projectile. She can only manifest it for a single instant, a burst of compressed purple life-force launched with enough force to cut stone on its own.
The projectile detonates midair from the damage anyways, and a wave of shrapnel cuts open the world towards the divine beast.
Its eye widens. She smells the scent of surprise and actual fear in it for the first time since their fight began, a sour note to the melody of joy and rhapsodic pain.
And then… she senses something else.
It’s colorless. Or maybe… maybe black. A black of a void. It pings familiar immediately.
For a moment, even with no change at all in the beast’s Qi or movements, she feels a sense of incredible danger.
The tournament. In Cragend. The Aspirant of the Cut.
In the language of intent, the beast overlays the desire, the inevitability, the context of killing into each and every movement.
It’s almost a literal attack. Like by stating one’s intent, one’s context and belief into one’s acts and presence, the world itself is forced to agree or communicate that intent. Killing intent radiates like the feeling of total oblivion behind a kiss of a knife.
The not-lion is there. Standing beside her. Inside the cage of limbs and Blades. The Dao of the Claw is ripe in the fractal edges of its limbs, of its squirming tendrils, and somehow, she knows that the next blow will not need to penetrate the skin to cut to the core of her.
Not Playing = You, the beast says, its intent both quiet and thunderous in a language without sound.
There is a long, drawn out moment of silence, where Raika feels the faint impression of claws poised sharply against every single vein, synapse, tendon and airway in her incredibly massive biology.
Surrender, she sends it.
The cat huffs, despite lacking any mouth to do so. She feels the claws retract.
And then they bap her in her core body, hard enough that she hits the sand with enough force to reshape a dune.
Good. Smart Sibling.
Raika grins without teeth in a language without words. Bite Better Next Time.
The cat makes the eldritch equivalent of a “harumph”. Is What All Say. Loser.