Raika blinks, panopticon and avatar-body both staring down at the two cultivators standing in front of her. A man and woman, at least going by hormonal balances, both of them wearing bright white robes with heavy splatters of paint decorating them like thick rain drops. The masculine one is wearing a thick and heavy scarf made of chainmail, the clothes under his robes something almost soldier-like, and there’s a sword almost twice his own height balanced on his shoulder. The more feminine of the two has what look like vines wrapped around her body beneath her robes, the glint of porcelain or something pale-white against light blue skin.
She… stares at them. She’s halted, sure, but more due to just blatant shock at what she’s seeing.
Li Shu and Jin both peek up over the side of the open-end patio atop her Body, joining her in staring down at the two cultivators in front of them. Equally, all three of them just sort of stare.
The two cultivators are both exuding a decent amount of force, the ground around them warping ever so slightly. She can sense their Domains extending just a few inches past their skin, almost… almost like some sort of armor, blocking off the transformative effects of the stone flora. Not as efficient as Kaena’s technique of circulating their Qi tightly around them in an aura, but certainly more cost-effective than just radiating Qi out of themselves to block the effect. She notes a few talismans on them as well, exuding energy colored bluish-green to her synesthesia, wrapping tightly around those same domains. Some sort of restriction to hold them in? Something to help them sustain the technique?
“Look here, senior sister! It seems there is some sense to these beast-tamers after all!”
The vine-wrapped woman snorts, rolling her eyes. “You just wanted to pick a fight with some tribe, Ko. Travelers! What business do you have in this place?”
Raika, still a bit dumbfounded, does rally a bit faster than the others. Perks of multiple frontal lobes.
“Uh… just passing through. Headed east.”
The man (Ko?) snorts, throwing his head back with the sound like he thinks it’ll make him look cooler. “And what excuse do you have to be passing through fields which belong to the Crashing Rainfall sect? Speak now, lest we decide your trespass is worthy of annihilation!”
Hmm. He’s certainly dramatic enough to be in a sect.
“Well… we left the sands and were here. I don’t think any of us saw a sign or anything. If you planted this place, great job, it’s really impressive.”
The compliment doesn’t quite land, and she picks up the bite on her bait immediately. The whole time they’ve been here, the place has felt intrinsically natural to her- strange, but natural. A majestic and wonderful little biome born from some few thousand years of patterns and reactions. It doesn’t have the touch of tools or even human footprints, be they literal or scent-based. When she complemented their planting, the micro-reactions in their faces told her all she needs- they might lay claim to this place, but they didn’t plant it.
“This is a valuable resource of the Crashing Rainfall sect, and you have no right to trespass. Ignorance is no excuse for disrespecting your betters!”
Hmm.
On the one hand- politeness is a tool like any other. These two haven’t attacked yet, which is something, and playing to their egos is as valid a way to resolve the situation as any other. It likely has its own advantages, ensuring that if rumors of them do travel, they’ll be mild, maybe even friendly to the sect. Potentially less enemies that way.
Or… it might make the sect’s enemies turn against them. It might make others think that they’re weak enough to be bullied, rather than polite.
She doesn’t really have the information to say which of the possibilities is more likely. Maybe she could ask Many-Grasping, but that would also take time that might make the decision for them. Raika instead decides based on more objective criteria how to respond.
“My betters?” she asks, her voice dangerously low.
Ko of the Crashing Rainfall throws his head back and laughs, the massive blade on his shoulder jingling slightly as he does. A few small bells on its hilt jangle with every chortle he performs, making her wonder if the whole thing is specifically for that very purpose.
“Of course your betters. Unless you claim that a bunch of Qi-Gathering and Foundational-realm cultivators are the equals of Nascent Soul cultivators of one of the most honored sects of the divine Republic of Mora! If so, perhaps you might wish to claim that you are traveling comedians rather than thieves, come to steal precious resources!”
Raika looks at him, one eye cocked. Li Shu is already sighing, and pats her on the shoulder. “Just don’t kill them?” she asks.
Raika gives a little groan-growl in the back of her throat, but she nods. Li Shu gives a tired little laugh before pulling Jin back and away- he’s more than eager to join her, both of them getting a particular vibe from Raika that indicates messiness. She feels them start to head through the doors into her Body, Li Shu likely going for medical supplies.
“Hey!” the female cultivator yells. “How dare you turn your backs on us?”
“Maybe,” Raika says, standing tall on her own shoulders and stepping a bit forward off of the platform she’s made, “you might wonder who we are to be able to dismiss you. How a bunch of no-Qi low-cultivation nobodies could waltz into this little garden in the first place. And perhaps, at the end of that thought, you might want to rethink calling yourselves my better.”
To her credit, the vine-wrapped cultivator does actually pause at that. A little smarter than her compatriot, maybe. She still doesn’t seem unsure, though- just thinking things through, trying to figure out the mystery.
Ko, to the credit of his bullheadedness, doesn’t seem to even hesitate. “It is not the way of this cultivator to wonder at the thought of lesser beings! Bow a hundred times at my feet, lick the soles of my boots and return whatever it is you have stolen and I might just forgive your trespass. It would be a true shame to see such beauty wasted on the edge of my blade!”
So, Raika thinks. On the one hand, he hasn’t attacked yet. And he called her hot, points in his favor for some taste.
He also insulted her again, threatened her and her friends, and demanded she demean herself for something she hasn’t done.
Ok, so she did actually take a patch of the stone prairie for herself, but he hasn’t mentioned it so he obviously doesn’t know, so it’s stupid to assume!
She stares at the giant body of the bioconstruct she’s made herself into. Looks at him. Looks at herself again. The panopticon-head of her main Body bends and warps down, facing itself towards the two of them more directly as she steps her avatar-body onto the edge of her own shoulder.
“Call me lesser one more time,” she says. “See what happens.”
Yet again to her credit, the vine-wrapped cultivator does actually take a step back. Raika feels her senses emanate out from her, a slight mix of Qi and… oh, Intent! Subconscious, maybe, barely there. It might just be proof that she’s gotten better at perceiving it- between herself, Ko-es, and possible the Aspirant of the Cut waaaay back in Cragend, it’s further proof you don’t need to be a beastkin to speak it. It’s just intention transmitted into the world, and of course it would be present in Qi!
Refocusing, she feels the woman’s Qi touch on her form- and be rebuffed by her cursed skin. Her Intent, flavored mostly with curiosity and barely-present even to Raika’s senses, is thoroughly dissipated, and Raika watches her blink for a moment. What was once simply a large beast without much Qi to its name becomes something else in her mind, and watching it happen leaves Raika with a big, toothy grin on her face.
Ko, to his discredit, seems to take that as a taunt, and neglects to take note of his partner’s reaction.
“And what else would this cultivator call you? You stand on a beast whose power may be allied to you but is not yours, One so frail and saddled it does not even bear Qi, while letting off little more power than a mortal. It is I who laughs at your audacity to speak to me with your forehead off the ground! You should be honored I am not in the habit of simply slaying outright those lesser-”
He doesn’t quite get to finish the sentence as Raika’s fist slams into his face.
His reaction is actually terrifyingly fast, though. She hears the slightest jingle of his bells, but by the time that the sound has reached her ears he is somehow already behind her, the blade half-swung straight into her neck.
She didn’t bother with a combat form. Her body, as it stands, is still modified far beyond baseline human- she could likely fistfight even the physically toughest Foundational cultivator in this form, easily. Against a Nascent Soul cultivator, though, that’s like a starved child trying to fight a professional athlete, and there’s simply no way for her to turn and parry before the sword hits her.
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So she doesn’t.
Her minds, neural connections literally thousands of times denser and more numerous than any unmodified organism, make it feel like the world is moving in slow motion as she activates Supreme Body Art: Overclocking. The technique removes limiters and pushes whatever system she’s using it with to the absolute maximum performance possible, and even as she tracks time moving at the same pace as ever, the speed at which she notices and processes goes so high that it feels like she has all the time in the world to make any choice she can imagine.
Her avatar body has the enhancements that she would consider her baseline, and is further limited by a thin trail of neurons and flesh-wires that connect her back to her main Body, but even for a Nascent Soul cultivator, this Ko guy is fast. Almost like he teleported rather than move, and for all she knows, maybe he did. But her self, her foundational elements, are Hers, and respond at the speed of thought, faster than cells should ever be able to.
A new arm, wrapped in Blacksteel nanoscales, like something made out of a ferrofluid, blooms out of her back and grabs hold of Ko’s hand hard enough to shatter it.
She feels one, two bones break- and then he’s gone, just vanished. Teleportation of some kind, possibly a reactive teleportation. It doesn’t take him very far- he appears maybe fifty feet away, the momentum of his swing canceled and wincing as his hand heals itself.
Hmm. Either better equipped or just better than the platoon-commanders she fought. More experience? Less training spent on command, more on gaining tools to survive?
In the nearly stopped-time experience, Raika sees a dozen curling whips of serrated porcelain flying towards her, her main body, and the patio-palanquin at its top. The female cultivator is using a sort of shotgun approach, attacking everywhere at once, the edges of the serration edging towards vulnerable flesh…
So maybe the start of the battle was a little inefficient. Was it worth it to see the look of shock (and currently, the look of pain) on his face? Absolutely. But no reason to just let them win.
Ko may have a more unique technique than one she’s encountered before, but they’re still Nascent Soul cultivators. Going all out? She’s eaten more than a few already.
With Li Shu, Jin, and Many-Grasping already inside her body, Raika collapses herself.
Like a singularity of flesh, like a sudden vacuum spawned inside her Body, every limb, trailing connection, her avatar body and the exterior flesh of her strider-form all collapse inward. She goes from a multi-ton bio-construct and human-sized representative into a chunk of meat no larger than the size of a fist in less time than it takes for the serrated whips to strike.
For a moment, her senses are cut off, her brains rewiring their perception after losing so much surface area so fast.
Then she blooms, and enjoys the little tang of fear that travels through the scent and Intent of both of the arrogant young masters that tried to threaten her.
She lands on the ground amidst a shower of sparks, her body coated in the ever-sharp ferrofluid armor she learned to make of her Blacksteel. Reactive nanoscales connected to minute nerves and muscles make the tiny scales move like a liquid, all of them so pitch-black that they consume the light that touches them. She stands a good fifteen feet tall, six-limbed, her face a statuesque pair of hands covering eyes, yet surrounded by an ever-spawning halo of them. A many-limbed jaw stretches open beneath the hands that cover her ‘eyes’, and from deep in its gullet there glows a fire of CHANGE.
See, transforming takes a lot of time. It takes real effort to form and organize each individual piece, even with enhanced cognition and Overclocking. Raika’s solution?
Just make it ahead of time.
She’s got a lot of space inside her flesh. Somehow, through spatial warping she still doesn’t fully understand, her Heart allows her to store multiple tons of biology into a space… possibly as small as she needs, but usually no bigger than a fist. Most of that space goes to creating natural formations to provide the Qi she needs, supporting her own mass so she doesn’t collapse and bleed out internally, and providing space and power for her organs, but being able to freely modify it means there’s usually some space left that you can optimize. In Raika’s case, she decided to just store her latest battle-form in a corner of her biology rather than waste time recreating it when needed. Reacting quickly to danger is the most important factor to surviving an ambush after all.
She modified it a bit smaller, sure, and a bit less powerful than before- no need to waste resources when they’re not in use. But it’s more than enough.
Heart-organs pump hyper-dense indigo blood through her, pressurizing her combat form, and she moves.
None of the female cultivator’s whips hit. Dozens of them, thrown in chaotic and curving patterns to be harder to predict, all fail to land a blow.
She notices a strange sort of distortion as her fist travels through the Domain wrapped around her, slight but there. Some resistance, yes, but mostly just a feeling of strangeness, like the rules shift just a bit in that space.
Then, she connects, and breaks six ribs, a forearm, and her nose with the first set of blows.
She has delivered thirty six more by the time that Ko has teleported behind her again.
Predictable. His angle is different, so it’s not exclusively directly behind her, but it’s still easy to guess where he’ll appear.
Still impressive. It’s almost like some sort of visual failure- one moment, there’s nothing, and the next he’s just there, like he always was, already in motion like he wound up for it out of sight.
Her tail wraps around his leg, yanking him off balance, and before he vanishes again she’s already turned into an axe kick that she feels his hip shatter under.
In the slowed-down world, the sound from his scream feels like it registers later than it should, making for an interesting sort of doppler-effect to the whole thing. Fun!
Feeling just a hint of strain, Raika cancels the Overclocking, returning to her standard speed of perception, just in time for Ko to shatter the stone flora around him on impact with the ground and for the female cultivator to go flying into a hillside.
“Aria!” Ko roars, his hand reaching towards his fellow cultivator’s impact site. Her synesthesia turns sound to touch as she feels a sort of haptic feedback from his hip repairing itself, but he’s still going to be at least a few seconds from being able to move. Good to know her name, though. Already, she’s getting results from her chosen tactic!
Aria is on her feet, impressing Raika with her durability. A wave of Qi starts to flavor the air around her, infusing the whips with the scent of something like the shattered edges of a doll, turned to beautiful damage, and the scent of broken pottery and beautiful harm begins to radiate out. Raika smells a series of pops as her bones snap back into place, repairing themselves well enough to fight (though she can taste the accumulating scar tissue from the rapid regeneration).
With a battle cry, Aria throws her whips out in a vast array, blades ricocheting off each other to make a chaotic, almost perfectly random pattern, nearly impossible to dodge. Ko recovers just in time to launch himself up, his blade ringing with Intent, an edge of Sword Dao that shows he’s taking her seriously-
If only it wasn’t much too late.
She could keep playing. There’s certainly more they can do, more ways for them to disrupt her, more techniques they can throw at her. Despite their wounds, they’re healing fast, faster than she’d expect, and if they unleash their domains, summon their Nascent Souls, pull out the real show-stopper techniques, they’ll certainly put up more of a fight.
But… she did promise not to kill them. And most of the absolute best techniques only come out when people are at death’s door. It would be rude to Li Shu, and a big waste of time, and a major source of damage for the lovely stone prairie to force the fight to drag on for her own enjoyment. Really, there’s no good reason to prolong the battle.
On the other hand… she really, really wants to. It would be fun! A risk, but a small one, right?
She sighs, Overclocking her brains again. There are times to be selfish in her enjoyment, and there are times to be reasonable, and she’s reached the end of the compromise between them. She’s had some fun, and despite how much fun it is toying with cultivators this strong… ugh. She can have a better fight some other time..
In the slowed-time effect of her Overclocking, she morphs two limbs. On her right side, she morphs a Sword and Gun both. With one limb, a blade of perfect obsidian, nightmare black with spots of brilliant indigo blood, swipes away the wall of serration coming at her in a single blow, shattering many of the mini-blades outright. In the tinkling shrapnel of the following moment, a limb that has become a single long rifle, as long as she is tall, fires once, a burst of True Flame igniting a shell of bone and death into and through the cultivator Aria’s collarbone.
She’s less gentle with Ko. On her left side, a Blade, wrapped and shining with Qi and her Intent to shatter his blade, slices the steel cleanly into two pieces, carving into his guts right after. When he still squirms a bit, a fist weighing approximately 700 pounds slams into his head hard enough to fracture his skull and concuss the shit out of him.
She deactivates her Overclocking a moment after, just in time to hear both of her opponents gurgle out sounds of pain. Aria stays down, the bullet that shot through her infused with Dao and finally locking down her regeneration. Raika can still hear her breathing, but she also hears the bubbling sound of blood leaking from the hole shot clean through her collarbone, leaving her collapsed on the ground.
Ko keeps struggling. Stupid he may be, but he’s no coward, and while the Sword Dao and Blacksteel that cut through him make it so his guts are still out and bleeding, he doesn’t let that stop him.
He swings his broken sword, the bells jingling… and she kind of just lets him.
After a while of her just kind of staring down at him as he flails, barely even needing to shift to dodge his attacks, he… well, his blushing isn’t all from pain.
“You done?” she asks.
He gurgles out a bit of blood, swinging the sword at her again. He flickers, his teleportation half-activating, but apparently it doesn’t work so well with death-metal spearing through him.
She feels his Qi shift, tall and staring eyes atop mountains full of bells, flags and paints rising from him in a domain…
She punches him again.
He snarls, goes to try to rise-
“Listen, if you keep trying to pull a domain, I’m just going to keep hitting you in the face. That’s not very fun for me when you’re tied down like this, but you’re strong enough that it’s going to be super tough to balance knocking you unconscious hard enough to keep you there versus putting my fist through your skull.”
He gurgles, swinging his sword at her, mustering up a few scraps of Sword Dao around its shattered edge. “I will never surrender to an invader! I am a proud warrior of the Crashing Rainfall sect, and-
She sighs. And punches him in the face again.
This repeats for three or four more cycles before he’s missing most of his teeth and just sort of groaning.
“Are we done? Can I take the sword out now?”
He mumbles a bit, swiping his blade vaguely in her direction- but at this point, judging by the smell of him, he’s burned through most of the Qi in his meridians. He could burn the Qi of his core, but since he hasn’t yet…
She pulls her sword-hand out of his gut, prompting another groan from him. “Yeah, yeah. I accept your surrender.”
She expands her flesh back out, folding the palanquin-patio out from where she compressed it inside her body. Considering the state of him, even with his cultivation, it won’t be long before the stone flowers overtake him and turn him to stone. It’s a bit awkward picking up Aria too, she has to make a suuuper long tendril for it, but she’s fairly light by comparison.
With two unconscious cultivators laying preserved on her body, Raika puts four of her six arms on her hips and crosses the last set, looking down at them.
“Well now what the fuck am I going to do with you?”