There is not a real word for what Raika holds close to her core. Not now. Intent, the all-language, is a complex and beautiful thing, full of nuance and complexity and depth. It is only rarely ever capable of being reduced down to just one thing.
And yet, Raika feels it. Bubbling in her gut. Stewing in her throat.
She wants to kill someone.
She may want to kill a lot of people.
But she sets the feeling aside. Adds her own depth, her own complexity as a person.
First and foremost, she worries about the man unconscious before her.
With a whisper of will, she forms another body in front of Li Shu, Jin, and Many-Grasping. Even as she keeps one version of her Body crouched and holding the stranger’s hand, she creates a duplicate, connected through muscle fibers and neural tissue, to start digging a secure chamber, someplace defensible and hard to notice. True Flame makes short work of much of the vines surrounding the space, and remodeling the terrain and the stones in it to accommodate finishes the work.
By the time she’s finished, all three of her passengers have emerged, exiting through a portal of her flesh into the improvised shelter.
“Are you sure about this?” Li Shu asks before she can say anything.
“I am. You can’t come with me, it’s too risky. I need to follow the trail while their scent is still fresh, and I’m not taking you or the victim along with me.”
Li Shu takes a deep breath, struggling for a moment, and then nods once, firmly. “Ok. Take me to the patient.”
She nods. Before turning away, though, she turns to Jin and Many-Grasping.
Many-Grasping-Young-Of-Harsh-Lands-Reaching. Protect. Reward. Demand.
Many-Grasping does not waste time with piecemeal intent. They bow, once, the adrenaline slowly beginning to run through muscles as tension rises in them.
Lord.
“Jin.”
“Yes, master?” he says.
“I want you to do something for me. Failure is completely acceptable, but I worry about you getting hurt. I want you to develop a technique, be it cultivation, an array, a ritual circle, anything, designed specifically to block your ability to see and absorb the Dao of Death. I wanted to wait a bit further, but you understand your powers best. Use some Blacksteel if you need it, but maybe avoid that for now. Ask Li Shu for help later, once she’s sure that the wounded is safe and stable.”
His eyes are wide, but she does not miss to how they dart to the entrance of the area she has carved out. Towards the bodies.
“First priority- I want you to practice differentiating your Qi and comprehension from what you’re absorbing. Picture a wall, one shaped to your skin, and your own Qi circulating right under it, like a bubble of water in open air. Anything that taints the water gets pushed out with the cycle. If you need more, then I trust in your ability to think on your feet.”
He takes a deep breath, and she can feel his adrenaline start to increase- but not towards a ‘fight’ instinct. His breathing is accelerating, his neuron-activation in his brain too sharp, too bright.
She kneels down in front of him, looking him straight in the ey and taking his hand in hers.
“Hey. It’s not an emergency. Nothing wrong with failing. I’ll be back soon, and this is a step that you should take sooner than later. I’m… I’m a little angry right now, but you’re ok. You’re safe.”
Subconsciously, before she even realizes, she’s matched her breathing pattern to his. She slows it back down, guiding him in the same direction, until he gives one last, shaky breath. A long, slow exhale.
“It’s a good project to have, between your carving,” she says, smiling softly. “Sorry to startle you.”
He shakes his head vigorously, a mix of embarrassment and anger forming towards willpower rather than fear. She smiles, even as he firms his teeth and meets her eyes.
“No. It’s ok. I’m ok, master. Thank you for the mission. I am certain I will match your faith in me and achieve success with your advice.”
She snorts, but nods. “Damn right you will. Get started, alright? Many-Grasping and Li Shu will keep an eye out in the meantime.”
She turns back to Li Shu, who is standing with her medical bag, rifling through it, checking everything. She can smell the medicinal properties imbued into her Sacrifice, the flavor of it melding with her own unique Qi scent of soft flowers and scalpels. A dozen needle-tong-syringe-scalpels of keratin float around her, with a singular exception- a solid orb of medicinal energy, Keratin aping something like an organ or veined mass of herbs, the mutation in the Sacrifice born from her entry into Core Formation realm.
“Ready?” she asks.
“Mmh,” Li Shu replies, already focused in. “Pre-op breakdown?”
“I don’t know what that means, but if you’re asking how he’s doing- exhausted. Dehydrated, experiencing minor malnutrition from what looks like months of pursuit on and off, and while there are no major injuries, he’s had some breaks that Qi hasn’t healed entirely correctly.”
Li Shu nods, already shifting the close-at-hand resources in her bag. “Ok.”
And then they’re off, with Jin already meditating and Many-Grasping doing something with the ferns and smaller vines around the hideaway, obfuscating it further.
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
Li Shu kneels down next to the collapsed young man (Wei… Zin, that was it), taking his pulse. Raika reintegrates both bodies, melting the form she’s been walking around with back into her own Body like a complex, interlocking puzzle of clay and bone, opening up and reconnecting directly. Li Shu makes no comment, and doesn’t force her to let go of the young man’s hand, either.
He’s gorgeous. Effeminate, well-fit and lithe, wearing a complex and beautifully woven dress of still-living grasses, each individual strand still alive and almost glowing with every color, but primarily an almost neon green. His hair is short, cropped into a sort of pixie-cut but with interesting, almost runic patterns styled into it, close to the scalp.
In a different mindset, Raika might let herself think very different thoughts about the figure in front of her. As it is, her Mind is packed much too full with worry, resignation, and a desire to harm.
“He’s alright, just passed out,” Li Shu says. “I’ll take him back to the cave and we can get to work on fixing him back up, ok? He needs sleep, food, and the attention of a healer, and we can provide all three. Go.”
Raika gets up, letting go of the kid’s hand at last… but then turns back to Li Shu.
“Are you sure?”
“I trust you, and I see what is in front of me. Go.”
Raika lets out a long, slow exhale.
“Thank you.”
Li Shu has time enough to turn a smile in her direction. “You’re very welcome. Now go do what you’re going to do.”
And Raika is gone.
As a humanoid, in a bipedal form, she hits about halfway to the sound barrier.
As a Gun, she goes a lot faster.
She lands on the vine above where Li Shu and her patient sit with six legs, a streamlined panther with a crablike, spiky armor of chitin.
Then there is a sound like a thunderclap but heavier, thicker, felt in the lungs, and she is launched at her target.
To her senses, the trail that the soldiers left is clear as day. It stretches off to the horizon, southward and back towards the west, towards the dead sands. It could be a thousand miles, it could be more.
The air is pierced like flesh or wet tissue as Raika uses True Flame and her Dao of the Gun to turn her body to a guided projectile, the concepts of Ignition, Explosion, Propulsion, all acting in concert. Six legs are tucked in tight to the body, each limb wrapped around her in a spiral to add rotational spin to her movement, helping to keep her perfectly on course- the Dao of the Gun, teaching her of rifling through its patterns. Jets of tightly-packed Qi, the Dao of Gun and Flame both touching on it through her comprehension, detonate into True Flame with enough force to launch her across the world in a straight line, defying gravity and air resistance.
The way that the scent of the three Imperials and their hunted prey feels to her synesthesia is a bright ribbon of miasma, flowing out and away from her. They’ve clearly been chasing him for days, maybe longer wandering around every time he lost them.
She does not need to wander. She has multiple brains tracking trajectory, patterns, the ways that they moved and the general space they moved through.
From five hundred feet up, the horizon is approximately two-hundred and fifty miles away. The curvature of the world, flat but ever-so-slightly curved as it is, makes the horizon ever-distant.
As Raika recreates the pockets of Qi, reweaves Dao into the moment of ignition and into the shape of her being, her brains track her movement at approximately half a mile per second. That makes eight and a half minutes to reach the horizon.
It takes her about twenty minutes of on-and-off firing to reach the point where Zin’s trail and the soldier’s finally intersect. It takes another hour and a half to find their origin point.
Part of the way there, she hears the smell of blood. Tastes the feeling of crackling ash, long left to sit, buried under plants that grow so fast they have already erased all that once was.
The smell of the three individuals melds into a terrible, horrible mess of industrialized, acrid and powdered Qi. The scent of alchemy, industry, artificial and beautifully carved shapes- but for sharp-edged purpose.
She catches sight of it not long after. The scent is so faint, to hide what is already hidden, and there are distortions in the air that she recognizes as part of a formation, and a damn subtle one. But to her synesthesia, it’s not open air and forced invisibility, it’s the glowing edges of runes, the vague hints of Intent wrapped around the taste of iron fillings and ozone, the texture of a dome wrapped beneath several of the larger vines that are only just off-center.
There is a time for subtlety. A time for faking a behavior, for finding ways to play with the rules of conduct and to manipulate the rules of engagement and social expectation.
The smell of the dead place, the taste-sight of the bones she passed on the way, and the grief she could hear ringing like music in the voice of the man who asked her for mercy and violence say otherwise.
She’d heard the expression before, but never really understood it, never felt it. They’d say it in stories about noble cultivators fighting terrible monsters, talking about the things that would grant a cultivator a true edge in their battles.
For the first time since the tournament in Cragend, facing a very different man named Jin, Raika feels Killing Intent.
Intent is honest. Pure. Direct. It is a complex weave of every emotion and intention a being has in a given moment, layered into their movements and energy by way of consciousness. Just like understanding the ways that reality works leads to Dao, controlling one’s emotions and intentions and using them leads to Intent.
But now she understands why it is so rare. Why she hasn’t felt it before.
For there to be Killing Intent, there can be no fear. No hesitation. No questions, no confusion, nothing like love or hate or fear or rage.
There is only an exclusively the conclusion that something needs to die, and the bending of one’s entire being towards that purpose.
There is a place there, beneath the vines, from which the mark of Empire sits, quiet but loud. In it, there are those who ordered and participated in a slaughter, as an extension of the same entity that has harmed her and her loved ones so much.
She is the Gun. She is the Bullet. That is the Target.
Raika penetrates through a vine of wood thick and saturated with Qi almost fifty meters thick, and another after that, and then into a wall of Qi.
For a moment, she is frozen there, the impact of her being against the structure of the arrays protecting the Imperial base fighting. She feels the edges of her outer shell begin to spark, the idea of the runes long-carved into her being fighting against the Qi that she tries to push through.
The curse carved by her friend rejects the Qi that tries to reject her.
The force of True Flame and Dao propel her against array and Qi alone.
A Body of Blacksteel, flesh, bone, and Radiant Metal makes itself the perfect bullet.
The protections of a forward operating base of the Empire fail to stop her.
A wave of alarms and screams echo across the landscape as she detonates the ground the lands on.
The ground beneath her Body is marble and concrete, shaped to exacting specifications of brutalism. A hundred eyes take in everything at once- a courtyard full of training soldiers, all into the Nascent Soul realm, training against a multitude of arenas and practical arrays. A standing structure, a tall building of stone and carved jade arrays which stands at the far end, like a five-story mountain at the far end of the courtyard. Walls made to withstand siege, acting as focal points for an array that is falling musically to earth in notes of burning Qi.
A crater, cracked and broken into the ground, drenched in the blood of three dead soldiers, crackling with fire and lightning.
Raika unfolds one leg, then another, then all remaining of the six. She stretches upward, growing more vertebrae to raise her higher, higher, Supreme Body Art: Gigant transforming her bit by bit.
Some of the soldiers are already reacting. They are elite, well-trained, carrying scars from battles that left truly impressive marks. These are not the fresh-faced recruits of the Wall.
Raika looks at them, and sees only things that she chooses to make die.
Killing Intent floods the courtyard, and a dozen of the Empire’s best covert units begin to bleed from the face as she stares down upon them, spiraling ever upward into monstrous transcendence.