The wise dog goes for the throat.

She once told that to Li Shu. A note of wisdom that came to her, bright and crystal clear, out of an old saying. “A dog should not bite the hand that feeds”.

She does not care for the hand. It is not from the hand that horrors originate, nor the hand which chooses with what to feed.

There aren’t many cultivators here. This forward operating base, whatever its purpose, only has the space for a dozen or so, if that. The barracks she can sense at the edge of her perception seem underutilized, with minimal personal effects and not all that much of each cultivator’s scent. There are five individuals in the training courtyard, all of them wearing some sort of complex array of runes tattooed onto their bodies, none of them currently armored.

They are all, one and each, in the Nascent Soul realm.

A hundred eyes see each and every one of them, but there is a heartbeat, a moment where the shock of her arrival forces them onto the back foot. In that time, her eyes are turned to only one place.

The building she can sense the barracks, and supply room, and armory in. The building with personal chambers, and a central nexus for the defensive array she broke through.

The building with a single tree on the front, a sigil colored in in an incredibly familiar shade of green.

She feels the ground around her begin to corrode and break down. She tastes the blood of the cultivators, leaking free under the attention of her Killing Intent. She feels every part of every murder she has ever committed, and realizes, in this moment, that she can repeat those actions here if she decides.

Feng.

Our business is to hunt down enemies of the Empire and serve the will of the high lords, the soldier had said. “The will of the high lords”.

There are many such families, most likely. Raika never bothered to memorize or even really think of them, but she knows one.

Feng.

The Feng clan is here. In the fourth ring. In command of a forward operating base, on behalf of the same Division that Taurus told her Feng Gui worked in, commanded in. The same Feng as Feng Gao, who woke her from her possession and mind control accidentally through his abuse of Yun Ka, her friend. The same Feng family that she put at the top of her list when she thinks of killing or changing the Empire.

She never understood what it meant to hear the old stories say that killing Intent could cause death without touching. Now? Feeling her own Intent manifesting like a wave of unilateral, all-consuming will?

She’s pretty sure she could kill just by standing close to someone.

No need to check it now, though. Not when she has so many other ways to make sure.

From the bullet comes flesh, and from Flesh comes Gun. Five different gunbarrels emerge like tumors from her body, chitin and Blacksteel forming the rifling and obsidian shards crafted as projectiles.

For three of them, she uses True Flame, but why not experiment? What better time than when in danger?

Guns are close to ignition, but it’s not perfectly intrinsic to them. A Gun is a projectile and a launch system. For two of the Guns, she prepares a very different launch system indeed.

Supreme Body Art: Pressurized Indigo joins True Flame in launching obsidian bullets at the cultivators all around.

All five of her enemies dodge, but she didn’t make single-shot cannons- not useful here. No longer needed.

The memory of Taran, who she has not seen in so fucking long, is fresh in her mind. Her Minds swim as she remembers the multitude of weapons the greatest gunwielder she knows carried with him.

Pressurized Indigo doesn’t need multiple explosions, only one continuous generation of force and ammunition. It destroys the bullet, but that’s fine. Two pieces of of Blacksteel are constantly brought in from her stock, shaved down into flechettes by a pressurized stream of the hyper-thick fluid that makes up her blood supply. The way she’s rifled the barrels, the spray of Pressurized Indigo and Blacksteel flechettes divide out, spraying as semi-random buckshot at a few hundred impacts a second. Meanwhile, three barrels armed with True Flame send out explosive shells, much larger and packed full of Qi to ignite further on contact.

Two of them are dashing toward her, both of them wielding proto-Domains. There’s a moment where something like a landscape of dripping wax and a void surrounding a blaring star appear, approaching her-

She doesn’t wait for them to get closer.

She doesn’t need to limit herself to one body. She is the flesh-core at the center, and so long as she is still connected to herself, her Body is as many limbs as she wants.

For each of the two proto-domains charging her, she spawns two weapons of her own. Connected by threads of neural tissue and muscle, four sleek, armored forms wielding Blades in place of hands charge from her, every muscle twitch-optimized and each one with a brain all her own.

Spatial rings open up and bring out Jians, the one-handed swords the Division of War favors. Raika lets her combat-brains take over, turning her attention towards the remaining three cultivators as the two find their Domains struggling to manifest. Killing Intent and the Dao of the Blade cut through the edges of their techniques as her central body, now a pillar of gunsmoke and spawning flesh, continues to rain fire on them.

The other three are scrambling each in their own way, but they are Nascent Soul cultivators. One of them is accessing some sort of stone tablet, the glow of Qi connecting it to previously inert arrays of the base. The other two both bring out their own weapons- a jian, arcing with shadow and black flame, another with the sensation of gold coins, their edges tinged strangely into an edge with the weight of their value. Dao and strange powers intermingle against her, blocking every shot.

None of them are her opponent, not on their own. If she is still in the Nascent Soul territory, then she is at its edge, or perhaps its peak.

Something occurs to her then. The beast. The not-lion, cyclopean, cousin to the not-tiger she faced in the Cragend tournament.

She might be stronger than it is. Harder to kill, certainly. But it had something she didn’t. It designed its toolkit around the specific idea of evasion, and when it came to attack, the only thing that it had over her was Intent.

…she can do more.

She can always do more.

The alarm of the arrays cease, but a long ping sound echoes across the entire space.

From the arrays tattooed close to their ears, Raika hears a whisper of sound that takes her a second to process.

High-Level Threat Detected. Full Power Authorized.

She feels Mind, Body and Soul all together begin to smile.

She feels one of her four combat-bodies die, an elementally charged Jian cutting through a flaw in the armor. By the time it’s halfway to the ground, bleeding out, she’s corrected the flaw on the other three iterations and started repairing the broken one.

She can do more.

One of the three others attempting to attack steps back, and she feels his Qi begin to move in a complicated sort of spiraling shape. An instant later, as his two allies block as many of her shots as they can, something manifests from inside him.

Neither Soul nor Domain, this feels more like some incredibly complicated technique, and even with all her processing power, she can’t quite track what his Qi is doing. His cultivation spirals in on itself, falling into deeper and deeper shapes, until somehow it resolves to her sight into a coffin of an Iron Maiden.

Instantly, a series of chains erupt from within the black sarcophagus, the face of it blank and its hinges yawning open to reveal a perfect darkness. There’s a dozen chains at first, but it doubles a moment later, trying to reach her main body.

Forced to redirect some of her fire to blocking the chains, which seem to regenerate with Qi infusion, one of the two cultivators blocking her shots is freed to enforce their Domain.

Instantly, the bullets start going off course. Rather than a perfect sphere, he extends his Domain forward in a cone, concentrating it somehow, and in doing so a place of night and overbearing weight start to make her shots hit the ground early. In that cone of altered gravity, the third cultivator on that side extends out a spear of her Qi, forming it around the Jian, spinning it faster and faster as the tables turn.

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They’re weaker than her. All of them.

And yet, she’s still on guard. That iron maiden isn’t trying to attack, it’s trying to attach itself and pull her in, or some part of her. The Domain-shaping is something she hasn’t seen before, and the woman is truly focusing a terrifying amount of Qi into her drill-projectile, letting it pulse and start emitting little streams of energy from itself.

Two of them are locked down by her combat bodies, and she could just make more of those. She could unleash the pressurized cannon she used against the not-lion. She could try that [INFUSION] technique again and manifest her radiant CHANGE into her attacks, wipe out their defenses that way.

…

Hmm.

No.

Using chaotic, uncontrolled CHANGE is a good ace, but it’s costly, risky, and, as mentioned, out of her control. Nearly random in what it transforms things into. An army of combat bodies, while expensive, would be doable, overwhelm her enemies with numbers. And that cannon certainly would work as a knock-out punch.

None of that is what she needs. She has tools she isn’t using and techniques she isn’t forming because she’s still relying on the advantages her Body and inner world provide. Nothing wrong with that, but just as Taran’s different armaments feel bright in her memory, so does the time he shot her in the fucking face.

It had been a lesson. She’d been using her Body’s regeneration as a shield, to keep herself from needing to practice her martial arts or refining her abilities. It was a lesson that, like many of the best ones, needs to be consistently remembered.

If she so chooses, she can just build her energy reserves high enough that, over time, she can make as much ammunition and mass and combat bodies as she wants. And she probably will eventually. But there’s a difference between using the power that she has, and using it as a crutch to avoid learning and improving.

Perhaps it’s reckless to use a dangerous situation as a place for training, to treat warriors that could and are genuinely attempting to kill her as fodder for growth. Maybe she can save the training for when she’s not in danger.

The gestalt tosses the idea aside immediately.

She can do more.

And she wants, very badly, to murder every single person here in the most efficient ways possible.

Two new Guns spawn from her central mass, increasing the fire rate and decreasing her reserves of Blacksteel and Qi fast. Still, they manage to beat back the iron maiden technique’s manacles a little longer, buying her enough space to force the drill-wielding cultivator to dodge, slowing her energy buildup.

And then she collapses inward.

Raika doesn’t need to generate what she’s using on the surface of her Body anymore. In fact, a good chunk of her healing nowadays is less regeneration and more absorbing the damaged tissue and moving fresh material into the gap.

When the pillar collapses, the only thing that remains outside are the four combat forms, each of them leaving the cultivators they face on a constant defensive- but at the collapse of the tower, the cultivators pull back. The neural threads linking her combat bodies is only so long, and they don’t follow.

She doesn’t need them to.

They serve as an adequate distraction for the 0.57 seconds she needs to collapse her mass inward and replace it with what she’s been preparing.

She is humanoid, but not human. There are no restrictions here. In a body muscled like a panther and wolf blended, clad in reactive chitin and Blacksteel scales, Raika’s true form emerges.

She needs to know how to beat opponents without just overpowering them, otherwise she’ll find another bad matchup that will cancel out victory conditions. She needs to use her tools effectively and directly.

She doesn’t need six arms for this. Four will do this time. Gun, Blade, Lightning, and Flame- nothing else.

A crown of eyes and a face sculpted to look like there are hands covering it manifest out of biology and CHANGE, and she charges forth from the crater of her arrival.

The pitch black iron maiden gets to her first, but she is prepared. As chains fall around her, trying to wrap around her body and drag her into its darkness, her lower-right arm extends and moves faster than the eye can track. Twitch-reactive muscle groups fire out like a spasm, but rather than rely on random reaction, Raika takes a stance, every strike and parry precise.

A Blade of obsidian night, the entirety of its edge made out in blood orange Radiant Metal, cuts through every chain in a single consecutive burst of attacks.

Before they can regenerate, before her opponents can extend Domains or that drill spear (still charging, and holy fuck does that woman have a lot of Qi), her upper-left arm raises and flowers. Like a bouquet of red flowers, a dozen doorways open as Raika transforms a square cube of her inner world into fuel in her body and manifests the Dao of Flame.

She feels the golden band around her soul shudder, but it doesn’t retract. It keeps its perimeter locked.

And the Dao colors of Black, Red, Gold and Purple emerge into a flamethrower that melts the ground for fifty yards to her left, completely drowning out the chains and the efforts of the three cultivators.

By this point, the two that retreated have their own special techniques up and moving. Again their Domains manifest, but Raika’s attention highlights the fact that they overlap. The waxy terrain and shape of one of the Domains becomes the ground beneath the black sky and noisy, blaring star of the other. Both cultivators charge forward, but their Domains seem almost exponentially affected, and everywhere it covers, the world turns molten and goopy, only to be turned to liquid by the sound and heat of the star above.

This is nothing like fighting the squadron on the Wall. They feed the cultivators out here some other kinda shit.

But that’s fine. Ideal, even. It makes it a challenge.

From her lower left arm, there are Guns.

To be precise, there is a massive rifle, half as long again as her full height and bursting with power. Two other barrels are underslung, and it is from these that she fires, spraying flechettes rapid-fire with flashes of indigo blood. They fly towards her opponents- only for both to barely slow the cultivators, forcing them to pause momentarily for the projectiles to become affected and dissipate.

In that time, the crackling of lightning has entered the Gun, and things are different.

Radiant Metal is conductive. So is Blacksteel, on the condition that the conductivity is served for lethal purpose.

Multi-hued Lightning Dao enters the gun. On her own, it wouldn’t be enough- she doesn’t understand the mechanics, the ways the system would work.

But a Gun is made to fire. So fire it does.

The Dao of Lightning and Gun form around each other, and the discharge of a lightning bolt echoes with the crack of a gunshot as a shaped projectile of Radiant Metal leaves the barrel.

It enters the Domain- and cuts through it like it’s not there. The metal does not warp. The heat and sound do not affect it.

The cultivator with the star domain goes to sleep one last time, half of the back of his skull decorating the far wall of the compound, a little over a mile away.

His companion is screaming something, but she isn’t listening. She can only think of the fact that he is alive, and he has done horrible, monstrous things, and she has decided that he will not be alive anymore.

He takes one step closer, and blood gushes from his nose. She can taste his adrenal glands dumping into his body, his heart fighting not to slow down, his lungs catching as the oxygen in them finds every way that it can to be part of the possibility of death.

The not-lion’s claws, back in the desert, weren’t such a threat because of the Dao of the Claw that it had. They were a threat because Killing Intent magnified that.

She sets another restriction on herself- one strike.

Her Blade comes down, its edge glowing in the light, juxtaposed with the perfect black of the sword’s body, and the cultivator doesn’t die right away. He retreats back a step, his Domain strengthening, pushing back her intent, warping the space around her into wax, malleable and soft and strange.

It stops her. For all her momentum, all her Daos and power, she is physically stopped as the air turns to heavy wax around her and down her throat.

But the Blade grazes him.

His armor does nothing to defend him. Against a Blade shaped with Dao, a pattern of what it is to CUT, it is no more useful than paper. It cuts approximately three inches into his skin. For a cultivator, he could heal that wound with a technique in seconds. He could take a medicinal pill and be fine. He shouldn’t even need to heal it.

But Raika decided he is dead, and her Blade resonates with that Intent, focused around its edge.

A cut three inches deep into his shoulder somehow nicks something vital, and blood gushes from the wound. He goes to breathe, but it’s like his lungs have forgotten he is still alive, because no air escapes or enters them. He tries to cover the cut, but it begins to spread.

Just like the original version of Blacksteel.

It wasn’t a property of the material. Or, perhaps it was, just not in the sense of a physical property. This whole time, she’s struggled to use the material for anything other than violence.

Blacksteel radiates the Intent to kill. She hears it now.

And she adds it to her own as the cut that should have been nothing, should have been turned to a negligible danger with his quick thinking and trapping her in his Domain, spreads into something lethal.

The cultivator gurgles out one last breath before Killing Intent spreads through the cut and convinces reality that it is, in fact, lethal.

And then there were three.

She turns to look at them. The Flame is still burning, and seems to have eaten through the concrete floor of the base like kindling, burning where she pointed like a candle through paper. But it wasn’t enough to stop the other three.

Their Domain wielder is gasping, seemingly exhausted, his bubble of authority pulled back to close around him and his allies. The iron maiden technique seems to be draining a hell of a lot of Qi, but its wielder contributes as needed, and at the sight of his dead companions, doubles his focus, such that the technique creaks like rusted metal and opens wider.

And the final member of the troupe, glimpsing Raika for the first time since the Flames blocked her field of view, unleashes her technique.

She could survive it. Easily. She could regrow any part that goes missing, even though some of the materials used might take days.

She could dodge. Shift her biology at the speed of perception, so that it falls off to one side or damages only non-essential systems.

But no.

This time, she infuses her Killing Intent into the bouquet of flesh flowers that has replaced her upper-left arm. Upper-right joins it a moment later, electricity crackling through spires of bone and Blacksteel like a lightning rod. She puts all three arms at the “hilt” of her Blade, placing it into a guard before her.

The plasma-infused Qi projectile moves at approximately 3,500 feet per second.

Raika reacts just slightly faster, and swings her Blade and Dao as one.

Flame and Lightning Detonate from her, hitting the plasma that the projectile radiates and detonating everything in a thousand-foot dome in a circle of perfect destruction. The colors of Black and Red flow around the edges of the detonation, reality itself recognizing the destruction and violence of the technique at the fringes of sight.

When it fades, Raika has not moved.

The front of her body has melted. Blacksteel has fused to flesh like scar tissue, eyes have evaporated, blood, even alien and hyper-saturated as hers is, drips from every seam and crack in the armor.

But approximately three feet in front of her, the ground is intact. The line of the detonation divides from a point of impact just a bit in front of her, and Lightning and Flame flicker out from the space in that area, melding with the Plasma left over.

So. She’s not quite there yet. Still took a lot of damage from that.

But that was better.

And she can do more.

She pulls back her upper arms, bringing forward Gun and Blade. A third set slowly spawns out from her shoulder blades, longer than the other four, and begin to grow fractal pieces of Blacksteel.

Her face cracks open as a mouth forces the molten metal apart.

“You’re all going to die here today.”