To their immense credit, none of the remaining cultivators retreat. Raika can smell, past her own burning flesh and oxidized metal, their fear, right alongside their determination. She can taste the flickering of their neurons, the staccato patterns of willpower and courage flavoring their chemistry and actions.
The cultivator with the iron maiden lands, dedicating the Qi he was using to hover to further his technique. The woman with the horrifyingly deep Qi pools has another drill of plasma forming, but this time she holds it tight to her Jian, the smell of her knuckles burning emanating as the Plasma and the trembling of her muscles infuse the technique rather than release it.
The third one steps forward, between his group and her, and begins to weave his Qi into a shape.
She goes to interrupt, ready to end things- and stumbles.
Fuck. She can’t move.
Whether it’s due to the amount of Qi that was in the explosion or the destruction of her armor somehow changing its nature, it refuses to CHANGE under her command, trapping her in a shell of molten, transmuted Blacksteel. The heat and impact warped it, made it into something lesser than its original form, and it's thick and heavy enough that when she tries to move, it stutters to a halt with a screech of metal.
Her opponents do not let the opportunity slip them by.
Rather than unleashing his Domain again, the ‘tank’ of their group weaves his hands into signs, a chant rising from his lips to facilitate the formation of Qi he’s using. She cracks her shell hard enough that some of her less-solid internals starts to leak out, starts to reform herself, but a wave of Qi washes towards her.
The scent is the same as that of his domain- Unbearable weight under a quiet night, like feeling yourself collapse under an impossible burden in a place of quiet. The shape of it, on the other hand, forms into a series of arrays, the Qi shaped in the air into new formats and launching forward like darts made of formulae.
All six of them impact her paralyzed form and suddenly the world bends. Rather than increasing her overall weight, it’s like she’s collapsing in on each point, like her hands and elbow are being forcibly pulled into the space her forearm occupies.
There is a crashing, cataclysmic sound of wrenching metal, and her true form collapses into a crumpled wreck. Ruined Blacksteel crumples inward, and weaker flesh spurts out in every direction.
She steps out of the blood-spray at a dead sprint.
Jumping out of the spilled tissue like it’s a portal, she charges forward, her true form rebuilt inside herself and back in action, refreshed. Still, she's not inexhaustible. She’s burned through almost half her Blacksteel reserves for this fight, and there’s only so much acceptable risk before she needs to stop training and start just overwhelming them again. Wait too long, and she won’t have the resources for it anymore either.
A second wave of singularity arrays are launched at her, but this time the few that she doesn’t dodge fail to penetrate her armor, its Blacksteel repaired and uncompromised. They warp her flesh at the surface a bit, but not enough to cause any real damage, and in two more steps, she’ll be among them.
And then the iron maiden renews its assault.
She turns her bouquet of fleshy Flame-throwers at it, a wave of ignition washing forward and wiping out the chains- but they keep coming, forcing her to sustain the fire or be caught by them. The instant one of her arms is so occupied, the cultivator with the plasma techniques appears to her right, swinging a sword that has doubled in size from the blade of Plasma she's forged around it.
Her own Blade parries it, Radiant Metal ringing strangely on contact, but her enhanced metabolism isn’t enough. She Overclocks her muscles, using the technique on something other than her brains for once, and her arm spurts a bit of blood as it launches the Plasma-sword away, swinging in at thrice its normal speed to cut her throat.
A web of runes, formed from pure Qi and willpower, manifest around her right side and drag her away from the attack. Raika reacts, turning to face the first cultivator, feeling the heat of the Plasma-sword coming around for another cut, but he’s already moving, dodging shots of her Gun that wipe out whole chunks of the terrain.
Her Flame falters as the Qi it needs briefly sputters out, her well running dry for a moment. Instantly, the iron maiden’s chains dive in at her as the Plasma-sword descends and an orb of condensed midnight-Qi is shot at her. They are synchronized, efficient, taking perfect advantage of the opening.
She sighs.
Fuck. Still needs improvement.
Before the air even leaves her throat, Dink responds.
A ringing note of music echoes, making her head ache and her blood tremble. At the literal speed of sound, the Plasma-sword flickers, the iron-maiden’s chains briefly fall limp, and the projectile mass of Qi launched her way partially unravels, spinning off-target and detonating.
Raika feels Dink’s awareness fade, the Intent coming off her oldest companion growing faint. It hasn’t hurt it, but none of those techniques were light, and it’ll take it time to recover the energy expended. A one-time trick, and one that she shouldn’t have had to use.
What can she do better this time?
Fight smarter. Technique and tactics, not just power- that was the whole point.
She uses the stray detonation of the Qi projectile as cover to partially detonate her body, several plates of Blacksteel launched around the area, trailing blood behind them. The Plasma-sword flickers back to life, the dissipated aura of it burning into even Blacksteel and forming into arcs of energy as it again, and the iron maiden chains revitalize, and-
She lets herself get caught.
The chains grab and yank her, pulling her out of range of the sword-swing, and she’s yanked towards the summoned entity / technique. For a moment, her gaze is taken up solely by an abyss, a depthless space within the Qi construct that seems to somehow make it clear, deep in her bones, that she will never escape it.
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That’s fine.
Supreme Body Art: Overclocking
Supreme Body Art: Full Body Transmutation
She rarely uses the latter. Transmutation is a use of her engine of CHANGE, and a sort of explosive manifestation on top of that. Her Truth, I Can Change, already allows her to transform her body almost entirely, but by adding in her reactor, she can transform whole areas of herself into inorganic materials other than just Blacksteel as well.
It’s imperfect- the chaos of her Reactor is a nightmare to control, but with absolute focus and multiple minds Overclocked, imperfect is good enough.
The entirety of the outside of her body, with the exception of her halo of eyes and her mouth, turns to solid lead. Her weight multiplies, the chains straining against her altered form, and rather than getting yanked into its strange depths, she crashes into the ground, digging a furrow into the concrete. Through Full Body Transmutation, she forces ever-shifting CHANGE into her favor, lead turning back to flesh and tendon fast enough that the chains don’t have time to readjust.
It’s enough time for her Overclocked Mind to set up a shot.
More specifically, to set up a few dozen shots.
Her rifle arm crackles with the Dao of Gun and Lightning and Flame, compressing colossal energies into the propulsion of a single perfect object of destruction to a target. The iron maiden trembles, the focus required to maintain it briefly diverted to trying to save its creator’s life. The bullet, shaped of Blacksteel, magnetized, launched by Flame, makes the world bend, the Dao of the Gun ensuring that the bullet can’t not be on course to hit, that the shot won’t be anything less than lethal.
The iron maiden technique yanks as the cultivator controlling it desperately ducks. A sheath of Plasma swings for the back of her head as she fires. A wave of reality alteration, runes and Qi shoved into a pulse of weight that attempts to drag rifle and bullet off course.
It works, too. She can see it. A half-dozen brains process simultaneously the ways that she’s being forced off-center, the angles the bullet has to curve through, the way that her comprehension isn’t high enough to refute the efforts of all three techniques against her at once. She’ll miss her first and strongest shot.
Their mistake was only seeing the first of the dozen shots she set up.
Her true form is an avatar. Like her soul in her inner world is an avatar, a representation of the idea of her. It’s a tool, and not a limitation.
1.32 seconds ago, she used the impact of a Qi projectile as cover to launch plates of her armor, blood and tissue included, across the battlefield. 1.02 seconds ago, she allowed herself to get caught and relocated through the battlefield by the iron maiden technique. 0.2 seconds ago, she drew the focus of everyone on the battlefield towards the nexus of Dao and Qi she wielded, the impossible rifle she used as bait.
Now, her Mind finishes the calculations needed. From each ejected plate of armor, like a portal of flesh into another realm, rise more Guns.
In theory, she could learn to imbue Dao into every attack. True comprehension should lead her to someplace close- Dao isn’t a technique, it’s an emulation of a pattern of reality, and it can “flavor” nearly any technique or cultivation style once properly understood. She doesn’t have that yet, not by a long shot- her comprehension is stolen, consumed rather than home-grown.
Blacksteel is still lethal by its nature. Guns are lethal by their nature. And one Dao is plenty, at least when it comes to shooting people in the back of the head.
Killing Intent forces all of reality to bend towards lethality, towards murder as a foregone conclusion, as each of the dozen pieces of herself connected by blood bloom with rifles, shotguns and improvised pistols.
Her crown of eyes allows her a three-hundred and sixty degree view of three different cultivators splattering messily to the ground.
The iron maiden technique bursts open, the complex weave that made it such a threat falling into wisps of shadow, steel and imprisonment, if that’s a scent. The Dao of Plasma blade collapses, carving a hundred molten-red furrows into the ground in splashes of sunfire. The night and dream and weight of the Domain and array wielder fall to nothing.
She feels the rhythm of their hearts die against her skin. There’s a flicker there, their Qi leaking out, ready to create an echo like one of the things that Jin sees. Their Souls, nascent and half-formed though they may be, can still be felt, dying like fish without water now that their hosts / creators have perished.
…
Her golden band keeps her from growing indefinitely, or to a certain size. It doesn’t keep her from picking and choosing what she decides to grow. Raika has a lot of empty valleys at the moment, space that she isn’t using for anything but a playground for her Heart.
She can probably fit just a few more Souls in there.
With assistance from her Heart, she feels a large portion of her inner world, close to a good fifteen percent of it, vanish into Qi. She rediverts it into her Qi circuits, straining the natural formations made of veins close to bursting, and redirects that into rebuilding her stock of Blacksteel, rebuilding the pieces she burned through in the fight. She can feel her Body struggling to cope with the sudden influx of energy, the mass converting to a lot of Qi as it leaves her inner world, but she can handle it.
There’s almost certainly a better way to do this. She can practically feel the wasted material, the way that the conversion loses out on a lot of the concepts being cultivated by her Heart, but for now, she just needs room.
The disparate parts of her armor, still blooming with biological guns of Blacksteel, chitin and tendons, grow additional veins and tendons, reconnecting into a net. With a force of will, she draws the pieces in, dragging the dead and bullet-ridden bodies of the cultivators all around with them.
There’s a moment of messy communion. Flesh on flesh, biology living and not-quite-all-the-way-dead fusing together like a slurry of meat, wrapped in black scales and armor.
And then there is just Raika, standing in a ruined courtyard. Seven feet of obsidian bioweapon, six-armed and glowing with power, digesting her newest acquisitions.
There’s a smell. The arrays all around the space ripple, still intact despite the damage, and now there are more alerts. Whatever the array wielder was doing to deactivate the alarms seems to have died with him, or, more likely, the loss of personnel out in the courtyard brought on yet another reaction.
She turns her face to look towards the building at the center of the base. All three stories felt empty to her senses, blank, the eight people she’s killed so far making up the majority of the leftover scents, but now there’s another one, intruding in on the whole.
There’s no scent markers on the barracks. None in the armory, nothing that matches it in what looks like a kitchen-space.
She looks up at the top floor, the one marked with that oh-so-familiar shade of green.
A door has opened. One that she couldn’t see before, or maybe just didn’t notice in all the chaos.
No. Its new. Like it just appeared to her senses, a puff of Imperial array-smell unmaking runes around its perimeter that she can only now identify with her synesthesia, their glow fading through the stone walls as their scent dissipates.
Someone steps out from behind it.
She smells of pitch-black sandalwood. Of A forest so deep that you can’t not get lost in it, and the certainty that in being lost, something in the dark will find you.
She smells deeper. More intense. Like those she’s been fighting have been lakes, and this is a sea.
Raika feels herself smiling, vicious and cold and hungry, as her Killing Intent is sharpened into something so potent it makes the dust shiver, the cracks and gouges in the concrete lengthen and spiral out.
The front side of the building detonates as a Warrior-realm cultivator treads on the world, a hundred-thousand roots and black trunks bloom from the ruin she creates.
A woman wearing the jade and dark green of the Feng family steps out of her cultivation chamber and strides out against the enemy that has killed its way through her base.
A woman wearing a Body of death and ever-life and CHANGE turns to face her, flush with an infusion of power, digesting the Souls of the dead into weapons and worlds.
There are no words required.
Killing Intent fills the dome of the base so hard and so fast that everything in it begins to break, and both monsters launch themselves at each other beneath the light of glowing moons and a Cold Sun.