She needed him to stab her.

And stab her properly, like a javelin through a beast, not some imperial goody-two-shoes with his quick thrusts and cuts. He wanted to try and make something honorable of the whole thing, so she had to make it as dramatic and drawn out as possible, and the chances of him simply cutting her in half in midair (in her wild guess) was lower than a more dramatic strike that preserved her flesh, out of respect.

All things she could use.

The manacles hadn’t done shit for her but weigh her down. As a weapon, they’re simple iron, sharp angled but hardly sharpened enough to be a threat to him. She might smack him with them, and he might experience what it felt like to have an infant slap him softly, but otherwise they weren’t any more useful as weapons than her hand or teeth.

But Shin Ren is not a cripple without meridians and dantians, altered by madness and magic to care even less about Qi than those missing organs would entail. No, Shin Ren is an honorable cultivator, with likely cavernous Qi channels in his gorgeous body and what must have been a polished diamond of a Dantian to reach the heights he has at his age. Nearly Nascent Soul, barely Nascent Soul, what difference does it make to an ant? No, he is a cultivator’s cultivator, probably one of the sect’s most promising talents, and his ability to absorb and use Qi, to cycle properly, are likely extraordinary. Lucky, then, that the manacles they let her keep as a pity weapon are specifically design to prohibit both of those things.

Plus, they’re locked together now, wrist to wrist. Lovers of men all across the sect must be ever so jealous.

Bonus! He even unpinned her from the stone! What a gentleman.

She yanks on the chain as hard as she can, and, with him in shock and likely a lot of pain from feeling suddenly cut off from his Qi reserves and unable to cycle it through his body, it’s almost easy to pull him down. He falls to a knee, almost falls on her, and before he can jerk back or try to get away she grabs the collar of his robe, pulls him close and bites his throat.

He gives a yell, yanking himself bodily back and away from her, and she doesn’t quite get as much as she hoped for. His blood melds with hers as she coughs up more of it, rolling onto her side as he drags her along while he falls backward, making sure the spear doesn’t scrape against stone on the side coming out through her spine.

Not high enough to stop her heartbeat, though, and with a thought, she flexes her legs and arm both, her outer flesh still connected by Qi even as her nerves misfire and leave her twitching and juddering.

She shoves herself closer across the floor, just enough to let her unwind a bit of chain from her wrist and gain enough slack to grab the spear. It is agony, it is malfunction, it is ruin and damage and death behind her ribcage and she’s been dealing with that shit for over a year now, so she forces her fingers to curl, forces her muscles to react, and pulls.

The arena, dead fucking silent, gets to enjoy a horrifying squelching and slicing noise as Raika drags the upper third of a seven-foot spear entirely out of her chest.

Blood gushes immediately, and then she blinks and realizes she is still alive, and forces her flesh back over the gaps, skin and muscle tearing all along her torso to gain the slack needed to cover the wound. Cover it it does, though, slowing a flood to a stream, and she throws the spear off to the side as hard as she can, jerking Shin Ren’s arm as she sends it halfway across the arena.

“Chin up, pretty boy,” she gurgles, breaths wheezing, voice ragged and inhuman. “All the best babes dig scars.”

Shin Ren looks at her with horror in his eyes, and tries to scramble away.

She yanks him back with the chain, the act making her entire body malfunction in pain but arresting his momentum long enough for her to aim a kick with her right leg into his ribs.

He gasps, more in surprise than shock. Suddenly crippled or not, his body has far more refinement than hers, and that strengthening, though he can’t access it, hasn’t bled away through a broken dantian. Still, the pain must feel different without his Qi and soul actively cushioning it, and he curls up around the kick, which is the perfect opportunity to kick him in the teeth.

Teeth, Raika discovers, seem to be much tougher than their connection to the mouth itself. She discovers this as she feels a minute shift and Shin Ren’s mouth fills with blood. She pulls back, her knee screaming with the force and flexibility she’s forcing onto it, and goes for a stomp on his temple, but his eyes flash open.

Whatever training he got, it didn’t involve being a weakling, clearly, and he yanks hard on the chain so she has to abort the kick and hold her ground or be thrown.

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Even weakened, he’s still strong enough to literally whip her around like a rag doll if she doesn’t keep him off balance. He scrambles to his feet, some kind of fancy leg sweep into a jump upright, and she’s ready and waiting, leaning back from the sweep and then stepping in half a step closer between their outstretched arms to soccer-kick him in the nuts as hard as she can.

The stadium hisses and winces in equal measure at the move, but Shin Ren manages to lift a leg enough to block most of it, though he still grunts at the hit in that sort of wide-eyed way that lets Raika know she didn’t miss entirely.

So she spits a spray of blood into his wide eyes.

He yells this time, something like “What the FUC-” before she kicks him in the knee he has unsupported off the ground, once, twice, ducks under a wild swing, moves around him so his arm has him off balance, and punches him in the nose.

Unfortunately, it’s the last part that spells out disaster. Reflexes kick in at a more traditional attack, or maybe his senses are still sharp enough to tell what she’s doing, or maybe he’s just that good. He shifts the manacled wrist and her arm goes off-angle, scraping by his cheekbone, and before she can turn fully away he’s dropped into a perfect stance and shot a punch faster than her eyes can follow into her torso.

If she hadn’t managed to turn away at all, his fist probably would have gone straight into the hole his spear punched into her, and she’d be dead, plain as that. As it is, she’s only mostly dead when the punch hits her ribs, right over her heart and remaining lung, and she feels all the breath leave her body and her heart stall for a beat.

The punch is so hard she literally ragdolls away from him, the manacle connecting him all that keeps her in range and almost dislocating her shoulder in the process. Even that almost backfires as he moves into a series of jabs, eyes still closed and full of blood, aiming with technique and instinct alone, any one of the punches capable of killing her if he hits her skull, her throat, what’s left of her ribs-

So she forces her body to move, willing her flesh to shift and pull her back with the momentum of the chain and wrapping herself around him.

With a compromised rib cage, a grapple is suicidal, so she doesn’t stick around, just long enough to pull his arm off balance again wrap herself behind him. In a move she considers almost as impossible as plugging the holes in her body and moving with a shattered spine, she balances on her right leg and forces her body to move, to shift with her center of gravity, to bring down one of the best crescent kicks she’s ever done right on his neck, the joint between throat and clavicle, bloody from the chunk she bit out. It hits like a cannon, and she can feel parts of her foot and heel shatter, and he goes down to one knee and briefly chokes on the pain. Ignoring her foot, forcing it to hold her weight, she throws herself forward, arm extended, ready to dig into the wound, ready to try to rip his throat out, ready to dig into his eyes or punch him in the temple or any of the incredibly niche and dangerous blows that might take out the young master of a sect-

And then she hears a “clink”, and feels the manacle’s chain go slack.

She’s knocked away before she’s even had time to react, tumbling through the air like a broken toy and landing on the far edge of the stone slab with the sound of breaking bones.

Her vision is kind of blurry. Blood loss, pain, shock, concussion, all of the above, who knows. Still it’s clear enough to see her wrist as she lays there broken, to see the manacle at the end of the chain next to her and how it hisses and glows ever so slightly from the heat, it’s more delicate pieces warped and falling out, it’s runes fading as she watches.

Not rated for semi Nascent Soul cultivators, it would seem.

Some motherfuckers have all the damn luck.

Ah, well, Raika thinks. Can I still stand?

Her limbs most feel like they’re sloshing more than squirming, if that makes any sense. She’s proven she can force her knee to obey her again, but it doesn’t make her left leg any less of a more recent ruin, and she took the impact of that fall on her hip and arm in almost equal measure.

So… sort of.

She crawls, leaving a trail of blood, trying to get her arm under her. Her elbow is broken but she can force it to move anyways, will and flesh intertwined no matter the damage, and everything hurts anyways, so-

And then something slips in her, and her mind goes empty at the feeling of pain absolute, and in the silence after that, she hears someone walking towards her.

He makes it over to her after her second attempt to lift her body, each shift leaving more red pooling around her, the second time leaving her just as face down on the floor, legs limp, arm screaming at her to please stop trying to use it the way she is. She feels a shaft of metal and wood leverage her shoulder to flip her onto her back, his recovered spear rolling her over to reveal robes a whole new color of scarlet as she bleeds freely from every cut but the hole in her torso, which she stubbornly holds as tight as she can.

Shin Ren is above her, looking down at her, face bruised, one hand holding back the bleeding on his neck, mouth bloody.

“I don’t know what you are,” he says, voice strangely impassive, “but I can see how you would have won against the likes of Lu Feren.”

She tries to speak, and realizes her right lung is at this point all the way full of blood, and talking isn’t really a thing she can do. Breathing either, unfortunately, but that’s secondary. Probably. She may be delirious from the fact that she’s about to die.

“I don’t like how this was done,” Shin Ren says, “but I can see you really didn’t plan to die. Whatever you are, you have my respect. That was a terrifying fucking fight, and you were clever and strong both, despite your limitations.”

She can’t talk, or breathe, or see very well what with everything going dark, but she’s pretty sure she just rolled her eyes, if his chuckle is anything to go by. “Yeah,” he whispers. “I wouldn’t be very satisfied with that either.”

And then, with the smell of sweets and flame and freedom and comfort and heat together, overriding the copper smell she’s been drowning in, he lights her on fire.