Li Shu shoves Raika away at full force towards the door and against it so hard she feels it warp. The room has started to glow with the melting wall, the impossible heat and brilliant purple flames beginning to peek through as gaps in the stone begin to form. It’s been maybe less than ten seconds since it began, but already the entire exterior frame of the room has begun to violently come apart.
Raika doesn’t hesitate. Li Shu’s vow, her stated reality, does not allow for her to mistrust her, to wait or hesitate here, and being physically thrown away from her presence, as flimsy as the cover may be, is the best cover they have. Whoever is on the other side of the wall, they’re clearly not hesitating to get in here as fast as possible, even through sect-reinforced materials.
She looks one more time at Li Shu, who simply gives her a nod, assuming a combat stance facing towards the door and away from the wall.
Time to go, then.
She shoves herself backwards, as if to complete the arc from what such a throw should have caused, crashing through the door, rolling to her feet, and moving into a dead sprint immediately. She forces her heart to pump faster, her lungs to inhale whole clouds of air as she moves and feeds her body fuel to run faster, as fast as she can, muscles shifting to compensate for her weak physique, accommodating her missing arm to better balance her as she runs, altering her legs so she achieves violent bursts of speed every time her feet touch the ground. In an instant, Raika has shifted every part of herself into overdrive or an optimized form, done on instinct and by tweaking everything that starts to hurt as she runs.
All of this in no small part because as soon as she left the semi-silenced room (likely with its own runic arrays that she didn’t think about blocking out and in any stray Qi), she smelled who was burning through Li Shu’s wall. The air around her reeks of berries and honey, cooking over a deep firepit. Except that the berries have started to smell just a little bit off.
Shin Ren seems to have come back to see her again. What a gentleman, truly.
What might have taken her two or three movement arts before is instead eaten up in a single altered sprint, her entire body aching at the strain and minor modifications she’s pushed onto it so abruptly. She clears through the entire library, full of late-night studious healers and precious texts, through the central pavilion so useful for triage and material delivery, and out the ornate front doors in seconds.
And he’s standing in front of her somehow.
He’s holding his spear at the ready, relaxed and poised and its readiness to strike written over every line of him. Yet again, she’s immediately drawn to look at how gorgeous he looks. Drenched in moonlight and flames of gorgeous indigo, wrapped in his very own lighting, dressed in what looks like only a single robe and just as barefoot as she is, he looks like he dashed here straight out of bed, and is all the more gorgeous for it. He wakes up like this, for Heavens’ sake, with those locks of hair and bright eyes and mmph. All that.
Raika briefly wonders if it’s weird to be sexually attracted to the person she has the second most nightmares about.
He goes to speak, some proclamation or demand, and she’s not really listening because she needs to move. The sect is big, but to Nascent Soul cultivators distance is half joke and half inconvenience. If she sticks around, the elders of the sect will be here to crush her and pop her like an overheated balloon before she can say so much as a word in protest. So, best not to stick around, no matter how much the sexy nightmare of a cultivator before her wants to engage.
She still has a chance. She uses minimal Qi, if any, in her movements and body usage; so long as she gets out of range of their mortal senses, she might still be able to hide out and escape before the elders arrive. But that’s all predicated on one very important factor; that she doesn’t let Shin Ren follow her or leave a signal to trace her by.
So, first things first, she sprints at him as incredibly, impossibly, inhumanly quickly as she can and punches him in the throat.
Say what you will about Raika’s changes, but Shin Ren ain’t no bitch. He shifts at the last moment, eyes wide in surprise even as instinct kicks in and he moves to block and redirect the blow. He’s partially successful, the punch landing on the side of his throat rather than right in his larynx, but he still audibly chokes a bit.
She doesn’t let up, sticking as close to him as possible, not letting him get an arm around her to grab his spear with both hands, staying inside his range. She headbutts him as he flinches from the throat punch, knees him hard, ducks a punch, and-
Fuck. She’s actually fighting him. Not with a ruinous Qi restraining device on him, but… well, he is surprised, but that’s all she can say. She can feel strain begin to build in her body as she keeps pushing it, her eyes burning and headache forming as she feeds blood to every essential system and away from every other. Her body is, on its own, naturally shutting down and redirecting energy and blood from certain unnecessary systems (her stomach, her lower guts, her pain receptors); all she has to do is follow its lead and boost the effects with her own control. Her eyes are almost flickering, her mind thinking so fast, tracking every trace of movement on him, seeing his muscles shift and ripple as he moves to react, her arm and legs violently tense and spasming into place to block every move as she sees it. She’s hit him a dozen times and dodged half that much in the time it’s taken her to realize the fact that she’s somehow actually got him on the back foot.
Then Shin Ren remembers that he has more skills than just being an attractive bruiser, and the world lights up.
She smells it an instant before it appears, the firepit overwhelming the honey and fruit and exploding out in a detonation surrounding his body. The entire night turns brilliant, turns indigo and violet and gorgeous golden-red, and for a moment everything is obfuscated and washed in impossible light and heat hot enough to melt her ten times over. Call it panic, call it a genuine reaction, call it some sort of previously discovered technique, but Shin Ren spawns a perfect fireball of heat strong enough to have disintegrated her in their last (and current) fight, roaring as he does.
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Luckily for Raika, she is no longer there to see it.
At the instant the smell began to rise in the air, in the second that she felt and scented his Qi begin to move (and in quantities enough to make her sneeze violently if that system hadn’t been shut down in the battle too), she moved again. It’s a move she could not have done as a cultivator, not without movement techniques she’d never had and probably had never even heard of. As the adonis nearly two celestial realms above her at her prime brings a violent sun into the world, she tears ligaments, strains bones, violently damages legs and joints and spine, and launches herself away into the woods.
She briefly wonders if the levels of pain she’s gotten used to are getting kind of concerning. Then she leaves the thought be and focuses on getting the fuck out of the area.
It’s a best case scenario sort of moment. In a moment of panic, Shin Ren’s detonation carved through the entire area around him, lighting fires that illuminate the whole space, but more importantly, blinding himself for a brief moment. Raika has to physically force her limbs to keep moving, newfound ability to enact her will upon her flesh the only thing keeping her upright and moving as she runs; in that single moment she gave everything to move out of sight, out of range, not just of the blast radius but of the senses of the terrifying thing that spawned it.
She looks back only once, to see if he’s following or not.
All she sees in the growing distance is a roaring, bestial figure. He swings his spear like an additional limb, like something sharp and horrifying in the flickering purple flames, his form cast in shadow save for the parts of him that seem to literally exude flame and violence, crackling around him like skin, like breath, like limbs, ready to reach out to the world and unmake it at the whim of the thing from which they were spawned. Shin Ren roars, a sound so loud and so enhanced by Qi that she can smell his rage, and see the ground charring and turning to glass beneath his feet, and hear the sound of it echoing for miles.
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She almost collapses when she reaches the East Gate.
The smell of Shin Ren’s Qi, the absolute stench of burnt fruit and overpowered honey lit ablaze, fills the air behind her and around her and leaves her in a daze. The pain doesn’t help, necessarily, but the pain is an old friend, and it keeps her distracted as she keeps forcibly having to pause and rearrange something or deactivate parts too damaged to function temporarily. She feels like a puzzle, like a put-together mannequin, and if there’s one thing to be gained from this fucking disaster, it’s that she’s getting a lot of live experience about how her body functions in conditions of stress and how she can now influence it.
But, barring her really pushing it, she’s not going to be climbing that wall anytime soon, especially not with the scent of the elders washing over the entire courtyard and forests of the sect. Hiding on the ground is one thing; hiding up in the air, hanging on a bare, mostly-white wall, is quite another, especially when trying to hide from eyes that can pierce the darkness of even a moonless night. No, if she’s leaving now it’ll either be through the tunnels and hallways inside the sect walls themselves, or through one of the gates.
And lo-and-behold, she did indeed send a maybe-ally and maybe-ambush over to one said gate, far enough away from Shin Ren and the initial search area that she’s not too uncomfortable heading towards it.
She discovers something new along the way, too. While her senses have been absolutely enhanced, and her ability to smell Qi seems seriously heightened, Maen is very good at hiding herself. It’s only when she’s nearly at the east gate, every sense attuned and alert as she moves as quickly and quietly as she possibly can, that she finally finds the hidden servant.
Crouched behind some bushes, a backpack in her lap and a worried look on her face as she chews on her lower lip, the young semi-felinid woman looks about ready to either cry or burst sprinting from the woods away from where she’s sitting.
She literally jumps a full foot in the air when Raika taps onto the ground beside her.
“Fuck!” she whispers way too loudly. “Fuck, I thought you were- It’s almost five minutes past, I thought you were- what happened over there?”
Raika shrugs, the act bringing back pain in a way that feels kind of nostalgic. “I got in a fight,” she whispers back. “No one died and it wasn’t on purpose and I got away, but I need you to sneak me into the wall.”
Maen blinks. “Just like that?” she asks. “No “are you sure about this”, no “for grabbing this opportunity you’ll be rewarded,” just “sneak me into the wall”?”
Raika looks at her. “Well, yeah,” she says. “You’re the one who wanted to come. I’m just taking advantage, and then, later, you’ll try to take advantage of me. Simple and easy, right?”
Maen stares back, mouth slightly open. “You know, I thought you were some kind of weird philosopher-cripple when I found out you were out training to hit wood and saying all that stuff to me,” she admits, shaking her head. “Turns out you’re just crazy?”
Raika shrugs again. “I could’ve told you that,” she whispers. “Heck, I’m kinda sure that wisdom and being crazy are pretty much the same thing. So, you going to help?”
Maen hisses, the sound surprisingly catlike (and kind of adorable considering how small she is). “Fine,” she murmurs, “but you’d better be serious about taking me with you. I’m sick of this place, but I’m not planning on dying to leave.”
Raika nods. “More than fair,” she says. “I’m not trying to get you killed either. I could use a familiar face around, and as shitty as it’ll be for both of us come meeting my new boss, if you help me out of here I’ll owe you big.”
Maen shakes her head. “No,” she whispers. “I need you to swear it to me. Swear, on something you care about, that you’ll get me out of here, that you won’t leave me behind.”
Raika blinks, looking over at Maen, who’s staring at her with a surprising intensity. She didn’t know the girl before, but it’s clear that this means a lot to her. And the fact that, alone in the woods with a would-be demon cripple, she’s decided to confront and demand this of her says a lot about who she is, or that she’s a much better people reader than Raika had known her to be. Eventually, she nods, slow and serious.
“I, honored Raika the Unbroken, swear on my freedom and my flesh itself that I will do all in my power to assist junior sister Maen to freedom. So said, so shall it be.”
Maen nods. “So said, so shall it be.”
As the phrase is repeated back, Raika feels something, a little twinge inside of her. It hits in the same… “place” as the chafing before, as the sense of weight and discomfort of being under another’s yoke. It’s emotional, but… it doesn’t feel like it’s just that.
She briefly wonders if there’s a lot more Truth than people know about being used in the world, even if in strange, lighter forms. Or if Truth is something different than people think?
Either way, now’s not the time. She nods back at Maen, before standing to turn and look at the massive, ornate wall a ways away from them, its doorways locked, it’s soldiers ready, it’s very design meant to withstand hordes from above and below and give its defenders every advantage to repel and defeat those who challenge it.
“So,” Raika whispers, looking expectantly at the young servant beside her, “what’s the plan?”
Maen, for her part, let’s out a long, drawn out sigh and pinches the bridge of her nose.