Her legs are milling in the air for a moment before her feet make contact with the wall and she has to contract and balance violently to avoid getting flipped about by the impact, the traction of cliff-versus-person. The moment passes, her body further strained, and her next step hits, and again, until her legs are an agonizing blur sprinting along the wall, and then her knees bend and her spine has to fight not to let her slap face first into the floor or start tumbling, and for a moment she thinks she’s failed, and wraps her arm around Maen to try and shield her.

And then the added padding feels a moment of give, and locks into place, pinching nerves and flesh between bone and forcing the impact and sheer kinetic energy in her body to rocket up and behind her as she moves.

She hits the sharp curve where incline finally becomes a flat plane again and, almost bent over from the strain, she hits the ground faster than she has ever run before and keeps going.

There’s a strained whimper as the whiplash and gravity hit Maen, and she almost slips off Raika, her grip not quite strong enough to deal with the force of the abrupt gravitational turn, but she holds the small woman gripping her so tight, forcing them to stay together as she keeps running. Any attempt to stop now would simply see her wind up smeared into a streak of blood along cobbled streets rather than smeared into a puddle at the base of the plateau of the Purple Searchlight Blooming Idiots sect, so she just keeps going, pushing her system, keeping her heart pumping and forcibly manipulating the constantly damaged tissues of her legs to keep them from falling apart completely.

She makes it almost a kilometer into the city before she is able to slow down, the whole distance flashing by in seconds.

Then, and only then, does Raika allow herself to fall over limp.

For a while, she and Maen lay there, collapsed on the ground, neither one willing or able to be the first one to move. Maen, for all that she was only responsible for holding on, experienced some truly tremendous G-force for a solid few seconds, which isn’t something that’s comfortable for anyone, least of all someone untrained and only at the lower end of the Qi-Gathering realm. Raika, splayed out and almost entirely limp, is more… running up against the limits of biological possibility, even with her recent enhancement and evolution into a being capable of shifting said biology around a bit. She is breathing shallow, her focus pointed towards her heart, slowly draining away its constant heartbeat from the agony of the constant high-pace she’d taken it to as they both lay there, recovering.

And then another wave of light flickers behind her, brilliant and violet, with the smell of just a hint of berries and flame, and she decides it’s time to go.

Raising a trembling hand, she reaches into her shirt, grasping the small bundle of cloth there and rooting through it until she finds what she’s looking for. With a concentrated effort, she lifts her hand out of the bundle and Dinks what she’s holding against Maen’s forehead.

The sound almost makes her cry.

“Come on,” she says in a voice so shaky she’s not sure she even said it out loud. “Time to get up. You’re gonna have to help me to my feet, kitty.”

It’s the mix of getting Dinked in the forehead and the last word Raika said that seems to pull the younger woman together. She blinks, then scowls, then spasms and rolls over away from Raika to vomit on the street.

“There there,” Raika mumbles, “let it out. You’ll be fine.”

Maen turns like she’s about to respond, eyes incandescent with rage- but the act of turning skews with her balance and mushed up guts again, and she has to stop herself and turn back around before she pukes all over both of them.

While she’s busy, Raika decides to do properly what she hasn’t been able to do yet.

She Dinks herself in the forehead.

It’s not magic. She can feel the vibration hit, feel how the minute force of it vibrates through her, no more or less magical than her own heartbeat. Whatever she and Dink share, it’s not overtly supernatural or superhuman.

It is a fucked up tuning fork.

She is a fucked up human meatbag with mental issues.

And yet, she does it again.

It Dinks into her mind that man, she was missed. I mean, it’s not like it could do anything without her, so obviously it needed her around, but she was missed.

Yeah. Same ol Dink.

She lets the tears of exertion and non-existent tears that definitely have nothing to do with recovering her most major coping tool for the worst period of her life mix together as she lays there.

A flash of gold from the sect above and behind them, then another, both of them moving towards the city below. Not quite right where they are, but close.

She laughs a bit at the smell of Shin Ren raging behind them, and the casual way that other scents rise up and simply squash his. Serves him right for thinking he’s hot shit. He is, but still, serves him right.

“Come on, Maen,” Raika whispers, finally getting an arm underneath herself to try and get up. “You’ve got two arms and didn’t even do any of the running. Help me up, damnit.”

Maen spits off to the side, wipes her mouth, spits again, and nods.

“I already regret this choice so fucking much,” she mumbles, but she does start to get up. She grabs her pack and slings it over one shoulder before grabbing Raika’s left stump near the armpit and hoisting her up a bit, helping her walk.

Which, apparently, she can’t really do. Stumble-stagger is what’s available. Whatever was left of her legs from when she tore them apart escaping Shin Ren, it was not enough to survive the things she did to it intact. Even trying to exert her will, reaching mind and into her flesh and rearranging it or trying to fix it does almost nothing, the tissues so shredded they move sluggishly if at all. She does still stumble and stagger, though, and drags Maen under her good arm to use her as support as they walk.

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“Ok,” Maen asks. “Where do we go now?”

Ah. In theory she’d had a plan. Her reaction at seeing Li Shu, and the fact that she’d been found out and nearly caught right after, kind of ruined that. Ideally, they can spend the night limping over to the imperial palace and just get themselves picked up by the soldiers there, and hope for the best. Originally the plan had been to try climbing back up, and if that didn’t work, go through the front doors anyways and just be taken back inside, so falling back onto the latter half of that plan (and, admittedly, it’s consequences) doesn’t sting quite as bad as being forced to do so.

But… then again. There’s a promise she hasn’t kept yet.

“The red light district,” she mumbles. “Past the eastern market square. I’ll guide you once we’re there.”

Maen goes to say something, probably out of frustration or to spit back at Raika for trying to go to such a place now, but… maybe there’s something on her face. She sees it, and just bows her head, either trusting her or realizing she’s not really in the mood to banter. Not at the thought of this.

The night is lit by flashes of gold and purple, members of the sect and Imperial authorities both dashing through the night in search of them. Using their Qi senses, of course, to which Maen continues to do her weird shifting to disguise her signature, and Raika, to the best of her knowledge, doesn’t have a Qi signature to be sensed. There’s a few close calls, and they have to duck through a lot of back-alleys that become more and more familiar to Raika as they move, but she doesn’t ever feel the fear of getting caught.

She smiles. A furious, angry, gloriously happy thing. She’s free.

Maybe she doesn’t even need to go back to the Imperial palace. There’s a whole wide world out there, and once she’s healed she can probably tough it out against the minor spirit beasts that the region contains, maybe even grow on her own and go beyond that. Fuck the Empire. She’s no one's slave, no one’s servant. Fuck their cage, too.

…the bacon-wrapped dates can go unfucked, but fuck the gilded cage overall!

And then, eventually, she sees it.

The alley where she always met the kid.

And he’s there.

Staring up at the sky like a half-dozen other people she’s avoided, awake at three in the morning so he can look at the stars and the gold of the greatest authority the world has ever seen flashing through the night.

She smiles as she sees him.

“Hey, idiot,” she gasps, stumbling in on Maen’s shoulder. “Good to see you’ve been wasting even more time.”

He looks at her and… takes a step back. His eyes dart between the two of them, a weak, tangerine-scented breeze reaching out as he pushes against them and tries to sense their strength.

Fuck. Less than a year, no master, alone in a whorehouse and he can push his Qi like that. Foundational stage, or maybe just before it, at his age.

No more snow excuse in the later summer now. No excuse at all. The kid saved her fucking life, and at her absolute worst, she somehow still managed to do something good for him.

Before he can panic or need to ask who they are, she raises her remaining right arm and Dinks against her forehead, to a confused look from Maen.

JiaJia, though, lights up like he’s seen a firework. “Master!” he yells, so startled he almost trips as he sprints forward towards them, all alight with nervous energy and enthusiasm and relief. “I thought you weren’t coming back, I worried you died! I mean you said you would but it’s been so long and you’re super weak, I mean you still look super weak did they beat you up? But why did you look like that, I couldn’t even recognize you! Is it a witch thing? Are you a witch? Can you get younger? You look younger. Even the hole on your face looks better! Did the Purple Fire sect do that? I thought you said they were all losers and-”

She Dinks him on the forehead. “Yes, it’s me, idiot apprentice,” she growls. “It’s three in the morning, how are you able to ask this many questions?”

He looks at her, shocked, then gives her a cheeky grin. “Not my fault you can’t keep up,” he giggles. “Guess even turning back to my age wouldn’t be enough to let you match my new power. It seems the student is soon to be the master, huh?”

She laughs at that, though she notices JiaJia’s eyes flicking over to Maen.

“Maen, this is JiaJia,” Raika says. “JiaJia, this is a hot cat-eared girl I picked up at the sect who’s obsessed with me and helps carry me around.”

“Wha-” Maen splutters, but before she can properly defend herself JiaJia has broken into a giggle that Raika can’t help but laugh along to.

He’s alive. And he’s well. And she did good, even at her worst. She gave someone something. Still, there’s the issue of their promise. Oh, she’s surely further along in her journey, and he seems to be progressing well, but joke or not, she’s taken the role of his “master”. It wouldn’t do to come without gifts or advice. She pauses to think of what it is she can offer-

A hand, large enough to wrap around her entire torso, backhands JiaJia.

There is a red smear where his upper body was. A lot of it ended up on the wall, to her left.

One of his legs is fallen over on the floor. The other is at the foot of the wall.

They are not connected anymore.

She cannot look up.

He is here. She can smell the wind, the mountain, the steel and the thing that consumes and is all of them, but she cannot look up.

She is looking at the stain.

“Did you think we wouldn’t track where you’d been?” rumbles a voice like a mountain breaking. “That we wouldn’t have records? That the Empire wouldn’t notice everyone you ever spoke to the moment you became of interest?”

Maen is trying to say something, or whimper, or just trembling from the pressure of his Qi, and fails at all three. She has fallen over. Raika wonders if she’s ok. It’s a faint thought, and it flickers, and then she remembers what she is looking at, and it goes out.

She has fallen to her knees. Her legs are too broken to stand her up. Maen is on the floor too, and she can hear something like choking or gasping coming from her. Or maybe it’s coming from Raika.

She is looking at the stain.

“What was the plan?” Taurus rumbles. “Meet up with your friends? Go explore the woods, like a wandering cultivator of no notice? Did you even have a plan, or are you more animal than I’d hoped, wandering from instinct to instinct, one blind impulse to the next?”

One of the legs of- one of the legs is in front of her. The shoe has fallen off. She reaches a trembling hand to pick it up, holding the cold metal of something like a shield against the world and the proof of how little that shield could really do in the same grip.

There’s a thud of weight in front of her, like some colossal monolith taking a step forward, and a hot breath comes down onto her, heavy enough to make her blink.

“Did you think what would happen if someone ever asked a known associate of yours, a blabbering little fool raised in a whorehouse, if he’d seen his friend, the person of interest to Imperial Command and a Division, the night that someone broke into and attacked a sect under the Empire’s aegis? That same night when she should have been in her cage under the watchful eye of a Division of the Emperor’s Will?” he rumbles, less like stone now, more like thunder, coming closer, closer. “Did you think, Raika the bold, the brave, the mindless, what that would mean?”

She does not say anything.

She is looking at the stain.

“There are no wilds, here,” the thunder says, quiet for all its size. “There is no freedom to be had in rebellion. Only tighter collars.”

The alleyway is silent, save for the rumbling of breaths heavy enough to shake the air.

Maen has gone quiet, save for an occasional gargle or choked sound.

Raika has not moved. She cannot speak. She holds onto the shoe.

She is looking at the stain.

It is the last thing she sees before the world goes dark.