It’s an agonizing breath of fresh air, to be out in the woods after all this time. Weeks in a windowless room, a little over two months in a palace with the natural world stuck on the wrong side of windows and balconies, and for the first time in what feels like an eternity, all she can feel is the beauty of air that is free and moving and full of scents.
And oh is it full of scents. Raika hadn’t realized just how alien and enhanced her senses have become, exceeding what she had assumed was the norm by a full degree. Where before it seemed natural that she’d basically know what food was prepared long before she left her room to search for it, now she knows just how ridiculous that is, especially with her newfound knowledge that the air in the palace, for whatever reason, was insanely still and somehow almost always without scent. Compared to the wilds, it was basically a dead zone of mild perfumes and milder breezes.
Here, she can sense all of it. The smell of something furred and its droppings more than a hundred feet away, the scent of a dozen trails of creatures, none of which she can recognize for how new their smell is to her. She can smell the birds flying overhead, where they’ve placed their nests, where the nearest source of water is… frankly, it should be overwhelming, but without counting the tingling in her nose and right behind her eyes, she feels perfectly fine, tracking more scents and more nuances than anything human could. And none of that is to speak to her other senses.
She hears a fresh twig break, and turns to look back the way she came.
Glimpsed between the trees, about two miles behind, Maen steps on another twig.
Raika holds herself very still, putting her entire attention towards Maen. Slowly, other sounds start to fade away, the rustling of leaves and branches and bushes and moving mice and worms and birds all fading, bit by bit. And then… ba-bump. Again; ba-bump.
From almost two miles away, when she focuses, she can hear the blood in the felinid’s veins.
She turns back around. Even slowing her pace tremendously, there’s an agony to the affair in that, at least until they make camp, she simply can’t leave Maen entirely behind and let loose like she wants to. There’s a tension of freshly forged muscles and altered physiology that begs to be used, and she can feel her hand clenching and unclenching as she wears the impossible flesh she has crafted as a suit of armor.
And she’s absolutely certain this is just the beginning.
In truth, that’s been her biggest source of excitement about all this, the possibility of finding and studying other enhanced life. Sure, there are mortal animals about the forest, decorating different parts of the bottom of the food chain, but even in the inner rings of the Empire, there are still spirit beasts and monsters that roam the woods.
They’re a day’s travel by flight from Paleblossom city, here, still well within the bounds of the third ring of the Empire. The first ring, of course, being the Imperial Plateau, a country-sized spike of land reaching high enough into the sky to be obscured by the clouds, with the second ring denoting an area of a few thousand kilometers in every direction around it, and the third indicated by the more untamed areas for a few tens of thousands of kilometers beyond that. At its very edge are a ring of vaguely connected forts, indicating the end of the third ring and beginning of the fourth, which expands very nearly to the ends of the world itself, the Emperor’s most recently conquered lands, still unruly and writhing under his boot.
Beyond that lies the fifth ring, of course, but that’s millions of kilometers away even in a straight line.
The third ring is far more tame than the fourth when it comes to wildlife, but it’s nowhere near the carefully bred and selectively hunted treasured animals and bloodlines of the second ring, with its divine stags and visually appealing chimeras. Here, where Raika has lived most of her life (if quite a ways further north than she’s ever gone before), there still be some monsters left.
The thought reminds her of another monster she is trying hard to forget.
Taurus had apologized to Kaena for the silence… spell? afterwards, and they’d acquiesced when Raika had simply nodded and told them everything was fine.
Everything was fine. They’d even shaken hands at the end, so clearly, it was all fine.
How much of what Taurus said is a lie is yet to be determined. How much he can be trusted to keep his word, equally nebulous.
But one does not condense and then discard an entire droplet of liquid Qi, while right on the edge of an advancement into a new realm, for a simple lie. And one tends not to discuss treason against the Empire for the sake of tricking some lowly semi-prisoner. All signs, in this case, point to either Raika being as important as he says she is, or his plan being just as true as he claims, or, more terrifyingly, both. If it’s a lie, it’s a master-stroke and a near suicidal risk and waste of resources. If what he said is true, then… she’s not sure.
But it’s enough for now. And if it means that he trusts her just the tiniest bit more, and that she can stay close enough to rip his throat out when the time comes, it’s enough for her to stick around and avoid the annoyance of being hunted.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
But the chain chafes, nonetheless, and she can feel her Truth straining.
I Am Me, I Am Mine, she had said.
She is herself, but herself is in flux, its foundations unsteady, and she is as much her own as she is his, if only barely. She doesn’t know what will happen if her Truth continues to strain, or is pushed further, and she hasn’t asked yet, but soon there’ll be no other choice.
In the meantime, she plans to strengthen it, and herself, as much as she can on this mission.
She headed out immediately after arriving at the city. In truth, the journey hadn’t been all that bad; turns out, Imperial soldiers get the short end of the stick way more often than one would assume with all the fancy propaganda and golden armor. Whatever artifact they use to fly, it highlights their body in strains of neon yellow and even more gold, until they glow like they’ve been traced out with miniature suns, and, clad in that impossible power from whatever runic arrangement or arcane tool they’re given, they were tasked with carrying them over.
Flight is infinitely more convenient than walking nearly all the time, it would seem, but Raika couldn’t help but feel like some kind of caged zoo animal, sitting in a closed, reinforced traveling “carriage” with most of the others. It had been bigger on the inside, which had been fun for the first few hours, but then a lot more hours went by, and it got a lot less fun.
The village seemed… like a village, and they’d landed a ways away from it. Taran had wandered off nearly immediately, whispering under their breath constantly and twitching spasmodically whenever Hao Kai, acting as a phantom presence haunting them, would correct their posture or say something that Taran would grumble about but ultimately listen to. She’s still not sure what the deal with that is, but… maybe someday she’ll be interested enough to ask. She’d followed their example, and, carrying a bag of basic camping supplies (a waterskin, bedroll, flint, jerky, and a knife) she’d set out, Maen right behind her, her own bag overstuffed to nearly triple Raika’s.
And now… here they are. And here she is.
Ah. And there Maen is.
Staggering around a tree, the felinid bends double, her arms braced on her knees. “If I’d known,” she mutters darkly, “that escaping with you… would entail this much walking, I might have stayed with the damn sect.”
“You used to be ever so polite, Maen,” Raika chuckles, “even when you thought you were being insulting. Whatever happened to that genteel tongue?”
“It’s stuck in a body that’s been walking for six hours through these damned woods!” Maen exclaims. “I don’t know if you heard some racist bullshit about beast-bloods, but I am like, ninety percent human at least and humans in Qi-Gathering realm don’t really tend to do that!”
“More’s the pity,” Raika smiles. “I hear it’s good for your heart. And your ass.”
“My ass is fine,” Maen grumbles, cheeks heating as she realizes what she said. “I mean, it’s- ugh. Are we stopping here?”
Raika nods. “Yeah,” she says. “You are, anyways. We’re decently far from the base of the mountain and the village, and there’s a stream not too far away. We can start searching from here, probably.”
“What about you?” Maen asks. “Not going to help me set up camp?”
“Is it not the honored junior’s task to perform the more trivial duties?” Raika asks with a slight smile. Despite herself, she’s letting herself enjoy this, just a bit. “Besides, you’re the one who brought triple supplies.”
“Wha- I’m your senior!” Maen grumbles. “And only because you didn’t even bring a tent!”
“You’re a cultivator now, aren’t you?” Raika asks. “Camping under the stars is one of the great joys of the life. You get used to it.”
“Doesn’t answer what you’re going to be doing,” Maen mumbles.
Raika looks at her, not needing her control over her flesh to give her a genuine grin. It’s smaller than it used to be, all her smiles are, but it’s genuine nonetheless.
“I haven’t fought anything properly in almost two years,” Raika tells her. “I intend to find the nearest beast and see what it is I can do with all this new weirdness of mine.”
“Oh,” Maen mumbles. “Man, you… really are still a cultivator, huh?”
“Hopefully in only the best of ways,” Raika sighs, the smile slipping a little.
Maen nods. “Fair enough,” she replies. “Well… you should probably head towards the river, right? Upstream? You can probably find something there.”
Raika cocks her head. “Why do you think so?”
Maen shrugs. “I don’t know,” she says. “It just… feels like the kind of place a predator might go? Especially with the wind the way it is, heading upriver?”
Raika blinks. She hadn’t even noticed, but it’s true, and it makes sense. But… she looks again at Maen, the younger woman starting to unpack her supplies and sit down on an exposed root to rest.
“Maen,” she asks, “if you had to guess where the nearest large creature is, right now, where would you point to?”
Maen hesitates, looking up at Raika in confusion. When she sees that her would-be mentor is serious, she frowns, and starts to concentrate. At first, Raika can smell only something herbal and citrusy, but then, slowly, a growing hint of that sharpened, wild smell from before starts to peek through.
“Maybe… maybe that way?” Maen says, pointing a bit off to the right from the stream. “I’m not sure, though.”
Raika gives her a soft smile and shrugs. “As good a direction as any,” she says, and starts running that way.
And then, about fifty feet from the camp, she’s tackled to the ground.
She doesn’t sense its presence. She doesn’t smell it, or hear its heartbeat, or see it shifting. Her enhanced senses, through lack of training or some unknown factor, simply did not tell her there was something there.
But it stands above her, and it gets in her face and roars.
That’s when she smells it. Raw meat and delicious, dripping blood and glorious freshly grown steel, the smell of a predator, the smell of Qi. The beast had smelled like the forest, not like its own entity. It had hidden itself, hidden its Qi from a fellow predator that might be able to sense even a whiff of it, natural camouflage disguising its shape. It’s only now, as its teeth bear down towards her and its claws begin to tear into her stomach that she sees the green and black coloration, the bright, brilliant white teeth, the twelve glistening, bulbous black eyes. It stands over her, close to a hundred times her weight, and she can feel the intensity of its Qi on her skin, rippling like a heatwave along her flesh as its claws start to break through her defenses.
Maen screams. The beast snarls and the sounds of wet tearing and biting fill the clearing.
And then Raika punches its ribs so hard that the crack of breaking bones echoes.
The beast yowls and stumbles backwards, limping back and wheezing at a collapsed lung as Raika, bloodied and clawed and barely wounded by her standards, gets to her feet, crouching animalistically, teeth bared in ecstatic joy at the suffering so deserved, the adrenaline so desired, at the sight of the worthy thing she gets to kill.
“My turn,” she snarls, and launches herself forward.