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Reforged from Ruin [Eldritch Xianxia Cultivation]
Chapter 52 - Hungry Like The Wolves

Chapter 52 - Hungry Like The Wolves

Raika is beginning to find it very challenging to have a bad time.

As much as she knows she shouldn’t be enjoying this. As much as she knows that this really isn’t the appropriate reaction or behavior for the situation she’s in, or for the demands she’s made of herself. No, even as much as she knows there’s a very real risk of death, here, she’s having a really, really good time.

The part of her that thinks this might be a really, really big problem has learned to properly shut the fuck up. Or, at the very least, has gone quiet enough not to bother her right now.

She spins into a leaping crescent kick, shattering the bones of some feline-ape with incredibly baggy skin which makes every other blow simply slide off of it. She uses it as a platform, jumping off loose folds into the face of something that looks like a deer, if its skin was all antlers, her knee rocketing up into its snout hard enough she hears something crack. She grabs one said antler as a handlebar to swing herself off of, landing right in front of something like a turtle but with far too many legs and pieces that chitter, grabbing it by one such limb and feeling flesh and tendon inside her begin to tear as she uses all available force to fling the thing and ragdoll it violently against the ground, and exposed, chitinous underbelly much more vulnerable and now accessible for her to thrust her hand into like a spear.

In the time she wastes eliminating (or at least wounding) the shelled creature, something kicks her, hard and hooved, and she feels ribs break and start to shift. They don’t disintegrate, though, they don’t shatter like they might have before, and she forces the muscles in her body to react, binding the loose bones in place at the cost of a bit of flexibility on her right side. She lands almost right below something ursine, a towering, violent thing built like a gods-damned house and viciously overmuscled, its skin and needle-like fur barely holding together over a musculature so advanced and full that it looks like it’ll burst apart as the creature moves. It slams a paw down towards her, a slab of meat pushing forward a seabed of needle-tipped spikes.

She rolls out of the way, barely, ignoring the bear for now until she can figure out someplace she can hurt it and launching herself at the next creature, a distinctly humanoid looking goat-thing with six eyes and limbs that split at the elbows for additional hooved hands.

She doesn’t know how long she’s been fighting. She’s torn half to shreds, but she refuses to let the blood leave her body, forcing her skin to patch cuts and open wounds, for muscles and blood vessels to shift around the damage and allow her to keep fighting in spite of it. She looks a mess, her skin jagged with stretch marks and quickly forming new scars, but she doesn’t care, because to stop moving, even for a second, is to die, so anything she has to do to make sure she doesn’t stop moving is worth it.

And she is having so much fun.

The pain is secondary, the wounds are secondary, all she can feel is the thrill of razor blades in her soul, the song of broken bones and torn-open wounds, the fun of the ongoing puzzle to properly control her blood vessels and muscles and keep the system intact enough to move, to strike at the next target. All she is, in this moment, is a thing of endless abandon and wild, desperate need to survive.

And on the very edge of it, at the end of it all… she can feel something. Like an approaching signal, like the sound of far away swords clashing, like the scent of something on the wind. She’s getting closer to something.

Every moment she forces her heart to beat, she’s forcing her mangled, malformed Qi into every part of her body it can reach, smashing it against itself, running steel across steel, and in the process feeling it grow. Pushing herself like this, forcing her system to do this or die, she’s started to produce more Qi than she’s absorbing, the slow rate of absorption her body has not matching up to how much she’s stimulating and multiplying the Qi inside her. Cycling Qi, moving it, interacting with it, all increase its value by minute amounts, all allow a cultivator even in isolation to slowly, ever so slowly grow their own Qi and advance. But she is not in isolation, and cannot absorb any of it into storage or shunt it someplace else, and she does not have the luxury of moving slowly. Every bit of Qi she forces into being has nowhere to go but her flesh, and every moment she continues to overstuff said flesh with more and more of it, the more and more chaotic and damaging it becomes, the more it produces, unable to burst out of her or detonate in her Dantian.

No, all it does is slowly tear her apart.

Her muscles are being shredded, even without the constant sprinting and striking and dodging, her bones feel like they’re creaking, she’s fairly certain she’s bleeding from eyes, nose and ears, and she doesn’t bother to wonder about what its doing to her organs.

She is alive. She is in pain. She is killing things that have come to kill her.

All is right in the world.

And then, inevitably, as it could only ever be, she gets hit too hard.

She has the goat by the horns, arm yanking against the one she’s holding as she squeezes her thighs around its throat and forces its neck to snap, and then something strikes her. It’s smaller than the others, it kept its heartbeat in that way of stealthy synchronization the others abandoned as the fight began, and she doesn’t hear it or feel it coming until some stoat-like thing which glows vaguely blue and exudes an aura of cold slices violently across her shoulder and back.

She loses some of the movement in her arm, the violence too severe until she fixes it which takes time that she doesn’t have. Even still, while she can’t raise it much she can still reach, and manages to grab the creature and wring its neck and bite out part of its stomach as it keeps struggling even with a broken neck, and goes to move-

And then the bear hits her with a paw like a meat tenderizer, and she feels the entire right side of her stomach turn to fire.

She lands somewhere at the edge of the clearing, a dozen spirit beasts all circling, probably more out in the woods. Looking down, she can see that her right side is turned to a bloody mess, so many small punctures slammed into her with such force that everything below her ribs to her waist on that side is just a mess of red. It feels hard to breathe, and she can’t help but feel that something is wrong, even as she shifts muscle and skin and forces them both to work together and bind as much shut as they can. If she’s unlucky enough, the thing got deep enough to hit her liver, increased muscle resistance or not. It’ll be very relevant in a few moments; as it is, she directs a cluster of more Qi, a slightly more concentrated ball of the everywhere-agony in her, to sit on the area and forces her heart to keep beating at the same pace as before.

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The bear roars, and it doesn’t even sound like an animal. Spirit beasts aren’t animals, not really, but its roar sounds like a horn, like something mechanized and which reverberates and echoes strangely. The other creatures back off, briefly, the display of what must be its Qi (which she still can’t fucking sense) cowing the small army of abominations around them. With a thunderous impact, the creature lands, its needles punching four inches into the dirt with every step and seemingly no discomfort, and it starts to walk over to Raika, ready for a meal.

Raika grabs the nearest tree trunk. She grips it so hard that bark and core-wood both crackle as they shatter into a handhold. She puppeteers her legs back beneath her, forces her spine to stay straight and the strained, failing muscles in her to push her to her feet.

The ursine spirit beast looks at her, wary and a bit surprised. She looks at it, her smile blood red and wide.

“Come on then, you piss-ugly, gorgeous bastard,” she hisses, the air leaving her lungs weirdly. “Let’s get it on.”

And then something thunders in the clearing.

Almost immediately, most of the creatures sprint away, dashing out of sight in less than a heartbeat so intense is their velocity and so perfect their camouflage. Two of them, though, don’t move at all.

She blinks, and is surprised to find that she can see through them. There’s a few neat little tunnels, coming in one side and out the other, like in a line between them. Both of the creatures stagger, but even with a fist-sized hole through them, neither falls just yet.

And then the thunder strikes again, and again, and both of them are like limp, hole-filled rags on the ground.

She turns to look back at the over-muscled beast she’d been fighting, but it, too, has already left. Unlike the others, it stops at the edge of the clearing, turning back to look at Raika at the very edge of visibility. She meets its dead, strange little eyes, so recessed into its flesh she’s not sure she’s not just looking at empty pits.

For a moment, she smells it. Its Qi. Whatever control it had, whatever instinct it used to keep it completely scent-less, she smells it now, in this moment. Pine-wood and minced meat, the sound of a boulder rolling downhill and the tears of something weak. It’s the first time she’s smelled a sound, before.

She… doesn’t know if she has Qi in the same way that this beast has. Doesn’t know if hers smells like anything other than “alive”, and knows she certainly can’t push it outside her body on purpose. But she nods at the thing, and flicks her semi-limp hand towards it, letting some droplets of blood get sprinkled in its direction.

The thunder-sound comes again, three, four more times, and the spirit beasts huffs, and walks away.

Yeah. She’ll be seeing that one again.

“What in the ten fucking Hells did you do?” Taran asks as he steps into the clearing.

In his hands are two of the many pistols usually strapped and holstered about his body, each one distinct and dynamically strange. One seems to be a thing of powder and shot, one blast and then done until fully reloaded, carved from rich, dark wood and inlaid with pieces of opal and obsidian. In his other hand, he holds something like a revolving gun, its chamber holding maybe four shots, the whole thing a glistening thing of steel and brass. He looks at Raika at first in what seems to be revulsion, and then immediately fades to worry.

“What the fuck happened here?” he asks, looking around at the pile of corpses on the ground.

Raika looks up. The sun, even at its furthest tendril, is pretty far into the horizon by now. She’s been at this for hours.

They both hear a sob, and Raika immediately turns to the set of roots she left Maen under. A corpse has fallen over it, most of its head crushed to a mashed pulp by repeated blows when it refused to go down by disembowelment. Raika tries to sprint over to it, but something in her left leg fails for a second, and Taran gets there first.

He tosses the corpse aside, showing startling strength for how little of his Qi leaks out and taints the air with something alchemical. Maen looks up at the two of them, sobbing openly.

“Is it over?” she asks, with barely the slightest hint of yuzu in the air.

“Yeah, it’s over, I got you,” Taran whispers, putting one of his guns into a holster and kneeling down next to her as Raika collapses next to them both, letting herself simply fall and lay prone on the ground. “What happened?” he asks. “We weren’t expecting numbers like this in the village, even with the damn formations they’re setting up. I’ve never even heard of this many spirit beasts attacking someone outside of a damn beast tide.”

Raika, panting, whole body shuddering as she lets it free from direct control, just… tries and fails to shrug. “Don’t know,” she gasps, breath heaving. “Weren’t- weren’t for Maen, though. Came at me. Wouldn’t stop. More kept coming.”

Taran turns to Maen, who has been reduced to shuddering rather than sobbing. “Are you hurt?” he asks. She just shakes her head, silent.

Taran lets out a long, deep sigh, pale skin and all-black clothing putting him as a distinctly alien presence here in the wilds. He looks between the two of them, thinking.

“I can only carry one of you,” he says. “Strength isn’t my forte. But we need to get back to town and away from the wilds, especially if this is going to keep happening.”

“Take Maen,” Raika says immediately. “Take her to safety. Others will be drawn to the meat and death here, she can’t stay.”

Maen goes to say something, eyes wide, maybe to try and affirm that it’s ok, she can walk, but Raika doesn’t let her, reasserting control over flesh and forcing herself to start getting up. Limb by agonizing limb, she starts shifting and forcing new muscle tissues to adapt and reconnect severed links wherever she can, the absolute sea of Qi inside her making her entire body feel numb and sharp at the same time. She can feel every part of her tingling, from the top of her head to the balls of her feet, and everything feels horribly, painfully alive.

“I-” she pauses, forces her breathing under control, rearranges some ribs that fell out of place. “I can’t go back if they are going to attack in numbers like this,” she hisses, getting to her feet. She leans against a tree, leaving a nice bloody stain on it as she does. “I can make my own way. I’ll head toward the mountain, Runemaster Boriah’s cultivation should be enough to suppress nearly any beast in the area, right? I start heading there, and we can try and track and understand why they’re going after me. You get her out of here, keep her safe, guard the town.”

“It’ll take days,” he rasps in disagreement. “Especially if you’re going on foot, getting attacked like this. We can call Taurus, he’ll come back down the mountain in what, a few hours?”

“If you don’t see me by the weekly check-in,” she says, breathing back under control, flesh back under her command, starting to heal and close (and scar, if she’s not careful) even as she speaks, “then assume I could use some help. Now go.”

“I know you’ve had a bad beat,” Taran says, hesitantly, his voice smoky and quiet, “but… killing yourself isn’t-”

“Keep. Her. Safe.” Raika snarls. “I’ll be fine.”

There’s silence in the woods for a moment. And then, eventually, Taran nods.

“No, wait-” Maen tries to protest, still wide-eyed and panicked and barely coherent, but then he has her over his shoulder, leaving the bags where they are. He gives Raika one last look, a little nod, and then is off into the woods, gun at his side.

She waits until he’s gone. Waits until she can no longer hear or smell him, until he’s far, far away.

And then, she walks over to the nearest body. She kneels down. And, looking at its impossible musculature, its alien flesh and impossible biology so truly and well optimized for violence and survival in ways she can’t even see or understand yet, she carves a chunk from its flesh.

And begins to eat.

She’ll need fuel to survive this, and they say spirit beasts have all sorts of properties.

A little part of her says she’s jumping to conclusions, acting borderline mad. It’s trying its best to be helpful.

She does not listen to it, and like an animal, like a shifting, terrifying thing of the woods, begins to eat.

And the whisper, the tickle of scent, the vague feeling of something drawing closer inside her gets closer still.