It doesn’t take too long to figure out a workaround for the wound. The weight of the cut is real, and it feels like a weight she’s experienced before. The thought of it brings up the memory of razors and black metal and white stone, of the vision she experienced, of the stone she found orbiting her “self” in the cocoon. What exactly it’s doing, or what it’s drawing its power from, she assumes relates to the Cold Sun, probably, and either way it clearly limits her healing.
So… she just removes the part that’s hurt.
When Maen isn’t looking, turning to greet Tracker, rifle at the ready and leaking the scent of thorns, roses and bone from its barrel, she reshapes her hand into a claw. What might have been an exercise in madness and self harm before, now, feels easy; she pushes the bone forward, uses her reservoir of life energy and Qi (overlapping but distinct) to force her joints and muscles to adapt, and then sharpens the bone itself, watching it narrow itself, material shifting away from the point while maintaining the lattice-architecture of it and leaving a smooth blade that extends several inches past her finger. Then, she just slices off a chunk of flesh beneath the cut.
She catches the flesh as it falls, watching it. Her own arm, now free of the cut, heals over cleanly and immediately; blood flows out from the wound even as muscle fibers and skin regrow at visible rates, flowing over the wound until the blood retreats back into her body, leaving the area without even a scar.
But on the severed part of her, the cut grows.
It spirals, bit by bit, its ends stretching and following some unknown pattern as it wraps about the meat. The cut yawns wider, the edges of it stretching apart, its depths going deeper into the flesh, and then the end of the cut reaches the end of the piece she cut off-
And expands down onto her hand.
She drops the flesh and the cut immediately, watching even as the cut divides it further and further until it looks more like diced meat than a piece of her arm, and cuts off her hand.
That, Maen notices.
“Raika!” she yells, eyes wide. “What in the hells!?”
Raika picks up the severed hand by a finger, even as a new one begins to regrow from the stump, nubs of bone and flowing ribbons of muscle slowly emerging from the wound and regenerating. A minute, maybe, and she’ll be fine. The points with her stump at the hand as it slowly divides in half, the cut extending through it as well.
“I’ll be fine,” she says, “but don’t let it cut you. I think it’s slower on living flesh, but it wasn’t healing, even on me.” she waves her half-reformed hand.
“Leave the body,” she says. “Maen, can you call Taurus? Still can’t use Qi outside my flesh, and I don’t have a speaking stone besides. Tracker, can you-”
She turns to look, and sees Tracker gone.
She looks to Maen, panic receding a bit as she sees the felinid woman still there, hand on a small speaking stone and bringing it to her lips to speak. Her eyes are wide, but she’s in control, already improved from the panic she was showing earlier.
“Where did they go?” she asks.
Maen shakes her head, speaking into the stone, some sort of official-sounding words like “intrusion detected” and “assistance requisition” coming from her lips as her eyes dart around, tracking the dirt around them for other fast-forming hills.
Raika focuses, casting her senses out, and detects Tracker a moment before she hears the gunshot. The forest echoes with the retort of gunpowder and Qi, the smell of thorns filling the wind for a moment, the sound loud enough to send birds fluttering for miles.
And then Maen gives a squeak of surprise as Raika throws her over a shoulder and sprints towards the gunshot, away from the tunnel and the abomination there, still twitching.
Her legs reform again, back to that combat stance even as different muscle clusters and weaves activate. She feels herself grow a few inches in height, her body’s weight shifting and optimizing for a sprint-
And then she has to stop, almost immediately, face inches from a tree after a single step as she covers almost triple the distance she expected.
Maen gasps, then lets out a little yell of pain as the whiplash hits her, spine bending as she goes from bent over Raika’s shoulder to almost thrown off it by sheer force of inertia. She grunts, hands gripping Raika’s robes hard in pain.
“Sorry!” Raika says, crouching and letting her off immediately. “I didn’t mean to go that fast, that was-”
“It’s fine!” Maen hisses, waving Raika away and shoving her towards the sound of the gunshot as another rings out. “Go, go! I’ll be fine, I’ll hide, make my way back. Just go, the more you worry about me the more time we waste!”
Raika hesitates a moment, and Maen gives her a glare that makes it very clear that she is dead serious and that Raika’s being an idiot. For all her awkwardness, Maen is neither stupid nor cowardly, and she hisses a bit as Raika doesn’t take off.
Raika nods. “Stay safe,” she orders, and then her flesh shifts, her spine and organs and weight and legs all reformatting into something new and made to run, and she’s gone.
She follows the scent and sound both. Tracker is moving fast, leaving a trail of both, even as their “presence” Raika has been following flickers in and out as they move. She finds the spot where the first gunshot occurred and finds another tunnel. This one’s empty, the scent of wild, sharp flowers and old bones wafting from the crater that has been blasted through almost ten feet of solid earth and through said tunnel. There doesn’t seem to be any sort of corpse-weapon, which means-
Tracker figured out how to find the tunnels, and is going to check them across the perimeter.
And then, rather than a third rifle shot with the scent of wilderness and death to it, the sound of fireworks fills the air as smaller guns begin to light up the forest ahead of her.
Raika tightens her robes from where it’s started to slip off from sheer wind resistance, and moves.
Clawed feet hit the ground for impossibly powerful traction. Heel, knee and thigh all reform, their forms re-woven to allow her to detonate explosively against the ground and pull her legs back in time to react to obstacles and land the next step. Her shoulders and frame all shift, making her feel like an arrow cutting through the air in front of her, and her eyes briefly double in vision before eyesight returns and allows her to see wider, faster, fast enough to react. She feels organs churning, and feels a mix of elation and nausea as she feels chemicals and fluids emerge from them, materials she hasn’t studied or which may not even be native to human bodies boosting her system in a hundred ways. She’ll have to stop and study this at some point, but for now… for now, there is a gorgeous, glorious thrill.
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She is more. She wonders if her flesh is something new, some unique transformation, or if inside her one might find evidence of muscles and organs of beasts, consuming and consumed in turn.
Then she is there, the entire forest blurring past her, and she sees Taran.
They are Taran again, she’s fairly certain. Shit-eating grin, strangely puppet-like movement, mask lowered from their face and the rifle Tracker was using now slung along his back. Even as she watches, it seems to shrink, patterns of flora and living material shifting into a more sedate and simplified state, shrinking in size.
Still, Taran doesn’t seem to need it.
There are three of the corpse-weapons here, though whether Tracker got lucky finding a bunch at once or they reacted to the disruption of their tunnel system isn’t clear. Taran moves with impeccable precision, stiff and stuttering form suddenly moving with perfect fluidity and intensity the moment before an attack would hit them. Their legs skip and hop and occasionally even hold stances as their upper body twists and spins and leans every which way, like a mad jester or a puppet whose strings are held by a drunk.
And all throughout this, he never stops firing.
He alternates between four guns. She sees the powder-and-shot pistol, dark wood and opal flashing in the light of a thunderous detonation whose flash is black rather than white, disappearing into his coat and being replaced by a revolving pistol, steel and brass flashing in red-and-yellow flashes of gunpowder and Qi, before it clicks empty and is replaced in turn. She sees something sleek, needles poking from it, and as she watches each one realigns with something like a crossbow to fire until they are depleted, each needle sinking even into the metal of his attackers and leaving them juddering and sparking, until it in turn is replaced by what looks like a shotgun, cheaply made and strung together with rope and cloth, firing twice and then clicking open as the shells fall out and a wave of splintered air dissipates from its blasts. Each one is replaced into their holster, and each one is taken back out a moment later, a constant rotation of gunfire thundering loud enough that she can feel her skull vibrate a bit at the wall of noise.
Each weapon seems distinct, each one blasting apart chunks and pieces of the abominations that crawl and throw themselves towards him. Some of them look even less human than the last one she fought, their entire exterior made into a bed of razor wire and shards of obsidian-steel save for flashes of pale, rotten skin beneath them, and they move with abandon. They are shot, pieces are lost, and they just keep coming.
And then the shotgun emerges again as one gets nearly atop Taran and its torso just sort of scatters, thunder and shattering glass warring for supremacy of volume. It literally falls to pieces, most of its spine and all of its rib cage just gone as the connective tissues between its limbs is simply removed.
And even still, divided into nearly three distinct pieces, it still stutters and crawls across the ground, even as Taran cackles at them and pirouettes away, aiming the second shot at the next one.
And then the ground behind him bursts open and a maw of rotten flesh and reaching, blackened steel screams out a cry of grinding metal.
He is fast enough, moves strangely enough, to bend his back and waist almost to the ground as it leaps over and past him, filling it with lead and Qi of a variety of flavors as it flies past, but he is not fast enough to also dodge one of the still-standing original three as it pounces towards him.
And then Raika grabs it by the back of the head, ignoring how it tears at her hand to do so, and uses its skull as a joint for her to smash it into the ground like a doll, once, twice, three times, until the ground is scored to pieces and the abomination is missing one of its legs and most of its structural integrity.
“So good of you to join us,” Taran rasps, voice back and just as cadaverous as the rest of him. “I was wondering if you’d gotten lost.”
She grins at him, mask straining at the feral snarl she holds beneath it and the joy in her eyes. “Can’t let you have all the fun, senior brother,” she laughs, voice falling into that deeper hum of music and animal violence. “Though maybe you can tell Tracker to give some warning next time.”
“Ha!” Taran laughs. “Like she ever listens to me.”
And then the time for talk is over, and the time for violence returns.
Except for the shotgun and the powder-shot pistol, most of Taran’s shots seem to weaken and take off chunks of the cyborg constructs, but they don’t penetrate deep enough to kill, only enough to slow them down and break off parts. The needle-gun he uses seems to do the most, resonating with a very faint humming sound that she can hear at the edge of her range, any mechanical part they strike seeming to begin to malfunction. She goes for these, letting Taran recharge or reload his harder-hitting guns as she singles out one target after another.
Her hands are covered in cuts in moments. She lets it happen, smiles and howls inside her mind at the return of that beautiful, gorgeous thing called pain, even as she alters her system further. There are presets, for lack of a better term, versions of her muscle groups and chemical deposits that seem ready to spring into action as needed, but it’s not enough. They’re simple, vast improvements over her original muscles, but they don’t feel hers in the same way as the constructs she made herself, and she can feel little hitches in her movement as they overlap a bit strangely or where opposing patterns try to activate at once. She tries to undo some of the changes, but finds it a lot harder than it was before, whether due to their new density and potency or the lack of the storm of Qi she cultivated inside herself before.
Still, she has enough, and the flesh still bends to her will.
Recalling half-remembered medical diagrams that are probably borderline useless to her now anyways, she dislocates joints to reach farther, arms coiling and extending and distancing her from the blades and sharp edges of the impossible corpses even as her hands shift, bones locking together and melting together into blades that cut through her own flesh to cut into theirs. As edges made of altered, mutated and transformed bone matter strike literal steel, the bone chips and breaks and is replaced… but not before the steel is chipped and scored and eventually, moment after moment, carved apart.
And then the shotgun thunders amidst their fight, and the second-to-last corpse is unmade, its head, shoulders, and most of its sternum turned to pulp and launched away into the trees. She takes the opportunity, retracting her right arm back into a more natural state (even if every state feels unnatural and too natural all the time now) and stepping into striking range. Altered footing, shifted joints and musculature, flesh designed for power and strength and maybe barely flesh at all is reshaped, and she can feel, in her core, in her hyper-awareness of every fiber, exactly what she needs to do to enter a stance designed to use every inch of it like a force multiplier.
Her right arm strikes, her entire body coiling and springing forward, an engine of physics and flesh moving in tandem, and hits the final corpse.
Metal and bone and enhanced corpse-flesh and sharp edges and a sharp, distant and perfect piece of sunstone crumple and crack and fold over her arm like a rag, the inside of its body folded outside by the force of a blow from a hand reshaped into a hammer of bone and crackling energy.
Her heart is beating fast, and she is smiling, and she can feel her reserves growing with every blow, the Qi locked inside her circulating, bouncing and sharpening and multiplying against itself, drop by drop, even as she cast aside her flesh, convincing skin, muscle and bone covered in cuts that even now refuse to heal and begin to spiral and grow to simply slough off and fall to the ground as she grows new ones.
And then the smile dies as the scent of something rotten and living and pierced and dripping and torn open and pinned that way emerges from behind her.
“Ah!” says the voice of Jun Vral from behind her, the scent of snakes turned to blood beneath glass marking the air around him in a wave as he slows from cultivator speeds to land behind them. “How excellent. Our masters will be happy to see so many new samples, no?”