Things progress quickly from there.
Maen made it back safe, and Raika has made very certain that she is sent into seclusion for cultivation as soon as possible. The stigma behind interrupting a cultivator’s secluded meditation is strong, hopefully strong enough to force even Zhoulong and his lackeys to wait a bit, and she asked (politely) for Yun Ka to set up some defensive formations and alarms around it. To make sure, and avoid any retaliation from the likes of the constructs they’re hunting, she told her. She’s not sure if Yun Ka believed her at face value or understood some of the intent, but she doesn’t seem to mind either way, and Raika is pretty sure she’s happy for the excuse to avoid Zhoulong and Taurus.
Taurus, for his part, has seemed… subdued. Not quiet, but letting Zhoulong take the lead without much fight. She has no idea if it’s a ruse or not. She’s yet to see any of his plots truly in action, and if he’s making some kind of moves behind the scenes, she either isn’t seeing it or can’t yet find it. Even so, there’s palpable tension between them, and even with the amount of control both of them show, it’s no small thing to stand around two so noticeably opposed Nascent Soul tier cultivators.
Zhoulong gives a speech, at one point. It boils down pretty easy:
Jun Vral used his snakes, which either are him in a sort of hivemind situation or which he can communicate directly with, to explore the tunnels. He lost some, and those spots have been highlighted, most of them going away from the mountain and down into a nearby valley.
Taran, Raika, Jun Vral, the goblinoid, who she learns is called Shapefixit, and the young man with steel and edges emerging from his insides, who is only referred to as “Project 13”, are to head out into the conflict to find the creator of the constructs and apprehend him. Kaena, Yun Ka, Maen and the twins, who are only referred to as such, are to remain behind.
Raika can’t help but feel a bit of fear at the makeup of their groupings. They’re not ordered to work together, but even still, there is one more of Zhoulong’s team than there is of Taurus’ (if she counts herself). It’s not a concern for her directly, she’s pretty sure she could take them in a straight fight, but Yun Ka is more vulnerability than tool half the time, and Kaena is busy enough mediating and assisting the Researchers, and having two that smell like them around, free to prey on and sneak as needed, is not reassuring.
Even if they don’t smell right either. The twins are more intact than the others, by far, but still their scent twists wrong, the quicksilver hidden in Kaena’s scent replaced by the scent of skin peeled open, sweet peach-flesh bleeding onto the plate.
Even still, the similarity is uncanny. Members of the same sect, maybe? Either way, she worries. A lot can go wrong here, and she’s not in a position to do much about it. Yet.
But if it turns out that an opportunity comes her way, then… maybe.
She doesn’t know what she’s doing. She’s being patient. She’s advancing. And she aches to fulfill some kind of purpose, instead. The purpose of revenge is distant, far off, and requires her advancement, a mental loop that keeps her from feeling fulfilled even as she grows, even as she aches for more.
But there’s monsters to slay, and glory to one, and politics that go over her head. It almost feels like before. Before her fall. Before her change. Before her loss.
The thought disgusts her, and makes the feeling of chafing and claustrophobia all the worse, tight against her Truth and tighter still against who she is now. She can endure it, for now. But it cannot last.
All these thoughts and more rattle and hiss and crawl inside her from the village to the valley, and at no point does she find a solution that fits right. So. Violence and opportunity, for now. And patience. Ever and always, fucking patience.
“Ready for this, then?” Jun Vral asks from beside her, bringing her out of her thoughts.
She smiles, mask coming on easier and easier as time passes and her control improves once more. “As ready as I can be, honored brother,” she says. “As always, I am appreciative of honored brother’s contributions, and am eager to add my own to our tally.”
He smiles at her in turn, dipping his head in acknowledgement. “I’m sure you’ll be a valuable asset, like all of us,” he says. “13 can take the frontline, and I will support us from the backline, assisting with communication, scouting, and rear defense. You can take the middle-ground?”
She nods, keeping her face pleasant. “As your junior, I can only hope to impress, honored brother.”
He chuckles a bit at that. “An excellent answer. 13, are you ready?”
The third and final member of their group says nothing. If Raika’s face is a mask designed to convince people it’s real, their face seems to be designed to be particularly and disturbingly false. Their eyes don’t move, their expression doesn’t shift. Like clay. Taran, for all his mummified appearance and clear medical alterations, looks more alive than Project 13. Still, Jun Vral seems to receive some kind of confirmation, nodding and raising a speaking stone to his lips.
“Honored sister Shapefixit, honored Taran, are you ready?”
“In position!” Comes a voice that, for all that it sounds like a bird chirping, holds a hint of genuine malice to it. “Very pretty guns! Ready for moving with this one."
“Understood,” Jun Vral says. “On my mark, then.”
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“Three. Two. One.”
“Mark”.
And Project 13 moves.
They don’t do much more than move forward, but for a moment, the world bends around them, as if an impossible weight is coiled tight in their body, pressed hard against the outer surface of their skin and the metal that cuts out from it. Project 13 steps forward, and rather than walking along the surface, they walk as if on a perfectly smooth road, their feet sinking to a uniform depth, and the wall of the valley before them simply bending against their progress. 13 walks directly into a wall of stone and earth, and, with minimal Qi usage, simply keeps walking, forcing earth to bend and stone to shatter.
The smell tickles past her nose, and she almost chokes on their scent.
Scalpels and barbed wire, wrapped around a fleshy core far too small and bleeding freely. it feels stuffed, overfull of something she can’t quite grasp, except for in a slight moment where they hit some sort of deposit and slow for the briefest moment.
And then they thrum, ringing against the universe with the weight of the Truth that They Cannot Stop.
And the world, faced with that Truth, bends until it breaks, and the side of the valley crumbles into debris and stone as they carve a path into it with their pace and steps alone.
It is not her Truth. It can’t be, it could never be, they’re almost directly incompatible. It feels like a saw hacking at reality, like a buzzing thing of discord and discomfort that is nonetheless True in a way that makes her head hurt.
13 does not break the stone or use much Qi at all. The Truth simply is, and is reaffirmed, and the way is open, reeking of butchery and stinging with the moment reality was forced to bend.
She does not let the mask slip. She does not let herself react. She is, in this moment, slave to herself more than she is to instinct or circumstance, and no matter how much the chains hurt, she is grateful that she does not break, does not let her face show how she feels, doesn’t let her nausea win.
She can feel Jun Vral watching her, head tilted. Slitted eyes track her pulse and her smallest twitch, and fuck him, because she shows nothing with either.
And then, from the dark and chaotic and rubble-strewn tunnel carved in front of them comes the sound of steel-on-steel, honed edge on sharpened shard, and she feels it again but worse.
Black steel wielded by stone and dead flesh that promise the smallest whisper of the Truth that All Things End clashes against a compact, twisted thing that replies without words that Everything Hurts And Is Sharp.
13’s Qi flares, misshapen and sputtering in irregular bursts as the scent of metal and torment cut the air itself. Jun Vral takes the moment, his scent coming from a hundred smaller serpents that shoot past 13’s feet into the dark and back out to make a chain to connect with those left with Shapefixit and Taran, and Raika centers herself and remembers to fucking breathe.
And then the ground around them explodes, bloated corpses that reek of decay and the un-scent of the Cold Sun and their black steel bursting forth seemingly at random from a dozen different places across their little corner of the valley. They seem to be clustered around a nearby rock formation that might hold a hidden entrance they missed, but they re-center on the three of them more than quickly enough to make up for a few steps of distance.
More violence, then.
Despite herself, she can’t help but smile a bit more calmly.
Sure, it hurts, and this whole operation is probably going to hurt plenty more than average. But at least when she’s fighting, it’s easy to forget. It’s easy to be in the moment and not trying to teach herself to fucking plot, of all things. In the violence and the pain, at least, she knows who she is. And so, once again-
Glory be to the breaking and the bloodshed.
She doesn’t let them cut her this time. Not immediately. That little flicker of hunger from before might be nothing, might be key to discovering new limits and needs, but avoiding it seems like the best course for now. She makes her heart beat harder, hitting a rhythm almost comfortable now that it’s designed to take the stress, feels blood pumping, oxygen ripping through her and dragging bits of Qi along behind it in the red, flowing through more channels, reaching a tipping point faster than before. She forces the blood to slow at certain points, lets the shards and hissing, burning drops of Qi cluster against bone and traps them there with tissue dense and saturated already until the bone starts to grow.
It started as an idea. A little evolution from that last fight. If she can make something as unmalleable and slow to change as bone burst forth into claws… what’s to stop her from doing more?
I Am Mine, her Truth whispers, and she feels the chaos and random chance and uncontrolled transformation break under it.
She shapes it, focuses it, and then grins as she feels it detonate free of her. She keeps her right side mostly normal, letting her right hand remain a hand for the sake of utility, but her whole body shifts into a combat-oriented change. She gains a few inches in height, clusters of flesh-weave rearranging until the least useful ones are tucked in close to bone and organs as shields and the essential ones, the ones which twist through her whole being and leave her faster and stronger and so much more moving into position. She still looks human at a glance, but the shape of her is all wrong under the skin as she stands taller, feels her joints gain a wider range of movement, feels explosive tension coil in every newly reorganized bio-mechanism. Even as her body shifts to one of its pre-established “defaults”, she holds tight to her truth, forcing it and her Qi together into a pattern all along her newest limb. Her left arm lengthens, needles and shards of bone piercing her skin and bleeding in thick, syrupy droplets of marrow and rich blood. They spread, spiraling from their exits, expanding and oozing and crawling over her until until it looks and feels like she is covered in some kind of coral or shell.
And within that shell, something shifts again. The Qi around her skin, right over the surface of her, becomes trapped beneath Qi-dense bone it cannot phase through, and she pushes her own chaotic mass of Qi into it until they both explode. Muscle, blood and even more bone grow fast enough that she can’t help but let out a scream, elation and victory and violent joy as she feels the shell of armor and weapon she has created expand and meld with all new architecture that is Hers. Muscle and blood bulge from beneath porcelain-white armor, making it feel weightless, making it feel dense and fast and impossibly strong even as it continues to grow, spiraling into fish-hooks and bladed ends and mimicking a claw-like protrusion that looks almost like a hand. There is nothing human to the limb, even compared to the new form her body defaults to as it re-optimizes for combat.
She marvels at the feeling of explosive deviation in her new limb. If all it takes for such an extreme reaction in Qi is to trap them in a tight enough chamber, captured Qi and her own messy, chaotic form of it pressed too tight to escape…
Possibilities.
Ah, the beauties of a little creativity and a lot of agonizing self-modification. By the time they reach her, the coral and its new, impossible flesh has grown, up to her elbow, past her shoulder, until it’s almost difficult to move.
Even so improved, even so much more powerful and impossible, it chafes.
She can still make it better. Make it more.
And then they are upon her, and she holds tight to Dink in her right hand and lets the violence commence.