This whole place is starting to give her a toothache.
The worst part is she can’t even tell why. No muscles pinched, no rot she can feel, and while feeling enamel is even tougher than some bones, it’s still not something as alien to her as it used to be. The general area near her right molars is just achy.
And then Project 13 simply walks into open air, compressed stone and cripplingly dense matter shoved ahead of them detonating in a single, massive cone of shrapnel as Truth and physics try to reconcile, and the tunnel is flooded with grey-white light. The ache magnifies for a moment, before it starts to just sort of pulse, slowly.
If she finds out that she has toothache senses rather than enhanced eyesight or something actually useful to complement her nose, she’s going to lose it.
Fortunately enough, there’s a distraction readily available in the form of a massive pillar of geometrically perfect white stone, holding up the roof of a massive cavern and implanted deep into the strata beneath it, cracks radiating from what might be an impact site tens of thousands of years old. She looks at it, and for a moment, she is back in Paleblossom city, staring at the cold sun, staring at that one finger casually shifting it aside…
And then the moment is gone. It’s a larger amount than she’s been seeing in the constructs, true, but it’s hardly all that impressive compared to the celestial body itself. Even still, there’s a sort of queasiness that comes with the sight of the ivory obelisk, like a sort of… wavey feeling? Pressed against the surface of her skin, coming from outside. She wonders if her curse-ritual is still holding up, even as her saturation of flesh has outpaced it, or if she simply has far more Qi now than before and it’s maybe blocking some of the influence she feels.
It’s a lot of unknowns, and a lot of unpleasant feelings, and oh look, there’s a tunnel full of monsters to crush.
She lets out a happy laugh, and it echoes strangely inside her head and inside the thing she has made of herself, echoing in the chamber like a growl deep enough to make loose dirt shift and shake.
Turns out, if you’re willing to play around with your new toys and can handle a bit of overstimulation (which she has been handling every gods-damned day), you can make really fun things out of a human body.
She leaps out of the tunnel, going well past Project 13’s landing site and leaving Jun Vral in the tunnel, the slithering of snakes using viscera-and-scale scented Qi to cling to the walls and climb down to rejoin their fellows on the floor from where other tunnels have clearly been mapped while they detoured. She lands hard enough that one of the rocks she lands on cracks, the sound echoing alongside the thunderclap of weight hitting the earth.
She can be more. This is one path that might take.
She stands up from the fall as undead abominations begin to filter into the room, the clicking of metallic limbs and blades and gears and the limping, blunt sounds of dead, preserved flesh hitting stone echoing all around. She does not care.
They’re so small from up here.
She extends fully, lets her blood flow, forces the Qi in her flesh and the Qi she has trapped under transforming skin to clash violently until she can feel the violent thrashing and shredding of Qi deviation exploding in pockets inside her. Her new muscles are fine, excellent compared to human baseline, but she can do more, and towers over everything in the room but the pillar, forcibly catalyzed Qi fueling impossible growth as she hits nine, ten, eleven feet of height, all spiraling bone and bulging, hyper-saturated muscle.
As her newfound heart beats and new pockets of flesh are made specifically to allow for Qi reactions more violent than ever, her levels of fuel have been skyrocketing compared to her time in the wilds.
And she’s had hours of walking to let it build.
She roars, a second set of lungs barely allowing her to keep up with a violently unbalanced behemoth that she now wears, her original body tucked away somewhere and irrelevant. She has kept her eyes, kept her mind, but lungs are easy, a heart is easy, and she has reshaped muscles into facsimiles and regenerated severed pieces into usable short-term supports, until she can wield and oxygenate a body that looks like a ball of tangled fishing wire. She is all bone-hooks and bulging, overgrown muscles and chitinous, coral-like outer shells which spiral into denser and denser armor, and when they cut her it is easy to tangle blood flow and weaken connections enough to simply cast a piece off.
She can be more.
She does her best to educate her enemies on this matter.
She glories for a moment in her transformation, in just how far and how fast she can push her limits since her rebirth and tribulation. It is an unbalanced mess, a cavalcade of systems barely kept together through conscious control and Qi, but she is, for a moment, monstrous and glorious.
Gunfire begins to echo loudly in the chamber, the report of Taran’s guns heralding his arrival to her right as she crushes two of the construct-weapons to shrapnel between an armor-plate that she discards to fall apart from an infinite supply of minute cuts. She can’t really smell the same in this “armor”, her systems not really made for it and the hurricane of tornado she is cultivating bit by bit inside her working together to keep her blind to her newest sense, but she can still sense something as another cultivator (she assumes Shapefixit) enters the fray, the ground all around them shifting like clay, and then like water, until constructs that don’t watch their step begin to fall into it and become wrapped by reformed stone.
And then Project 13 is moving again, and any chance that the constructs arriving might hurt them goes out the window.
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
These are the dregs, less lethal even than the ones in Paleblossom city, never mind the more creative abominations they’ve been seeing since they arrived. Corpses, made of mortals and implanted with just enough metal to make up for missing pieces, moving in their dozens. If not for how fast they are, or how any cut could kill even a Core Formation cultivator if they’re not careful, they wouldn’t be anything of any value to anyone, much less a danger.
And yet they keep coming.
Flesh roils, bone spirals and groans and cracks under uneven distribution and self-blocking joints, but she keeps moving anyways, forcing the ungainly thing she has made herself to move anyways. She blocks incoming blows, regrows faster and more efficient pieces of bone as she is scraped, crushes and throws apart any that get close to her.
It’s not good. She can be more than this, but she can also do better, she’s sure of it.
But for a moment, she is just… here. Down, in the dark, surrounded by horrors, with danger behind her and ahead, she is strong and mighty and cannot be hurt. Just for a little while.
And then, eventually, the cave is quiet, save for her movement, impossible weight thundering and glowing, superheated flesh sizzling the only sounds still filling the chamber as the final construct falls to pieces.
They’re all looking at her. Taran, eyes wide, hands close to his pistols but not on any handles. Shapefixit, the goblinoid, eyes wide and expression strange. Even Project 13, standing there, pieces of blades that cut living wounds into flesh held in their hands from the last enemy they pulled apart.
All good things end.
It’s… a lot harder to leave the flesh armor than to create it. Cutting off the connection to her own “original” flesh is easy, the same twists and tearing she did for the armor plates coming into play here, the pain just another sensation in a sea of stimuli, but while it kills the excess, it doesn’t make it just disappear.
She can’t reconnect once she leaves it, either. The… nerves, she thinks, don’t really ever line up again, even just weaving the meat together doesn’t let her consciousness expand back into it. It’s like the moment she decided it wasn’t her body anymore, it stopped being so. Her tooth fucking aches as she snarls at the inside of what was once power and is now a poorly made coffin.
In the end, she has to shove and punch and tear at the sternum to crack the entire armor open like some strange, rotting crustacean, emerging from it sweaty and covered in closing disconnection wounds. It’s pretty embarrassing, honestly, just how badly she fucked up creating this thing, and she has to keep her face hidden for a moment before she can put a mask back on and not look like an idiot climbing out of it. Her stomach grumbles and her tooth aches as she works to lower her blood flow and prevent a blush.
“All clear?” she hears Taran rasp beside her.
She nods, once, before she reinstates a smaller, less intense version of her usual smile. “All good,” she replies. “My techniques and I are still getting acquainted. Not used to all of my changes yet.”
“It’s ok,” he whispers. “Takes time. Especially after a big change.”
She looks at him. Really looks. He gives her a small, sad smile.
Jun Vral claps once, interrupting any chance for a follow-up even as Taran opens his mouth, seeming ready to ask her something. He glides down to the floor, a heavier weight of cultivation glowing as he levitates for part of the fall and is then caught by a writhing mass of snakes rising up into a pillar on the floor below. The dirt undulates, the flesh moves in symphony, and an army of serpentine predators spirals over itself and crawls into his robes, until they are all gone save a few at the edges of the tunnels and he is standing there, the same height, shape, and apparent weight as ever.
“Well!” he says with a smile and a ripple under his skin. “That went well, I think! And what’s more, we’ve found the cold sunstone deposit. This thing must have landed here a long time ago. Shapefixit, what do you think?”
“Few thou,” whispers a voice of clicking musical notes and warbling crackling. Raika almost jumps at the sound of it; she’s never heard a voice like it. She didn’t know words could be made with those kinds of noises.
“A few thousand years. Still surprised the records missed it, we’ve had astronomers cataloging back that far. Something to refer to our honored Researchers for study later, hmm?”
“It would be wise,” Raika says agreeably, readjusting her flesh and robes a bit.
“It would be wise!” Jun Vral says, smiling even wider. “It would in fact be exactly what they might find most interesting. And it is all thanks to our contributions!”
“Honored brother,” Taran interrupts, “are you always like this?”
Jun Vral tilts his head. “I haven’t the faintest idea what you mean, honored sibling!” he says, smile seeming permanent. “Are you not also proud to have succeeded in a mission dictated by our masters?”
“...Sure,” Taran eventually rasps. “We are often proud to vanquish some threats, go on some adventures. But I worry that my honored brother’s face might cramp with such a smile.”
Shapefixit, without Raika noticing her move, even with her senses, tugs lightly at Taran’s sleeve. They both look down at her as she shakes her head, softly.
“Don’t,” she chirps, her ears flat. “Is fine.”
Jun Vral says nothing. Just stands there. Smiling.
Out of her tomb and sword of flesh, she smells snakes, squirming and open and pinned on bloody platters.
Hmmm. Patience is a useful thing. So is waiting to understand more.
But she understands enough.
“Want me to kill him?” she asks.
Four pairs of heads turn to look at her in perfect synchronicity.
There is a moment, a brief moment, where Project 13 starts to smell of iron. Not because they have used their Qi; for a heartbeat, their wounds begin to bleed. Then, it is gone, and they are clean and dry and bloodless around the edges of impossible shrapnel that blossoms from them. Shapefixit trembles, once, the tiny movement magnified by her ears until they make a sound like a flap of canvas.
Jun Vral keeps smiling.
“I have no idea who you could be referring to,” Jun Vral says politely, just as happy and friendly and agreeable as she is. “I’m sure you mustn’t mean the smith and artificers responsible for this underground wonderland of research. We’ve been tasked with retrieving them, after all.”
She can almost feel the weight of Shapefixit’s wide eyes as Taran nervously runs his hand along one of his holsters.
“I see,” she says, equally smiling. Equally agreeable. Equally pitched just right for her voice to be pleasant, even as her stomach continues to grumble and her guts roil and her flesh seethes with a contained storm being slowly consumed and a new one, far less literal, being formed.
“It might not be right away,” she says instead of shutting up and being patient. “But it can happen.”
There is nothing this time, not even from 13.
“Perhaps,” Jun Vral says amicably. “After proper research has been conducted on them, of course, or if they don’t prove utility.”
The sound of scales moving over clear ground, inaudible to most and crystal clear to Raika, lets her know a snake has come near her. She feels it open its mouth, feels the air and the heat of its miniscule breath as it goes to bite, and… presses the fangs down, gently, until they lay upon the skin rather than against it.
A threat? A request? An admission?
She’s not sure. But there’s an idea forming.
Knives made of metal so black it sucks the light from the room, stab through her before she can even feel them. One through her heart, the other through her gut, a third through her throat, and the weight of something impossible and silenced hits her and lifts her, skewered and bleeding molten blood and burning Qi, towards the far tunnel.