It almost took too long.
Kaena was the first hurdle. They heard “kill him” and that was enough for them. If anything, Raika found herself sort of flattered at how easily Kaena assumed she could do something. They’d stepped forward, bringing to bear the conjoined aura they’d gained by overtaking the twins, but by then Raika was already moving.
She hadn’t detected any aggression in Kaena, just concern, and that’s enough for her to think this is doable.
Taran’s eyes briefly flickered to her, then to Jun Vral and the others, and then over to Kaena.
And he’d stepped in their way. She owes him big for that, but it’s clear that what he saw in the tunnels and put together about Zhoulong’s “subjects” left an impact. She’ll need to make it up to him at some point.
The second hurdle was picking up the goblin without causing a panic.
She had to bring Shapefixit. A risk, but their ability to manipulate the earth was the priority, the only way she could picture getting close without being seen immediately. She ran forward, turning her head to track the detonations, the direction the destruction was trending in. Not too far, not yet.
The whole thing wouldn’t even work if they got too far away. But it’s an opportunity, and she made a promise, and it’s going to get a lot fucking harder to kill him once Taurus has him in custody. Sure, there’s a chance they kill each other in battle, but he wouldn’t have picked the fight she handed him if he didn’t think he could win, he’s too clever for that and she knows it.
So the choice was to move now, or be an oathbreaker (bad on its own) to people who felt like they’d been tortured (worse) while leaving a deadly enemy far above her in cultivation and political power alive (also somewhat not good). She chose to move.
She stops in front of Shapefixit.
“Can you do it?” the little figure asks, voice chittering and strange.
“I have a pretty good chance,” she replies.
They extend a hand out to her, and she picks them up like a baby and starts sprinting.
She can’t help but see Kaena giving her one hell of a glare as she sprints away.
Yeah, she’ll definitely have to make it up to them. Hopefully Taran can explain and help them understand some of the decisions being made, but she doubts that Kaena won’t demand to hear it from her properly.
Ideally, this would be something she could plan out, explaining it properly and giving information to potential allies. As it stands, the time for planning is over. The plan got her the opportunity, but she still needs to grasp it.
So she runs.
Her chest ached. Her heart, the open stab wound that it’s still fighting, both screaming in tandem, reminding her they exist. Her leg, still only just reformed, still a bit uneven, slowing her a bit, and she had to force her heart to beat harder, to cause that much more chaos and spawn just a bit more Qi for her to use to fix it.
The world thundered ahead of her to the tune of monsters fighting.
It was almost reassuring, in a sort of weird way. Her new form, her new existence, still so unrefined and messy even in its tremendous new power, wouldn’t put her in the eyes of the greater fighters of the world. She’s good enough to fight constructs of madmen, to survive a beast tide made just for her, but in front of her lies the heights of a peak she hasn’t gotten to yet.
She expected Shapefixit to be powerful to some extent, and seeing how she’d manipulated the earth during their battle had been enough to give her inspiration for this idea. Still, without the tunnel network they’d found under the valley, the plan wouldn’t have worked, and she’d have had to pretend she’d been there to help somehow.
But it worked.
One massive use of Qi to dive into the tunnels. Shapefixit guiding her when she couldn’t smell their Qi anymore, somehow knowing where in the twists and turns to move to find the right spot.
And then, after some kind of technique that she is fairly certain shook the world itself to the core and would’ve knocked her unconscious had she been above ground, Shapefixit turned the ground above her to water.
Shapefixit got to stay in the tunnel. Raika got to dive through liquid earth right beneath Zhoulong.
She couldn’t have asked for a more perfect shot. Zhoulong, kneeling, bleeding, neck exposed. Her, diving up out of nothing, bereft of a Dantian or a Qi signature, in the aftermath of a technique that made her Truths tremble.
And then, teeth of black metal, sharp as daggers, twice as large again as her original set, to bite through the skin of a cultivator in the Nascent Soul stage.
Weakened, wounded, it doesn’t matter; while burning Qi to empower one’s qualities is the default and most versatile power a cultivator has, climbing through the realms, especially past the foundational, inherently improves a cultivator. Their weight in the world, so to speak. Their skin more unbreakable, their healing faster, their muscles able to exert more strength, so on and so forth. While Zhoulong has less depth to his scent than Taurus, the size of his Qi pool or the realm he stands near the top of are not in question.
But she has teeth of black steel, born from death and End, and its very nature is to make what is alive cease to be so, for it has been made apart from itself by edge.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
So when she bites down, she does not find her teeth stopped just beneath the skin. She doesn’t leave a trail of damage easily healed without a Qi signature to infect it. She does not, in short, bite into a cultivator in the Nascent Soul realm who should, even at their lowest, have her dead to rights. She bites into something alive, and when her teeth close and she tastes his flesh on her tongue, the taste divine, it is no longer so.
He takes a moment to die. His entire Qi reserve splashes around him, the smell of violence made art made preservation blind and seeking, flooding towards his throat, where the qualities of black steel have made the tearing of his throat spread. He claws at himself, and fails to change what she has done to him. There is a moment, perhaps, where his Qi does something, its nature fighting that of the wound and the black steel… but then the loss of oxygen to his brain makes things a lot simpler.
His eyes turn to her in those final moments, and she feels his Qi gather one last time.
Taurus, standing right there, so close he should be able to exert enough force to easily stop or redirect Zhoulong’s attack, does nothing. She makes eye contact with him the moment before the attack hits, and as hard as he is to read, she gets it. Fair enough.
Zhoulong Cuts, and in a line down her torso, from right shoulder to left hip, her body falls apart.
Then he is dead, and she is bleeding onto the grass, left with an unfamiliar arm, a broken heart, and not much else.
Man. She really thought she’d gotten a grasp on this whole “pain” thing. Turns out, when a lethal blow isn’t actually as lethal anymore, the body doesn’t shut down pain receptors the same way. She coughs, a bubble of blood coming up, and tries to reach, to grab her missing half, to pull herself back together.
Taurus steps closer, and suddenly the world smells like wind and stone, like sky and ground and the weight in between.
“Well,” he says, crouching down to her level. “What a mess. What a mess indeed.”
She gurgles a bit, heart working overtime, her mind consumed by trying to hold in her blood, to keep it flowing with a system that is missing almost all of itself.
“You know, he was on the list,” Taurus says. “Not that high up, mind you, but not low either. Plenty of rumors about his predilections, especially with that Sword technique of his. And how long his studies tend to take. Less focus on showing ongoing improvements in his subjects, far too detailed about intricacies that aren’t usually very relevant. That, and he was insufferable, as I’m sure you saw. All that posturing, strutting about, the whole world his oyster. Those born above the mud tend to see themselves as too important to ever step in it, and, well. Beast-blooded, younger than him, and a subject to more scrutiny than most. You can see the pattern, I’m sure.
She chokes a bit, spitting blood past her chin to get some more air into her lung, closing off the direction where the other used to be. The sound of her breathing, as raspy as Taran, is the only response she can offer.
“You were clever about this, I admit. Smart, to create a story that’s surprisingly believable. Clever, and apparently a decent manipulator, to get his subjects on your side. But when I gave you the five-year timetable, I expected it would be at least a year before we crossed the first one off so violently. Yet, three months later, here you are. I wish I could say I’m impressed, but mostly I’m furious.”
He leans close, then, and she is breathless again for the weight of the Qi he presses down on her. In this moment, weak and mortal and bleeding, she can sense the pressure from it just fine.
“Decades of finding the right rumors, of planting some myself, of finding his weaknesses. A dozen times over, I’ve built the tools to get him and others out of the way. Even with the mess you made, getting him mired in the politics of prison would have been a win, gotten us months ahead of schedule. More than worth the cost of munitions I’d need to expend. And yet, here, dead, he is worth nothing. A drain, a sea of questions to answer, a mountain of further criticism and scrutiny to fight my way through. It could very well set me back more than if I’d cut ties, and then your boy would have lived. A delightful way to hurt the both of us, isn’t it? The realization this may set us back so, at the cost of what we did and lost to get here?”
He sighs. The pressure eases, enough that she can breathe, one gasp, another. Her heart is burning to keep her brain fueled with blood that is still leaving her, no matter how hard she focuses.
“So,” he says, quietly. “You’ve proven you’re not entirely a fool. Your little plan is proof enough of that. So answer me true, Raika the Unbroken: why did you risk me, my people, and yourself, just to kill a man you’d already maneuvered into my hands?”
She looks up at him. She’s only pretty sure that her eyes are working right. He looks very blurry. She takes one breath. Another. Tries to build up enough oxygen in her impossibly vast lungs that she can speak again.
“Would’ve… hurt them,” she wheezes. “Worse. Than this.”
The sound of wheezing breath is the only thing in the clearing for a good few moments.
Taurus sighs, and the clearing around them bends away from him, every stalk of grass dancing with the breeze of it.
Then he nudges her halves a bit closer together, and she feels living blood touch that which has gone still, and she thinks of nothing but the process of survival.
She doesn’t know how long it takes. She can’t make much Qi, not when she’s so damaged and her heart is so overtaxed, so she has to manipulate her blood directly, tracking every drop under her control and moving it into her severed half. The veins wake up first, and she spends minutes binding them together, getting the connections usually right. Skin comes next, still so malleable, binding the halves together, and bone after, lining up sheer edge to edge and forcing them to grow, to remember they’re alive. Only after she’s gotten her right lung back and working does she dare to break her focus.
Taurus is sitting in the grass beside her, looking up at the clear blue sky. It has been a long day, and it is close to ending, the ever-coiling snakes of the sun touching the lip of the valley and casting long, beautiful shadows. He does not look at her, staring instead at the moons entering their nightly dance, at the slowly glowing hint of stars behind the blue of daylight.
When she can breathe again, and wiggle her toes, she joins him in that, laying right where she landed and staring up at the sky as it changes.
“There’s a scar,” he says, pointing to the ragged white line that formed where she reconnected.
She shrugs, enjoying the fact that she can, despite the pain. “Sword technique,” she says simply.
He nods at that. Of course a Sword technique would be a pain to heal, even for her.
“You did promise me. “Stay with me, and I will sharpen you into a sword sharp enough to kill me and anyone else you choose”, you said.”
He sighs again. He seems to do that a lot around her. “I did, in fact, say that. And here you are, sharper than when we started, at least.”
They sit for a while longer, letting the sun dip lower, its tendrils reaching down to grab the southern horizon.
“Is it too much to hope that the next time we meet someone you feel objectionable towards, you tell me about it first?” he asks.
She thinks for a while.
“Yeah,” she says. “I believe that is more than fair.”
“Good,” he rumbles. “Because the list is long, and I assume you have your own.”
“Mmh,” she hums. “You’re still on top.”
He nods at that. “Good,” he says, quiet.
He gets up, letting the grass stains on his robe make their mark, and reaches a hand to help her up.
“Come on, then” he rumbles. “I’ve got more mouths to feed, and a very difficult report I need to write.”
She takes his hand, and they walk away from the Imperial Cultivator they killed.