“Ok. So you know I- so I say this with love. I care about you. You’ve helped be an anchor for me in dark spots, and I think if you weren’t present, I’d have spiraled much worse than I have, and that’s saying something. So just know that what I say next, I say with nothing but the best of intentions, yeah?”

“Alright…”

“Cool. You’re so unbelievably weak that I feel like you could die like, now, from someone sneezing.”

Maen looks at her with a raised eyebrow.

“A sneeze?” she asks. “A sneeze. Really.”

Raika already has her hands up to placate. “It’s said with the best of intentions, I so swear it! But also yes. A strong sneeze could kill you. And that’s not to say that you aren’t doing a really wonderful job cultivating! Your progress has really been considerable, impressive even, and I don’t want to diminish that. Foundational realm is no joke, and you’ve moved into it really well in just a few months, taken some real steps through it. But-”

“It’s not enough. Is what you’re trying to say. That I’m not enough.”

Raika looks at her. Really, really looks at her.

Maen is there, half-clothed in the early morning light. She watched her partner sleep through the night, awake, tasting the comforting remnants of smoke half-rotten and half poisonous. She kept watch against the night for any shadows that might slip between runes and opulence, practicing her mask and staring at the dark. She watched her lover move, the breath through her lungs, the beat of blood moving through veins. Raika is not prideful, not really, she hates herself too much for that, is too aware of her flaws, but she can find pride in how she has changed herself, in how she has reordered and remade her body. It is not perfect, far from it, but it is not the messy crisscross of wires, the weak and flawed and sweating meat that is-

That is Maen. The person she sleeps with, who cares for her, who grounds her, who she needs and wants.

Maen sees something in her eyes. She can tell by the way that her pupils widen, her sweat changes its scent. It is subtle, and perhaps without alteration even a cultivator might not notice, but she does not need to see the shape or color of a person’s Qi to taste that anxious moment of fear-sweat.

She hopes it isn’t fear. She hopes it’s just discomfort, anxiety. Uncertainty as to what Raika means, why she seems so on edge.

She’s not at her best, and her thoughts are dark and hungry to bite at what might be good or bring comfort. She’s aware of it, but it’s hard to stop.

She does, though. Stop. Breathe. In and out. Trying to taste the faintest remnants of smoke in her lungs, centering herself before she locks her senses away again, one by one, filtered through meditation.

“Your strength is not enough,” Raika eventually says. “I don’t need you for your strength. What we are and what the world is… they’re two different things. I know that. I know that. But I want you to be able to defend yourself, and you can’t right now. I think that, now that we have some time, it might be good to try and push your cultivation forward a bit, and work on what I’m missing too.”

Maen relaxes a bit, some of the resistance leaving at the sound of that little bit of shared weakness Raika hints at.

She is trying to tell her, without speaking, that she’s not being cruel. That she doesn’t want to leave her lover behind. That she is afraid. This is the only way she knows how, and she begs Maen to get that, if only enough to listen.

“That… sounds like a good idea,” Maen says. “You wouldn’t happen to have a plan for that, though?”

Raika lifts her hands, palms up. “I’m open to suggestions,” she admits, “but my first thought is to check on how you cultivate with some help. Maybe get Kaena in on it?”

“Not Yun Ka?” Maen asks.

“I… yes. Yun Ka might be a better pick. And then maybe sparring. I don’t think you have… any experience in a fight, right?”

Maen shakes her head. “None besides being chased by fucked up corpse puppets in the woods, but that was more of a you thing.”

Raika smiles at that in spite of herself. “I suppose so.”

“I’m all for this idea,” Maen admits, only lying a little, “but I’m… not sure what brought this on. Are you… ok? You seem on edge. It’s hard to tell with the mask, but you’ve got a lot of real intensity to you.”

Raika blinks and curses in her head. Hours of practice, the last few weeks and especially focused last night: she knows the mask has gotten better, that its face over her own fits far more comfortably and fluidly than it used to, no matter how she makes it look. And then, it’s immediately seen through, again.

Part of her can’t help but feel a little warmth at that.

“I’ll be fine,” Raika almost-lies. “Just… I have some things on my mind. Some worries about my direction, a bit, and what might happen. More importantly I’m- I’m trying very poorly to show that I care by saying you’re a rabbit before a tiger, except almost everyone we’ve met lately has been a tiger, and that I want to change that.”

“And my cultivation isn’t going fast enough,” Maen nods, her tone still a bit small in saying it but taking back just a bit by owning it.

“My standards for cultivation speed are fucked, I don’t even know precisely how fast you’re going. So we’re going to ask our allies to see if we can’t speed this up and get you some additional tools.”

Maen tilts her head at that.

“You still see them as only allies?”

Raika takes a slow moment to breathe.

“No. But I should, and you should too. Things can change, and just because we’re close, just because the people trying to hold our leashes are the same, doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be careful about how much we trust anyone at all.”

Maen says nothing for a while. In the morning light, they both sit still, Raika with her back to the wall, Maen wrapped in a half-cocoon of clothing and blankets, highlighted by morning sun.

“Ok,” she says. “I’ll try.”

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

Raika nods. “That’s all I ask.”

But it’s not. And the weight of the other things she asks remain unsaid, heavy in the air between the monster and the cultivator she’s pulled into her wake, no matter how willingly.

—-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“Sure, I’ll train with you,” Taran says with a shrug. “What do you think, median intensity, low intensity? Looking for a scrap or just looking to see what you need? First blood, second blood, first to surrender, first to-”

“Sages and Stars, I didn’t expect you to be so onboard,” Raika interrupts.

“I’m bored, and I’ve got some energy stored,” Taran rasps out with another shrug. “I don’t want to put myself to sleep, not when we’ve got so much company and Taurus is still gone, but I’m not exactly bursting with things to do. I can’t do any sort of push too hard, not enough of us are awake to really pull out any big guns, but that’s sort of for the best. All due respect, Raika, I’m not sure that’s what you’d need anyways. You’ve got a lot of fundamentals messing you up, I think. We should probably start on those.”

Raika blinks. “I was actually here to ask if you could spar with Maen, not me.”

“Oh. Alright. But only if you do it too. You fight like a moron and if I have to listen to Tracker and Hao Kai bitch about it so do you.”

“That’s… more than fair. I could probably use it.”

“Hmm. Hao Kai says humility is good for you. He’s kind of a loser, but I’m glad I don’t have to try to trick you into it. More Kaena’s arena than mine. Where is Maen, anyways?”

“I left her with Yun Ka,” Raika says. “I’m hoping that she has some more information on beastkin cultivation methods, and what might work well with them. I’m glad my advice managed to help a bit, but I’m not exactly the resident expert, and I’m worried about her progress.”

“Ever the doting lover. Alright then, shall we start with you?”

“Hmm?”

Taran shoots her in the chest.

She staggers a few steps back, gasping a breath, eyes wide. In his hand is the pearlescent revolver, the first of its shots expended and its smoke tracing a path to her chest, through her robes and into the red bleeding out.

“You shot me in the tit, you ass!”

Taran just laughs, dry and jangling with the holsters he always wears. “They say every bush harbors an enemy, love. Is it our fault you’re so slow?”

She blinks, and realizes that she was slow. Taran has techniques and expertise in drawing their weapons, she’s seen how fast he can swap between them and fire when in combat, and she still didn’t react in time to the movement of his hand, the flick of the wrist, the pull of the trigger.

“You’re fast, Raika,” he says, circling around her, his other hand holding the dual-barreled weapon he likes to alternate with despite her having missed the movement. “Your senses are top notch. You’ve got decent toughness, and that strength of yours is no joke. But I’ve seen you fight, and frankly? You suck at it. I don’t know how you were as a cultivator, but I’m starting to wonder if they called you Raika the Bloody because of how often you got your ass kicked.”

The mask laughs at the joke. It’s not even a bad joke, it’s earned a chuckle, but beneath it she tries not to think about delicate flesh and fragile masks, about pitchforks and sickles against the sect. “You’re not all wrong,” she says. “Definitely taken my fair share of bleeding over the years.”

She starts to circle around him right back, the two of them using the room to its fullest extent. She’d expected to take this to some sort of training room, someplace bare like what she’s managed to find for her “cultivation”, but Taran surprised her with his challenge, and she bleeds a few drops onto the floor of a bedroom a lot like her own. She crosses behind the steps to the lower lounge area, keeping the elevated “sleeping area” platform behind her, even as Taran moves in front of the door, in front of the bathing rooms and closet on the other side.

“And,” Taran continues, “I think you’ve gotten lazy. Why bother dodging and blocking when you can just grow back the missing bits? Speaking as someone who likes his bits and has to work very hard to keep them, your fighting isn’t animalistic, it’s sloppy, and the fact you’ve made such a hard-to-kill-beast of yourself is the only reason you made it through that mine.”

She smiles. “That, my incredible good looks and my gorgeous mind.”

Taran snorts. “I’ll train with Maen, sure. Hao Kai loves a good day of disciplining lazy students, I’ve given him plenty of opportunity back in- back in my day. But I’m not going to let you off the hook here.”

A scrap of metal clinks as it falls out of her wound, the flesh beneath it closed, the scent of over-rich blood thick in the air.

“Well come on then,” Raika says with a grin.

She opens herself to her senses, already so much more comfortable now that she’s in pain, now that she’s in combat. She lets her additional adrenal glands flush into her system, boosting herself further, her pupils widening, her mouth wide and grinning, her movement a sudden flash. She shatters the wood beneath her as she launches herself across the room, fast enough to hear the air whistling against her.

Not quite going all out, but one sucker punch deserves another.

Except Taran isn’t there anymore.

His legs move differently than the rest of him, like there’s someone else controlling them, and he pivots beneath her move, swaying almost parallel to the floor and coming upright behind her as she lands on the far wall, sinking into it by weight and force and using it as a foothold.

Before she can leap again, he’s fired another three times with the revolver, once into her elbow, once her knee, and a final time straight at her face, meeting her enthusiasm in kind. For how lethargic he normally is, since she broached the subject of combat he’s been as active as he ever is, and in return for the energy she’s bringing to the table she can see him twitch as his aim adjusts from her collarbone to her skull.

She moves her head before he pulls the trigger, not nearly fast enough to dodge or block a bullet in motion but more than capable of biting with black metal teeth where his aim promises the bullet will be.

Her jaw screams at the impact, and then heals back as she spits out the third bullet.

She moves again, and this time he doesn’t dodge. As the wall behind her cracks from the force of her jump, Taran stands stock still, letting her come at him. She tracks his options, where he could dodge, what space he could move into, ready to extend her reach, alter her body into her combat form and-

He raises the shotgun and fires, point blank, straight into her chest.

Stuck in the air, liable to the laws of physics and aerodynamics, she has no way to dodge, no way to move or arrest her momentum, not easily. The blast knocks her back, canceling her movement in a single series of dozens of impacts that splatter her upper body across half the room behind her and all over Taran’s clothing-

And don’t make it through the layer of calcified scales she grew beneath her skin, locking into place to reduce the impact of the shrapnel even as her curse-toughened skin is shredded apart.

It hurts like a bitch, but it also stops her from flying too far back, from taking too much damage. The under-armor, half exoskeleton and half reptilian scales, moves and twitches, muscle systems aided by her supernatural will and moldable flesh, forming the armor as needed. It weighs a ton, slows her down, even with her bone-latticing, but for moments like these, and for the surprise on Taran’s face, it’s more than worth it.

She stabs down with her legs as she’s thrown back, feet and legs shifted into a much more muscular, dense forms, claws of bone and toughened biomatter interrupting her momentum backwards as her joints lock in. She has to rip the floor (and part of her foot) out of place to step forward fast enough as Taran puts away the revolver, pulling out his flintlock, but she manages to get in close. Her body is shifting, lengthening, strengthening, systems and organs she doesn’t understand put aside for now and new infrastructure much too costly to keep active lighting up and regrowing all through her, her arms grotesque and bladed and blooming-

Taran tries to bring up the flintlock but she is already in his range, even as the smell of alchemy fills the air, even as he uses Qi finally to move. It’s too late, she’s already in his face, hungry and so very at peace here in the violence.

It takes everything she has to freeze, violently, to force herself still, when she hears the click of the hammer and sees half her vision get blocked by a dark tunnel.

The shotgun, whose first shot stopped all thirty or so stone of her, and whose other barrel, still loaded, forgotten and ignored, is now put nearly against her eye.

“Sloppy,” Taran repeats, his eyes wide, his skin even paler than the usual corpse-grey shade he sports.

Maen bursts into the room, Yun Ka less than a second behind, both of them looking around, Maen’s eyes wide and panicked.

Then she notices them both, Raika shifting her flesh back to human-ish, Taran breathing hard (by his standards, a sort of raspy wheeze) with a gun right at her head.

She blinks.

“I don’t think I want to spar anymore.”