Raika throws a punch, wincing inwardly at just how terrible of a blow it is, just how inefficiently the flesh moves (and how limited it is in its design). It makes it easier for Maen to duck past, which is a nice benefit, even as she cringes at just how off it feels.

Years and years, cultivating her body, improving her physique and her form. Even as a cripple she still upheld training regimes. Hell, that’s how she and Maen first spoke, after all. To find out just how severely constrained her ability to control her body without using her Truth is and the way it plays with her new physique to let her modify it is pretty disappointing. She’s grateful to Taran for pointing out the flaws, and even more grateful that he’s willing to assist in this case. She’s let her focus on improving her flesh and controlling her response to pain and her enhanced senses overtake her dedication to details and finesse in controlling what she already has.

And in that, she’s become woefully inadequate.

Her Truth helps a ton, her control over herself and her body’s ability to respond to that control letting her move easily and freely, but the instincts and ingrained responses she used to rely on are gone. It’s not all a loss: her ability to react using conscious intent is leagues faster, allowing her to not have to rely on those instincts as heavily as a normal fighter would, but it doesn’t change the fact that she’s changed her flesh so severely, so quickly, that she’s started to rely on her abilities almost entirely to be able to react and act, both.

Taking the time to step back, to track both her own and Maen’s actions and movements, is doing worlds of good in helping her re-learn how to move her body using her body, rather than her power.

Maen, in turn, is showing a rather surprising aptitude for combat.

For someone almost entirely untrained in combat, who spent most of her life before cultivating stuck in the Qi-gathering realm that all but the most cursed or untalented can manage even as children, she’s adapted to her new instincts with shocking speed. While there’s minimal technique to her movements, and she’s more throwing herself away from blows than actually dodging, she’s still moving fast. Each movement is a jerk or flinch magnified rather than a practical dodge, but Raika is limiting herself to only her body and trying to focus on technique rather than speed, and it’s enough to keep her ahead.

Not enough, unfortunately, to keep her from Hao Kai’s constant criticism.

“Don’t be so afraid! Next time you dodge, I want to see it close enough you feel the wind of it, not miles away!”

Maen hisses, sweating hard, eyes wide and intense. “Easy for you to say!” she yells as Raika lobs a slow crescent kick at her head, which she dodges by falling almost to all fours. “You’re not the one with the super-cultivator trying to hit you.”

“And she’ll have twice as much trouble when you stop flinching like a startled pet and start being efficient. You’re wasting energy and time, and neither one of those is in heavy supply. Hold still!”

“And as for you!”

There’s something almost comical about the nearly zombified Taran pointing at her like some haughty noble, chin held high, body usually so stiff and puppet-like moving like a real, living being. “You’re wasting everyone’s time! I don’t care how well she warms your bed, your next swing better be an actual swing, unless you want me to get Taran to sneak firecrackers in your room while you sleep.”

She laughs, putting a bit more speed into her next swing even as she feels how her new muscle groups pull at each other, how her foot placements are all off from where they would be in her old body.

A few more swings, a couple of jabs, and she has to call a stop, much to Maen’s relief as she almost collapses onto the floor, breathing hard and almost boneless. Raika squats down next to her, laughing softly.

“You alright?” she asks, even as she tracks her heartbeat, checks on her breathing. She’s fine, but it’s important to ask, nonetheless.

Hao Kai makes his way onto the training floor, stepping out from the sidelines. The room they’ve found is a bit deeper into the “main” or “central” area of the Palace, and there’s more than a few soldiers standing guard around the circumference of a massive training arena. It’s large enough that it almost seems strange that the room is inside the palace, runic formations on the ceiling creating the illusion of natural light but no more. Bereft of windows, the space stands as gorgeous nonetheless, the power of the magics all around more than potent enough to create phantasmal images of mist at the higher end of the colosseum-style seats all around, obfuscating the outer limits of the space from easy view. It’s something like a massive arena, with the central area made of packed earth heavily condensed with Qi techniques to be able to survive even the most violent blows. The main floor is divided into five sections, the largest of them by far a spatially-altered section on the far side with several targets and mannequins ready to be fired upon, with the next closest holding dozens of pieces of equipment for weight training, stretches, and other exercises. The middle portion is the second largest, the self-same open combat terrain that Maen and Raika are currently sparring in, with smaller square fighting rings off beside that, and last but not least a number of elevated pedestals, surrounded by sharpened objects and water beneath them.

“We call an end when I say so, young lady!” Hao Kai says, the black of Taran’s wardrobe and their mutually clattering holsters and pistols and piercings making them deeply out of place with the gorgeous pillars, artificial plants and tasteful decorations of gold, purple and red. “What reason do you have for stopping us?”

“Hao Kai,” Raika says, not without fondness; “I appreciate your tutelage, but if you keep taking that tone ordering me around, I’m going to, at minimum, convince Taran to chug spiced jelly wholesale.”

He harrumphs, straightens his overcoat like it’s a gentleman’s robes, but doesn’t refute. “Fine then. Is all well?”

She shakes her head. “No. I can’t move properly, but I don’t want to try and modify things wildly again. I’ve been making a lot of changes, but I need to push myself a bit further if I’m going to get comfortable using them.”

“I do believe that pushing yourself further might lead you further into that state we saw before, no? Pushing to use your powers isn’t-”

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

“No, not like that,” she says, shaking her head. “I think I need to shift my focus. Make a few specific things I can shift to, and master a few stable parts. But I can’t master them, or properly see what I need to change and what I just need to adjust to, if I can’t push myself harder.”

“And I… could use a break,” Maen says, panting, hard.

“Perhaps I might be of some assistance, then.”

The room is so vast it actually takes her a moment to pinpoint where the voice is coming from, but a quick sniff tells her what she needs faster. In between the arrayed smells of the charged artifacts and armor all the soldiers at the peripherals of the room are equipped with, the scent of scales, blood, and coiling, writhing venom, pure and bright and violet, wafts over to her.

Similar to Kaena, Jun Vral often smells at least a little bit of his Qi, his unique constitution seeming to make it some kind of requirement that he use at least a little to move as a man, walking on two legs. She has an eyebrow raised as she turns to look over her shoulder at him, watching him approach from across the arena.

With a burst of Qi and a refreshing of his signature to her senses, he jumps forward, clearing a few hundred feet of space in a single bound and landing comfortably and almost silently on the packed arena dirt. “I don’t mean to impose,” he says with a smile, “but I think it might be good for me to stretch some poorly used muscles of my own, and seeing as how you could use a sparring partner…”

She watches him, tracking microexpressions as he looks at her, as he shifts. They haven’t spoken since the day before, where the possibility of Zhoulong influencing or possessing her was enough to make even his strange physiology flush with the scent of fear. Now he stands ready, confident, looking at her like a challenge.

But stiff. Every so slightly so.

She nods, once. “I think that could be useful,” she says. “Maen, you good to run drills with Hao Kai for a bit?”

Maen looks up at her from the ground, eyes wide in betrayal. “There’s more? We just fought for like an hour!”

Raika laughs. “Cultivator rules, love. You keep going until you have to stop, not until you want to.”

She groans, but to her credit doesn’t need any further goading, rolling onto her side and standing. She has to use a drop of Qi to push herself higher, smelling deliciously of sharp yuzu citrus and sharp, hidden paths, and Hao Kai nods to Raika.

“Alright, come on then,” he says, indicating with his head towards the smaller combat squares. “We can run you through some kata, get you some drills you can practice on your own now that I know your limits better.”

Raika nods back to him in thanks, and again to her credit, Maen rallies, jogging over to the arena areas as Hao Kai hops over, using Qi and his more advanced cultivation to cross the space much more easily. Jun Vral, meanwhile, steps closer to her, keeping only a few meters between them. He tosses his outer, heavier robe off to one side, letting it fall on one of the seats at the lowest end of the audience seats.

“To first blood?” he asks, circling around her, his flesh shifting, undulating minutely beneath the skin.

“To surrender,” she replies, cracking her neck one way, then the other, before sinking down to a crouch, feeling how alien it feels, the strains and stresses on different parts of her, no longer alien, no longer strange, but still unfamiliar.

He smiles. “A better choice, given our natures, perhaps.”

“On three?” she asks.

“On three.”

“One.”

“Two.”

“Three.”

The ground to either side of her explodes as snakes, larger than a human torso, burst through condensed, altered stone to try and bite her.

She follows Hao Kai’s advice to Maen, trying for efficiency over using her whole force all at once. She felt the trembling of the earth, subtle shifts beneath her feet, and isn’t nearly as surprised as she might have been on the unveiling of the spirit-like beasts, leaning back and out of the way of the first bite, taking a step back and leaning further to dodge the second.

And then Jun Vral is there, coming at her exposed head as she leans away from the first attack.

She gets a hand up in time, blocking the first punch, but in a sudden flash of Qi his flesh restructures. His fist remains, but as if his body holds far more matter or space than it should, snakes spawn from his limbs, emerging both from beneath and from his skin and flesh and going around his fist to wrap around her arm. A half-dozen fanged mouths bite into her flesh before she has time to yank her arm back, and she can feel the sting of the bites being overshadowed by the burning pain of their venom lacing through her, immediately discoloring it a darker shade of purple and bloody red.

She forces herself to keep it, to avoid discarding the flesh even as she shakes off the serpents and kicks at him, throwing a roundhouse that slams into both of the larger serpents and knocks their heads away at him before they can come back a second time. Rather than blocking his path or slowing him, they seem to meld into his body, absorbed easily, and he doesn’t hesitate to step through them and emerge with both mostly subsumed.

She feels the ground shift beneath her feet again, notices the small cracking sound as he steps, the slight hole in the dirt he leaves behind: his serpents are strong enough to displace the ground as they move, emerging from out of his body and digging through the ground.

She moves forward instead of back, swinging at him, feeling newly developed tendons straining in unexpected ways as she forces herself to remain in the form she’s in now, even as her left arm starts to go numb and she can feel the poison circulating. It’s slow, less effective than she expected, and she hopes her growth has given her some protections from the venom, but she can’t rely on it.

He ducks, and she knees him in the chin, closing his mouth with a satisfying ‘crack’ and following it up, keeping close, jabbing twice-

Jun Vral pivots, parries both punches expertly, and she has to dodge as another snake emerges from his shoulder as he throws a punch, biting at the empty air she was just in.

She pushes back, ducking under the snake, heart pumping, forcing her regeneration to kick in and work harder to counter the poison, when-

Jun Vral is already there. He takes a step back, and the ground explodes beneath her feet, another massive serpent ripping into her thigh, and then a dozen more spring forth from him, wrapping around her, trying to suffocate her, biting all over-

She taps out.

Immediately, all of the serpents fall away, slithering back into him. He steps forward, and she can feel the intensity of a dozen soldiers, of Hao Kai and Maen, all staring at them, all tense, ready to step in, worried for the outcome.

Slowly, she breathes. Jun Vral says something, and she ignores him. She feels the poison, intricately feels it burning through her nerves, eating at her veins, thickening her blood. It takes her longer than she’d care to admit, but slowly, drop by drop, she gathers the blood, freezes it in place, moves it through her from her torso, her legs, her arms into just her left side…

And rips out a chunk of flesh, letting thickened, black, muddy blood fall out of her.

She takes a breath, finally.

“All better then?” Jun Vral asks, unworried.

She nods. “Yeah. That’s some fucking venom you’ve got.”

“Some body you’ve got.”

“Now now, snakeman,” she says with a smile. “Gotta go at least three rounds before you can start flirting with me.”

He breathes out, and for a moment she thinks its a laugh, but… it sounds more like a sigh of relief.

“Good to see you’re still you, then,” he says, smiling. He sinks back into a stance, his flesh rippling. “Mind stopping the bleeding? The smell of it is… intense.”

She frowns, then realizes she actually didn’t heal the wounded portion, letting fresh blood flow out faster than her body is making it. She closes it off, forces the flesh to regrow, and takes special note of how Jun Vral and Maen both track every drop as it lands and is absorbed by the dirt. Maen, especially, she can hear breathing a bit faster at the sight.

“Didn’t mean to distract. Round two?”

“Of course. Just don’t be shocked when I win again. I’m used to tougher pains than your corpse-friend seems to want to dish out.”

“We’ll see.”

She flashes across the ground and they clash again, impacts ringing through the arena.