> Reality is inherently empty: nothing has an inherent essence. If there is an essence, then that essence is made up of various other component parts. Nothing can be stripped to its bare minimum. When the smallest motes of reality are broken down to its bare minimum one still finds other particles that make up it, and even in nothingness there are strands of possibility. This is the truth of reality. If one breaks reality down even further, then one might find Flower-Nature, the truth of all things. But it is impossible to do so without proper Awakening.
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> Treatise on Emptiness by Snake Hero Mystic
"Make your way to the monastery's courtyard," said the Abbot. "I will see you there." The Abbot leapt into the skies, their body piercing the very clouds as they somersaulted into the monastery.
Raxri's eyes widened. "When will I be able to do that?"
Shrugging, Raxri broke into a run. What was happening? Were these the dog demons? No doubt it was. That was a war trumpet, wasn't it? Was there a horde outside?
As they ran up the stairs that led into the monastery's courtyard, the thrumming steady beat of wardrums echoed across the mountain. The erratic beat drummed, each strike chilling Raxri's spine. Their heart tried to match the beat but the beat was so inhumanely aberrant...
When Raxri arrived, they saw the monks going about composed. They stood rank and file within the courtyard, wielding lances, blades, shields, and longbows. Those in front had layered atop their monk robes lacquered wood armors and helmets. Among them was a tall and gaunt man, broad-shouldered, skin the beautiful black of night. Upon their skin glowed scarlet tattoos, showcasing gods, tigers, crocodiles, all tied together in the same mystic script both Raxri and Akazha had.
One of the nuns ran out of the meditation house and past Raxri. Raxri called out: "Excuse me! Can you tell me what's happening?"
"Oh," the nun bowed. Raxri returned the folded-hand bow. Raxri remembered this one. This was Pilinitala. Her face lined with ferocious pink face paint made her look like a wrathful tiger god. "Raxri Uttara, right? Here, the Abbot told me to give you this." They were handed a sword, similar to the one they trained with, though this one was tasseled with scarlet threads and was sheathed in a long rectangular wooden sheathe. The sheathe itself had a thread around it that could be worn. Raxri did so, making it so that the sword was positioned across their back.
"Thank you. What is going on outside the gates?" The gates were still closed, though multiple monks were atop the walls. Within the pagoda towers stood bowmen at the ready, with the same yew longbow painted red and tasseled with bright red threads.
"The Dog Demon Horde has arrived," said Pilinitala. "We are to fend them off. Though, it seems their forces have diminished."
Raxri blinked, worry now striking their face. "Do they have their chief with them?"
Pilinitala shook her head. "It doesn't seem so. Come, we must fall into rank."
Raxri nodded and followed Pilinitala. They lined up beside one of the rows of people.
Raxri looked up and saw Yiwaritala atop the wall, wielding but a staff. The staff was decorated with clouds and thunderbolts on both ends. This was different from the usual staff they wielded, Raxri realized. He was also clad now in the same lacquered wood armor as the frontline. Lamellars that covered their torso, their lower half a sarong also plated with the same lamellar. His feet were similarly wrapped with lacquered wood shinguards.
When he spoke, his voice boomed, as if he were a dragon god. "Dog Demons of Silver Wind Cave! Announce why you have arrived here, with weapons bared and war drums ringing!"
From the other side of the gate, Raxri heard the snarling retort of their warlord: "You monks have meditated so far up your ass that you've lost all common sense! What else would we be doing here? We shall pillage your monastery and take all your merit for ourselves!"
Yiwaritala scowled. "This is not the way to attain merit, my brothers! There are better ways to cultivate good karma, and lead to a better life!"
"Without power, there will be nothing!" screamed the warlord back. "This monastery has accrued scrumptious amounts of Will. What else can we do but sup on its sweet nectar? What else can we do but seize this Will with forced transmission!"
Yiwaritala roared: "And what makes you think we will allow such depravity?"
"You will allow fuck all! We shall take it from your bloody hands, and feast on your corpse and gain Will tenfold!"
"The cultivation of Will is not the only way to happiness and bliss! The Awoken grant you an escape. You will find peace and joy in the lands beyond heaven and earth. If you only humble yourself and submit to the teachings of the Awoken!" And to that a roaring chorus of laughter from the army greeted him back.
Pilinitala said, "Hmph. I don't know why Yiwaritala is doing this. Slaying demons is a meritorious thing to do, so that they may reincarnate into better bodies. Trying to sway them into the Awoken's teachings is a fool's errand!"
A deep voice echoed from behind them: "Even demons can be redeemed yet, though they are of the Wrathful Path in the Wheel. It is unlikely, but it is possible. Killing them yields good merit and little negative karma still, but that way is the easy way, and will not accrue you Wisdom for Extinction." Raxri turned to see the night-skinned man, clad only in loose-fitting robes, wooden sandals, and an interesting poker--no doubt the poker he uses for tattooing. He was smirking. "Greetings. I am Ampun Sagara. You're new."
Raxri performed mouth reverence to them. "A-Ah, yes. I am Raxri Uttara. I've come here looking for enlightenment."
Ampun Sagara smiled. Their eyes were bright ambers. "Don't we all?" They were covered, head to toe, in the tattoos. Even their bald head was a site for a confluence of mystic scripts and geometries of the talismanic tattoos.
"Here you are again Ampun. I'm just saying what's at stake here is our lives! A bit of a karma hit and good merit is a good trade." Pilinitala said. She sighed. "As always, the ever war between merit and liberation."
"Doing things for good karma and merit is different from doing things for Liberation," replied Ampun. "I'm sure you know this."
"Yes, yes," Pilintala said, visibly out of patience. She rolled her eyes and grasped her weapon: a long lance with a tassel by the end. The blade of her lance seemed long, almost the length of a longknife.
Ampun glanced at the talismanic tattoo on Raxri's forearm and said, "We should talk later. The festival begins."
Outside, the sound of the war drum beat faster, still with that erratic, demonic rhythm. More intimidatingly, the scream of the demon's war trumpets ripped through the air. "I speak to you once more," said Yiwaritala, having to shout to be heard against the din of the demonic cacophony. "Yield now and be enlightened!"
"We will become more powerful than your enlightenment! Strike, my brothers! The Awoken shall fall to demonic accumulation!"
Explosions wracked the monastery walls. The gate bulged inward, as if seeking to vomit something out. It shuddered and shook and looked like it might give way. They were ramming it down, as if this were a siege!
Yiwaritala raised his hand with a particular hand sign.
A shout from atop the pagoda towers. "Ready!" The shout could be heard even against the booming rhapsody of the demon's violence. The bowmen readied their arrows, some of them on the courtyard where Raxri was, others upon the pagodas. Each of them had three arrows nocked onto their bows. They pulled, pulled, pulled. Their yew longbows bent under the strain.
"Fire!"
One thousand arrows flew into the air, as all the bowmen unleashed a nerve-wracking scream in unison. It struck fear even into Raxri, who suddenly flinched at the scream that sounded more like the howl of a Thunderous Warrior God. All of the arrows bore a strange feather pinned to them; they whistled loudly as they spiralled through the sky, meeting with the clouds, arcing and falling like rain towards the demons.
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The cries of the demons struck filled the air. The pungent smell of brimstone sliced through the sacred smell of incense and lotuses and bamboo. Raxri scrunched their nose in primal retaliation against the offensive odor.
"Aim!" The man guiding all the archers barked out again. All at once, the three arrows were nocked onto place. "Ready!" All at once, they pulled, their longbows bending, creaking.
All the while, the assault on the doors did not let up. The nails on the hinges of the door creaked, bent in an unnatural way. They about to give way.
Raxri's adrenaline surged through them. With their meditation, they forced it to pool where their Will Furnace was, getting ready to channel it into their techniques.
Beside them, Pilinatala was readying her lance. "Here they come..."
"Fire!" Another set of arrows into the sky, accompanied with roars. Just as they did, a stunning wave of sorcery blast through the air, slamming into a good majority of the arrows and rendering them into useless sticks that clattered to the ground. A chunk of the arrows still arced through, skewering what they could on the other side of the wall.
Yiwaritala slammed his foot down and took on a wide stance. He inhaled.
When he exhaled, black billowing fumes erupted from him, and his face bulged with the ferocity of a wrathful carabao. He performed a quick, spiralling kata, at the end of which he launched himself into the army of demons below. Along with him also leaped warbands of monks, each with weapons at the ready, each with streamers of Will surging from them.
The gate blast open. On the other side of the door, a hundred demon warriors at the ready, with a single three tail tall bull demon as their battering ram. They charged inside, hefting demonic weapons of flailing whips, rusted blades, and jagged blade daggers. All of them were dog demons, or were at least in some form canine. Their snouts all looked as if they had been replaced by a thunderbird's beak.
Pilinitala yelled alongside the throngs of monks, and they charged. Raxri exhaled and let their gathered Will flow. They ran together.
The two armies slammed against each other.
Blade against blade, steel against flesh, demon ferocity against human justice.
Ampun was among them; he fought with nothing but his tattoo poker. He wielded it as if it was a sword, slashing and thrusting. As he did, solid-liquid flows of black ink erupted from the tip of the weapon, skewering and slicing through hordes of demons. He parried with nothing but his bare hands, catching weaponstrikes with the various talismanic tattoos on his forearms and biceps. He moved through the throngs as if he was clad in full armor, with only a few weapons actually scoring scratches on him. The majority of the weapons bounced off of the latticework of talismanic tattoos he had engraved against his skin.
Pilinatala was no slouch either. With her glaive at the ready, she acrobatically flipped over a wide sword swing, which continued into a downward arcing cut that cleaved another demon warrior in half. She crouched low and spun her glaive around, weaving her entire body, cutting in all directions around in her in a circular motion. When a hammer slammed down towards her she dove to the side and flipped onto the hammer, bringing the glaive with her so that she decapitated that demon warrior in a single motion. She then leapt on top of that same demon warrior, exhaled, and then hopped over the heads of the crowd until she was in a spot where she wasn't completely surrounded by the demon warriors. She down at one of the dog demons, skewering them through and impaling them to the ground. When she rose to her feet, she had her other hand in a half folded hands mudra, uttering: "Let my violence be offering, let my be offering," again and again and again.
A shiver ran down Raxri's spine. Somewhere, the Termagant Buddha watched them, eyes scowling, eyebrows on fire.
The rest of the monk warriors fought similarly, and they fought very orderly. Those that were clad in armor stood in the front, commanding the flow of the demon warriors. Those that were able to move freely bounded and leaped--some of them even used their armored comrades as jumping platforms or as pivot points for their attacks--slashing and striking and then deftly moving out of the way. While the dog demons were tenacious and straightforward, the monks used the advantage of their limber bodies and cultivation of Will to outmaneuver and cut down the enemy lines.
The demon warriors fought with hard numbers on their side, severly outnumbering the Monastery forces. The demon warriors struck and winnowed thorugh the ranks of the monks, without a care for losing lives. They had enough forces anyway. Though the monks were quick and acrobatic, the savage swings and pragmatic strikes of the dog demon warriors struck some and brutally impaired a few others. Screams from monks interspersed the violent and furious clash of steel and demon.
Raxri had jumped into the fray and was somewhere behind the monk's frontlines, taking care of the demons that had managed to push through the heavily armored lines. With the sword that the Abbot had given them, their weaponstrikes cut through the dog demons as if they were hot butter. Two quick horizontal strikes moved into a cross-legged whipping strike to a sudden on the ground ankle strike. They lifted themselves up with their Light Body Technique, kicked away two incoming dog demon soldiers, and then violently flipped forward to vertically bisect a demon whose shield had been pushed away by a nearby monk comrade.
When a dog demon came too close, they channeled their Will and slammed them with their Devastating Red Hand. That demon crashed into their comrades behind them.
Raxri's swordstrikes, they were only now realizing, were both defense and offense. With every strike they blocked, countered, decapitated or cleft. Raxri realized now that some attacks they viewed as telegraphing a strike were actually ways to block incoming attacks and then to counter back at them. The Adamantine Sword burst open with this realization.
A kinetic blur. Raxri traded blows, parries, counters, with the dog demons. Two dog demons came too close: Raxri quickly struck the both of them, locked in the demon to their left with a snaking motion, coiled their feet into a cross-legged stance and slammed that demon against the demon to their right, and then uncoiled their cross-legged stance, bringing their weapon with them to cleave both the dog demons in two.
The new Adamantine Sword came naturally to Raxri. Exhilaration pumped through them, but they did not allow that to send them into a harmful frenzy. They channeled all the adrenaline into their Will Furnace once again, and they could feel their muscles jovially strengthening at this discipline.
From afar, Yiwaritala and his fellow monk adepts fought furiously. A mixture of overwhelming strikes that embedded multiple dog demons into the ground, telekinetic pushes that threw many of the dog demons off the cliff, and powerful staff strikes that, when they slammed into their opponents, resonated with the echo of thunder. Various other monks shared this fighting style, fighting in this same way.
Others fought with the ferocity of a cornered mountain boar, whipping and roaring and using two blades to gore and skewer. Others moved like serpents, taking on heavily low stances and striking out suddenly, using their legs to wind around the necks of their victims which they then turned around and corkscrew-slammed into the ground. There were some that fought with the tenacity of the carabao: they struck and performed heavy winding attacks, but whenever a weapon would strike against them the demonic weapons would only break and shatter under the strength of their hide.
Despite all this however, and no matter how much Raxri overwhelmed the dog demons with their prowess, with the quickness in which they struck, with the strength of their blade, trading blows, with the deftness of their parries (though they suffered a good few hits to be sure; in a matter of a few rounds of fighting their face was bruised and cut, their forearms bleeding with open wounds), their enemy's forces never seemed to abate.
"The horde thins not," said Ampun, as they were pushed to the zone where Raxri fought in. They pointed their poker and an inky claw roared out, tearing at a nearby dog. They parried another incoming blade with thier tattood arm, and then stabbed that dog demon in the eye, turned them around--poker still in eye--and then ripped the poker away.
Raxri nodded. They used their Light Body to dodge an attack, flipping in the air, and cut three times in the span of a second, like a blossoming iron peony. "Do they have such numbers?"
"They have not the numbers." Ampun pointed with their poker to the far distance, behind enemy lines, at the point where the mountain path descended. "It be their summoner." There, a dog demon in a brocaded cassock--no doubt stolen from a monk--raised a rusted pewter staff into the air. He shook it with certainty, in certain rhythms, as the iron rings clanged and clanged in muted tones due to its rusted form. As they did this, dog demons clawed out from a rift in reality, stepping onto the mountain path fully clad in their armors (which clung to them only by string) and cheap rusting weapons. "Though our kind be strong, their numbers will overwhelm us yet."
Raxri and Ampun kept up the fight. Despite their combined efforts, they were steadily becoming overwhelmed. Raxri traded blows with another nearby dog demon and that dog demon managed a savage bit on their shoulder. They winced, and managed to decapitate that dog demon, forcing their body to dissipate into that coagualated mass that eventually unraveled into a thousand thousand threads.
"Do you witness?" Ampun asked Raxri, as he parried away another demon and punctured their neck with their tattoo-poker. "Strands of Will. Many of these dog demons are Will constructs."
"Those are possible?"
"Oh yes more than possible... demons are commonly wrought of sorcery. Though many demons are sentient beings, these don't seem to be."
"Maybe it is their chieftain that is the sentient being and these are but summoned from his magicks?" conjectured Raxri. Ampun only nodded in agreement, as he dodged a lunge, caught that dog demon's strike, and then twisted, slamming the demon onto the ground. They unraveled into strands of Will as well.
A pair of dog demons attacked Raxri from behind, but they were summarily destroyed by a twin attack by Pilinitala and Ampun. Pilinatala struck both of them with a single swipe of her lance, Ampun clobbered them with a summoned script-hammer (a mallet conjured from the poker's tip!), and then they finished them off with a conjoined smash.
Other dog demons were constantly trying to strike at Raxri, but other monks, wielding staves and swords and chains and spears, were handily fighting them off. Though Raxri sustained some injuries, they were nothing more than grazes as the dog demons closed in.
Then, Raxri heard the sound of crying.
Off in the distance, surrounded by another horde, was a child.
Raxri was doing well here, among the rest of the monks. Fighting alongside them, they were able to maneuver themselves so that they were never surrounded by dog demons. They knew, even with their superior Adamantine Sword Art and Whorl Hand Art, being overwhelmed by these unmerciful and savage dog demons would only spell certain death.
That was why Raxri couldn't just stand by and watch as a poor child-monk, no doubt circled off from the protection of other monks by the dog demons, was surrounded by at least five dog demons. The child, a boy, desperatly staved off the dog demons with a monk's spade much too large for their hands, striking and slashing to no avail.
One of the demons brought with them a handgun. It fulminated with sorcerous energy.
The single shot kind, the kind one had no choice but to discard after unleashing its shot.
The demon aimed it at the child.