Book One, Chapter 14 - Fuck You And The Corpse You Rode In On

And here we go! Next one's gonna be something brand new, but I really liked the edits on this one.

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Conflict is universal, and universally shaped by its participants. Humans, and most humanoids, due to the limitations of biology and the sufferings of form, find their greatest achievements through invention and innovation, and the ways they experience conflict are no exception.

First were rocks, thrown with accuracy. Then a sharpened stick. Then a sharp stick that can be thrown with accuracy. 

The pattern continues. Synthesis across infinite transformations, forming tools of conquest and devastation, though those tend to be the same thing.

There is power tremendous in being outside the rules. There is far more accessible, equally lethal power in understanding them, bending them, and figuring out how to shape them as you’d prefer.

-Forms Of Violence 301, Soldier’s Academy, taught by Soo Sang-Ai “Blade Of Iron, Bastion-Bearer, Black Flash Breaks The World”.

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Raika coughs, violently, and instinctually grabs onto the sensation; if she’s coughing, she’s still alive, and you can do things if you’re alive. 

She’s surrounded by the smell of exploded brick and burning wood, but the smell of Li Shu comes in loud and clear, almost oppressive, like a blanket laid over her. She can see why; it’s not a shielding technique or anything of the sort, but there’s a space around them clear of debris, a cloud of Qi acting as a proto-cushion to protect them from the whole impact. The smell of flowers and sterile metal is strong enough to make her sneeze mid-cough- it wasn’t this strong before. The glimpse, that moment of revelation no one else seemed to share, did it do something? Unlock something? It’s so much louder than before, and it doesn’t feel like it’s just from the amount in the space around her.

Is the smell more than just personality? Does amount of Qi influence it? Does the smell indicate qualities? 

She shakes her head to clear the questions, an action that almost blinds her with how bad it hurts; she might not have gotten hit directly, but she’s worse than mortal. She can feel a burst eardrum leaking red down the side of her jaw and a dizziness that feels familiar after a life full of concussions; she’s lucky to be awake. She blinks away the pain and tries to find Li Shu in the haze, first instinct being to make sure she’s alright. The girl’s an idiot and Raika wouldn’t put it past her to protect the cripple first, and she refuses to believe that she’s not ok but she needs to know.

She’s inside the remains of a building, one entire half of it collapsed and the other with a gaping hole through the middle of it, through which she can smell that magnesium and ozone fire smell. All around her is what remains of a well-to-do restaurant, tables overturned, a fire in the kitchen and the smell of hot oil spreading. Throughout all the wood debris and smoke and dust, she can see bits of crimson, the smell of iron and flesh leaking through, hinting towards others that weren’t as lucky as she. There were people in this place, those who came in to sit here and enjoy a meal amidst the festival, and while her brain puts their deaths somewhere far less important than the fact she has to find Li Shu and whatever hit them, it still feels heavy to turn her head away and filter out the bits and pieces of people.

“Li Shu!” she croaks, coughing again as she does. Cries of alarm and distress are sounding out through the hole behind her, back to the open air, but she doesn’t hear nearly as many voices as she thinks there should be. “Li Shu!”

“Here!” a voice coughs, far too soft and disoriented for Raika not to turn to the sound and move. Her crutch is lost somewhere, thrown clear in the blast, but she manages to limp long enough to grab a chair. It isn’t exactly convenient, but she staggers from one bit of rubble to the other, heading towards the back wall where she heard the voice.

A healer’s outfit is designed to be always visible, even amidst chaos. Raika follows the vague motion she can see, tracking the scent, when she almost stumbles into what she thought was snow blasted into the building. Li Shu’s more grey than white now, her robes sullied in the blast even with her Qi shielding them. She’s standing over someone, and it doesn’t take Qi senses or years of battle to recognize the fact that the body is smaller than it should be, and the ropey blur leaking out their middle smells more like rot and offal already than fresh, living blood.

Li Shu crouches over them anyways, breathing hard, eyes unfocused, a mix of panic and effort in her face, her arms stained red up past the elbows. It’s been seconds since the impact threw them through the wall, but Raika doesn’t think that this is the first body she’s tried to save.

But the restaurant is quiet, if not for the crumbling of debris and falling stones.

“Go back,” Raika rasps, the dust making it hard for her to even breathe. “Back to the courtyard-” cough cough- “more people. Open. More might need help. Here it’s- (cough) too late. Go.”

Li Shu doesn’t seem to hear her, pushing waves of Qi into the still form beneath her, hands dripping bright red. There’s a pause, just a moment of stillness, and it’s broken by an additional roll of intestines falling out of the body. The sound of it is loud enough that she seems to shiver and start a bit in surprise. She looks down at the corpse, then at her hands, eyes wide, and slowly, they start to tremble. She starts breathing hard, harder, panting, hyperventilating, hands shaking-

Raika hits her in the back of the head with a chair.

It’s mostly disintegrated, and she’s not exactly able to fully swing the damn thing, but she manages to lift and pivot at least. It shatters on impact, splinters falling all around her. Li Shu’s a cultivator, of course; entry as a healer into a Sect requires no less, and working as a healer almost entirely depends on having at least a slightly higher than normal amount of Qi. What’s a fragile wooden chair to a cultivator, even one in the Qi-Gathering realm?

Exactly what this one needs to be shocked back to her senses, it would seem.

Her head rocks back, a shower of splinters landing in her hair and the floor around them. The hit doesn’t bruise or break the skin, but it’s still more than enough to get her to wake up. She blinks, eyes owlishly wide, mouth open in shock. “Move!” Raika snarls, waving her arm back at the collapsed wall through which the too-quiet courtyard can be heard. “Get off your ass and help, healer!”

The younger cultivator almost bounces up, the commanding tone reaching to ingrained training. Raika can’t help but offer up a prayer of thanks to Rui Ka for putting some spine in the girl, even if she still needs a firm hand. She nods, still dazed, but a shove from Raika, even weak as a child, is enough to finish the transformation and get her running back towards the impact crater, towards where the most people who need help will be.

Raika turns out towards where she can smell magnesium, facing away from the hole at the rear wall to the collapsed crater of its front.

She doesn’t look at the blood. Blocks out the chunks of people. 

The smell makes it through anyways. Heightened senses, awoken by the sensory deprivation of whatever that vision was, allow nothing less. It smells like a slaughter. Not the smell of steel or gunpowder or alchemy- just the scent of bodies, too weak to endure an impact hard enough to unmake half a building. 

A memory flickers through her. Masked faces, long scarves, farmer’s tools. Her hands, coated in red. 

She hobbles forward, towards the sounds of screaming. 

She can’t keep up with Li Shu, has no healer’s training, no supplies. Useless. She can’t help people, can’t alleviate their suffering or fix them or- she can’t help there. The most she can be is a distraction.

So she heads towards where she can hear the most people in pain, towards whatever it was that threw her through a fucking wall, and decides that she might as well try to be a distraction for whatever’s doing this rather than anyone she cares about. 

Even with a burst eardrum, the sounds of slaughter remain.

Through the hole that used to be the front of the restaurant, she hears an impact, the sound of another wall of wood and stone shattering and spraying debris everywhere, the sounds of screaming following a moment after or stopping abruptly. She steps through after the smell of the magnesium fire, into something… slimier, like old, spoiled algae and not unlike the smell of a freezing cold evening.

It takes a minute of stumbling, and crawling over wreckage, and outright dragging herself one-armed through parts of the restaurant, but she makes it to the wall in time to see what’s happening. The night sky is still dancing, like a pool of water with oil splashed atop it, streamers of celestial tears wrapping the horizon of the Cold Sun tight, but in the light of the fires below their colors seem almost a bit muted. Earthly horrors reflect light against the sky, that distant orb of marble glinting in tune with the screaming and abrupt silences that echo up. Between the dancing fairy lights and the fluttering, ash-cloaked flags still fluttering, the sight looks like a parody of only moments before. People in clothes colored purely in blood red, ash white and soot black are cowering and running for their lives, trying to drag each other to safety as two impossible, inhuman things rip each other apart in the streets, every unblocked blow sending more devastation through walls and homes and soft, squishy bodies.

She can’t follow their movements. Even if her eyes were perfect, without any cultivation there’s simply no way for a mortal to follow a fight between cultivators going all out, and Qen Hou, arrogant shithead or not, is clearly someone fucking talented, close enough to where she was as a cultivator to have been a threat. Foundational realm for sure, and closer to the far side of that realm than the shore. In the center of the street, going back and forth, neither giving an inch, his smell tells her that he’s one of the two impossible blurs of color and violence. One is launched through a small shrine only to fly back fast enough to shove the other back a good ten feet. The movement is returned instantly, followed by a series of strikes, only for them to blur together and leave a crater on the side of the road, then on the other side, and-

Again that smell, like an empty puppet with a rock inside, filled with mold and mildew and slimy wet rot. It burns wrong, the smell of the ozone and fire matching it and coming off muted and full of must. A moment later, she catches sight of the fighters properly, Qen Hou impacting with a crater not teen feet from her, spraying her with bits of stone and splinters.

“You dare!” he howls, scrambling back to his feet. “Worthless fool, who are you to-”

He doesn’t finish before something has him by the throat.

It is dressed in robes, but they’re undecorated, colored a plain midnight dark. Its face and hands, every inch of exposed skin, is covered entirely by pitch-black bandages, the upper half of its head covered in a crown of metal thorns and screws that leak black droplets from insertion points. Every other detail blends together, a mix of bad eyesight and how quickly it crushes Qen Hou into the ground. It uses barely any Qi to do it, the smell of it a flat constant the entire time she’s been feeling it, but it’s still strong enough that the late Foundation stage cultivator has his words completely choked off.

His Qi roars up in a conflagration, a vicious burst of magenta flame that scorches the air in every direction and detonates against the ground, launching the bandaged figure away, burning away some of the hairs on Raika’s head from the proximity. He yells out a challenge, getting to his feet in an instant as he grabs hold of the roaring flame. He grips it like a cloak, throwing it about himself until he is clad in robes of burning violet and red, his eyes glowing with power, the remnants of loose Qi gathered finally into something akin to a spear or a staff of some sort.

The bandaged figure does not seem intimidated. If anything, the sight of qi gets it moving even faster, that impossibly musty, rotten-plant smell wrapped around… a block of ice? Salt? Moving from the far end of the street to right up in Qen Hou’s face in less time than it takes for Raika to blink. A flurry of blows and movement and a wave of concussive shocks that might be individual impacts rings out through the space, glass shattering, paper blown apart and away, the few eardrums unbroken shattering with bursts of blood and silent screams.

Qen Hou comes out on top, barely, his flame-staff scoring a burning cut a few inches deep into the figure’s shoulder. It stumbles back but does not cry out, arm going limp.

But not at the depth of the cut, Raika realizes; the bandages, burnt and cut off the surface of the shoulder, snap with a burst of the mildew smell, going entirely still. Qen Hou notices too, igniting a burst of movement that warps the air and sends embers to catch alight on paper and wood all around. Staff first, he ducks down just enough, the bandaged figure’s other hand swinging and missing by millimeters, and then light flares. The staff’s tip explodes, unleashing a wave of intense heat and indigo fire directly into the figure’s chest. It catches flame, the bandages flaring with strange runes that fail to stand up to the heat, transmitting the fire all across its form. In seconds, the center of its body starts to melt, its entire form wreathed in flames and dripping molten bone and metal and-

The smell. The mildew is burnt, lit into ozone and heat, evaporating moment by moment, but the smell behind it, the smell it was wrapped around, it comes across so fucking strong. Past the dank mold, there’s a scent sharp enough to cut, blood starting to flow from her nostrils. It’s like a moment of bright, violently clear water, like ice water just beginning to steam, like freshly chiseled stone washed in a spring that has never seen light- and like none of the above. It makes no sense (half of the things she’s smelling don’t have smells, damnit), but it’s so goddamn loud.

Qen Hou is saying something, but she’s not listening, eardrums broken or not. His mouth is moving, trying to say something, and he even catches her eye as she walks closer, coming out of the hole he originally got blasted through and limping out into the street. He’s talking to the crowd, the smell of his cultivation loudly emanating from him. She’s not sure if he’s trying to contact other sect members, if he means to check on the victims, but whatever it is, it’s focused on the wrong thing.

The fire is starting to fade from the bandages. Black smoke obscures whatever was hidden beneath, roaring flames turning to embers as that sharp smell gets louder and louder, until she can feel blood running down her lips, dripping from her chin.

How can he not sense it? It’s like a knife’s been shoved up her nose, something so cold and so keen that it whistles when it cuts the air, something that demands silence. He’s looking at her, his eyes scrunched in confusion, reaching towards her.

Does he care? Is he trying to hold her back?

He hasn’t noticed it yet. It’s invisible to him? He’s too arrogant to notice? It doesn’t matter. She stumbles forward another step.

The space around them is devastated. Ruined. The colors have been stolen and replaced with death and suffering. Barely anyone still moves, and those few who can are running away. 

No. 

There’s one person coming closer.

It’s-

She can’t see more than the movement, but the hint of tangerines is all she needs.

JiaJia. The kid. He’s the one who suggested this spot for her, helped her set up, no, no, why is he here-

The thing shifts. In the fading light of the stars and the crackling magenta fires all around, she sees what’s left of the bandages swirl like snakes, the cooked flesh beneath them pale and bloated and ringed with metal inserts, like coins with holes in them, spikes poking through them like acupuncture. The last of the runes flicker away, turning to more cloying smoke and ash, but whatever is beneath, whatever might once have been human but now looks like black metal and iron and silver veins and charred meat and spongy, snow-white flesh still moves. It is rippling, in waves, in pulses, like a puddle with something beneath it ready to rise-

Qen Hou notices too late. It’s lucky for him, then, that she is already there.

It’s like it was using the body like an egg or a cocoon, and the soft flesh falls apart around it like a flower, blossoming open so that what served temporarily as bones can emerge. A human set of bones, made out of something that is not bone, wrapped around and part of something that looks like a squid, a crab, and a sword, all in one. Too many limbs, too many moving pieces, all sharp edges and black steel and at the center of it, like an eye or an anchor or shrapnel, a single piece of perfect white marble.

It smells like the sound of being deafened. It smells like coldest night and glints like the satellite which cannot quite hide away that horrible thing behind it.

And then she has her fucking hand around it.

Touching it feels like someone has slit open her veins and let them gush. It pulls at something in her, something deeper, and she tastes rot and bad meat and smoke as that impossible smell drinks what she is.

Qen Hou says something, loudly enough and with enough Qi that she can feel the vibrations and the waves of the smell coming off his words, even if she can’t hear the words themselves. His hand is up, but he isn’t approaching, eyes darting from her to the thing that writhes around her, stuttering as her fingers bleed around the edges of its core. 

She doesn’t care.

The drain isn’t enough to kill her. She feels empty, like her heart is stuttering, like her lungs are fluttering and barely able to draw breath, like everything down to her bones is turning molten and weak, but she does not let go because it is not enough to kill her.

“You knocked me through a wall,” she snarls, feeling the words, feeling the heat in them and the breath in them and the flow of them through her system. She is full of tingling, half-real wisps of nothing that she’s grown used to living on, feels them yanked out of her like water down a drain, like a river off a cliff, and she doesn’t care. She grips tight the thing of black and steel and perfect white, hard enough that her bones creak and her heart struggles and her tendons strain. “That was rude, cunt.”

And it squirms, and it writhes, and the perfect cube at its heart cuts at her hand as needles from the blacksteel mechanisms try to get past her to their core. It slices at her, spasming its many limbs and skeletal edges, and it is cutting pieces off her and off her hand and she still has fingers so she does not let go, and she is not dead so she does not let go, and Qen Hou is screaming and the air is warm around her and she does not let go and-

And it’s slowing. In the edges of her sight, she can see its tendrils still squirming, drinking the fire and the ozone and the color and the heat, but where she is, in her hand, it has nothing. It flails, striking at Qen Hou and stabbing at his techniques, but against her it seems almost blind. Spastic blows are thrown out wide, only partially for how she’s keeping it from properly functioning. She is half-empty already, and the smell of the cold and the marble is not a smell of substance, it is a smell of solid absence. 

Whatever this thing is, its cold marble is not the equal to the Cold Sun in the sky- it is a hungering void, but it can do nothing against an absence. It drags life and energy and thought from her but she isn’t dead yet, and so she is empty, and so she remains and holds. 

But it is still fighting back and cutting her and she is not about to hold onto something squirming just to hold it, and she only has one hand, and Qen Hou is no fucking help considering he’s still blasting fire at the thing even as it makes it more active.

So she drags herself into it, pulling at her changed body and forcing it to work, getting her face right at the point where the thin stilettos of metal latch onto the white stone.

She bites down.

She’s making a habit of that.

 She pulls her head back, straining hard, pulling on it with her whole body, twisted spine tensed, hand pushing the thing away even as her blood makes her grip slippery… but it’s enough, and she hears something go tink as one of the needles connecting it to the black steel breaks.

And then the whole thing goes limp as the white stone shifts out of place, a half-dozen tendrils of metal razors simply falling quiet.

It collapses, inert, and she falls with it, cutting herself on its edges.

It’s fine. The pain is far away.

The heat is enough that she can literally feel her hair crisping and her skin burning. She feels cold, though. Too much blood loss.

Still she turns, rising up just enough to stare at the magenta-red clad figure off to the side, his eyes wide.

She spits on the ground off to one side. “Told you,” she rasps, throat heavy, body limp and heavy; “too tough to kill.”

Then her vision turns dark, and she knows no more.