Chapter 370 - Cry "Fuck You", And Let Slip A Beast Of War

And we're back! Here I am moaning and groaning about putting myself in a goddamn cliffhanger with VISCERAE and wanting to keep going, only to have such a fucking blast with this chapter that it's practically 4k with barely any effort. Joy and good tidings, my good bitches! Enjoy and indulge!

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“And Lo! Hath said the Crawling Saint, the lady of blessed turning, unearther of deepest rest. Lo! And behold upon the dark below! Doth thee not gust the harmony beneath? Doth thee not seeth the way yond our pains landeth quiet atop the dirt, as we findeth our own quiet beneath t?

“Thence is silence in the grave. Thence is stillness. Thence is the harmony of meditation, of holy communion in truth, in yond placeth wh're thence is nothing but thee and the Nothing. Tis a demise coequal f'r the existing, to beest beneath the earth. Thence is nay blanket m're consoling, nay manor m're secureth, nay safety m're true, than the weight of the w'rld pressing down on thee, defending thee from the pitch and roil of the turbulence above.”

And so those who is't followed h'r listened, and those gents hath heard, and those gents understood. And those gents, too, began to Digeth.  

-Words recorded In the Annals of the Church of the Most Holy

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The world moves in a blur beneath her as she launches herself through the battlefield, pulled and tossed by the anchors that hold her to the corpse-flesh that is her shell in this world.

A thousand-thousand bullets whizz by, each one hold a shade of a death they once caused or have consumed to fuel themselves. Waves of grave-soil and skeletal legions advance, malformed and chaotic and all the more powerful for it, and where they tower high enough she uses them as footholds and cover, changing directions or avoiding a well-placed bolt of artillery or a volcanic scream from one of the half-mechanical abomination of Mortaria. Corpse-industry and augmented flesh battle against wraiths, ghosts and the skeletal things they inhabit, turning the world into a mess of mud and ruin. 

There’s something deeply funny about watching dead people kill each other, devastate the landscape, unveil weapons of mass annihilation against each other, and know that it’s all a joke. 

Not in the literal sense, but what’s life if one can’t find the humor in it? Raika’s had practice with that. 

She follows the pathways of the carved through by her shock troops, her hex-hounds tearing into enemy lines with ambush tactics and bull-rushes, only to detonate in screaming corpse-flesh and malfunctioning Echoes whenever they’re damaged enough to be forced to stand still. They can’t break the enemy lines, but they sow enough discord that she can keep moving, ducking and weaving deeper into the chaos of the front lines. The battlefield changes by her presence, even without her wielding her deeper powers or going all-out; after all, this whole little baby war is for her, after all. Her insult to the Holiest, her threats against their organization, tailored to force them to respond or lose face, and her challenge, so clearly weighed against her and her allies. As much as the Bishops of Godsfall have begun acting as her allies in the conflict, they won’t win the mock battles, even if they could- they swore to follow in her footsteps, and she is well aware of the fact that having them carve the war forward doesn’t fit in that arrangement.

The other cities of the Fallen Kingdom meet her unfair challenge with further unfairness, seeking to crush her for her insult. Her allies oh-so-generously offer her enough rope to pull with- or hang herself from. 

If she wins, they go to war against the Empire, prove they’ve backed the right horse, humiliate their rivals and old friend in good fun.

If she loses, they get to wait and build their forces further, lose little, and gain much in having her lose mentorship of Jin, a tacit part of the “bet”. After all, if she isn’t strong enough to back up her threats and insults, then she can’t be all that capable of backing up her promises, and surely their Blessed Mortal would be better off in more capable hands. 

There’s plans in the works for that possibility, but better to not let things get to that point. This war, stalemated artificially, meant for her to humiliate herself against, revolves around her. 

And stalemating is not in her favor.

So even as the number of Godsfall’s constructs and abominations diminish, even as she has to juke and dodge far more forcefully, tearing at reinforced corpse-tissue as she does, she goes forward. 

It took a few days to set things up. It’s not perfect, but that’s fine- she’s good at improvising. 

Half the hounds are down, their disruption efforts diminishing as Mortaria’s soldiers adapt to their tactics and face a lesser number of the pack. One lucky or well-placed piston-shot knocks a railroad spike through one of the enchanted beasts and into the one behind it, and the resulting detonation throws the rest of the pack into disarray, inciting a chain reaction. Echo-stuff spasms out of their misaligned spellwork, forcing chaotic devastation in place of dissipation, and for a moment the battlefield lights up off-white with screaming un-faces of the dead she has made into these things. 

Blackened mud explodes, turning to viscous mud and raining back down alongside shards of metal and bone and vaporised tissue- and Raika launches herself through it like a missile, trailing the devastation like smoke behind her.

She grins, animalistic and hungry, her Blacksteel arm rippling like a sea of needles, her form coated in wraith-flesh. Hundreds of guns fire in her direction, most of them too slow, more of them missing as she casts off her armor. With a squirming of the worms inside her, pre-prepared spell-patterns are linked, manifesting their properties and forming illusory bodies out of the Echo-stuff she’s surrounded by, and the sea of bullets coming at her start to drift, failing to hit more than her afterimage. 

She lands, still trailing more of the ephemeral power of Death, sprinting forward  through the battlefield. Her body ripples and squirms endlessly, spell-patterns forming and un-forming as the worms that have replaced much of her internal tissue connect themselves in arcane patterns, blocking stray effects and clearing her vision and forcing her body to go faster, faster. She cradles her Rifle in her arms as she runs, its power heavy enough to warp some of the weaker ghost-magics she passes, drawing them in towards her.. She doesn’t fire- anything that gets close enough to interrupt, her Blacksteel spears out to cut into and End, and anything that fires at her is deflected or dodged by her spellwork.

The battlefield echoes as it curves inwards, the industrial dead rearranging themselves to better halt her progress, better vanquish her, better survive her. Not enough to alter the whole battlefield, not nearly enough to bring out the enemy’s Bishops just yet, but enough that the frontline starts to shift, re-centering itself in the breach she’s carving. 

She cackles as she runs, letting it echo across death-stained muck and off of shining industry and bone. 

“Come on then!” Raika roars, loud and bright and oh-so-attention-grabbing. “Come and get some!”

Hundreds of corpse-automata and clambering engines of war turn to face her, turn to address the breach in their lines, to confront the target of their wrath. Distant artillery quiets rather than fire on their own soldiers, and Death-infused weaponry turns the space around the whirling, illusion-wielding invader into their territory into a storm of metal and smoke and engine-fury.

Through it all, she laughs, collecting more and more of the energy around her from each fallen enemy to add to the ghost-stuff orbiting around her. The illusions around her get hazier, harder to mistake for the real deal, but she makes up for it in sheer quantity, casting haze of gunsmoke and ghost-blood around her like a misty front entering the battlefield. Anything that gets too close gets carved open, her Blacksteel proving superior to cold iron and wax-smelted steels and acting as a sort of magnet, drinking out the Death animating the lesser soldiers she cuts down to add more spikes to itself. Before long, there’s a cloud of poorly-managed energy roiling across the battlefield, sloppy spellwork and mediocre tactics compensated for by Blacksteel and her sheer presence.

And then a part of the sky falls on her.

The world quakes under the impact of the vehicle, a sort of sky-engine warped into the flesh of a hundred-limbed corpse-automata. Its legs and hands scrabble and crush and slam against the ground, a chaotic assault that tears into the battlefield and disperses the mist of Echo-stuff with every spasm. 

She ducks under a wild swing, hops up to land on a curled fist, sprints up the limb towards the central brass and iron engine. Sharp-edged spike-limbs skitter out of her Blacksteel arm like spider legs, carving open the massive arm as she runs along it. The engine spasms, tearing itself open and using that smaller Death to reform itself, like a perpetual motion machine powered by self destruction. A maw of burnt metal and crackling bone rotates around the central frame, bringing with it a wave of limbs that slam down to try and crush her.

Another casting launches forward an illusion, making it step forward even as she steps backwards and pulls herself out of the way with her anchors. The falling limbs devastate the arm she was on, turning it to mulched Echo-meat, but the construct’s nature is already turning, absorbing the Death and Ruin of its own limb to spawn another on the opposite side and fuel itself. It has no true mouth or conventional lungs she can sense, glimpsing some of the patterns beneath its armor and spellcraft, but it still screams, steam and tearing metal taking on the function in place of conventional organs. 

She screams back, feeling her vocal cords tear and repairing them with some of the Echo-stuff all around, reforming the corpse-flesh by force of will into a functional throat. 

Then the next wave of limbs comes along. 

The engine attacks haphazardly, chaotically, but in some ways that’s an active tool. It’s harder to dodge a flood than a single attack, and harder to dodge chaotic spasms than predictable motions. Still, comparative to her, it’s slow enough that she has time to cast out one or two illusions with every motion, dividing enough of the blows each time for her to be able to step onto another flailing limb and leap off of it again. She conserves energy, refusing to enter flight by infusing her vessel with the energy required- the higher she goes, the more enemies can target her. Several mechanical soldiers are happily firing into the chaos of the engine, sure, but it uses the damage, feeding off its own cyclical devastation, and she’s still forced to dodge anyways.

That’s fine though. It’s more engaging this way. 

A dozen inhuman hands flail and grasp and punch at her, and she slides between them, vaults over one, uses Blacksteel to carve an opening through a distended forearm. Emerging from the other side, an illusion of her stabs at the dozen fingers curling around the damaged limb while her real body launches down towards the elbow, pausing after just a step to cast another illusion forward while she diverts left.

Throughout it all, the engine screams, consuming all the Death energy surrounding it in its vortex of self-destruction, draining many of the corpses that come close and depriving her of useful energy. Her next illusion breaks off as she heads straight, but it dissipates a little too fast, turned to mist by a flailing arm that breaks itself in multiple places to reach past and strike at her central form. 

She’s forced to pause, anchor her feet enough for her to raise her left arm and Cut. The limb is severed down the middle, half of it falling away into nothing as her Blacksteel hand tingles with the Dao infused in it. The creature shrieks as it contorts and curls in on itself, the remnants of that arm collapsing and falling to ruin- but it’s back to swinging less than a second later, a dozen more limbs on the way. 

She could keep dodging, or she could anchor herself here and Cut some more, or…

Raika exhales, smiling softly. “Alright then.”

The chamber cycles as part of her arm ejects into the cylinder. The clik-clak of the bolt closing in place echoes, the weight of the Rifle loud enough to make its noises just more important than the engine’s screaming. The trigger makes a little clicking sound as she aims down the sight and fires.

The slam of the hammer is erased by the thundering crack of breaking bone and crushed tissue of the bullet. The squealing and screeching of the corpse-construct is briefly eclipsed by the sound of the bullet punching cleanly into its body- only to immediately shatter and become quite messy indeed. 

Her Weapon Made Of Pain fires a single shot into the engine, taking with it all the leftover scraps of energy floating about the space. Like a whirlpool, like a drill, it spirals down into the wound she has made, into the messy hole punched into the corpse-construct, and-

It screams. 

Like a child touching the stove, like a woman with her limbs torn free, like the victim of an industrial accident and the sufferer of professional torture, it screams, tearing itself down the middle with the force of the agony. The damage is extensive, actively bleeding harm into the engine’s body, disrupting it on a fundamental level, ripping open its spellwork- but it wouldn’t be enough to kill it on its own. That’s not what this weapon is for.

It was made for sharing her Pain. Her understanding of the Dao of it. 

The engine is, unfortunately, a good learner. 

Even as it fails to heal itself, fails to access its core functions to renew itself with self-harm, it reaches with every limb towards the center of its frame, grabbing each and every piece of metal and engine and corpse-organ its hundreds of limbs can reach. 

With a single convulsion, a single desperate attempt to stop the Pain at any cost, it rips itself in half.

Raika lands lightly off to one side as it falls, building-sized arms collapsing like falling pillars from where they curled inward. Much of the construct is dissipating into energy and Echo-flesh, but much more of it is that same too-pale, watery-blooded tissue she made her Hounds with, which Mortaria seems to use in most of its soldiers and constructs. They splatter wetly, coming apart at the seams, too large to survive without their ability to manipulate Death and Echoes, and she politely steps aside as a small river of too-pale blood splashes chunkily from one of them. 

She smiles wide, watching the energy at the core of the engine die, the construct unraveling at its own self-destruction.

“Well that was-”

The section of muddy no-man’s land she’s standing on evaporates. 

Raika blinks, turning her head to stare at the expanding mushroom-cloud of devastation emanating from where she just was. It flickers and fluctuates with an aurora of Red, Black, Blue, Purple and Gold- five colors of Dao, visible to those powerful enough to see, but felt by all. The Dao colors of harm, final end, infinity, mystery, and truth, all aligned in a single all-consuming blast that has wiped out several dozen kilometers of that section of the battlefield.

Even as she stares up at it, several of the Dirt-Turners around her kneel, staring up at the explosion, their eyes sizzling. What exactly they are, she isn’t clear on (not Bishops, not those who have completely conquered their own Deaths), but they’re no corpse-puppets, and any sentient being that desires understanding is wise to look at such a powerful learning opportunity, even if it hurts a bit.

She shakes her head, looking up at the cloud as it begins to dissipate into the atmosphere. A heartbeat later, the shockwave passes by overhead, an echoing boom of force snapping over the trench-line and throwing many of Mortaria’s own soldiers off their feet. She can feel them recovering quickly enough, their flesh burnt but much of their mechanical features still intact, but most of Godfall’s soldiery remains in the trenches or the grave-dirt. 

A poor move, but a good one if it had meant wiping her out.

She turns to smile at Su Mar, backlit by the explosion only now turning to ashen rain.

“See? Told you it would work. None the wiser.”

The hooded figure’s eyes are wide, his pupils flickering and stained by the colors of the explosion, visible to esoteric senses. He looks on the verge of holy revelation- or maybe on the cusp of pissing himself. “I… as… as you say, Bishop.”

She waves a hand. “Hey, call me a liar if it fits me. Now come on- you can stare at divine destruction later, we’re walking.”

She walks past him, and after a few seconds, she hears him turn to follow, falling in line with the few remaining hex-hounds following her.

That first chain reaction really was the perfect distraction- just enough damage to annoy the opposition, but messy enough to leave tons of leftover energy, which is useful in its own way. The illusion array was not easy to work with, and infusing it with a shard of her Blacksteel arm to grant it an additional anchor and realism was its own challenge, but the payoff was pretty great. She would be worried about her rifle, but frankly, if it was destroyed so easily, it wasn’t worth the investment.

And it was absolutely worth the investment.

She can still feel it, like a toothache for her soul, or whatever her animus is now. She can feel how it pulses and grows, feel the drain-suction of it drinking deep of everything around it. 

It is Hers. It’ll come back to her somehow. No need to micromanage everything, especially not after such a wildly successful plan.

After a few more steps, she reaches a point along the wall of the trench they’re traveling through, turning back to look at Su Mar. The poor little cultist still seems rattled, his gaze seemingly unable to lock onto anything- but when one of the vaguely trembling hounds at his side nudges him, sending a little pulse of Death and Qi into him to get his attention, he perks right up, blinking.

“I- apologies, Bishop, I-”

“We have to move quick if we want this to work, little digger. You with me?”

He takes a breath, the movement weirdly undefined beneath all his layers, but he nods vigorously a moment later, so it seems like it worked.

“Good. This is the spot, so… do your thing.”

He looks at the wall in front of them, then at her, before the thought seems to click. He almost stops to say something, maybe bow, but whatever he saw in her seems to help him decide against it. Instead, he raises shovel and pickaxe both, clasping them together as if in prayer before approaching the wall she indicated.

Then, he begins to dig.

She’s pretty sure that the Dirt-Turners, as an organization, are some sort of undead, possibly powerful Echoes preserved by the Fallen Kingdom’s powers and returned to functional bodies afterwards. They worship the Burrowing Saint, the one for which the Cathedral in the center of the city is consecrated, and seem to try to emulate her as a form of worship. For them, as much as Raika’s been able and willing to learn, digging is prayer, a holy imitation of a greater holiness in turn. As such, they’re quite good at it.

The wall practically liquifies before the hooded figure’s tools, each swipe and thrust overturning far more soil than it should, yet leaving it restful and carefully packed to the sides rather than throwing it about. The flow of Qi is subtle, flavored through techniques, belief, and Death in turn- “a grave for every body, and for every body, a grave”, as she’s heard them say. Considering the size of some of the creatures she’s met in the world, she supposes it’s not weird that Su Mar, with his minute presence to her senses and tiny size, can dig a tunnel through the world big enough to fit a carriage in seconds.

She follows him forward, her senses as tuned as she can make them, tracking the flows of Death and the Qi it carries as best she can. It’s easier for her to track the former than the latter- even now, her ability to perceive Qi is tied to other senses, and with her mortal organs mostly nonfunctional, her perception of Death and its myriad forms is her best tool for the job. With the chaos of the battlefield, it’s a bit hard to track, but the explosion of whatever attacked her scoured clean large swathes of the battlefield, and only now is the fight starting to pitch back up. 

How, she’s not totally sure, but she’s certain it won’t be long before the other side’s Bishops confirm she’s still… well, not alive. Undead, at least. Timeframe is limited, but then again, that’s the beauty of a well-executed plan- it all goes off, or it falls apart and she has to improv.

It takes minutes, rather than hours or days of digging, and all done almost soundlessly. The remaining hex-hounds, which diverted to follow her from the explosions of their pack, are starting to break apart- not much time left there either. Several of them are downright vibrating, their poorly-designed spellcraft causing the Qi equivalent of friction in their bodies. She diverts some of the worms inside her from their positions, rearranging some of her prepared arrays from illusion-crafting to stabilization.

It doesn’t actually manage to put them back to wholeness, but it slows their breakdowns. Long enough for her to get some more use out of them, she hopes.

She pauses, catching something in the air above her. 

Some fluctuation in the fields above. The faint tromping of booted feet, each one infused with the weight of the mortal endings of so many. 

She wonders, sometimes, just how they got so very much Death here, at the end of the world. In theory, they might have got it all naturally, from gradual deaths, bit by bit. 

Considering the nature of the stomping, industrial, gunpowder-flavored Death that Mortaria exudes… she doubts it. 

“Here’s good,” she tells Su Mar. “You should probably get moving. Back the way we came, now. Honorable service, and your senior appreciates your dedication to your craft- but it’s probably best you not stick around for this part.”

He doesn’t need to be told twice- with a hurried bow, he turns and sprints back the way they came, almost bumping into the last of the hounds as they shake and judder and deform from the forces within them. 

Perfect. 

Calling all three of the remaining beasts, she has them stand skin-to-skin with each other, pale corpse-flesh and supernatural power practically humming from holding themselves together. The hounds, their sightless eyes and barely-functional bodies, still turn to look at her, as if awaiting direction.

She sighs. She can’t help it. 

She kneels, reaching her flesh hand down to pet the poor creatures. Sentient or not, aware or not, alive or not… 

“Good pups. Good job.”

And then she reaches inside herself, into her Death and her guts and her pieces, and pulls out the winged thing curled tightly inside her.

Her first (and so far only) Gu flutters, wiggling itself as it unwraps meter after meter of its long wings. Like something wrapped in blankets, it unveils itself, shivering in the warmer temperatures outside her flesh, and fleks of necrotic ooze dribble from its wings.

There’s not enough room for it in the dirt. 

That’s fine too. It won’t have to stay here very long.

Its eyes, still distressingly blank, focus on the barely-functional hex-hounds, and the too-human teeth in its too-human mouth chitter against each other. 

She takes in a breath.

Exhales.

Force of habit- but a useful one. 

“Go,” she whispers. “Eat.”

It obliges. 

And as the hex-hounds at last come apart, aided by the gnashing consumption of the twisted thing she has grown, she feels all the force of violence and devastation she imbued them with be drunk deep. And then she feels the creature turn its gaze up, towards the world above, and hunger for more. 

It beats its wings, and the tunnel is unmade as she unleashes it into the world.

Right in the middle of the army of dumbasses that marched to try and fuck with her.