Chapter 217 - Honor To Us All On The Killing Floor (Patreon)

Maaaan, I'm gonna miss these guys. They were cool.

But I'm pretty sure they'll taste scrumpty-didly-umptious going down, so that's something!

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Raika, whole and complete once more, forms a human mouth once more.

“No chance I can convince you to surrender?”

The Lightning Dao cultivator slams into her lower body hard enough that an explosion of viscera falls out the front, the charge running through her nerves and tearing into her organs. Then, in the moment she takes dealing with that, the giant star-skinned cultivator punches her head so hard that part of her face caves in.

And then the sound of thunder echoes in the room, shattering a thousand shards of crystal outcroppings, and a hundred shards fall into her wounds and begin to blossom into new quartz.

Mhmm. Well, she gave them a shot.

And it’s not arrogant if you back it up.

Priorities first. She can tell she’s been doing this poorly, her body and deeper self both flailing at the surface, both unable to properly synergize. She feels a rush of gratitude and genuine warmth towards Dink, enveloping him in a soft envelope to keep him safer and closer to her. 

Second priority- she cannot lose the Mind again.

There’s limited memory of the battle and its events, but tellingly, there is memory. Her sub-minds maintained some degree of function, kept alive by the Body, and she’s likely sharing information between all the different parts of herself, which is great. But that’s no reason not to prioritize. Transforming herself, she keeps her skull and the shape of her throat the same while forcibly wrapping her brain in a layer of semi-hardened calcium, packing it with impact-retardant gelatin to avoid concussing herself. She speed-builds her way into a sort of contained emergency organ packet, all of her sub-minds and central brain protected in a thick, hyper-oxygenated ooze and surrounded by layers of metal.

Not Blacksteel. Waaaay too risky, wrapping her brains in sharpened death. But she does have an alternative she can control- the orange metal that the Blacksteel containing her reactor is slowly turning into. Whatever it is, it’s better than obsidian death shards for building a protective shell.

She has to use all of it, force-rebuilding her Reactor at the same time with fresh Blacksteel to keep its energies screaming through her veins.

The gold-skinned cultivator with the kimono sends out a burst of Qi, flavored with obsession, determination, and the scent of patient and painful things that grow from soil like steel and stone. A cluster of infectious quartz grows to a pillar in response, forcing her upper and lower halves apart violently and spraying arterial neon-crimson across the chamber. 

That’s fine. She’s busy with other shit, and the Body and its freshly exercised instincts and muscle memory are still doing… enough to keep her alive.

She builds a secondary heart and some fresh lungs and something enough like a liver to potentially sustain the whole bundle. She can pack it full of more goodies later- it’s good enough for now.

And now, secondary priority. Splitting her attention, she starts forming more brains.

Not full consciousness packages, but simple setups, a bit of memory storage and pieces to enhance her autonomic nervous system, speed up the sending of messages and the data processing all across her body. Hopefully a way to better store the Mind and rebuild it in case of the worst occurring. The movements of the Body tangibly improve, instinct now supported by mechanism. Her limbs synchronize quickly, balancing on the tail-end of the massive flesh-trunk that she’s still a part of (and isn’t that an image) and beginning to stop getting in each other’s way while speeding up.

The lightning-wielder dashes in again, the air of the chamber and a clear pulse of some sort of attraction from one of the arrays his ally has formed speeding him so fast she doesn’t even perceive him.

Not consciously. Not instinctively.

But the subconscious of a well-organized machine is a delight to behold. 

Her sword manages to intersect this time, cracking down its spine- but holding.

She grins with three mouths and a thousand eyes as she sees his eyes wide, right before her whip cuts into him with booming thunder all her own.

He lands in a crater on the floor, and the star-skinned cultivator immediately moves to defend him in a well-trained maneuver. These aren’t individual cultivators, fighting wildly, they’re a trained and organized team, and she moves to stand over him near-instantly.

It’s what saves him, as she tanks a hit from Raika’s pillar-shield that cracks a spatially altered rib.

Good. Improvements.

About ten arrays light up at once and suddenly everything is heavy.

Raika slams to the ground, a dozen of the anchor-tendrils of her flesh-trunk dislodging with her from the force of it. The literal topology of the hangar bay shifted, arrays that were planted in random places across the chamber moved into an alignment that multiples the weight of- of everything. Her blood moves sluggish, her bones and armor try to crush through her muscles to fall on the floor. It’s like her own mass just grew by three without any ways to compensate for it.

But incredibly thick, hyper-oxygenated gelatin makes for good cushioning, and her Reactor keeps screaming in tongues of radiant color.

Keep. Going.

She starts reinforcing her muscle fibers, replacing blood with thicker gelatin and flooding it with oxygen, forcing hearts half-smushed to keep beating-

Hmm. About… half of her ribs are still holding up surprisingly well. She can feel the changes from them, and-

Dink trembles, speaking in musical notes, and she frowns. She turns her attention inwards to her Heart.

It’s changing her.

She can feel it, reaching out, tendrils of Qi like veins slowly moving through her body. The natural formations it built out of her veins have been thoroughly scrambled, and she can feel how starved it is with all her energies feeding elsewhere- but it’s still helping, doing something she can’t quite track to her bones and reinforcing them in a way she hasn’t seem before.

…Ok then.

Raika, struggling to breathe as her opponents heal their one wounded, her insides ground up with quartz and the star-skinned about to crush her, decides to do something very stupid.

Groping blindly along the connection between her physical body and the abstract landscape of the Heart, she grabs her reactor- and shoves it into the valley of her Soul.

An instant later, the star-skinned soldier drops a traincar of about ten tons on her chest, the array pinning her down multiplying it a couple more times.

There’s a crack, like a particularly large bug being stepped on, and then a much louder splurting sound- and then the hangar bay goes quiet.

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All four cultivators are drained. Nascent Soul might be the line where human ends and divine begins, but it’s not so great a step they can pull out powers like this freely. The lightning cultivator crackles as his skin repairs, the bright glow of his flesh magnified as he transforms in and out of lightning to repair his wounds in seconds rather than minutes. The array cultivator is sweating profusely, his artifact holding hostage a chunk of his Qi even as he maintains the array magnifying gravity on Raika, and the star-skinned warrior is breathing hard, her transformed body still struggling with a few broken ribs. Durability at the cost of regeneration, perhaps.

A few more seconds pass, and the traincar finally warps in on itself, the gravity collapsing its roof and further squelching the body of the aberration.

“How long can you maintain it?” the star-skinned cultivator asks, not daring to look away. The thing came back from what should have been lethal wounds a dozen times, and even now, the winding body of meat and skin stretching down the hall indicates it might somehow come back.

“Another minute. No more.”

The cultivator in the kimono throws a pill over towards the array-master, who gratefully swallows it. “Minute and thirty seconds, but I’ll need to circulate after,” he amends.

“We’ll all need to circulate after this,” the lightning cultivator groans. “What the hell was that thing? Did you hear it talk?”

“Didn’t seem like a spirit beast. Not any kind I know. Never met a spirit beast my gemstones couldn’t grow through, but it’s like its blood was too thick for it. Screams bioweapon to me.”

“Fucking rebels,” the lightning cultivator says, spitting to one side. His armor is ruined, leaving his left arm and torso bared, but the wounds have vanished amidst the crackling of multi-colored electricity. “No low they won’t sink to.”

The array cultivator, in spite of his focus, shoots him a look. “The Empire uses bioweapons all the time. What’s wrong with flesh crafters?”

The lightning cultivator blinks. “Um… nothing, sorry. Didn’t know you felt that strongly about it.”

The array master snorts. It’s a conversation to be had, or not, somewhere else. He’ll hold the array as long as he needs to to make sure the thing stays dead, at least long enough to get some sappers down here.

“Look on the bright side,” the star-skinned soldier says. “No way we won’t be getting merit points for this. Daemon quarantine protocols and killed dozens of Core Formation troops- the reward is going to be worthy of us.”

The lightning cultivator nods with a grin, resting the ornate spear he wields on his shoulder. He looks over towards the kimono-wearing cultivator, who is even now beginning to remove his crystal outcroppings from the hangar bay.

“You’re on rotation soon, right? Next week? This young master would be honored to treat you to a proper visit to the second ring. You haven’t lived until you’ve drank with the dancers of the Western Expansion.”

“I’ll pass. My junior sister from my sect will be joining the Academy soon, I’m off to celebrate with her.”

“Oh! Congratulations! Two from the same sect so close is impressive,” the star-skinned cultivator says, her transformation slowly receding as she comes closer to the ground.

The kimono-wearing cultivator bows politely. “Thank you. It does us good, not to be entirely outdone by the second ring’s central six. Us third ring sects need to gain face where we can.”

“It’s a real struggle to get recognition out here, it’s true.”

All four cultivators whirl, the star-skinned one burning a bit of her Core to manifest her transformation again so quickly. The backlash is visible, but she does not flinch as the Qi burns its way through her body. The lightning cultivator is on his feet a half-instant later, electrical brilliance transforming back into his body from a higher vantage point.

The meat and blood in the crater at the center of the array is moving.

“Kai Toei! Is the array still at maximum?”

The array-wielding cultivator nods, his teeth gritting together as blood starts to run from his nose. “Yes! The Sevenfold Existential Mass array cannot decrease, only stop! To lose power means it breaks!”

“Good to know. It’s an impressive technique. Most complicated one I’ve ever seen. The sheer amount of runes… your skill is evident.”

Slowly, the mass of meat is reconstituting. A slash of four-colored lightning rips through the tail section of the crushed meat in the array, severing the meat-pillar from the body they were fighting- but the squirming continues. Bit by bit, little worms of neon-crimson are moving towards the middle of the body, beneath the traincar.

“You should all be proud. Each and every one of you eclipses me as a wielder of techniques. I’m creative, but your dedication shows in your execution and power. I would say I’m sorry it’s come to this, but your friends shot me in the head maybe thirty minutes ago, and I don’t forgive so easily.”

The kimono-wearing cultivator makes a seal with his hands, a sudden burst of Qi exploding from the quartz in the array, growing inside the remains of the creature. The crystals shatter immediately under the weight of the increased gravity, but they don’t stop growing, spearing into more and more of the wriggling meat- but it keeps moving.

“You four came down here to do your jobs. I know you won’t let me leave, there’s no reason to trust me when I say I will do no further harm to you and yours if you let me through. I offer it anyways. This is a place of mindless killing and death en masse. Let me pass, out into the fourth ring, and I swear on my Soul, my Qi, and my very being to never again attack this fortress or anyone in it.”

The words thrum in the air, like music. They have weight to them, putting every cultivator on edge- a vow, no matter who it is spoken by, is nothing to be taken lightly.

It is the star-skinned cultivator who steps forward, her transformation complete. She is towering at nearly thirty feet high, her skin the deep blue-black of the night sky, filled with stars. 

“We are honor bound to defend this place. You have reaped a tally of lives, whatever or whoever you may be, and an oath from you does not supercede our oath to fight on behalf of the Empire and protect its peoples in every way we can. You end here.”

The voice doesn’t return for a moment. The kimono-wearing cultivator breaks off his technique, the meat still wriggling even while perforated by crystal, and takes out a small bell instead. His Qi runs through the artifact as he begins to whisper, sending out an update.

A call for help, and a gift of information in case they don’t make it.

“I understand. I didn’t start this, but neither did you. I need to go past this place, and through you is my only way, now. You’re simply doing your job.

“But your fellow soldiers did blow my brains across a wall to feed me to a pit of monsters. And I do still need to get through. So let’s get to the killing and the dying, and find what honor we can in that.

“I’m going to try to eat you now.”

From inside the array, nearing the end of its lifespan, the traincar begins to move as something stands up from beneath it.