Chapter 70 - A New Ally, A New Horror, A New Idea, Oh My! (Patreon)

Alright! I am iffy on the ending, here; the intent is good, Raika being sneaky and trying to find a way to fuck over Zhoulong and Taurus, makes a lot of sense, but I'm wondering if it should wait a bit. I'd love to know your thoughts on it! It's not my favorite chapter, even as it gives our favorite baby boy a new role in the plot, my beloved. Input is appreciated on this one, I want to make sure I'm providing the best content I can for y'all!

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The blades are cold.

Her blood feels like it’s turning to ice in her veins, her muscles freezing in place, the bones shattered and sheared left like chunks of stone inside her rather than the strangely natural coral that she can feel within herself. She tries to draw in a breath, tries to say anything, and cold, stagnant blood flows past her lips and down her chin. Her robes, kept painfully (and at least mostly) intact all through her transformation and armored form, are torn as she is thrown, carried, skewered like a bite over a flame and cast into the wall-

And where the blades touch on the tight, contained pockets of Qi she has painstakingly regrown and brought once more to climactic, painful deviation, something goes wrong.

A third Qi, or energy, or something disruptive finds its way into semi-contained clumps of chaotic swirling Qi tied into her blood and her body and trace elements of the outside Qi she managed to capture in her transformation, and the three together do something worse than simple deviation. No, rather than deviation she can use,\, meridian-tearing clusters of razors and lightning that she can endure and force her body to adjust to are cut open by cold, black steel made from the Truth of the death of all, and a moment of catalysis occurs.

Her throat is penetrated, torn, impaled, full of cold and stagnation and pain.

Her heart struggles to beat, more than half its valves and muscles torn open by a long, slender cleaver.

And her stomach detonates like a gods-damned bomb.

She can feel her spine flex unnaturally, new bone structures resisting the stress of explosion, but most of what’s beneath her ribcage and above her hips is thrown away from her, organs and meat and bits of things she can’t identify decorating the floor in front of her as she is launched backwards further onto the blades by the kinetic force of the detonation.

She watches, choking, as her flesh burns, the combination of ambiental Qi, her own wild, chaotically altered energies, and the trigger in the form of a blade of perfect death all turn to fire.

Her blood burns gold and living scarlet, its edges turned white, like mist, barely even shaped like true, normal flame, and in the glow of her ruined flesh, she sees the other new constructs. One of them towers over Project 13, massive, sharpened stilts for legs letting five different upper limbs emerging from a properly made undead wrapped in black bandages stab down and emerge from the other side of the towering, twisted humanoid. Another she hears skittering, half-dozen limbs stabbing into the stone of the cavern and pursuing Jun Vral up a wall at breakneck speeds, a bundle of snakes and a black, glistening spider of machinery and murder whirling about the chamber almost faster than she can follow.

Taran’s guns start to fire, two new guns she hasn’t seen them use before, looking like fancy dueling pistols with awkward chains of additional bullets slotted into them. She’s not sure if she’s not seeing a fourth, her vision sort of flickering. The retort fills the room, but it feels muted to her, the “krak, krak” of repeated gunfire almost quiet in the face of her blood loss.

Limited time. She has limited time. The thought clicks into place, finally, the blood loss slowing her.

She’s maybe had worse injuries in the wilds, it’s hard to remember with the sleep deprivation, but she knows she’s been disemboweled before, the feeling of sharp edges through her throat and scraping her spine both deeply familiar, but one at a time at most, and always with her newfound regeneration to protect her. Here, there’s so much less; her Qi is undigested, because she has no organs to digest it with, and in the wilds Qi altered to work hand in hand with living flesh had been a bite away. Here, there is just the feeling of cold steel and the flow of blood leaving through cataclysmic damage.

Her attacker made a mistake, though. It didn’t kill her with its first hit.

Her relationship to pain is different now, her trial by beast, followed by a body that doesn’t really need pain signals to tell her what’s wrong, leaving her more equipped to move through agony than ever. Her mind shifts, slow and hazy but fundamentally still alive, and fires her will back into her body. Veins constrict, muscle groups cluster, cutting off blood flow to the gaping hole that is her former stomach area, current gaping hole of meat and death. Her heart continues to beat, tearing itself apart against the blade, and she’s going to lose bloodflow to her legs pretty quick if she can’t figure out a workaround for the ruined infrastructure of her midriff, but the priority is on her neck. She closes her throat, shifts veins away from the blade and closes off the crippled ones, already feeling a strain and headache conjoined by the the sudden lack of required blood-vessels-

And then a rush hits her as a fresh dose of life makes it past the blade that has so thoroughly killed part of her, doping her brain with its first hit of oxygen in almost a full second and a half..

Two choices; fake her death somehow, or find a weakness, now. Any wrong move and it can use a fresh blade, hit another clump of stored Qi deviation or simply pull its blade and slice its way out of her rather than dragging her along like a captured prize. Faking her death, in this case, involves both surrendering and somehow finding a way to survive her heart staying ruined. As fascinating as that experiment might be, she’s not a fan of the idea. Especially not with the at least two other constructs still in a place where they can murder Taran.

So, taking as big a risk as she has in at least a week, thank you very much, she creates and splits open a seam in her throat and through her ribcage, and throws herself away from the blades.

It doesn’t go perfectly, or even all that well, but it works. She grabs at the ground, digging her fingers into stone and grabbing at the one of the blades and pulling herself away from them even as she opens throat and torso worse than any conventional sword-slash could. It takes every ounce of focus in her addled brain to remember to restrict and then reconnect the blood vessels, to click things back into place, and even as she does she can tell it’s going slower. She lost a lot of Qi in that explosion, and even as she wonders at if she can replicate it later, try to do it on purpose, she can’t help but think she’d much rather still have all of it.

Her body grows new tissue because she tells it to, fueling it with what Qi she still has, and she focuses on her heart, trying to repair it and get her blood flow and Qi generating tool back-

Two more black blades stab down at her as she writhes on the floor. She dodges one, throwing her head to the side such that it only cuts open her cheek rather than going through her skull, but the other goes through her shoulder, going all the way through and a few inches into the stone beneath her to pin her entirely.

She looks up, the fire of her blood and the flashes of gunfire the only light to see by in the tunnel she’s been dragged into. The undead thing here is recognizable, wrapped in the full-body black bandages or cloth that the one that attacked Paleblossom city had been, rather than the other ones she’s been fighting, pale corpse-skin and mutilations on clear display. It tilts its head, sharpened spikes replacing its lower legs, five arms reformed and added to it, each one ending in a beautiful black sword, and pulls its face closer to hers, as if curious to her survival.

She feels it in her cheek, her throat, even her heart. They’re healing slower, a similar effect to the spiraling cuts of the lesser undead forcing her to burn through Qi at a ridiculous rate, willing her body to obey. She is her flesh as much as it is her, and she doesn’t want to die here.

The corpse doesn’t care. It raises one of its limbs, even as she reforms her free arm into an improvised shield, even as she convinces bone to spiral and grow and-

It stabs down, and as it falls, ready to cut her heart apart entirely, something on her chest shifts.

She feels a piece of cold steel shift, ever so slightly, and the blade hits Dink, suddenly pressed over her heart.

Except Dink doesn’t speak as she convinces herself it does. It doesn’t make its signature sound. A blade formed for a thing of perfect death tries to stab through it, and Dink rings.

The blade shatters to pieces. It shivers, trembles, quivers with vibration for an instant, and then shatters like glass, flying everywhere in pieces. The undead construct staggers back, forgetting her for a moment, staring down in confusion at its now ruined limb-

And she grabs Dink, swinging their tines against the sword penetrating her shoulder.

It too, shatters, taking the thing down to just three weapons now and destabilizing its balance long enough for her to throw herself back, superhuman strength coming in handy to get her away from it.

The thing looks towards her, but, seeming stunned for a moment, doesn’t move to follow.

She doesn’t waste the opportunity. With a flex of will and a sharp tearing, she casts aside her throat, growing all new flesh rather than trying to push past the “death” energies of the thing. It’s still slow, still slower than it was in the early beast-tide, but she knows how to use it better now, fixing just the bronchial tube and main arteries first to reconnect air and blood before the rest of it grows back at a more leisurely place. She starts work on her stomach, leaving most of her lower organs to the side for now and reforming structure so she can sit up and use her legs again.

Still, the construct stares at her, and she stares back.

In her hand, she feels Dink vibrate on its own. Just a bit.

She nods. Yeah, ok. She’s got an item spirit, apparently. If it was going to be anyone, it was going to be Dink, the incredible, unbelievable, perfect little bastard.

She can’t help but grin, wide and toothy like a shark. And the Construct takes it as a cue to sprint at her, skittering like a spider, black on black and framed by the light of the sunstone at the tunnel mouth behind it.

She doesn’t let it get much closer than that. Her heart is still healing slower, her body is still slowed and wounded, but if she loses the initiative or retreats it’s not going to work. She sprints forward, using modified arms and legs to literally launch herself off the ground, one arm partially transformed into a club and shield of bone both, the other wielding an item of immeasurable power capable of killing gods themselves.

Or at least breaking spooky metal. Wouldn’t do to let the little thing get too bloated an ego just yet, after all.

It pauses, its balance fine to stand on its sharpened legs but too top-heavy to walk without the use of its multi-jointed upper limbs, and casts its swords at her, a spasmodic dance of slashes and cuts that spark and slice pieces from the stone around them.

She blocks one blade on her shield, altered-density bone tough enough to trap the blade even as it’s cut, long enough for her to touch Dink to it again. The vibration this time takes longer, and she has to dodge two more cuts, one slicing across her ribs and forcing her to shed another piece of skin, before the blade finally cracks-

And doesn’t shatter.

Limited ammunition. It’s all right, she thinks to the tuning fork; happens to the best of us, little guy.

She snaps off the partially broken blade with the shield it’s trapped in, pivoting under a now decidedly lopsided construct. She lets her body use its new senses, letting the lack of smell the thing exudes focus her on it in a world of blazing scent, letting her new eyes track its sword movements clear as day, letting new instinct stolen from that which she ate and used to rebuild herself prime her for movement-

And then in a flurry, she dashes into range, ducking once, pivoting once, dodging hard to her left, and then using the piece of black blade trapped in her bone shield to cut the abomination in half at the waist. There’s a sound of screeching metal-on-metal, a weird toughness to the pale flesh beneath black bandages, and then its torso flops to the ground, sword-limbs twitching and spasming but failing to do more than imitate a dying insect. It cuts all around itself, unable to move, looking like it’s in the midst of a seizure, cutting into its own self in the process.

One such cut opens up the bandages covering its face.

The flesh beneath is clearly dead, the eyes milky white, the teeth grit in a rictus of vigor mortis- and it turns to look at her.

For an instant, she makes eye contact with a dead woman. For an instant, the blades slow. For an instant, a smell, so faint she can barely detect it, flutters against her nose.

The corpse, for a moment, smells of fresh herbs, wheat, and sunshine. She smells like a happy day in the fields, under the kiss of sun.

And then it is gone, and the machine spasms and goes still one last time, and it is just a corpse again, the not-scent of the cold at the end of all filling the tunnel.

No time. She can still hear gunfire, still feel and smell the clashes of Qi and Truth in the sunstone chamber. She turns, still feeling slowed, her heart only barely winning its battle to regenerate lost valves against the cut, ready to rejoin the fray-

Mmmh. No. Patience. For once, think before you leap, she thinks.

She focuses on the sounds and scents, the glimpses she can see through the tunnel opening. There really was a fourth one, skittering along the walls, but 13 has their enemy well in hand, simply forcing its blades to remain trapped in their body as they walk into it, grabbing and crushing as they move. Only two of the remaining constructs are currently a threat, and she believes that they won’t be for long.

She wants Taran to live. She doesn’t mind it if the others do, to. But neither one is the objective here, not really. She likes Taran, the fact that they have the fight in hand making it much easier to justify leaving them behind, but she needs to be smart about this.

Taurus and Zhoulong, despite their differences, have made it clear their orders are to take in the monster that made these things in alive. They aren’t here to stop a monster, their orders are to research, to capture that which is strange and make it useful. Fuck them both, though. She might not be able to kill the weaponsmith first, especially not without endangering Maen and Li Shu, same as if she ran away, but if she can get information before the others, maybe find some kind of opportunity, then she might be able to act.

She looks down at the dead woman.

Yeah, she thinks. There’s that, too.

The corpses down here don’t smell like corpses, just like death and cold. While the scent of rot has been present amidst the weaker models, neither this one, the ones in the chamber, or the one she fought in Paleblossom city (well, helped finish off at the very end) smelled of decay. She can’t imagine that something more horrifying might be happening, not when, in the machine’s dying moments, she smelled something alive instead, that drop of Qi. She really, really doesn’t want Zhoulong to get his hands on this.

The team can handle itself for now. She turns into the dark and starts sprinting deeper, trusting in her newly altered vision and sensitivity to alert her of threats in the dark. There are a hundred easy lies and excuses as to why she went ahead of them (more of them came and took her away, easy enough to fake with all the scattered parts and footprints), and if she plays this right, if she’s careful and smart and doesn’t get in her own way, maybe, just maybe, she can find a way to turn this little adventure to her advantage.

And yes, fuck over some authority figures, too.

She just has to make sure it doesn’t come back to break something else this time.

The smell of tangerines haunts her down the hallway, into the dark, towards danger and the faint possibility she’s changed enough to do a little rebellion right this time.