Chapter 392 - Can't Stop Me Now~

And we are... still not confirmed on amazon! Really got a lot of things I can and should make sure to do differently next time. Live and learn! In the meantime- more chapters! More frequency! Joy and delight in this chili's tonight, fuckos! We're reaching the end of arc 9! Not sure if we'll get to do a whole assault on New Inquisum- we don't have to visit every single place, after all, and I've got some very juicy possibilities for a climax for all this.

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Self destructive behavior is not the norm for a cultivator- it is the baseline. Anyone that thinks otherwise is fooling themselves or attempting to sell you something. 

We stare at reality, and decide that it should not be this way. We go against our senses, our bodies, the systems under which we understand all things, and do so with the specific expectation that we will utterly transform ourselves. It hurts. It will hurt at every step of the way. It might begin as exercise, but each step deeper will require a far more fundamental transformation, and far more fundamental agonies with it.

Relationships, time, sensations, safety, comfort, more. Flesh and mind, bone and belief, all of these things need to be tested and sacrificed and changed and broken and rebuilt, sometimes from the ground up, forever. For the rest of one’s life. Forever. If you wish to remain a cultivator, to continue growing, and not to just leave oneself to another’s control or to gradually succumb to entropy, you have so be self destructive, because the self is all we are, and if it is not enough, it must be made more.

The strongest powers in the world are those who embrace the need for self destruction, and who manage to become something more than they were, to build on the bones of previously complete structures. They’re the ones insane enough to see what they are, and what they could have as they are, and say, forevermore, that it is not enough. That it could be better. That it could be different.

Some of them have a cost they won’t pay. Some of them have some anchor for themselves, something to hold them down.

Those that can’t relinquish that anchor can never take the final step. 

More. Better. Different. 

At any cost.

-“Examinations On Cultivation As A Whole”, by Grandmaster Errath of the Division of Research and the Division of Altered Cultivation

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The next few days continue much as the one before. A defensive line is established and, again and again, is breached, delaying the advance but never stopping it. Raika does most of the line-breaking, though on occasion, Bishop Seo En-Hyun does one, letting her breathe for a moment. 

In those breaks, she spends her time refining her approach. 

The amount of power she uses with each defensive line acts as a sort of stress-testing for her arrays and techniques, highlighting areas that still need improvements, places where she’s wasting power or routing connections poorly. Each iteration of her spears gets a little bit sharper, flies a little bit faster, helps her re-grasp some of the Dao she’s been cut off from- but always, she focuses on the arrays. Every time she manages to get a set of inscriptions as tight as she can, she rebuilds them, adding new runes, trying out new combinations. 

It’s an imperfect science, which is sort of weird for something so carefully calculated and documented by the Fallen Kingdom. Its properties are distinctive, the rules relatively straightforward, but it also has a sort of fluidity to it, where the order of runes and connecting lines between them makes a difference, but also, the proximity or shape of the connections can change the effects of that changed order. 

She starts to experiment with Intent, too, and that seems to have… interesting effects. It gives a similar feeling as when she started looking into the Craft, or when she started comparing the way that her body was changing through Qi saturation with her old cultivation.

There’s overlap. 

Not just that everything uses Qi and concept, not just that everything has rules and has ways of changing or escalating things. There’s overlap. Arrays, superficially, seem different than the ways that spiritual organs or more esoteric magics work, but it’s not- it just looks like it’s different when looked at in the smallest parts. The more complex it becomes, the more the ways that it starts to seem fluid, dependent on the person wielding it. 

Dao and Truth. Craft and Arrays. Cultivation and Necromancy. 

Overlap. Always. 

There’s something there.

It’s getting closer, every time that she finds a way to change things, every time she gets a bit of understanding about how things work behind the scenes. Probably. 

It’s still exhausting. Too dense by half, too much to understand all at once. Unlike the other, more intuitive or “organic” methods of cultivation she’s used to, there’s no instinct to guide her with arrays. Li Shu seems to see connections in a way that Raika just doesn’t, making her have to brute force her learning in more ways than one. 

Between advances, she studies. Rune after rune after rune, connecting line after connecting line, style of connections and types of interactions. 

Force has variations for “energy”, which have variations for heat versus kinetic energies, which have variations for electricity, for transfer of power, for movement between other runes- but they’re all also the same? Kind of? They’re too similar, like they all share the same descendant, written in the jagged, angular styles of the Fallen Kingdom. Then there’s direction, angle, scale, timing, size, quantity- all have their own runes, their own runic families, and unlike her more talented companions, she doesn’t get how to just “figure out” the changes from one rune to another in the same family. 

That’s without getting into more specific arrays, like those for veins, specific kinds of stone, specific kinds of wind-

She is trying very, very hard not to get annoyed about all this shit. She gets a little bit of comeuppance about it, though, every time that she lets go of the notes and books and starts to experiment.

In the distance, a metal machine the size of mansion rolls on massive tracks of steel and… some kind of rubber, she’s not sure. It, and the hundreds of nearly identical machines that cover the flatlands going forward, clustered around soldiers and bunkers, fires continuously at the incoming shielding of Godsfall’s armies. 

In a defensive war, it’s clear that Mortaria has some fucking serious advantages. Their terrain is mined with explosives, the landscape covered in wire bedecked in sharp points, and several emplacements of weapons or buried soldiers emerge as the islands pass above. By being aerial, they’re managing to get past most of those defenses fairly enough, though Centi-croc often has to act as counter-ambusher or climb on one of the islands to avoid it. Even still, there are whole fields of bunkers, artillery emplacements, towers of arcane might that cast bolts of enchanted power or weave intricate spells towards them.  None of them are powerful enough to stop another city, one wielding Bishops of tremendous power and skill of their own, but they’re also not even using all their strength. Its her one advantage- every city, every player in the game is holding back. 

Until one of them doesn’t, which presents its own issues.

Still, delaying her is enough. The longer it takes, the more time they have to set up a more efficient defense later on, the more likely it is that they’ll have something prepared to counter her specifically. 

That’s always the shitty bit. They don’t need to beat Godsfall or Viviae’s volunteers, the Church needs to beat her.

She’s got a plan in mind for when they actually try. In the meantime, they’re fighting a war of attrition without ever even needing to push back against her. 

She fights back by getting better. 

She fires a spear, and feels how it shatters the moment it cuts through the outer shell of the machine. 

The first of these “tanks”, as Seo En-Hyun calls them, vanishes in a single sharp shriek, every single surface cut or penetrated by the projectile experiencing Pain and a dozen different arrays and collapsing inward. 

Raika frowns, and with a gesture of will, makes bits of Blacksteel shavings melt off of her next spear, slightly altering the arrays on it. Carefully, she meditates on her Dao, Pain acting as the centerpiece through which every other comprehension she still has grows on, and infuses her Intent into the weapon. 

It’s all… there’s overlap. Like different languages, but always the same underlying ideas, no matter the alphabet. 

The language of Intent says that the spear is a thing of death and pain which overwhelms all. The language of Dao says that it is a sharp, honed projectile, which can cut anything, fly true, and cause agony untold. The language of arrays says… well, it says a shitload of stupid little details but mainly it says the same shit. 

The spear flies true, and in spite of the magical shielding and armor plating of the next tank, it too is struck and shattered.

This time the machine comes apart out, rather than in. The convulsion of an almost life-like response to agony, rather than cringing inward hard enough to implode, instead spasms out, each piece affected by the spear imparted with some of its power and force.

The world thunders as a crater forms around where the tank was, as hundreds of Deaths suddenly bloom in her garden as the nearby soldiers convulse and detonate, shrapnel from the tank touching them and transferring the properties of her attack. The bunker they’re surrounding explosively disassembles itself, the debris from that making some of the nearby tanks shriek in metallic agony as some of their exterior plating comes apart.

They survive, though. Damaged, partially disassembled, they survive.

Raika frowns at that. 

Well. Recycling and all.

She uses some of the energy of the Deaths she just caused to enact a few more modifications to the next spear, adding small arrays for durability and cohesion in the hopes that the shrapnel will penetrate further. 

In the distance, she sees several of the machines and the soldiers behind them starting to retreat. Partially machine corpses stomp and wheel away from the carnage sites, towards areas with less exposed terrain, towards underground tunnel-systems where they’ll be out of her line of sight. 

She fires again.

And again. 

And again. 

She’s lying there, limp, her corpse resting like a puppet without strings- because that’s what it is. The body she’s wearing isn’t even her original corpse- that vanished when she started undergoing necromancy training with Seo En-Hyun, rebuilt entirely from out of her anchors, which are in turn built almost entirely out of will and pure Death, manifested in a shape that used to be true. Now, without her actively believing that she’s alive, without her actively moving herself around, they all lie limp, emanating power but no more living than grave-dirt. 

All of her that she is willing to spend is in the way she changes the world around her.

Most of the last defensive line has retreated, the ash-coated flats of this part of the Fallen Kingdom littered with broken machines and corpse-meat, both fresh and old. A good chunk of the thousands that remain, their defenses proven incapable of stopping her, have already gone back underground, traveling through the miles of tunnels and transportation hubs beneath the earth.

They actually kind of remind her of the soldiers on the Wall. Not that she’ll tell them that. Not unless she wants to be really mean. 

She waits a few more seconds. Long enough for them to get mostly under the ground. 

Then she fires one last spear. 

This one has been marinating in her Gu’s poison for a few hours, a bit thicker and sleeker than the others. It’s got enough material for two or three of the thinner, shard-like spears, but is covered in enough arrays for a good four or five of them. 

The island she’s sitting on, long since evacuated and worn down to just floating rock, cracks down the middle. Then more. It begins to crumble apart, its structure too unstable to support even Glorianna’s complex runework. 

She thinks about how cold being dead is. How it feels to have no heartbeat. How it feels to burn alive. How it feels to have her brains shot out of her head, to bleed out, to break and to grow wrong and feel yourself unmade and torn open and violated to the depths of her soul. 

The world around her crackles, the air itself starting to hiss and distort and break down at the power she’s emanating. 

She thinks about how a Gun works, how a projectile is guided by force and design into a singular point of projectile force, a delivery mechanism for whatever is most useful or most devastating. 

She thinks of Blades, and how the sharp-edged shape of reality divides all within it. 

She looks towards the hidden tunnels, the tunnels designed to block her view and keep their forces out of her line of fire. 

She doesn’t have eyes. They’re corpse-jelly, sitting in rotten sockets, infested with worms and magic. 

She doesn’t see with her eyes. 

There’s a thin film of violent ends across the earth, the way that it’s been unmade, worn down, carved up and drained dry over thousands of years. It makes everything hard to see, even with supernatural energies, the Death of the land itself superceding in power all that walk atop or below it. 

But the flavor is off. 

Beneath the dry, tasteless death of the exploited terrain, there are a thousand thousand unique scents, relating to infinitely variable and yet similar foundations. Death by industrial press, by slaughter, by machines designed for efficiency in ending life, multiplied by the livelihoods and experiences of those whose Death was caused, whose Echoes now take up space, or un-space, in reality.

Every person she kills is one Death. 

Every clergy member she kills is one Death- and, if she does it right, if she claims it, all the Deaths they carry too. 

Another reason why the Bishops never go all out against each other, maybe. Not just to avoid waste of a limited, hard to renew resource, but to avoid unbalancing the politics of it all- one dies, and the other comes out exponentially greater. 

That’s fine. She’s factoring that in too. The plan is aaaaaall coming together. No worries at all. 

With a force of will, the spear she’s been building up for the entire assault fires out. 

The last of the island completely comes apart, shattering into dust. It would be joined by a dozen others if not for how closely she controls the force infused, if not for how precise the array-work. Days of nearly non-stop study allows her to imbue enough force into the missile that the air combusts around it, the thunder of the supersonic projectile unmaking what’s left of the island after the amount of violence it’s endured. 

She falls through the landscape, hundreds of tons of stone and grave dirt tumbling apart as enchanted violence finally unmakes enchanted stability. 

It’s joined by the land ahead. 

Eruption. 

The missile hits the ground, penetrating through a few hundred feet of stone, before every single bit of force she launched it with travels through the arrays and transforms, redirected to force the exterior of the missile out. 

It explodes with the force of a bomb, powerful enough to devastate a city, and then multiplies. Exponentially. 

The ground upheaves, then erupts, then explodes, everything touched by the spear acting as an extension of her Intent to cause destruction, to kill, to cause Death. The world for a few thousand feet in every direction from the impact site unravels, and the land, the air, the stone and space itself scream. 

Raika’s corpse shudders for a moment as the garden of her Death expands, growing so fast that, for a moment, the crumbling island starts to grow roots, phantom-life manifesting in the space where the Echo of un-life demands it be. 

And then she inhales, and exhales, and moves. 

In the blink of an eye, she steps onto Centi-croc’s back, Beetle stamping joyously at her arrival. The spears she didn’t use finish orbiting her, dropping down to the spirit beast’s back, and she senses Jin and Li Shu both stirring to meet her.

Behind her, a mushroom cloud of dust and ash tumbles skyward, an army of machines and corpse-soldiers turned to ruin behind her. 

A few more days, and they’ll reach Mortaria. 

They’ll be ready. 

So will she.