Chapter 385 - It’s All Coming Up Raika, This Time For Sure

Alright! It did come quicker, it did also take a while. But we're here, we're queer, we're moving forward, we're not looking at the scary numbers we're just gonna do good and keep going!

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The issue with any ongoing conflict is that wars should not be, but ultimately are, won by individuals. They are most often won by systems, series of institutions and structures which balance logistics with murder and plan for and compensate for things, but they are not always won by systems. The existence of Qi fundamentally creates a single, unenviable reality to any prolonged armed conflict- it can end at any point that the strongest person involved wants, because they’ll be strong enough to do more than the armies could ever do in far less time. Without rules, expectations, social demands and systems, every conflict against every major group would not be fought amongst the masses or against armed troops, but between a handful of individuals that can singlehandedly redraw topographical maps of a region.

-Soldier’s Academy assigned reading for introductory coursework: Armed Conflict, Escalation, and Understanding the Risks, volume 1, version 317, written by General Chao Quei, famous for his singlehanded victory over the  Xi-Eng family’s rebellion in the year of our Emperor of Emperors, 1007.

—----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The city is on fire, and it is very much her fault. 

Thousands upon thousands of nails, implanted into key points of the city’s living and undead architecture, burst in sequence. Pre-prepared arrays and intricately carved spells, seconded by Raika’s favorite expert in bio-engineering, finish feeding on the constant flow of Death energy flowing through the infrastructure of Viviae, and begin to blossom. 

Most of them manifest as parasitic counterparts to the unnatural flora that make up the city’s architecture, Li Shu’s invention of Death-consuming dynamos in the form of pale white wood and black flowers overtaking large chunks of the fungal makeup of the city. Almost as often, however, are multiple manifestations of Echo-stuff, Raika’s own works with array-crafting and Death-wielding forming ghostly limbs, entities, and outright beasts from out of half-real flesh and matter, which run rampant through everywhere around them. Limbs, organic ghosts, and twisting abominations make themselves known, tearing the city apart.

And yet, the number of screaming civilians remains about the same, even as Viviae’s clans begin to retaliate, acting against the sabotage. The damage is mitigated, directed, pointed where it can do the most harm with the least damage to the actual citizens of the city that she is very much invading and assaulting.

The last few weeks have been a mixture of reconnaissance, creating a false sense of security, and establishing the tools to cause today’s events. Understanding how the city works, what parts of its infrastructure can be destroyed and which would take things too far, as well as luring the defenders into a false sense of security as she slowly built everything up. She didn’t plant a nail with every little outing she took- too often and she’d get noticed, inevitably. She made just enough that when shit truly goes off, when the trigger is pulled, the city is left in turmoil, but not in ruins, all while flying under the radar.

That phase has ended.

Several presences erupt from the clan towers in the center of the city, actual Bishops and above beginning to move to respond to the threat bombarding their city. Not all of them, luckily- the presence of Godsfall’s armies on the horizon ensures that some of them hold back, keep their strength for the oncoming conflict rather than the current one. Still, she can sense a good four or five presences proclaiming themselves throughout the city, manifesting their Deaths as a layer upon reality rather than a bygone moment.

It feels remarkably similar to a Soul, as per usual. A new version of reality, or an addition to it, manifesting out of nothingness and into form. Whole parts of the city start to suffer, and dozens of the exploding siege-traps start to become unmade. A series of ghostly limbs is overtaken by an impossible bacterial growth, manifesting out of literal nothingness, while a fresh copse of Death-eating trees withers under the life-drinking Rot of one of the Valdir Clan’s assaults. 

Between the lesser clergy dashing around and the higher clan members deciding to risk their powers on this blatant opening salvo, she’s gained maybe a few minutes of time in which to act. 

Where she was sitting and drinking tea, a grander trap has been sprung. The puppet she was wearing and the array she crafted, pulling from the wider interconnected formation of the nails, have transformed into a massive beast, currently swatting at the lesser clan members and tearing chunks out of buildings to throw as missiles all across the landscape. It’s an abomination of pale, oozing wood, bone, and black flowers, a half-dozen limbs spawned from it and allowing it to throw itself fast enough to leave afterimages as it tears apart its pursuers. Every time it pauses, more and more puppets emerge, skeletal, Blacksteel-toting copies of each other made to run in random directions and start destroying chunks of the city, implanting fresh nails into spots she saw before but didn’t want to risk. 

The purple eyed Dreyus life-drinker is the one closest on her tail, actively launching violent blasts that turn everything they touch into wriggling masses of rats and insects. They skitter and hiss and bite at the construct, swarming over it but making little headway, even as the abomination screams in a thousand voices and launches itself to and fro. One clergy member dies, then another, pulped into messy puddles by the force of the beast unleashed amongst them, several puppets usually emerging at the sites of the deaths to harvest the bodies for fresh material.

Homes, businesses and sculptures all detonate as something with far too much mass for its size moves at nearly the speed of sound, shattering everything it touches and grabbing or striking around itself as it moves. It’s a berserker, a blind construct born for violence, and it outclasses everything around it in that respect.

But it’s outnumbered.

Even as more and more puppets emerge from out of its shadows and Echo-flesh, the clergy advance, all three clans of Viviae battling against it. There are delays as some of them compete, occasionally hesitating to avoid letting a rival take advantage, but they do, overall, tend to work decently well together. Homunculi are launched and explode in bursts of rot and maleficent cancer while decay and transmutation spells fly through the air, tearing chunks out of the hex-beast.

Raika laughs as she catches sight of one of her targets actually stab another in the back, literally, drinking dry their Death even as the area they could have guarded gets destroyed by the abomination they could have been fighting. She’s pretty sure, based on reading lips, that she blames her victim for trying to attack her, even as she’s drawn back into the fight by the other defenders.

It’s a lot less fun, watching it all through a scope, but it’s too much to not have at least a little bit leak through.

Sighting her target, she pulls the trigger.

The sound doesn’t carry all the way to the city. She’s too far away for that. In spite of this, dozens of heads turn to her location simultaneously, immediately aware of the crack of gunfire by the weight it has rather than by sound. 

A life-drinker starts to scream. Their suffering is momentary, done in a heartbeat, but in that time they unleash the most piercing, heart-wrenching sound of agony that most have ever heard. In an instant, they experience Pain beyond pain, and the instant after, they simply explode.

Not from the bullet, ironically. Turns out, if you can imbue someone’s body, mind, and even soul with enough agony all at once, the resulting spasm can make them literally tear themselves apart. 

The wet splatter of her first target falls to the street in a rain of murky, rotted blood and strands of cloth- and the second shot hits its target, eliciting another scream.

From atop a fungal bloom, approximately six hours of walking travel from the city, Raika pulls the trigger again. And again.

An invasive plague of flora, massive manifestations of Echo-flesh and her hex-abominations (like hex-hounds! Fun to say), the strongest of her constructs and now the screaming of clergy, loud enough to echo. 

The city is worse than on fire, and it’s all her fault.

It feels messy. Painful. Beyond the obvious. Raika feels, with every pull of the trigger, the chaos she’s causing, not as a consequence of circumstance, not as an accident relating to a conflict with someone who’s done her wrong. This is intentional.

Shock and awe. The more damage she can cause, the quicker this all ends- and even then, she’s stuck behind limitations. She sees civilians, people she’s interacted with through her puppets, screaming, hiding, running in fear. She sees, through the scope and through glimpses from the puppets unleashed onto the city, the panic and distress she’s causing.

She doesn’t block it out. She’s here, present, aware. This is her responsibility.

She can’t deny it. She won’t ignore it.

She pulls the trigger again. 

She’ll take responsibility.

And it is the right decision, as far as she can tell. Given a limited timeframe, not enough power to just walk in and make demands, and the framework of the war-games she’s operating under, it’s the best that can be done. It’s a weird detente- she doesn’t want to really remove the Fallen Kingdom’s ability to wage war, which means that, between that fact and the civilians in the way, there’s a hard limit to how much damage she can do. Most of the clergy also don’t really care about fighting each other- they don’t want to march, actively want to show her up or remove her, but they’ve all known each other for millenia. Age-old truces, old habits, and the simple fact that they’re trying to keep their civilization at least a little alive all mean that the Church isn’t going to move in such a way that it might kill itself.

But they do very much want to kill her.

Her allies and enemies are playing with gloved hands against each other, trying to save face and play political games in all aspects, and actively trying to remove her specifically from existence. And if she pushes too hard, her own allies start to turn against her. She’s under no illusions that the Church’s loyalty is to itself more than it is to her, even as it pertains to the Bishops of Godsfall. 

So- shock and awe. 

Tell them, to their faces, that she could do worse. That in this little game they’re all agreeing with, even if they do act as Bishop Anaya of Mortaris did, they’d still show themselves as weak, still prove to the world that she could have done worse and she forced them to break the rules.

Of course, if they don’t get caught, don’t care about getting caught, or manage to excuse it if they are, well… it’s all fair game then, isn’t it?

So.

She’s spent a good two weeks harassing, playing with, and embarrassing the locals. She’s revealed that, in spite of acting in broad daylight, she set up a scary-as-fuck plan that has the city currently being torn apart. And now, the city is filled with the sounds of some of its most powerful and twisted individuals screaming in unimaginable agony.

Pretty good run so far.

She pulls the trigger, and her Gun made of Pain shrieks, pulling on instincts embedded in all that’s once lived and which doesn’t like to suffer. 

Another life-drinker screams, shrill enough to match the initial echo, and then spasms so hard he tears himself apart.

She turns, pulls the trigger, and fires.

It’s not her preferred way of fighting, but there’s an appeal. The scope of a rifle against her senses, the stock against her body, the way that it bucks and recoils at the pull of the trigger, how the world changes in response. 

The city of Viviae descends into chaos as she tears its stability apart, all to the sound of screaming demigods.

“Everything ok over there?” comes a little voice from beside her.

She turns, just enough to look at the shard of keratin with the corner of her “sight”. Li Shu’s voice transmits through a piece of her Sacrifice,  a small shard of keratin forming strings to vibrate as vocal cords. Part of the advantage of arrays and Craft users- unlike a cultivator, who is where they are, Li Shu kinda-sorta is wherever her Sacrifice is. She could launch a shard of keratin to the opposite end of the world and still be able to control it just as easily, see through it (if that’s part of the concepts infused in it) just as freely. 

“Fine,” she replies. “The kid doing ok?”

The shard of keratin tries and fails to make a snorting sound. “Please. Like you aren’t watching him like a hawk.”

“I’m actually not. I’ve got a few puppets around him, and his robes are pretty well enchanted, but other than tracking his general location and the threats around him, I’m leaving him be.”

There’s a moment of silence over the line, through which Raika can feel Li Shu’s smug little smile.

“Yes, Raika dear, your martial son is doing fine. Helping with the evacuations, mostly, and making sure that the mess stays under control. You know my Sacrifice can pull him out in a heartbeat if we need, and you’ve got enough arrays in that poor boy’s clothes to stop a hit from Bishop Anaya. He’s fine, and flying beneath the clouds, avoiding higher hunters for now.”

“Ok. Good.” She pauses to pull the trigger again. “Any sign of changes?”

“Yes. If we’re going to make it to Mortaria on our timetable, the army’s going to have to start turning now rather than later, so pretty soon it’s gonna be obvious that we don’t intend to attack the city with it. At that point, the elders are probably going to emerge in force and wipe us out. I’d say you’ve got just a few hours left to make our point.”

“‘Our’ point, hmm?”

“Believe or not, sister, I do actually believe in your cause. It’s hard not to. I may not always connect with your methods, but you know that we both want a better world, and I’m just as willing to work for it as you. So yes- our point. The point being that we can win this. That they can get on our side or get behind us.”

“Damn right.”

She pulls the trigger again.

Something appears beside her.

The aftershock of its arrival comes a millisecond after, the sheer velocity with which it traveled making the air detonate around it. The shockwave leaves the fungal spire Raika was perched on a ruin, dissolving it in a flash-fired instant that tears it apart more forcefully than a hurricane, launching her away.

Pre-prepared defenses form a shell of Echo-matter around Raika, manifesting force, kinetic impact and heat runes to absorb and redirect the damage away. It stops her from getting torn apart instantly, but still launches her a good distance away, letting her flip and tumble through the air.

A second set of runes, this time carved into the ground beneath her, grabs hold of her, bleeding away the kinetic force and momentum and redirecting her hard to one side, dodging the re-arrival of the figure. 

The second time, they hold still for a moment, letting Raika’s tumbling move land her on another fungal spore-tower, which creaks from the damage that it’s suffered, but manages to hold her weight. 

A massive woman, almost ten feet tall, her body writhing with tens of thousands of centipedes crawling in and out of her arms, floats static in the air. Her eyes glow a brilliant emerald, tracking her movement as Raika comes to a rest.

“Hi there!” Raika calls, waving with her Blacksteel arm, holding her Gun with the other. “Fancy meeting you here, Elder Dreyus!”

The higher Bishop says nothing, simply glaring down at her. As if waiting. The centipedes begin to dribble out of her limbs, her flesh shrinking ever so slightly as they fall. As they reach the ground, the strange insects begin to massively increase, multiplying in scale, to the point that hundreds of building-sized entities are starting to crawl and slither across the fungal landscape beneath them both.

“I don’t suppose you’d allow me to keep blowing up your city, would you?”

The pale-skinned, corpse-like elder furrows her brow, the only hint of a reaction that she transmits. There’s some hints of Intent in the writhing of the centipedes coming in and out of her, but it’s a bit too diffuse to identify, especially with Raika’s unfamiliarity with that particular kind of language. 

“Sooo… can we…”

“I am determining whether or not your clown act is, in fact, an act,” says the elder.

“Ah!” Raika nods, acknowledging the wisdom. “Understandable. If I may assist- I am, in fact, a good actress. The best actors, however, tend to play with the truth. I’m pretty clownish, admittedly.”

The elder hums, ever so slightly.

And then a sea of centipedes, each the size of a small building and utterly shredding through the landscape in their movements, forms a swarm that launches itself at Raika.

The keratin shard of Li Shu’s Sacrifice reappears, shattering into a fracturing mirror of keratin that opens and unleash one hungry hungry crocodile. 

The centi-croc emerges, and if each centipede is the size of a building, he’s grown to the size of a city street. A massive, multi-layered maw slams shut with an explosive crack of teeth, shredding and shattering dozens of the insectile summons. It doesn’t stop there, either- the centi-croc goes wild, diving frenetically into the pool of squirming meals that have presented itself to the hungry hungry lizard, and in seconds, the fungal jungle is being shredded, torn apart into spores and shrapnel as her spirit beast companions rides forth into battle.

She doesn’t have a ton of enhanced senses at the moment, but considering Beetle’s size, it’s gotten a lot easier to see him riding atop the massive reptile, his legs waving victoriously in the air as they ride into battle. 

By the time the centicroc and its commander have hit and broken the wave of centipedes, the elder Dreyus has its hand up, aiming an attack- and meets Raika, pointing her scope right back her way.

Swarmhusk Technique: Starvation Empowers The Desperate

[TRANSCENDENT ART: A BULLET FOR EVERY BREATH]

In the distance, the city continues exploding.

It’s a good day.