Chapter 384 - The One Where The City Starts Having A Bad Time

I really need to get my shit together about chapters! Feel like I keep trying to make them better rather than make them done. This sort of mindset shift is a big issue with my editing but ugh. That plus the trips (Japan and then Seattle in less than 2 months) and I am ALL out of whack. Here's to keeping things schmoovin as best we can, loves. I shall continue to push forward and move back into a place where I can output the stuff y'all came here for- I miss posting more frequently, and I definitely miss what those numbers can do for me being able to eat in a given month. It feels good to write and finish chapters. I just wish it felt easier than it is ;(

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It’s always so appealing to look at the accumulation of power as the ability to directly conquer and counter that which you face. There are thousands, perhaps millions over the eons, who have found their deaths in the assumption that they would be able to overpower and annihilate anyone before them. They were wrong, of course. The truth isn’t that there’s always someone stronger, it’s that there’s always someone with something you don’t have. 

I have seen sorcerers capable of summoning event horizons and newborn suns fall victim to a well-placed word. I have seen warriors whose blows could shatter mountain ranges be felled by an unexpected venom. I once actively faced a Beast which could consume or claw apart anything that lived, and watched it break itself and come apart in the face of a few hundred mechanical constructs. 

Asymmetry. Finding what you can do that someone else can’t. Realizing that you inevitably have things that you can’t do. The best way to survive, then, is to cover as many bases as possible. Never let yourself fall to the assumption that mastery of a single aspect will grant you victory over all the others. Always make sure to be learning, to be examining your own weaknesses, to find ways to expand your repertoire and skillset. To become predictable, to become single-minded and blinded to other options, is to create whole battlefields in which you are blind and already outmaneuvered.

Be more. More complex, more powerful, more multi-faceted. To try to cover all your bases with only a single item, only a single tool, is madness, and not the competent kind. 

-Historical journal, kept in the hidden libraries of the Feng Clan. Attributed to the Feng Patriarch. Unauthorized viewings punishable by six centuries of torment, ending in inevitable execution.

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For weeks, Raika has run rampant throughout the city, turning its well-worn gears and well-evolved organs into disorganized chaos. Never so much or so viciously that she became the city’s sole focus, not with the armies of Godsfall approaching, not with the Bishops encroaching on the horizon against their own clergy. It’s a delicate balance, an act of care, to add enough disruption that what came before can’t be cleared away in time, but never cause enough damage to bring down the powers-that-be.

She’s becoming a fixture, honestly. Hundreds of times a day, all over the entire city-state, her puppet-bodies, formed into and of her own ghost, causing all sorts of mischief. Damage to infrastructure, just enough to close off the occasional road; paint and minor arrays and other visual disruptions, which need to be cleaned up but aren’t so deadly as to kill; tearing up vehicles and pouring pollutants onto food and supplies. She supplements the harm by adding a little playfulness, a little mischief. Rare reagents tossed about back and forth in her wake, small crimes stopped on her route, some of the shittier parts of the city finding themselves suddenly propped up. Food delivered in surprise locations, resources redistributed in all sorts of fun ways. 

A trickster spirit, a nightmare to manage, a folkloric little devil in the making. Every time, she gets caught, and every time, it doesn’t matter. Smoke and keratin make new portals in new places, and newly formed puppets spread seeds and nails throughout the city as they run amok. Not so much of an issue that she needs to be stopped, that the resources kept for the encroaching army are turned towards her, but not so little that she isn’t making things build up, adding pressure. 

Li Shu came up with the idea. Slower than what Raika would normally do, but also more stable- it’s the difference between a viral plague, burning through a system, and a slow infection, seeping bacteria bit by bit into the whole system.

That’s a fun one. Bacteria. So many interesting names for things, things that Raika neglected. 

But it’s time to switch things up.

Over the course of six hours, the endless antics pervading the city start to wind down. A self-fulfilling cycle plays out, as all those who are particularly motivated to stop her slowly gain more resources with which to do so. From morning to afternoon, the city of Viviae goes from an ever-bustling chaos to experiencing a strange peace. No one’s fooled, of course. Even in a place as unchanging and strange as the Fallen Kingdom are, people know what it means to feel calm before the storm. 

Out of a portal of shade and smoke, Raika hops out onto a rounded rooftop, wearing one of her corpse puppets. Rather than rush off, this time, she takes a seat. She sets out a portable little table, placing a series of glass bulbs, a kettle, and a few small cups on it. 

She looks to her powers, forming a brief manifestation of Echo-matterial and shaping it to the arrays she needs. The kettle starts to warm, runes for heat and energy containment slowly bringing the water up to a boil. As it heats, she takes a series of ground up herbs, some roasted, some only dried, and puts them into one of the bulbs. Slowly, the kettle starts to hiss, bits of steam escaping from it. 

A shrill little whistle starts to echo across the roof of the building. 

The ground directly beside her explodes into whistling shards of bone, slashing through the air and spattering off the shielding array she carved when she arrived. 

A purple-eyed woman, clad in monochrome robes and bright white patterns of the clergy, stands with her feet entrenched in the bone of the roof.

“You.”

Raika smiles. There’s no illusion this time, nothing worn over the home-grown flesh, vines, and worms of her puppet. Messy, but in a controlled way. Dead, but in a writhing way, as soil dies. The smile is all teeth and necrosis. 

“Me.”

The Bishop of the Dreyus clan is only the first to arrive. Within moments, two other Bishops, these ones bearing the crimson eyes of the Valdir line, join them on the roof. They transform from out of smoke and mutant animal forms to become humanoid on the rooftop, and she can see several other members of the clergy, their eyes glowing in multiple alternate forms. They’re distinctive, these clans, but even with that, she recognizes some of them more directly. She’s been harassing most of the people approaching for a good long while, after all.

She can see that one guy who always tries to do a speech when he “gets” her, his body a swarm of corpse dust that rematerializes into his body. There’s another one that she’s bullied once or twice, who turns into a series of small homunculi that launch themselves in whatever direction is needed, bright green eyes manifesting in every one of them. A bunch of funky little fellows, really. 

She doesn’t bother to wait for them all, though. She only needs a few. They’ll get politicking pretty fast, arguing over who gets what. Momentum. It’s important.

She pours the hot water into the contraption of glass bowls, carved for her as a gift by her kid (and partially as an excuse to have a break from his homework). The bubbling water touches the ingredients, rapidly infusing, before it starts filtering, drop by drop, through the others.

“So I’m sure you’re wondering why I called you here.”

One of the bishops snorts, taking the broken silence as an excuse to start moving. He steps forward, waving a hand as he summons-

Doesn’t really matter what he summons, because the array wrapped around her burns for a moment, the runes and arrays she carved down into the roof making her shield reach out. A manifested hand of smoke and Echo reaches out and yanks at the forming spell, tearing it apart in a way that backlashes directly against the clergy. 

His eyes are wide, bright red and startled as his spell gets unmade.

“So you see, I figured, seeing as we’ve all become such good friends over the course of the last month, that y’all should get some early warning. Things are about to get a little crazy, and you all are going to receive the brunt of it, so, frankly. It feels only fair.”

“What does that mean?” asks the Dreyus clergywoman, her eyes squinted and shining dark purple. “For all your chaos, the city remains. You’re actively being contained as we speak. Your threats are as wind in an open field- real only for a moment.”

“Oh I see you talking fancy now, huh. Where was all that poetry during the fireworks incident?”

The purple-eyed woman snarls, moving forward-

And blinks. 

Raika smiles, the pressure around her finally starting to become tangible. 

She’s spent a month running circles around the city using the least of her tricks. 

This isn’t that. 

The array carved into the roof, extending a few dozen feet down into the building proper, pulses and flexes with the energy it’s accumulating, the force it’s been drawing in through the building. Slow and subtle, but it’s connecting itself to a much wider network, and that grants it advantages. Enough Death energy to kill a city block slowly roils through the carefully prepared sequence of spells she’s carved, coiling in spirals up towards whatever comes closest to her.

It is, single-handedly, more energy than they’ve seen her use in the entire month that they’ve been chasing her.

The liquid in the glass bulbs reaches the pipette at its end, and with a slight push to get the glass out of the way, flows into a cup she’s holding for herself. 

It smells a bit sweet, and a bit harsh, herbal and heavy with hints of bitterness.

Raika tilts the cup into her mouth, letting the wasteful act flow out across the skinless, fleshless bone and soil that makes up her body. The flavor of the Death in the coffee, in the act of wasting it, tastes again, herbal and bitter, even as it spatters down her ribcage and over her pelvis onto the roof. 

A few more have arrived, and the accumulation of power here is going to lead to a mess sooner than later. Either someone will act rashly and try to take credit for capturing her, someone will overestimate themselves and try to crack the barrier, or, worst case scenario, this much clergy all together in the same spot will call out some of the bigger players in the clans.

“I get it, honestly. If anything, all this rage? Makes me happy. I have truly pushed myself to annoy all of you as much as possible, and it’s great to see those results in action. Ran from every confrontation, shit in as many of your plates as possible, and oh I do hope that I have made every district, building and person you’re all responsible for just a mess to deal with.”

She can feel several of the lesser clergy that have arrived tensing up at that. Rage, trepidation, concern, all mixing together with a genuine wariness at the fact that she’s sitting on what might well be a bomb.

“So when you’re angry, I enjoy that. Also, I apologize- can I get some names? I know I’ve learned them, I just didn’t care enough to memorize them. I know we’ve got some Valdir clansmen, some Dreyus, I see little miss homunculus over there-”

“You haven’t earned our names, terrorist,” snarls one of the Valdir ones. Abrasive, that group. Something about all that Rot in them, just fermenting the little guys. 

“Well that’s disappointing,” she says, letting more of her drink spill down the puppet’s lack of lips. “I really thought we’d built a rapport. All those times I coated your patrol areas in rice and milk, that didn’t spark anything between us? I saw that they made you clean it up that one time- you really think that I don’t even merit your name after all that?”

He schools his expression at first, doesn’t snarl or anything- but one of the other clergymen, someone with the green eyes of the Eneru clan, snickers. Wisely, the cleaner keeps his composure- but the short expression of power that emanates from him is enough to get the array to react again, bulging and shifting towards him. Almost as one, every one of the clergy on the roof take a step back, eyes tracking the spell and the potent bundle of energy it’s built from.

“That’s alright. If it’s important, I can ask later. The point is, none of you are directly responsible for what’s about to happen, and I’ve already made quite a bit of trouble for you, so I figured I’d offer a little bit of my own personal brew and let you guys know that things are about to get messy. It’s silly, I know, giving up the advantage of surprise, but… I’m in a good mood. Most of you haven’t done anything I’d consider killing you over out of hand, except the ones who are about to die already. Things have gone off pretty damn well. I’m excited, even. All this buildup, and finally, things can really get moving. So. Best of luck. See you guys soon. Try not to End in the midst of… all this.”

The first part of the runic formation activates.

Across the city, breaching the walls at the perimeter between urban sprawl and fungal farms, a tree is born.

It erupts out of the ground moving fast enough to blur, the shock of its birth exploding the building it emerges from and knocks over several around it. Long, slender branches, too pointed to be natural and growing strange black flowers, start to spawn out from a central trunk that reaches fifty, then a hundred, then two hundred feet tall in seconds, displacing enough air for the growth to spawn a sonic boom.

And then the next part of the formation activates.

And the next.

The lesser clergy, the low-ranking clan-members that have been tasked with stopping her mischief, are staring, some slack-jawed, at the now-exploding city around them. Raika can feel the pressure of several greater Deaths starting to move, some of the clan’s actual Bishops emerging from where they’ve been squirreling their energy, even as their lessers start to try and perform damage control. Several of the smarter clergy are taking off to assist, with those who still think that Raika’s current puppet matters or who have personal reasons being left behind.

She smiles liplessly at the more recognizable faces in the crowd, letting some more coffee spill down her throat and rain in her ribcage. “Really should have checked my paths more thoroughly. Easy to hide some little gifts in all that mess I caused.”

And then the array she’s sitting in, connected to some of the others spread throughout the city’s infrastructure through roots of un-living un-dead plant matter, drinks in one last gasp of Death.

The tea set and glass vanish into smoke and silence as her puppet body smiles wide.

 “See you soon.”

The black azalea flowers that replace Raika’s eyes flash in obsidian sharpness before vanishing into the array.

Out of the dead bone and twisted flora of the city of Viviae, a hundred hands, each the size of small buildings, spawn from out of Echo-stuff and Death and pulverize a half-dozen liches.

The thing they herald, the core from which they grow, breaches the earth with a roar.

The city’s siege begins properly.