Chapter 382 - Another Step Forward

Alright so I'm currently in Washington State on a somewhat impulsive move (yes the same one that a third party scammed me about but which I moved forward about anyways fuckos), so technically I think this is a next-day chapter for me. So there. Enjoy! After the large-scale horrors and depths of Shin Ren's miniarc, it's time to come back to Raika- and enjoy how she's kept growing, because she just can't stop herself from healing sometimes.

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Frankly, I never got what people see about Viviae. Sure, it avoids Stillness better than most, but it falls into its own patterns. Plenty visible if you know where to look. And it’s always just so… sticky there. 

-Bishop Aria “Break Them Beneath The Treads” Chi-hoon of Mortaria

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Viviae is, much like its namesake would entail, a living city. 

In this it is deeply alien to its surroundings. 

Vast tracts of farmland crowned by fungal blooms and vast, miles-long carrion surround a city that feels so much louder than everything else around it, glorying, in some ways, in the idea of life-from-death. Those very same corpses, replete with necrosis and flesh that is always rotting but never quite seems to fully decay, are home to millions of maggot-things, feeding and spawning and being harvested to be fed upon in turn. Some of them are used as mulch for the other gardens, providing the raw materials useful for the fungal colonies to grow. 

The city beyond them both reflects their nature and refines it. For one thing, it has color- the red of flickering flame, the greens and blues of bright paints, the purple of spellcraft tied to unique defenses and arrays in the infrastructure around them. There’s smoke emerging from homes, sounds of voices, laughter, shouting and more, all of them overlapping to make a strange background that echoes against the universally flat geography of the land. 

Compared to Godsfall (which it seems is quite a bit of an outlier anyways), it’s borderline chaotic, so different from the stately silence and programmed actions of the dead there that it feels like something from another time. Massive skeletal architecture forms the backbones (heh) of most of the buildings, contrary to the industrialist or almost performative structures of Mortaris and Godsfall, and the specter of death exists alongside that with blooms from it.

Raika can see herself spending some time here. Maybe when things aren’t quite as hectic.

Something blows part of her head off, and she has to scramble around the next corner to avoid the follow-up attack.

Fungal spores and strange insects bred for projectile purpose spew out after her, chipping bits of stone and bone off of nearby buildings as she sprints through an alleyway, cackling loudly as she goes. Her pursuers are mere steps behind, but she puts on a show anyways, making sure that they can hear her every step on the way.

They’re already catching on, true. She’s pretty sure she can sense a good half-dozen other members of this particular militia going around to try and catch her in a pincer maneuver. She leaps over a vagrant, making sure to shed a bit of spell-infused bone down as she does, then runs halfway up a wall to turn a corner at speed, only to dive above a maggot-mule carting some kind of procession of weapons towards the far gates. People yell and shout as she passes, cackling joyously in the most maddening tone she can manage, and she sees kids, adults, beastkin, mutants, corpses and the living side-by-side.

It’s just such a lively city.

Something reeking of vitality appears as if out of nowhere directly in front of her, in midair. She’s not strong enough as she currently is to stop herself, and a hand shoots out to grab her while she’s still in the middle of the street, above the heads of the crowd.

Alabaster skin and glowing crimson eyes make up one of the prettier men she’s seen recently, a long black cloak complementing his rather form-fitting clothing and overall flair for the dramatic. It’s funny, looking at him- even as some of her senses tell her what he “looks” like, others, deeper down, describe to her in loving detail the way that his porcelain skin oozes with blood that is not his, stolen moments and tainted vitality oozing through worm-veins and overwhelming decay transformed to something else. 

Not a Bishop, though. His Death wears him, not the other way around. He’s past the point of sentient undeath, sure, but he hasn’t mantled his own End the way the greater members of the Church have.

She smiles, half of her current skull turned to a gaping shell, revealing the plant-thing growing within it.

“Ah! A Valdir!” She says, her voice carrying throughout the space in spite of the hand crushing what would, in someone else, be a functioning throat. “I’m flattered! What might bring about this honor?”

The man snarls, the crimson glow of his eyes deepening to the color of black and rotten blood. “Disruptor! You shame yourself with these techniques, these demonstrations of pointless chaos. I-”

“Well, they did get you here.”

The blood-drinker slaps her face hard enough to remove her jaw entirely, letting fall some of the roots and worms that make up the inner musculature of it.

“Silence! Your audacity may have earned you a right to trial in the face of the Church, but here, in Viviae, you meet your end! Shameless upstarts have no place running amok in our cities!”

At this point some members of the crowd below have begun to add their own weight to his proclamations, cheering or clapping at the performance the Valdir is putting on. The members of the local militia she’d tangled up have burst from a nearby ribcage, her earlier pursuers slowing and circling around the maggot-mule she’s suspended over as they arrive. 

“The outside world and its chaos knocks on our doors, and we rise to match it! Behold, citizens of the Fallen Kingdom, how the Valdir line once again secures us against those who would unmake our walls, who would cast our home into ruin! Just as the Necrai Stigmata were repulsed, as the Blackened Legion was cast down, so too shall this broken Bishop of a broken city be unmade!”

He’s really hamming it up. If not for how wasteful he’s being with this whole mess, she’d almost be impressed by the whole speech thing. Can’t even blame the guy- this much of a crowd, the mess she’s made, she’d find it hard not to try and make a show of things too. Reassure people, tell folks they’ve got it handled.

Unfortunately, she can’t have any of that.

Putting her hands on her hips and cocking her spine in spite of the way she’s being held by the throat, Raika sighs. “Come on now, I’ve barely even blown up a building yet! I’ve been rather polite about this whole thi-”

Another blow comes, this time shattering her skull entirely and dashing its contents into the air. Before they can act as any sort of vector for control or further spellcraft, the Valdir’s hand has shot out, catching and Ending every shred of her as he does.

“See how the clowns they send fall easily before us! Viviae! Together, we stand! Together, we triumph! For the Rot! For the Life! For the Church!”

“For the Rot! For the Life! For the Church!”

The chant is repeated up and down the street, with people cheering in time with the life-drinking Clergy’s proclamation. There are some jeers, Raika notes- a few people in what seem like local bars or cafes, well into their cups of fermented beverages, raise toasts that are as mocking as they are sincere. She makes a note of how the Valdir’s eyes track those who are particularly loud with their criticisms, and how they get real quiet once they’ve been properly noticed.

“You know, that’s entirely fair,” she says from the rooftop she’s been sitting on. “I mean, if I-”

The life-drinker is beside her, a flash of rotten crimson unmaking the entire edge of the roof and her body along with it.

“-was as scared as you were, I’d-”

Again, this time eliminating a whole chunk of the wall around her as she leans out a window.

“-be trying to raise morale too!”

This time, it’s the militia that catch on first. They cry out, but aren’t fast enough to get a shot off before the Valdir clansmen arrives to grab her by the throat again, hoisting her out from behind the mushroom-stalk that one of the local businesses seems to be using as support pillars.

“You measly little-”

She just grins before dissolving into a bundle of bones, worms, and plant matter.

She hears the crimson-eyed clergy vent his frustration on her failing puppet from a good kilometer away, laughing as she takes a bite of some kind of pastry made entirely of thin layers of deep-fried spores.

Her current body, like all of the others, is only superficially disguised as a normal corpse. Illusion arrays carved into the loose bones she’s wearing by the worms and Echo-worms she inhabits make her seem like a normal person at first glance, but only just. The more attention she draws to herself, the more quickly the arrays fail, bringing attention to her height, the Blacksteel prosthetic she continues to use for her left arm, and the fact that she’s…

Well, rotting would be too generous. She’s rotted.

Most of the corpses she’s passed by have some combination of animal and plant life growing in and out of them, acting in a sort of stylistic symbiosis that, for some, seems to be part of their cultivation as well. She’s even seen some of the still-living imitate the practice. 

Raika, on the other hand, is more decay than not. 

Individual bones are used as anchors for pale wood and vines, grown hand-in-hand with the black flowers they feed off of, with the rest of her mass made up almost exclusively of wriggling worms. Costs a lot less Death-energy overall to sustain, and creates the kind of feedback loop that Viviae has been excellent for studying. Li Shu is having a phenomenal fucking time about it.

Rai Jin is too, actually. Kid’s out there making friends.

She’s just busy disrupting things.

She takes another bite of the spore-pastry as a purple-eyed clergymember catches her running down another street, carrying a cart full of fireworks. 

“Will you stop that!” yells the woman flying above her. Not Valdir clan, not going by her eyes- and beneath them, the way that the blood she’s drank ferments instead of rots, life inverted through Death rather than Death sublimated through life. It’s a bit confusing. Point being- different clan.

“Be more specific, big sister!” Raika laughs, sprinting forward, jumping over people milling about the streets as they scramble out of the way. “Stop running? Stop exploding things? Stop beating you at your own-”

The clergywoman shrieks in world-altering frustration as she manifests a sea of spikes below Raika. 

Dozens of them impale her, cutting into or knotting through the vines and squirming not-meat she’s made of. Echostuff and decay both explode out of her in thick splatters, coating several innocent passers-by. 

The clergywoman lands hard enough to crack some of the smooth bone of the road, stalking forward in pale white robes and complex high-heels that leave little craters as she stomps. “Stop ruining my day! This is the sixth time today, you absolute-”

“Making such a bad impression for the kids,” Raika says as she lands on the fireworks cart her other, currently impaled puppet is holding. 

The indigo-eyed clergywoman roars, something bordering on the edge of anger and into bestial fury, and manifests a chunk of Echostuff and biological madness through the space that Raika’s upper half occupies.

But not before she’s summoned a spark of flame, dropping it into the cart of crude fireworks.

A third Raika hits the clergywoman with a wet dumpling from across the road, distracting and infuriating her enough that the resulting scream explodes both puppets, the cart, and scatters several currently lit fireworks across the street, much to the panic and cheers of the watching crowd.

The road lights up in hasty, poorly-colored and very smokey explosions as yet another distraction starts to overwhelm the city.

Raika’s puppet finishes off the tasty little spore-pastry and watches the literal fireworks, painting a dozen different streets across half the city. 

It’s pretty nice to let herself have a bit of fun, for once. 

Turns out, infuriating a bunch of uppity undead when they expect you to bombard them or face them head on is really fun. And she likes subverting expectations. 

With a thought, she finishes pushing Death energy and Qi into the spores that are currently being digested by a bunch of ghost-worms, stepping out into the middle of the street and popping her own head like a fresh firework all its own. 

The crowds, long since starting to get used to these little disruptions over the last few days, gives a mix of jeers and cheers, throwing bits of food and retreating from the spreading cloud of irritating but non-lethal fungus that will be shortly contained.

And in the meantime, while she continues to strain the city’s infrastructure and leadership to its limits, she unfolds out of more shadows, out of more bits of growth, planting long nails made of her deeper self into hidden corners as she moves, preparing further manifestations. 

Life is good. Undeath is pretty nice too. 

But there’s always more work to do.