Chapter 381 - Into Something More And Less Than We Were

Hello! Bit of a shorter one, but you know how it is when I get poetic- too much and it ruins the pot, makes it too top-heavy. A smidge under 2k words, but they are delightful ones. A good way to relaunch into the story, I think. This ends Shin Ren's side of the story- now we head back to Raika proper as she deals with being a zombie girl in a zombie woooorld~, and that should lead us to the end of arc 9. See you guys again soon- I gotta get on my flight!

I stand here beside me

With no one to guide me

And pray I have found my way

For the first time in months, she IS. 

Cognition returns hand in hand with self-awareness, a burning schism that shatters self-imposed ignorance. She is as she was- and she is something new. She is reborn- and she is still dying. 

The Knife is still in the wound, but at last, she can think again. 

The Pillar segments away its perception of pain, moving the appropriate neurons out of the arranged machinery of its newfound body. It will decrease the overall efficiency of their physicality to lose an awareness of damage, lose one of the pivotal senses of self-awareness, but unlike its other fragments, it is best suited to more pragmatic changes, and there is a lot of pain in the gun-shade that was R***a. The gun-shade, in turn, evaporates large portions of the thoughts sent into it, dissolving them into smoke that suffuses itself like incense, flavoring the metal and powder as they transform.

A rotting thing, eating itself and the decay around it, spiraling like a snail into itself, blooms. 

The dead sands come alive.

Wraiths old and new shriek as they are impaled and imbibed, Echoes of unquiet war-dead being absorbed right alongside the bone-sand and millenia-old metals of old weaponry and armor. Several figures actively digging into the surface of what was the strange orchard of death in the desert are forced into active retreat, packs of Beasts and undead alike scrambling to escape- and being afforded just enough time, in most cases. What was a lake of war-Ruin instead comes alive as something far more, expanding exponentially into a sea. 

The response is immediate.

Hovering above the battlefield is a city in itself, standing as replacement to the collapsed fortress that was once the Breach. The Skyship Aurora, powered by three beating Hearts and held aloft by arcane sorceries that warp space and air and gravity itself, moves at last, after weeks of casual bombardment from on high. Soldiers cheer below it as the Pack is forced into retreat, the undead sorceries of their enemies are dispelled by its very presence, and the Breach is briefly retaken once more.

And then the Ruin of War arrives at their doorstep.

Iron sand and gunpowder and sharpened fractals shatter the idea of victory, spreading like tendrils of mold through the desert and beneath the lines of the defenders. People start to die, instantly, violently, impaled by spikes emerging chaotically from below, silenced by sniper-fire from strange and distant trees, pushed back by sudden and chaotic detonations. 

And then Aurora arrives, and makes good on her name.

Three Hearts beat, in spite of and because of the chains that bind them, and illuminate the world in divine glory.

Qi itself bends beneath the skyship as the world responds to the presence of Holy Will. Within seconds, a thousand-thousand spells colored by every iridescent shade of Dao manifest below the vessel of Imperial will, glowing brighter than sunlight in the sky above, overcast as it is by gunpowder clouds. The world transforms, with and against its own will, and suddenly the spikes and explosions and spreading Ruin are miles away from the Breach, sprinting and expanding forward through a corridor of equally expanding space.

The ever-shifting, almost fluid lights of the Aurora’s impact on the world glow, and a million different things become true at once.

Green life blooms in the desert. Sand becomes glass becomes water. Air becomes fire becomes inert gases becomes lightning. The world is thrown into controlled chaos, with thousands of different versions of the ground and local atmosphere forming and dissipating in sequence. Soon, the ideal transformations are achieved, the infinitely expanding space filled by a tranquility and growth at odds with the growing Ruin-

And then, gunfire.

The air around the skyship turns briefly opaque, shining like a star in the sky as energy is bled off from the impacts thrown against it. Arrays built by masters and powered by enslaved divinity shudder, briefly, under a blast so devastating that it echoes like thunder for miles and miles, a single gunshot writ large into existence. 

In the distance, as the Pack retreats around its edges and recoups its forces, larger and more powerful Beasts held in reserve starting to prepare themselves, the Ruin grows.

Even as it eats away at the concepts thrown against it, growing blades of razor-sharp glass in place of the tranquil fields placed before it, its original site has continued to expand. The sand around it drains away from it, like it is falling into a sinkhole below to unveil the impossible geometries of the thing they hid. 

It is like a factory and a sea-urchin and a corpse were all one thing, each one holding equal weight and, by blending, becoming something new. Cannons and barricades made of razors and shifting ash festoon the strange, almost deep-sea-like construct, which shifts in ways that imitate life only superficially. 

It has eyes, shaped of gun-flame and molten, iridescent metals, and they turn to look at the colors of the sky above.

And fire.

Mile-long barrels cycle explosions internally, each detonation acting as a trigger for a larger explosion until an acceptable scale has been met and the ammunition is delivered. Stars of sharpened metal, spikes of burning ash, and magnetized teardrops of molten magma all turn the world into a symphony of devastation as they are fired, over and over, against the incoming god-ship. 

They are matched in ferocity.

Fractal instinct and embodiment of concepts are met by the industrial viciousness of the Empire’s engineers and enslaved reality-shapers. Projectiles that get faster and harder the further they travel are fired out of weapons that bear supernaturally warped barrels, traveling fast enough to ionize the air. Spells that unleash world-changing magics onto existence scrawl across the sky and ground, carving it apart into quarantined sections that are purged of specific concepts one after another. 

What was once R***a and is now both Pillar and [Hungering War] and something else, born of intervention and fusion, roars in thermobaric voices.

The skyship Aurora beats in tune to distant marches, and responds in kind. 

It is horrifying. It is agonizing. Those who are too close and not of high enough cultivation fall, foaming at the mouth, bleeding from their eyes, catatonic from the weight of enlightenment and the violence it births. The Wall itself shudders, thousands of years of construction and hyper-optimized biomechanisms reinforcing themselves against power they’ve rarely experienced before. What was a war is reduced and elevated to a battle between gods, ground and sky clashing in ways half-impossible to describe.

The victor was decided before the battle even began. 

The world is split, divided, carved, along the lines of a CUT.

The fractal monolith amidst the sands stutters, shrieks in the sound of wrenching metals, as a sky-splitting strike splits it perfectly in half.

For a moment, there is light from the sky above. The sun and stars are briefly visible by the way that the clouds have been perfectly divided in a single, broad stroke, like a paintbrush through canvas.

And then- detonation.

A thing that was once a man, but is now far sharper and far less than that, smiles from atop a palanquin of golden luxury and writhing bodies, many of them moaning and crying and dying and orgasming from their proximity to him. 

Fully half of what was once R***a stops being anything more than malformed metal.

Concepts and ideas, Qi and spellcraft, all the things that make reality more than simple physicality, are carved away from the [Hungering War] in a single slice of the Fourth Blade. 

The impossible construct half-collapses, its momentum lost as the once equally overwhelming Aurora above gains a massive foothold against it. Already it had more versatility, already it was forcing back the nascent thing birthed from the sands, but the tide shifts from a gradual victory to a sudden and cataclysmic one. The divine demon of war and destruction continues to fight, continues to struggle and fight and claw and fire, but even as it rebuilds itself there is no time. Even as it tries to refill its form, finding that anything which crosses the CUT equally turned to dead metal, it continues to fire, continues to shake the world with its force- and is matched at every turn.

For all that she is a reflection of war, the thing above her is what casts the light. 

A newborn god of industrial ruin and overwhelming devastation is unmade, step by step, by the very same.

There is, however, such an advantage to knowing the victor before the battle is decided.

The skyship Aurora shines, like a radiating flame, like a perfect spiral of force- and from its shielding array, a single point is created. Magnification and majesty and all the colors of the world-shaping aurora beneath it come together as it unleashes one of its main cannons.

The place in the sand where divine Ruin lived and slaughtered is turned to nothing.

Where once there was sand and air and metal and space, there is a hole. 

The cannon makes no sound. The light flashes only briefly. Beyond the preparations to fire, there is almost no sign that damage has been done.

Save the emptiness where once there was none.

The resulting sonic boom of the vacuum being refilled by air and space is enough to kill dozens of people outright, on both sides of the conflict. 

Whole buildings are unmade. Mortals in the trench cities experience vibration from the blast hard enough that many of them experience partial organ failure, and the strange biologies of the Overgrowth, encroaching through the sands, are turned to pulp beneath the impact. 

That which was once real is no more.

The skyship Aurora lets loose a deafening blare, an ornate horn signaling to its lessers that they may celebrate its victory. 

Cheers, reluctant at first and then enforced, rise up from the Breach and the lands behind it. 

All is well with the world.

All is as planned. 

Deep beneath the sands, a few miles away, a capsule of flesh and metal anchors itself into a new home. It digs deep, growing downwards towards whatever lies beneath the world, and spreads new tendrils upwards and outwards through the ruins above. 

Feeding on the accumulated millenia of suffering that is the desert beyond the Wall, a statue of a woman, glowing with molten CHANGE and impaled by a singular Pillar of thought, begins to move with intention. 

The infection spreads, spike by spike, outwards into more and into changing things.

Distant islands of flesh, spread throughout the Overgrowth, begin to grow metallic spines and sharper edges. 

The battlefield becomes infested in truth.

And far above, in the sky blue beyond the clouds, a man clad in the fires of possibility stands beside his brother on an infinite staircase, his allies around him. 

He holds in his Soul a seed, black and red and ready to bloom. 

He smiles, and it is wide and hungry enough to match the smile of she who is alive again, in some small way, down below. 

He falls towards the skyship, even as a fishing hook steals away the priestess he traveled with, even as he feels the weight of others he traveled with arriving at their shared destination. 

Some things remain. Some things change. 

He takes a step forward on his path, aiming towards a goal that has come in sight. 

The Empire welcomes him back, knowing and none the wiser.