Book One, Chapter 39

Alright! Let myself have a break yesterday. I'm having fun sure, but also I really want the editing to be done! I wanna make NEW chapters! I want to write VISCERAE! Heck, I even want to do some EVO.exe! Ya girl needs some variety!

But first, focus. Be back soon!

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This affront cannot be borne. The ongoing attacks from our enemies, both local and abroad, have forced our hand. The Flame can heal, can warm, can protect- but its deeper nature always calls to the consumption, that it might grow further. 

Our borders have been breached. The intrusion has been tracked, confirming the identity of traitors and saboteurs driven to attempt ruination against us. The other sects of this city, which should be rightfully ours by virtue of strength and honor both, have begun to move, clearly turning to action now that their lackeys have been uncovered. The Empire’s interference in our internal matters has been exposed as the unjust suppression of the worthy, as we always knew it was.

Swiftly, we act. Profoundly, we strike. Endlessly, we burn away that which seeks to make us lesser. 

Your orders are given. Redeem yourselves in the gaze of the Purple Flame, and rise to the occasion. 

-Elder Kai Shu of the Punishment Hall of the Purple Flame Burning Lotus sect, pre-deployment briefing to a localized response squad.

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Li Shu shoves Raika away at full force towards the door and against it so hard she feels it warp. The room has started to glow with the melting wall, the impossible heat and brilliant purple flames beginning to peek through as gaps in the stone begin to form. It’s been maybe less than five seconds since it began, but already the entire exterior frame of the room has begun to violently come apart.

Raika doesn’t hesitate. Li Shu’s vow, her stated reality, does not allow for her to mistrust her, to wait or hesitate here, and being physically thrown away from her presence, as flimsy as the cover may be, is the best cover they have. Whoever is on the other side of the wall, they’re clearly not hesitating to get in here as fast as possible, even through sect-reinforced materials.

She looks one more time at Li Shu, who simply gives her a nod, leaning back against the far wall and collapsing against it in a convincing illusion of distress. Before Raika can stop her, she’s cut open three claw marks against her own shoulder, imitating claw marks.

She’s in danger. In danger because of Raika. 

Li Shu’s words echo anyways. 

She can’t protect her here. All she can do is escape, and offer any evidence she can that she was never plotting alongside the healer as she can.

Time to go, then.

She shoves herself backwards towards the damaged section of the door, crashing through the glowing wards and Qi-saturated wood and  rolling to her feet, moving into a dead sprint immediately. She forces her heart to pump faster, her lungs to inhale whole clouds of air as she moves and feeds her body fuel to run faster, muscles shifting to compensate for her weak physique, accommodating her missing arm to better balance her as she runs, altering her legs so she achieves violent bursts of speed every time her feet touch the ground. In an instant, Raika has shifted every part of herself into overdrive or rearranged it to push her towards speed, done on instinct and by tweaking everything that starts to hurt as she runs.

All of this in no small part because as soon as she left the semi-silenced room she smelled who was burning through Li Shu’s wall. The air around her reeks of berries and honey, cooking over a deep firepit. Except that the berries have started to smell just a little bit off.

Shin Ren seems to have come back to see her again. What a gentleman, truly.

What might have taken her two or three Movement Arts before is instead eaten up in a single altered sprint, her entire body aching at the strain and minor modifications she’s pushed onto it so abruptly. She clears through the hallway, the housing area, the entire library full of late-night studious healers and precious texts, in under a minute. She’s through the central pavilion so useful for triage and material delivery and out one of the alternative entrances in seconds, even as alarms begin to howl through the building and runes begin to flare to life.

And somehow, he’s already in front of her.

The cool air of the outside she expected is replaced by a burst of violent heat as soon as she opens the door, the night lit by the glow of indigo fires. 

Shin Ren, the same man who once nearly burned her alive, hovers in the air above her. He’s holding his spear at the ready, relaxed and poised, even as her instincts scream at the danger. In spite of this, she’s drawn to look at how gorgeous he looks. Drenched in moonlight and flames of gorgeous purple, dressed in what looks like only a basic, combat-tailored robe, he looks like he dashed here straight out of bed, and is all the more gorgeous for it. He wakes up like this, for Heavens’ sake, with those locks of hair and bright eyes and mmph. All that.

Raika briefly wonders if it’s weird to be sexually attracted to the person she has the second most nightmares about.

And he’s not alone.

She can smell a dozen more trails of cultivation coming in from afar, trailing the same path Shin Ren seems to have taken, nevermind all of the disciples reacting to the alarms from inside the building. The wards have trouble locating her, but they wash over where she stands repeatedly, highlighting her as so very many new opponents rush towards her.

He goes to speak, some proclamation or demand, and she’s not really listening because she needs to move. The sect is big, but to Nascent Soul cultivators distance is half joke and half inconvenience. If she sticks around, the elders of the sect will be here to crush her and pop her like an overheated balloon before she can say so much as a word in protest. So, best not to stick around, no matter how much the sexy nightmare of a cultivator before her wants to engage.

She still has a chance. She uses minimal Qi, if any, in her movements and body usage; so long as she gets out of range of their mortal senses, she might still be able to hide out and escape before the elders arrive. But that’s all predicated on one very important factor; that she doesn’t let Shin Ren follow her or leave a signal to trace her by.

So, first things first, she sprints at him as incredibly, impossibly, inhumanly quickly as she can and punches him in the throat.

Say what you will about Raika’s changes, but Shin Ren ain’t no bitch. He shifts at the last moment, eyes wide in surprise even as instinct kicks in and he moves to block and redirect the blow. He’s partially successful, the punch landing on the side of his throat rather than right in his larynx, but he still audibly chokes a bit.

She doesn’t let up, sticking as close to him as possible, not letting him get an arm around her to grab his spear with both hands, staying inside his range. She headbutts him as he flinches from the throat punch, knees him hard, ducks a punch, and-

Fuck. She’s actually fighting him. 

She can feel strain begin to build in her body as she keeps pushing it, her eyes burning and headache forming as she feeds blood to every essential system and away from every other. Her body is, on its own, naturally shutting down and redirecting energy from certain unnecessary systems (her stomach, her lower guts, her pain receptors); all she has to do is follow its lead and boost the effects with her own control. Her eyes are almost flickering, her mind thinking so fast, seeing his muscles shift and ripple as he moves to react, her arm and legs violently tense and spasming into place to block every move as she sees it. She’s hit him a dozen times and dodged half that much in the time it’s taken her to realize the fact that she’s somehow actually got him on the back foot.

Then Shin Ren remembers that he has more skills than just being an attractive bruiser, and the world lights up.

She smells it an instant before it appears, the firepit overwhelming the honey and fruit and exploding out in a detonation from him. The entire night turns brilliant, turns indigo and violet and gorgeous golden-red, and for a moment everything is obfuscated and washed in impossible light and heat hot enough to melt her ten times over. She’s not sure she’d call it a technique, per se, but it’s damn effective- Shin Ren spawns a perfect fireball of heat strong enough to have disintegrated her in their last (and current) fight, roaring as he does.

Luckily for Raika, she is no longer there to see it.

She smelled it an instant before it happened. She smelled his Qi moving in his body, and at the moment it began to emerge (in quantities enough to make her sneeze violently if that system hadn’t been shut down in the battle too), she moved again. It’s a move she could not have done as a cultivator, not without movement techniques she’d never had and probably had never even heard of. As the adonis nearly two celestial realms above her at her prime brings a violent sun into the world, she tears ligaments, strains bones, violently damages legs and joints and spine, and launches herself off his body and away into the woods.

She briefly wonders if the levels of pain she’s gotten used to are getting kind of concerning. Then she leaves the thought be and focuses on getting the fuck out of the area.

The smells of other cultivators pause, then accelerate, as Shin Ren’s detonation carves through the area around him, reaching far enough to activate some of the defences on the medical pavilion’s outer walls. They’ll arrive in moments, but her main idea worked- she got him to panic.

That much Qi, that much destruction, that much attention all on him? For something like her, bereft of a proper Qi signature, it’s the next best thing to actual camouflage.

Still, that short burst was enough. She managed to get him to panic-counter with his flames, yes, but it cost her pushing her body past its newly altered limits. If not for her ability to consciously force parts of her body to move, they’d be entirely inactive, and she has to use said ability hard to keep herself upright and moving. In that single moment, she gave everything to move out of sight, out of range, not just of the blast radius but of the senses of the terrifying thing that spawned it.

And still, she feels several of the Qi signatures she scented coming in her direction.

There are dozens of lights glowing behind her, ranging from the size of bonfires to smaller jets of heat. The natural forest around the medical pavilion burns as Raika pushes herself out and into the urbanized parts of the sect, climbing through alleyways and clustered structures to lose track of her pursuers.

Some of them get close. One strange technique that seemed to manifest fireflies made of purple flame almost caught her, burning a coin-sized hole through part of a building an inch from her shoulder.

But none get closer fast enough.

She turns into the darkened corners of the sect, through its complex pathways of infrastructure and artificial nature, moving away as fast as she can.

And in the distance, she hears something.

She allows herself to look back. Just once.

The horizon behind her glows indigo. 

She can see, in its shadows, a roaring, bestial figure. It swings its spear like an additional limb, like a sharpened extension of itself, strange and alien in the flickering shadows cast by flames. Something shoots up into the sky, and for a moment, before she ducks around a corner and out of sight, she sees him. A singular figure, surrounded by lesser lights, exuding flame and violence so densely that they seem to armor him, act as breath and limbs as well as flames, eager to reach out into the world and consume. 

Shin Ren roars, a sound so loud and so enhanced by Qi that she can smell his rage, hear the crackling of dirt and carbon being glassed. 

She smiles.

And keeps running.

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She almost collapses when she reaches the East Gate.

The smell of Shin Ren’s Qi, the absolute stench of burnt fruit and overpowered honey lit ablaze, fills the air behind her and around her and leaves her in a daze. The pain doesn’t help, necessarily, but the pain is an old friend, and it keeps her distracted as she keeps forcibly having to pause and rearrange something or deactivate parts too damaged to function temporarily. She feels like a puzzle, like a put-together mannequin, and if there’s one thing to be gained from this fucking disaster, it’s that she’s getting a lot of live experience about how her body functions in conditions of stress and how she can now influence it.

But, barring her really pushing it, she’s not going to be climbing that wall anytime soon, especially not with the scent of the elders washing over the entire sect. Hiding on the ground amongst buildings is one thing; hiding up in the air, hanging on a bare, mostly-white wall, is quite another, especially when trying to hide from eyes that can pierce the darkness of even a moonless night. No, if she’s leaving now it’ll either be through the tunnels and hallways inside the sect walls themselves, or through one of the gates.

And lo-and-behold, she did indeed send a maybe-ally and maybe-ambush over to one said gate, far enough away from Shin Ren and the initial search area that she’s not too uncomfortable heading towards it.

She discovers something new along the way, too. While her senses have been absolutely enhanced, and her ability to smell Qi seems seriously heightened, Maen is very good at hiding herself. It’s only when she’s nearly at the eastern gate, every sense attuned and alert as she moves as quickly and quietly as she possibly can, that she finally finds the hidden servant. 

Crouched behind some bushes, a backpack in her lap and a worried look on her face as she chews on her lower lip, the young semi-felinid woman looks about ready to either cry or burst sprinting from the woods away from where she’s sitting.

She literally jumps a full foot in the air when Raika taps onto the ground beside her.

“Fuck!” she whispers way too loudly. “Fuck, I thought you were- It’s almost five minutes past, I thought you were- what happened over there?”

Raika shrugs, the act bringing back pain in a way that feels kind of nostalgic. “I got in a fight,” she whispers back. “No one died and it wasn’t on purpose and I got away, but I need you to sneak me into the wall.”

Maen blinks. “Just like that?” she asks. “No “are you sure about this”, no “for grabbing this opportunity you’ll be rewarded,” just “sneak me into the wall’?”

Raika looks at her. “Well, yeah,” she says. “You’re the one who wanted to come. I’m just taking advantage, and then, later, you’ll try to take advantage of me. Simple and easy, right?”

Maen stares back, mouth slightly open. “You know, I thought you were some kind of weird philosopher-cripple when I found out how you were training and when you said all that stuff to me,” she admits, shaking her head. “Turns out you’re just crazy?”

Raika shrugs again. “I could’ve told you that,” she whispers. “Heck, I’m kinda sure that wisdom and being crazy are pretty much the same thing. So, you going to help?”

Maen hisses, the sound surprisingly catlike (and kind of adorable considering how small she is). She looks behind Raika, towards the glowing lights of seeking cultivators, and then back towards the wall, so tantalizingly close from behind the little copse of trees they’re hiding in.

“Fine, but you’d better be serious about taking me with you. I don’t want to get killed just because I met you. I’m not planning on dying to leave.”

Raika nods. “More than fair. I’m not trying to get you killed. I could use someone who’s been here long enough to know the walls more than me, you could use someone to pull you out of this place. It’ll be messy, after, but… you help me out, I’ll help you.”

Maen shakes her head. “No,” she whispers. “I need you to swear it to me. Swear, on something you care about, that you’ll get me out of here, that you won’t leave me behind.”

Raika blinks, looking over at Maen, who’s staring at her with a surprising intensity. She didn’t know the girl before, but it’s clear that this means a lot to her. And the fact that, alone in the woods with a would-be demon cripple, she’s decided to confront and demand this of her says a lot about who she is, or that she’s a much better people reader than Raika thought she was. Eventually, she nods, slow and serious. 

“I, honored Raika the Unbroken, swear that I will do all in my power to assist junior sister Maen to freedom. So said, so shall it be.”

Mane nods. “So said, so shall it be.”

As the phrase is repeated back, Raika feels something, a little twinge inside of her. It hits in the same… “place” as the chafing before, as the sense of weight and discomfort of being under another’s yoke. It’s emotional, but… it doesn’t feel like it’s just that. It makes her throat feel funny.

She briefly wonders if there’s a lot more Truth than people know about. Or maybe there’s different kinds?

Not the time. She nods back at Maen, before standing to turn and look at the massive, ornate wall a ways away from them, its doorways locked, its soldiers ready, its very design meant to withstand hordes from above and below and give its defenders every advantage to repel and defeat those who challenge it.

“So,” Raika whispers, looking expectantly at the young servant beside her, “what’s the plan?”

Maen, for her part, lets out a long, drawn out sigh and pinches the bridge of her nose.