Book One, Chapter 25 - Unfortunately, Some Villains Are Also Real Hotties

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Raika can admit that she’s having fun wondering about how annoyed the sect elders are right now.

She’s been to a sect trial before, though one much showier than her own. It was a weird feeling, seeing it from the other side, recognizing the dynamics at play. The arbiter of Law, surrounded by and “supported” by the greater powers of the Sect, a vision of unity between empire and cult. 

She never much cared before. Never had the opportunity to stand before them. She was too useful and too unimportant by parts, at least back in the Hungering Roots sect.

She’d figured that the trial had been something of a formality, and maybe she’d been right, considering the lip service the elders had paid to her being judged before they eagerly jumped to tearing her open for study. The delivery of actual judgment apparently skewed that intended result, and now she’s finding herself entertained wondering how the elders are going to weasel out of this one.

Or if they’re even going to try. Maybe she’s not that interesting.

That thought sounds a lot like the other ones she’s been having, the ones about the fact that she’s going to be murdered, that she’s so fucking hungry, that her body feels weaker than ever, that she’s trapped in a sunless room listening to moaning and screaming and quiet whispers and-

They’re not very useful, those thoughts. She puts it with the others, continuing to focus on the idea of how humiliating this must be for the big bad elders of two of the Purple-something-something sect’s pavilions.

And on the bright side, a fight to the death (or “defeat”, whatever that means) with a cultivator is a life saver, because it complicates things. There’s more incentive for people to be there, at least a few healers for the appearance of care, and when news gets out, more than a few people are going to want to see it. It’ll be novel- a cripple, sentenced to fight a cultivator or construct to the death? Or a monster, made and hidden in human skin, vanquished by the sect’s righteousness? 

 More importantly, she has been making them lose face, in small ways just by being here and working with their robes, and in a much more fun way in nearly slitting open an outer disciple. If they send out someone so strong they could crush her by breathing, doesn’t that just make them lose face even more?

So the ruling probably ensures that she won’t be fighting anyone of a high enough cultivation that people will talk about how embarrassing it is for the sect to need someone so high ranked to kill little old her. More or less the same applies if they cheat too obviously; then rumors start that the purple-whatever sect needed to cheat to kill a simple worm. Subtle stuff is fine, obviously, but it complicates things. The elders, if they’re to save face, need to spin the hell out of the whole fight, while finding the perfect candidate to sucker into such an “embarrassing” role of executioner, while also showing off their strength and righteousness somehow mid-murder of a lesser. Otherwise, the illusion breaks down.

Raika makes herself chuckle at the thought that the elders must be bleeding out of their noses with annoyance. 

She can’t do anything else, really.

No.

There’s can’t, and there’s won’t, and she will, so can’t can fuck off. There’s a chance. A chance to survive, or at least to make them regret their choices, even if only a little.

She’s not strong enough for more. Starved, locked in a fucking cage for her second week, minimal rations, manacled… she’s weak. Progress set back again, even as she feels her body continuing to shift, bit by bit, meditation after meditation. 

Doesn’t matter. She’s a fighter. If she’s to go out, might as well do it properly.

And there’s rage behind that.

If she were still a cultivator, she’d have been praised for her victory. The death of an arrogant, useless idiot who dared to challenge a superior or overestimate himself. If he’d killed her, she’d be barely a footnote, and yet, simply by value of power, of usefulness, of appearances and saving face, her victory is poison, spat back into her own wounds. 

It’s unfair. It’s upright. It’s wrong. 

The dissonance between devaluing his life and the insult levied at her own life’s value hurts to think about, so for now, it goes with the other thoughts too.

She’s done her best to spend her time productively. They didn’t let her keep Dink, which is a fucking heartbreak even now, but she’s still managed to focus. It’s actually been… almost easy. The environment is starved of Qi with some sort of array, built into the prison’s very walls; another layer of punishment for a cultivator, keeping them from recovering or advancing while imprisoned. For her, it acts as a contrast, her weird sense of smell empty of any distractions, keeping her with nothing to focus on but the energy already in her.

She’s kept her heartbeat-meditation going this entire time, the constant, neverending awareness of it beating making it impossible to forget. She wonders if she’s maybe gone a little crazy from it, spending a week alone with a ticking, tocking metronome of her own flesh, inescapable and unforgettable. It’s useful, though, so the fact she can hear it in her sleep is no big deal, probably. 

And the doubt isn’t helpful right now. It doesn’t make her stronger.

So it goes with the other unhelpful thoughts.

She practices holding her breath, absorbing not even air for long enough to put strain on her body, feeling the tingling pain of Qi deviation in the organs increasing as she stresses them. She tracks the pulses of her heart, feeling it move blood through her entire body. She focuses on one part at a time, sometimes for hours, sometimes for days, until she feels she has mapped out everywhere the blood can go by the pins and needles sensation of trapped, divergent Qi that it moves around. She tenses muscles, one at a time, to feel exactly how the flesh moves, how the bones shift, and how the heat and pain seem to make her more aware of their details. By holding her breath or hyperventilating in random measures, she forces her heart rate as high as she can, until she’s sweating from exertion and pain and the focus it takes.

A week. Maybe longer. She’s fed at irregular hours, and without a visible sky, she lost her circadian rhythm within days.

The tingling is fading, though. The harsher the sensation, the more intently she focuses on it, stresses its surroundings, the more it begins to… fade into the background, a bit.  She can feel hunger, exhaustion, and a need to use the bathroom (a grate, off in a corner) far more often than she ever did as a cultivator. At the same time, the sense of carefully understanding what’s inside the self, of feeling out what is happening in one’s body, is… nostalgic. Like old trances, spirit organs helping her experience single pieces and whole systems at once, one by one. 

Starved, barely sleeping, (afraid) focused only on her goal, she can feel things changing. Theory, put into practice, changing hyper-awareness of biology to something more

Of course, cultivation is the product of years of mentoring, refinement, bla bla bla, which means it could be next year that she is truly altered by whatever she’s forcing to happen inside her. And the fight, as it were, is about… six minutes away.

The same cultivator comes back around to escort her, wearing the Punishment pavilion’s colors, dark purple on dark black of stone. His skin is stone-like, harsh and scaled like a lizard’s with little spikes, and she can feel every point dig into her as he hoists her by the arm, shoving her forward.

Again, they pass a dozen hallways, up multiple flights. She’s not sure if any of the other prisoners have gotten out, or if new ones have arrived, but some of the stains have been cleaned, and some voices sound louder than others. 

Eventually she’s left in a small stone room, a bucket of cold water, and a lye stone to scrub with left for her.

She’s tempted to go out as she is. Filthy, sweat-stained, grimy.

A bath would be nice, though. Kind of.

Whe’s she’s done (really fucking hard to bathe yourself when you have the disabilities she does, never mind the conditions) she finds robes, colored plain red, placed to one side. She wonders if it’s so the cloth doesn’t show too much of the blood that’s sure to come. Bad for image, that.

Her jailor is there when she’s done dressing herself. His face shows… nothing. Like she’s not even there. Like he’s just doing paperwork or sweeping the floor. 

She’s met him twice. She doesn’t even know his name.

She hates him. The way he doesn’t even see her. The way he doesn’t care.

She walks ahead of him, and finds a long hallway, leading back somewhere new.

Still shackled, she’s escorted by a hateful, worthless, vile disciple  Purple Campfire Flowers sect down a hallway and out into sunlight.

It’s overwhelming to start. The glare of natural light, the burning heat of an early summer day, the sudden flood of smells from both the outside world and the people in it, all crashing against her senses all at once.  She flinches, blinking her eyes as hard as she can to try to get them to adjust even as she hears a wave of whispers start and build up to annoying heights. 

There’s a crowd watching her emerge, and she gets the impression this may have grown a bit more than anyone expected. Standing a respectful few meters from the edges and main paved walkway to the punishment pavilion’s boundaries, a brutish building that looks half-blackened by old scorch marks and obsidian gates, there’s an absolute throng of people eager to get a look. She sees almost exclusively cultivators, with perhaps a few minor nobles with a relationship to the sect joining the eager crowds, and she knows walking through the minimum two hundred cultivator crowd is going to be hell on her sinuses.

They mostly keep quiet, but she hears more than a few of their whispers. “Not as big as I thought she’d be”, whispers one. “No Qi at all, I thought they were joking,” whispers another. “I hear she’s some rabid half-monster, bred bad and wild. Thirty silver says she takes a bite out of the young master,” whispers her favorite. 

She’d probably have to do it anyways, but it’s… almost nice to think someone will be getting something out of it. Almost like the enthusiastic little shit is on her side, in a way.

No one else in the crowd is.

She’ll get that little gambler his thirty silver if she can. 

The words “young master” keep creeping through the crowd, though, the headache of that phrase melding casually into the headache of so many different smelling Qi’s. The young master will be fighting, they say. “A show of force”, says one. “Proving his Killing Intent,” says another. “Blooding him properly before he returns to the Academies.”

Like she’s cattle, to be bled for another’s benefit.

Maybe it’s a punishment. Big public event, punish an uppity privileged shit by having them kill her in front of a crowd, while also making the kid perform as well as possible to save face. Add to that he’s probably got his own artifacts to bring into the arena, and the sect won’t have to be seen equipping him against little old Raika the overly-bitey. 

Her body aches. Tension. An urge to curl her fingers into claws. A rumbling in her stomach that hasn’t stopped in days, making her want to latch onto a scent and rip it open, drink it deep.

She hates them.

She hates it all. 

It’s unfair. 

It takes almost thirty minutes of walking to reach the arena, due to just the sheer size of the damn sect grounds and the plateau they rest on. If she was important, maybe they’d have an artifact or someone cultivating wind techniques to carry her over. As it is, it still takes her longer than normal; they didn’t give her a new cane, and she’s shackled, so the limp is particularly bad today. Interestingly, it doesn’t hurt as much, even if it’s just as pronounced, which is at least an improvement. Could be her pain tolerance just got way better recently, but Raika decides she might as well believe it’s going to magically regenerate mid-battle. Why not?

And then they arrive, around the far side of the punishment hall, to the sound of a murmuring crowd. No roars of enthusiasm, but the sheer number of folks and the Qi they put in their voices to talk to each other make the colosseum’s volume just short of painful. Which is good; she’s been in enough colosseum fights to be ashamed if it were quiet on her arrival. Raika the Boody does not do boring, especially on her fucking death march. 

The rings of stone around them are laced with smooth obsidian, limestone and slate bricks melted together into semi-organic shapes making up the stadium and the thousands of seats all around them. From the gaping archways of the cardinal entrances, decorated with scorch-marks shaped like plant life, to the rivers of molten metal and stone used as lighting and decoration along the central pathways and pillars, to the almost conch-like shape of the structure proper, the whole place gives off an air of vitality. Like an unearthed deep sea beast, or an ornate war-construct bound to stillness, or a building grown from a single explosive flex of magma. For all she knows, the Purple Kitchen Marigold Smoking sect has some kind of great ancestor that literally did… any one of those things. Whatever the case, the stadium is nearly half full, a crazy amount for a purely in-sect production and for the execution of a criminal mortal, and the acoustics both mute and magnify their presence.

And then she is before the arena proper.

Three steps, leading onto an upraised platform. Carved in ornate red calligraphy, a story is written on a massive slab of gorgeous white marble, detailing the history of this place or some such grandiose nonsense, making up a perfectly circular slab of stone raised above the ground. There are no railings on its sides, no sand to muddy its middle; this isn’t some competition of Foundational gladiators performing for the entertainment of the masses. This is an arena prepared for execution, for flame and fury, made for cultivators to carve each other apart and climb higher on the bodies they pile beneath them. There may be other fighting halls in other arenas, or they may have taken away multiple smaller arenas for the sake of this battle, but whatever the case may be, Raika knows, instinctively, that this is the place where duels of honor, duels for glory and power and “honor”, ring out against the spiraling columns and echoing stands.

She takes a long, deep breath, ignoring the confusing mess of scents that clash and focusing on just the air, warm and pure and filled with the scent of sweating bodies and warm stone and cold steel.

She remembers her first arena. How she was called up to be humiliated, to be stolen from, how she tried so hard to find a technique that would suit her and came up empty. How she won anyways, by fighting dirtier, more violently, more efficiently.

She doesn’t remember if the other kid ever came back from that. If he lived as a cripple of a different kind, his journey cut short by the viciousness she showed rather than be broken in turn.

Raika the Bloody. Her fists, painted red. Over and over.

And then torn apart and made bloody in turn.

She exhales.

The thought hurts. It’s not helpful. It goes with the others.

She looks up and smiles instead.

 Now this is an arena. What a place to kill in.

She comes out of the brief trance to the sound of metal “clunk”ing against her legs. The metal cuffs are unlocked by a force of will and burst of Qi from her jailor, clattering to the floor as the locking mechanisms spiral apart. A moment later, the same happens to the heavier, more mechanical manacles clamped twice on her right arm, letting them fall to the ground with a “clang” that echoes a tiny bit, and letting her feel like she can stand upright properly for the first time in over a week.

On the other side of the arena, watching the process, is one of the most gorgeous men she’s ever seen. Seriously. He could be drawn on posters and in pictures in romance novels from here to the southern seas and no one would bat an eye. He stands out, even amongst the crowds in the stands.

 Beautiful red lips. Bright golden eyes highlighted with just a touch of shadow, a jawline that could cut steel in a face that’s somehow still soft, empowers the other sharp angles of his cheekbones and nose. His hair, black as sinner’s wallet, cascades down to his lower back, made into some kind of single ornate warrior’s braid, matched perfectly to the onyx robes that he wears, themselves highlighted with a tasteful blend of magenta, pink, and crimson. His clothing is kept simple, but the sheer quality speaks for itself, all the more notable from a lack of gold and poems and extra sleeves that might decorate it, and is only matched in quality by the blade he wields. In other men, some might joke about overcompensation, but with how artfully he holds and casually spins the long, refined spear of pale white wood and shining steel blade, she thinks it just advertises skill with such a long and potent weapon.

She almost laughs. The dude is hawt, and he knows it. 

Whatever fuckup he must have done to be stuck performing execution duty must have been truly embarrassing, but the elders must have thanked the gods for having such an absurd creature act as their face in the proceedings. She can’t imagine they haven’t offered him a lot more than forgiveness for whatever slight he must have done, and she can’t even blame them. Again; he is. The hottest guy. She’s ever seen. And she usually prefers the more feminine types. Clearly defined muscle, noticeable height and a well-honed physique on display, even with his face shaven, paint a very clear masculine image, and even still she’s kind of tempted.

Damn. If she wasn’t so sure she’d rather do literally anything other than give up, she might just let the bastard win. She understands the whispers she heard before a bit better; if she’d been born in a competition with this guy, even a perceived one, she might be desperate for him to get a bite taken out of him too.

Well, she’d still want to bite him even if they weren’t fighting but- well. Ahem. Refocusing.

Taking a deep breath and lightly slapping her own face once, then again when the first time isn’t enough, she bends over and picks up the chain for the manacles, making sure to resecure one of the cuffs around her forearm and letting the other stay loose. Her jailor gives her a look and goes to open the cuffs again, but she just growls at him, and he rolls his eyes and lets her keep it. As a weapon, it’s shit, but when you’ve got none, you make do.

To the sounds of hundreds of whispering voices, Raika straightens her spine, pulls on all her new strength, and steps up the stairs onto the stage of her intended execution.