Chapter 375 - They Grow Up So Fast...

Hey. In case you haven't heard it from me recently- thank you. It means a lot that you're here.

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Fuck Mortaria. Bunch of smog-choked dipshits. Betcha they turned to all this necromancy shit cause they were so clogged with smoke they’da died soon anyway.

-Paraphrased, oft-repeated comment on the nature of the Dread City Mortaria of the Fallen Kingdom, most commonly heard in the Bright City of Viviae of the Fallen Kingdom

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The shadows dim to ash, tumbling away on nonexistent winds as their source burns to nothing, going quiet. 

The Bishop remains in her transcendent form, divine in Death, but a mask has made a re-appearance. A blank plate of perfectly welded steel rests where a face might be, and though it pulses with the power it holds, it remains perfectly controlled.

From within a dome of shadows and ash, a boy, his skin red from the heat he ran through, his hair burnt, his eyes bright and whole, stares up at the colossi of Death before him. Behind him, a corpse, missing about a third of its overall body, sizzling from the heat of the needles embedded in it, breathes in an attempt to center herself. 

There is the ashen imprint of a knife still emerging from her chest.

“Child,” says a voice made of gunfire and the whistle of bomb-drops, “Stand aside. This does not concern you, and you endanger yourself by your presence.”

Raika laughs, stirring some of the ash around her face. “Jin, don’t- don’t you fucking go anywhere. Not until you tell me how you just did that, you little genius.”

He frowns, turning to shoot her a scathing look. She blinks, then raises what’s left of the half-powdered prosthetic in surrender.

“Woah, kid. I-”

“I Honor The Dead,” he says, his voice cold. “Being dead and part of something else doesn’t always mean the dead are honored. Their Deaths belong to them, even if they’ve been taken.”

He turns away from Raika, and she stares at his back, at the torn robes he was so proud of, as he stands between her and the floating ghost-king before them. 

“I know you’d kill me as easy as anyone else here if I step away. You and everyone else here want me dead. But you all want me dead in a special way, for some reason, and I think I just proved that, at the very least, I won’t make that easy. You attacked us. And you were getting your ass kicked. So back down.”

The floating obliteration before them tilts her head, arms limp at her sides, still leaking porcelain sand and ignited light. 

“With respect to your eyes, junior… that is not how the fight was progressing.”

“What matters most is how it ends,” Raika says, leaning upright on the remains of one leg and the stump of another. “Li Shu?”

Instantaneously, a portal opens, behind which a building-sized crocodilian beast pokes its head forward. The centi-croc’s growl fills the air with a pulse that makes the earth shake, echoing off the armor covering it, made entirely of still-living and parasitically entwined wood, pale and feeding off the Death in the air to flower more already. On its back stands Li Shu, her healer’s robes fluttering, several needles floating around her, made of carved Blacksteel and enchanted metals and far surpassing the original anchors Raika used- and standing there, with a few dozen such needles embedded into an incredibly complex spiral of arrays, is Raika’s other body. 

In its hands is something that looks very much like a blade, if blades were made of vibrating, levitating chunks of pale wood and needles, floating between discordant shards.

Around her neck is a quiet little piece of metal, which thrums sleepily- but echoes nonetheless.

“No guarantees here,” Raika says from her other body, puppeteering the semi-functional clone-form and shrugging with its shoulders. “But I’m a scary bitch. Fight wasn’t over just yet, and I can get pretty fucking nasty when I’m in a corner. Proved that much just now. And how much I’m willing to risk. So-”

“Enough,” Jin says, his voice cutting through the battlefield. She turns to him, blinking, as if noticing his wounds again, rather than for the second time. He is wincing from the burns, pulling at his skin, but his gaze is firm, against her especially. “That’s enough, Master.”

She tilts her head. “Jin, I-”

“Big sis!” he interrupts again.

She’s at their side in a moment, sandals sizzling against the burning earth, her Sacrifice orbiting around them in a defensive array even as several needles stab into Raika’s corpse, replacing some of the missing needles, if only partially. “Your martial son is right, Raika. You’re straining yourself again.”

Raika snorts, rolling her eyes. “Yeah. Obviously. We need to strain if we-”

“I don’t desire to End your companions,” the bomb in shape of a woman whispers, “but I will cease hesitating to do so in but a moment. Unleash your arts against me, Bishop. If you still can.”

The air begins to heat up again, a sense of pressure pushing against eardrums, pressing in against the lungs of those who still possess them. The Bishop hovers there, an icon of violence, a thing of seething brilliance and fires both bright and invisible. Raika shifts, pushing Li Shu behind her despite how she immediately protests, her Sacrifices stabbing into acupuncture points to hold her back.

“Raika, you-”

She pushes forward anyways. The needles strain against the Qi she still has, the Echostuff that powers and provides her flesh. It still forces a stagger, but she’s rising to her feet at the same time as her clone body takes a step forward.

“I’ve got enough left to kill you with,” Raika snarls, the thrum of Truespeak burning against her vocal cords. “After the shit you pulled? Why don’t we step to the side and-”

“ENOUGH.”

The sound comes with its very own shockwave, small though it may be. It knocks no one off their feet- but robes shift in the breeze, and ash is lifted by the force of the word. 

Jin stands, burnt but unbowed, his cultivation oozing from him in streams of mist and half-glimpsed shapes. He turns to face Raika first, his gaze cold, angry at her.

“Stand. Down.”

There is a part of her whose first instinct is to scoff. To stare him down, to step past him, to keep carving until the price is paid and-

His eyes do not waver, even as she shifts to act.

Instead, he speaks with a cool, stone-solid tone.

“I have this.”

She blinks. Goes to inhale- remembers that she has to choose to, goes again- and then just pauses there. 

Huh.

“Ok then.”

And she sits back down.

Li Shu stares at her, incredulous. And then smacks her upside the head.

“Seriously? I stab you and you get back up, and he just says that and you sit down? What am I to you, huh? Why don’t you-” whack “-listen to your-” whack “-doctor!”

Raika leans away from the hits, more from the emotional damage than the force of them. Dead nerves and Qi-saturated Echo-stuff don’t make for particularly painful reactions, but Li Shu takes a moment to redouble her efforts, smacking harder.

“I- fuck! Sorry! I just-”

“Bishop Anaya of Mortaria. I would have words with you.”

Jin’s voice carries through the silence of the battlefield, loud in spite of the lack of Qi or Intent imbued into it. 

The demigod of porcelain and industry, of Detonation and Death by Obliteration, exists before him. She does not hover- she simply has not landed yet, and thus has not yet detonated. She does not stand still- she is just the part of the moment that is the leadup to Detonation rather than its presence, a part of the whole of herself. 

Not a Soul. Not a Domain. A Death, in the shape of a person. A sequence of events, and the echoes thereof, vast enough to eclipse the scale of the mortal, the person that created them, the power others might call the Warrior Realm. 

For all the complexity of their battle, all the violence of Raika’s [TRANSCENDENT ART]... she stands marred by only a single bite. It is more scar than wound already- an imprint on a moment, and not an interruption to it.

Jin stands, an adolescent, burned even as Li Shu’s Sacrifice melds with the harm and heals it, his robes ashen and tattered, his presence surrounded by the half-seen shapes of vanished shades.

The Bishop nods its head.

“Very well, Blessed Mortal. For your place in the Liturgy, and your skill in surviving my presence to this proximity, I shall hear you.”

He nods, his gaze firm. Raika watches him, tracking microexpressions, heartbeat, sweat- deadened senses or no, she knows his baseline, knows what his cultivation feels like when it’s disturbed.

The kid is like a still pond. As the pain leaves him, Li Shu’s Sacrifice pulling back as its pieces impart their properties of Healing, his presence is as quiet and firm as she’s ever felt it.

“Bishop Anaya. Clergy of the Church and Industrialist of Mortaria. I, Rai Jin, your supposed ‘Blessed Mortal’, stand before you aware of my limitations. I know that my protest against you, in this specific moment, might seem to matter little. I am aware that claims of refusing to cooperate must be balanced with the fact that, in the grasp of those older, more powerful, and more insidious than I can defeat, my options will be limited, and perhaps inevitable.”

“It is good to know your place in things, child.”

“Sometimes. But I’ve spent the last few months working, listening, learning. And your actions here have helped me to understand something. You are not safe, either. Your goals, less so.”

The thrumming of barely-contained Detonation, of the moment of pre-explosion to the moment of eternal combustion, grows louder. The Qi in the air thrums in tune with it, a bass-line that burns against the back of one’s throat and like sunburn on the skin.

“You overplayed,” Jin says, his voice still steady, his presence still calm and still. “The moment when you became… this. Before that, you were talking. I couldn’t see what about, but talking. Then you saw the Gu-bug thing. Then you talked some more. I’m assuming, because I know my Master, that she told you something true about herself, and you decided that it was too dangerous. That’s why you started doing this. I felt the battlefield when you changed. The other Bishops. They were surprised. It was unexpected. Too much. Why?”

“My patience is not endless, boy.”

He raises both hands, palms up. “Neither is my explanation, senior. Please understand- I simply wish to provide the foundation upon which I will lay out my threat.”

There’s a pause- and then Raika lets out a laugh, like a sharp bark of humor. 

Jin turns to glare at her, but it’s more petulant than angry now. “Master, please.”

“Sorry, sorry, just- I’ve taught you so well.”

He rolls his eyes- and then turns back to the Bishop Anaya, hovering icon of explosive megadeath. 

She is staring, that faceless plate of impossible metal containing the ever-Detonation that lives inside her somehow conveying genuine bafflement.

“Threat, boy? I am millenia your senior. I am-”

“Scared.”

The echoing bassline of barely-contained power wavers. Just for a moment. 

Jin smiles, and Raika can’t help but see some of her own sharpness in it.

“You reacted because you decided that the regular rules wouldn’t work to contain a problem and incoming danger. Broke the rules of engagement to ensure a total victory. I love my Master, and she is very terrifying in some of her ideas, but not so threatening, not as she is, not to you, not over these war-games, that you should do this. Unless you think that any real disruption at all more than you planned for might fuck everything up.”

“I have yet to hear any reason to deviate from my current path, boy. And as our dialogue confirms, your own allies understand the necessity of my actions.”

Jin nods, not turning to look towards the city behind him or the Bishops notably absent from the moment. “True enough. But if it’s so delicate that any unplanned disruption can fuck it up? Then I have something to say.”

“A Blessed Mortal is a great piece in the Liturgy, but the coming of the End was foretold decades before your birth, boy. If you-”

“Not my ‘Blessed Mortal’ stuff. That’s not what I’m talking about. You’ve all made sure we don’t know what that’s about yet, and I don’t think we could get all the way out of the Kingdom before being captured, and then you could just overpower me. But I’m talking about the cost of that.

“Because the first one to catch us gets unmade.”

The silence echoes again.

“Boy-”

“I Honor The Dead,” he whispers, the words thrumming with the inevitability and madness of Truth. “And I understand Death. I can feel all the Echoes you are, all the Deaths that make you up. I can’t fight back against, or outrun, or outthink you, but I can reach into you and make those Deaths be themselves again, rather than you. Maybe you’ll survive it- but if so, you’ll be very spread out.”

He smiles wider, sharp and cold. “Like I said- being dead and part of something else doesn’t always mean the dead are honored. Their Deaths belong to them. I can give them back to them, even if that just means taking them further out of the thing that is you. Your Death might stick around- but I doubt your ability to exist as you would.”

And before another word can be spoken, he lifts a hand.

The smoke of his cultivation drifts further, and becomes ash, and becomes blacker-than-black shadows, and the thrumming of the Bishop’s power increases- and disharmonizes.

“I might not be a Bishop yet, or in the Paths, or whatever the hells else, but I know for sure that my Master and I can unmake at least one member of the Clergy before we go down for good. I’d put good odds on three.

“She might not be able to beat you- but we most certainly can.”

He lowers the hand, and the thrumming, louder than ever, echoes across glassed plains.

“So- what’s it going to be? Back to the war games? Or do I do what we do best, and really fuck things up?”

The glow from behind the faceplate hurts to look at. The shining of ashed lives almost shakes the porcelain around it as it screams from behind cracked porcelain and churning industry.

And then-

Quiet.

The porcelain mask rests on a simple body of basic machinery, a few barely-visible grenades and a stray missile attached but pointed inward more than out. 

“It would seem, Bishop Raika, that I am forced to surrender twice. I trust that you will allow me the privilege of keeping the rest of my forces alive?”

Raika turns her head, making a show of staring out at the blasted-flat warzone they’re in. “If you’ve left us any, sure. But I’ll be checking whatever fucking arrays we put you under real carefully.”

“I believe I can take it from here,” says a new voice, emerging from out of the Bishop Anaya’s shadow. The dripping-gold bones of Lu Karai emerge, the empty sockets staring out with less than his usual charismatic persona. “No need for a shameful journey. Well-fought and well-surrendered, Anaya.”

“Fill your sockets with piss and mold, Karai.”

With a nod to Raika and her group, he falls back into his shadow, taking the demi-divine bomber with him.

“Holy fuck, kid,” Raika says, letting out a breath she had to actively remember to hold in. “That was-”

“And you!” Jin says with a yell, whirling to face her, finger pointing right at her face. “Don’t think I’m done with you, you big, stupid, idiot, idiot Master!”