Chapter 374 - For The Sake Of Peace

Whoo! A day later than expected, but maybe one of my favorite chapters in a while. Fuckin hell, got to use some stuff I haven't used in a Long time. I think this chapter's SOLID. Does bring up an issue of length and serialization, buuuuut... that's for later. For now- enjoy.

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For the first time in the history of mankind, one generation literally has the power to destroy the past, the present and the future, the power to bring time to an end.

-A wise man, in the face of a dreadful truth. H.H.H 

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He’s running.

Sandals clacking against overturned dirt and ringing against glass. Whispers of shadow and darkness, the weight of presences long gone pressing down on his shoulders and pushing him forward, like friends giving him a shove in a race. Robes flutter, undone by superheated wind that cuts against his skin, painted grey by the ash on the air. He almost slips, almost lets the energy flowing around him escape his grasp, and the way that the world tries to bake him to char in an instant.

The distance is impossibly far. There are no landmarks to tell him he’s going the right way. 

He doesn’t need any. The goalpost is impossibly bright in his eyes. 

Even with his eyes closed, he can still See. 

There is a field of flowers, growing on a lake of corpses. There is a sharp-edged Nothing moving through it, hunting through its roots, and even still, the flowers stand tall, blooming with a series of events and echoing moments. 

There is a single, all-consuming moment, which is forever and tomorrow and the past and now, and it is the moment of oblivion, which takes all that is and through a Detonation that echoes eternal, turns it into broken pieces, into ruins, into Death. 

The blast is so bright, the moment so powerful, that he knows there is a sea of events within it, a multitude of things outside of time that click and whirr, that weld and cut and bend and shape, but they are all secondary to the moment where anything becomes anything but itself, becomes anything but something untouched by explosive violence. It is a sea of dead things and broken monuments and unmade landscapes, contrasted against the lake that is a garden that is a thousand Deaths made into growing things. 

So he runs. 

He knows it’s not what they would want. Knows it’s not what his “big sis” or his Master or the corpses that watch them all would tell him to do, in the face of the absolute oblivion he’s facing.

But things aren’t going to plan. And if his Master were here, she’d improvise something. She’d do what she could, and learn from it. 

He won’t dare to do less. 

It might be madness. It might be arrogance. It might even be just genuine stupidity. He knows he’s still a child, that his cultivation is minimal, that his understanding of Dao and ghosts and magics is lacking-

But his Master is struggling, and the plan didn’t account for whatever this is, and he has an idea. 

He can do something. So he should.

Wrapped in shadows and whispers and only barely enough power to keep himself from burning in that endless moment, Rai Jin sprints over scorched earth, trying to make it in time to use what he’s saw in the blast. 

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If not for being dead, Raika would be blind.

The fact that she doesn’t use her eyes to see, same as she doesn’t use any other part of her corpse to be conscious and “alive”, is the main reason why she’s capable of comprehending anything at all at the moment. After all, she has no face anymore. It’s melting off. Again.

The Rifle in her hand is screaming, escaping air and incoming damage making its materials hiss and screech against the pressure of existing in this space. It’s not a refined, precise instrument, it’s an art piece, a first attempt at what it is, and the fact that it’s held on this long is practically a miracle.

The rest of her body stands in pretty much the same position.

Chunks of her flesh are missing, parts that no longer reappear as she re-summons herself to her anchors because those acupuncture needles are just gone making gaping holes in her leg and gut. The remaining needles glow with heat, generated both by her opponent and by the friction the energy in them causes, inefficiencies turning to thermal force as the things which keep her undead fight against something demanding Death absolute. Most of her is charcoal and cooked meat, sloughing off in waves. 

All of this before a single attack. 

Her first Gu is gone. Fucking vaporised, turned from a living organism to a carbonized chunk of flesh she saw go flying away a second ago. Her flesh is searing away, the worms and ghosts of worms inside her evaporating almost as fast as she can remake them.

She raises the rifle to fire, skinless fingers and bubbling muscle acting in supernatural concert to line up the shot.

The Bishop is no longer there.

From behind, a wave of force splatters Raika against the glassed ground, powerful enough to liquify her. She reforms around her needles, anchoring herself back into shape- and gets liquified again. The Rifle creaks and groans, cracks starting to appear throughout its surface, but holds- for now.

For a moment, she is there again. The not-place. Oblivion by any other name. 

It is dark there, and there is something with her, and she is very close to Not being at all. 

A Cold Sun stares out from an empty socket, and it holds no hunger, because it is inevitable.

Again, she says no.

Again, she pulls herself back.

She goes fast enough that she has enough time to turn and throw up a few burst of Echo-stuff to-

A wave of force liquifies her. 

What’s left of her corpse is a twisted thing, the Blacksteel of her skeletal prosthetic the only thing truly intact. Everything else is molten like wax or glassed into the earth or ash entirely, save a few needles, glowing with heat.

The corpse is gone.

She’s still here. 

She stops herself from reforming for a moment. Holds her metaphorical breath.

She learned this lesson already. The corpse is a vessel. It’s not what she’s anchored to. It’s not what she is, not like this. What she is, is her own Death, bound to the acupuncture needles she used to keep herself from turning dead rather than undead. 

She forms a new azalea, one whose petals are bright as a sunburst and form an almost perfect circle. It grows, manifesting from nonexistent shadows, burning through her Qi and the Death she holds- but at that expensive price, it offers an instant of shade, her latest brush with Death manifesting as a way to counter and control it. She redirects the wave of force that spawns almost instantaneously, just long enough to drag her anchor-needles back together and grab hold of the rifle made of Pain. 

She doesn’t need fingers to pull the trigger, any more than she needed eyes through which to see. 

A shard of Blacksteel leaves her prosthetic, enters the chamber, clicks into place as the hammer cocks back-

A wave of force hits the Death-bloom she’s created, her personal perspective on her own Deaths and those she’s caused reflecting that Detonation back towards its origin. It also shreds the azalea to ribbons, turning it from a semi-solid construct of Qi and Death into something like wisps of force, glimpsed memories or vague concepts turning to air.

It bought enough time, though.

The gun fires. 

A visage of porcelain and black light, whose face is an empty cavity that bears the endless mechanisms that birth the perfect and absolute Detonation, reels back, flinching from the blow.

A flinch- barely even a scratch where the bullet grazed her, carving the barest indent against center-mass, but that’s what the Rifle is designed for. Things of absolute power and inhuman natures, forced to experience their equivalent of pain at the levels which Raika comprehends it, at the level of Dao which she places within each bullet. The damage to cause a pain reaction would be immense- the ability to cause just the pain reaction, relatively free of damage, is considerably cheaper. 

In that moment of reaction, an Echo of a person, wrapped around and bound by half-ruined needles, sprints forward.

Not enough to make a corpse that just gets evaporated. This isn’t the plan, but that doesn’t matter- the plan only exists until it doesn’t. No room to build a new one- she spends everything she has instantly.

The metaphorical garden of azaleas that is her Death shrinks, a thousand times over, until it’s barely a few flowers wide, its “dirt” little more than blood-red mud from which they struggle to keep roots. She burns through her reserves, manifesting through the prosthetic on the ground, forming from it a thin, skeletal abomination of obsidian shards. 

She screams, her throat made of shattering Blacksteel, and throws herself towards from the Detonating figure.

Infinite gears and the perfection of the machine build to an eternal moment, which is a Death that Detonates infinitely, forever and now all in one. The luminance of oblivion, leaking through a body that is a shell in truth, made to be shattered, made to be a vessel for Devastation as much as it is made to exist in the first place. A wellspring of complexity, of mechanisms, of metal and chemistry and fuel rods and ignition, like a hole in the world shaped like the illusion of a woman, into which one could fall in and be ground apart into fuel for a destruction that is total and eternal. 

The Bishop of Mortaria glows with the resplendence of a war’s burning climax, and she is the center of the world, and that world is a flat plane burned lower every moment by a shockwave made infinite, by heat and force and invisible fire so absolute they are more present than air. And Raika throws herself forward.

There is nowhere she could run, no pocket of power she could build within herself, nothing in this body that she can use. She does not think of anything else, does not offer herself an out, does not consider the things she intended to save for a rainy day. 

She burns herself to the core, and throws herself forward. 

She has no lips, no teeth, not even a real mouth- but she is smiling. 

It feels like home.

A wave of force shatters her.

The leftover shrapnel keeps throwing itself forward. She keeps grinning. 

She lets it all go, for just a moment. Everything. She lets herself fall apart. She lets herself stop worrying about the knife of End echoing closer towards her, about the city she should, in theory, be defending, about her friends, about the workings and plans that got absolutely fucked by the Bishop making this move, about herself. 

She is in an agony beyond a nervous system’s capacity to communicate, risking everything, carving herself apart and using every scrap for fuel to achieve something fucking stupid, unhinged, impossible. 

It feels like home. 

And so does the Bishop.

The idea for needles came from her original lobotomy. Her self-excision, crippling her connection to the Ur-Raika, her greater self that now lies dead and dying, came through using needles to damage her brain, removing herself from some memories, some thoughts, some connections. 

She was never the part of herself that was supposed to learn architecture, or deeper biomancy, or, most notably, Dao. She was meant to learn of Death and spellcraft, and she has, but it doesn’t stop the Bishop from feeling familiar, almost as much as the agony of the moment, the hopelessness that feels as comfortable and ephemeral as a familiar blanket. 

A wave of force shatters her.

Sand wrapped around needles, floating in the illusion of a body that they inhabit and anchor to, throws itself forward. 

The Bishop looks unbothered. That face, which is a cavern and well and gun-barrel in which that sun of cataclysmic obliteration resides, shows not a hint of concern. Not an ounce of Intent leaks from her. 

She is incarnation and source of the Death she has conquered. It is not a Soul that resides within her, for there is nothing that can reside there which does not Die or exist as source of Death. It is not a Domain, for there is no true domain of Death- all that dies in its way is that Death, anywhere and everywhere. It is a divinity of transition, a god which is a moment made eternal, a mortal thing made into a moment and cause of death, a snake devouring itself, a paradox as power, feeding on the blood of existence to Be. 

[Dead Shadows Etched In Stone] is Bishop and God and moment and Death, cause and consequence, all in one. 

And that moment, that Bishop, that god, is made of comprehension. The mutation of a mind, and that which it understands, acting as evolution for an apotheosis- what a person believes and understands and experiences becomes that which they build themselves from. 

And it feels familiar.

The clicking of machinery. The delivery system of the Death that is coming, launched from barrel by alchemy and mechanism. The flame that burns, invisible and realized, colored by impossible radiances which have no name but are sometimes called Red and Black and Blue and Gold and Purple and Green by those who can somehow see them. 

War, and its machinery. Weapons-fire, and its foundations. Flame, and all that it creates and is. 

Raika does not use eyes to see. Her eyes are gone, evaporated, and corpse-flesh beforehand. 

She sees anyways.

Raika does not use her brain to think. Its synapses, interrupted by the metal needles that broke her from herself, have not been what she uses to think in some time.

Something clicks.

Raika the Burnt, the Bloody, the Broken, The Undying looks out from out of an Echo of herself, barely as real as mist in the face of Detonation.

Her End twists and carves through her, digging through meat and meaning to cut at the truth of her made manifest again.

It’s too late.

She sees the moment that [Dead Shadows Etched In Stone] realizes something is different, raises a hand to do more than just wear her down by its presence. A flex of Intent, the impossible radiance of “Comprehension”, the shaping of Qi into a targeting reticule and the positioning of a TACTICAL STRIKE - 

It’s too late.

I Am Me, I Am Mine.

I Can Change.

We Are What We Eat.

She has no throat to swallow. No teeth to chew. No muscles to masticate. No tongue to taste.

She has not used her eyes to see, and has seen anyways. She has not used her brain to think, and has thought anyways. 

She is dead.

She is undead anyways.

She opens wide and bites down.

[TRANSCENDENT ART: EAT OF THE FRUIT, GOLDEN AND RIPE]

The field, blasted flat by a force powerful enough to shape the landscape, falls into a crater as the blast of divinities meeting cracks it in half.

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The ground shakes, and he almost loses his footing. Hands that smell of smoke, of soil, of woodwork and masonry and fried fat and blisters and paint, pick him up and help him back along the path, and he keeps running. Even as his sides ache, even as his feet blister and burn through his sandals at the temperature of the ground, even as his lungs ache and force his breath to come up pink and misted, he runs.

He can feel it. He’s almost there. He’s almost too late.

He can also feel, behind him, the impossible things that kill their way through the world to find him.

The undead giant, many-headed and wearing his own skulls as crowns and prayer beads, tears apart the world on the way to him, opening space itself like a set of doors he tears apart and wreathes in un-flame, which creates as it consumes and consumes by creating itself. The shadows, stark and horrifyingly sharp behind him from the light that blasts from ahead, ring with the sound of gold and jewelry spilling over itself to catch him. He knows well that they do not want him dead here, like this, even as he knows they will carve the life from him and call it a gift the moment they are free to do so. 

He knows that big sis Li Shu is working on things, and that his Master won’t lose. She can’t lose, ever, not really, and she knows better than anyone what she can do.

But she doesn’t care what it costs her.

Even now, Rai Jin feels in his heart that she can still win, that she could unleash some hidden trick or impossible gamble and change the battlefield entirely. But she doesn’t. She uses herself at her weakest level that is still useful, limits her options, does everything she can but only in the ways that keep everyone else safe, that involve no one suffering or struggling save herself.

She won’t save herself, no matter what.

So he has to.

He remembers hearing the sound of her beating at her chest. Hearing the ringing of metal as Dink tried to keep her alive. Heard the way her voice rasped as she told big sis Li Shu to grab the needles. Felt how she died, and is dying, and didn’t die, and he remembers how something in him almost broke at the thought of her being gone. 

She will do worse to herself if it means that she protects him. That she wins. That she changes the world, somehow, some way. 

But that just means he has to be the one to protect her.

His Core trembles at how fast he makes it spin, tearing Qi out of it in a hurricane of consumption. The shades that run with him and guide him and protect him swell with permanence and weight on reality, even as they spend it alongside him. With smoke and whispers, with faith and care and the strength needed to make both real, he keeps running. Ahead of the ghost-kings that come to take him, towards the person who would kill herself to be strong enough for him.

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Detonation shatters as something that is not teeth digs through it, tears it asunder, and swallows. 

The Bishop, whose name Raika does not know, whose name is [Dead Shadows Etched In Stone], shrieks, as much in surprise as in pain, as a chunk of her is carved away. Part of her chest is ripped away, the shattered porcelain turning to razor-sharp sand that cuts through the landscape under the force of what is unleashed. Beneath that chest are beating engines, pulsing reactors, a kaleidoscope of industry that all feed into a further-increased ever-bomb ever-sun.

And yet, it is now how this Death is. This Death, wrapped in the form of an undead thing, is death by Detonation, not by Consumption. It is not vanquished, not unmade, but its unspooling of further depths is defense more than offense.

Across from it, basking in the glow of muzzle-flash and shrapnel and ricochet, forging itself out from Flame in glowing streams of metal and flesh, is a beast of nightmare. A thing that Devours and is devoured by itself, spawning from out of the biggest bite of Qi and Dao she’s taken in a long time. 

Raika stares out of true eyes, like pointed stars in pools of midnight, and smiles. 

No words pass between them. She is still the lesser. She is still weak. She is still forming.

But as a halo of teeth and flesh and machinery orbit an acupuncture model of a person, with glowing needles anchoring a self into reality, a sun rises from out of the mass. A sun that is the shape of Plasma, Lightning and Flame both, Detonating endlessly.

Smaller than that of [Dead Shadows Etched In Stone], but its origin is impossible to negate. 

We Are What We Eat.

There is a frozen instant, as a warrior-god of Death re-evaluates and a divine beast of CHANGE remembers how it feels to be herself.

And then-

Absolute Bombardment: Hellfire Detonation Unmakes The World

Supreme Body Art: Full Body Transmutation

[Dead Shadows Etched In Stone] waves a hand out of space, and when it returns, a riptide burns through existence, pulling away the veil that made it seem like it was ever more than the instant before oblivion. Missiles, shaped of infinitely carbonized shadows and glowing with suns of hateful crimson, launch in an infinite parade, painting the world the black of smoke and, an instant later, the Red of harm.

An ever-changing mass of horror and transcendence turns to Radiant Metal. Engines powered by True Flame, Qi acting with the properties of Flame, manifest patterns of Qi acting with the properties of Lightning, as True Plasma, a reflection of Dao and Qi and the Will of the Heavens weaponized to power something like the burning aura of a sun. From that sunlight, amidst detonations that run into detonations and break the world but fail to reach their intended targets, that light reshapes itself down long, cavernous cannon-barrels.

[TRANSCENDENT ART: A BULLET FOR EVERY BREATH]

A technique born of the Dao of the Gun, magnified by the quasi-divine flesh she built and built from, now powered by Detonation and an understanding of Death that eclipses all but her understanding of Flesh.

The forever-bomb is interrupted by a staccato of smaller, symbiotic explosions, feeding off their source and redirecting it to bullets made of divine lead and Blacksteel and fire forward.

Bright Oblivion Style: Thousand Flashes Erase Existence

Like firecrackers made of suns, a thousand-thousand explosions unmake each bullet as it carves away reality, straight lines of Death tunneling through the world and unmade by the heat and counter-force launched against her. 

[Dead Shadows Etched In Stone] reaches out, hands going towards the cracks in her shell, beginning to tear herself open, and Raika-

A knife cuts out of her. 

Metal and flesh and radiance and infinite CHANGE tear apart. Plasma and Flesh and Death and newfound Detonation all are severed, bleeding and un-being from the source of the wound. 

The blade is the black after black. The dark after the final dark has come and gone. 

The shape of her falls to its knees. 

She raises a hand anyways, shaping the fingers into a gun. The digit becomes a barrel. A sun is born and prepares to die inside the idea of a limb. A bullet made of a needle that should not be loads into the chamber. 

[Dead Shadows Etched In Stone] moves, preparing to tear herself open and unleash a grander blow-

“STOP!”

The body of a child appears between the two impossibilities. 

Rai Jin steps out of shadows that should not exist and claps his hands as if in prayer.

The light of the Detonation is blotted out by the carbon shadows it casts, rising as one to wrap around the boy and his mother. 

For a moment… silence.

And then the sizzling quiet that comes after the flame of war.