Well that was a bit of a cock-block.

  All that build-up, all that preparation, only to get stopped at the last moment. She did feel the panic, at least- whatever had stopped her news and greatest trick (the Apex, she assumes) certainly didn’t seem like they were taking it lightly, so that’s something.

  The moment that space unfreezes, she emerges, a fresh, humanoid body popping up out of the mass of absolutely devastated meat that her body has fallen into and become. “Well hi to you too!” she says, with a bow that is at least partially sarcasm. “I heard from a mutual friend that you were interested in new recruits, and that your recruitment policy can be rather violent around these parts. I hope my opening audition has properly impressed?”

  The presence, and the voice behind it, slowly pull away. The world trembles as it kicks back into action, pulsing with a strange below-the-surface twitch that she can’t quite identify.

  But she feels something inside her respond to it.

  A confirmation. Maybe. Possibly it means something else.

  Or… it is what it seems like, and her Heart just responded to whatever Many-Mouths just did.

  As the impossible pressure vanishes, and the world resumes its regular function, the other beasts all resume movement as well, each of them exhaling Intent and breath in equal form.

  What!?

  Raika turns, one eyebrow raised, and looks at the branching serpent that spoke.

  Its many branched heads and limbs are glowing with insane levels of pressure and heat, its own Dao of Flame and the unique attributes of its cultivation thundering through the space. It opens its “primary” mouth, and within it, multi-hued and venomous flame swirls, its ashes and heat pulsing in time to a pulse and eventually forming what looks like a young woman, covered in scales, with branching antlers on her head.

  “WHAT WAS THAT!” she yells. Her voice is thunderously loud, holding an accent that has a mix of sibilant hisses and guttural growls mixed into it. “You just- you- I-”

  Raika leans back into herself, shrugging and lounging in equal measure. “I was told that your Pack appreciates strength above all. I figured I could skip some of the bullshit if I proved that I have some. And now, here we are. So! Are you taking me to your boss yet, or do I have to beat you up again?”

  “You did NOT- I was NOT LOSING! You CHEATED! You had an ARTIFACT and TRICKS and you were MEAN and-”

  “I think that’s enough of that,” says a voice from above.

  While she’s currently digesting herself, CHANGING the flesh away (and having… a surprising amount of difficulty with it, actually), Raika doesn’t need to make a panopticon-head to sense what’s around her. Faux-human bodies, like her true form, work just fine for supporting Qi-saturated, superpowered biology to hear, feel, see and smell just about everything in a radius (though admittedly a lesser radius than with a proper sensory suite). Entering that radius now is the beast that was… titled(?) Thief Of Many Wings.

  It has no mouth that she can see. It’s mostly wings and limbs, some of them very distinctly torn off of the flesh of another and kept, seemingly on purpose, dripping blood and only half-joined to its body. But still, it speaks.

  Truespeak radiates from it as vibrations through the air, pulses of energy forcing matter and wind into the shape of words.

  “I do not believe there is a need for further hostilities.”

  “Well, let’s not rule anything out just yet, shall we?” she asks, smiling with her many fangs on display. “That was pretty fun. I would have won if not for you, too- it’s nice to have a challenge sometimes.”

  At this, a spear with a fan-blade at its edge clinks against a piece of glass that was once plant-life, before they… well, glassed it. She turns to look at the Sage Of Motion Born Again, meeting its implacable and surprisingly calm gaze.

  Unlike the others, it still speaks through Intent, transmitting feelings much more clearly than she’s felt from most other beasts. Victory Possible. Defeat Possible. You Have Many Flaws.

  “And many strengths too, darling,” she says with a wink. “Big weird guns and fancy materials ain’t all I’ve got going on.”

  “Yeah, well- you’re not the ONLY one with more POWER!” hisses Flame-Scale Of Many Branches, its humanoid body looking weirdly out of place amongst the monsters. She’s most similar to Raika in appearance, but smaller, human-scale and covered in serpentine features (and the antlers) but otherwise “normal”, like someone you could see as a beastkin in one of the further cities of the second or third ring. “If I went ALL OUT I could CRUSH you and-”

  “So! Your boss. Do I get an invitation?”

  “Don’t IGNORE me!!!”

  Raika ignores her, looking out at the rest- and at the two members not yet introduced. “And I suppose that you two could most assuredly slay me as well? Without a doubt and with utter ease?”

  The two beasts, huff, one of them poofing out their feathers wildly. This, in turn, makes their eyes look huge, considering that their feathers are where their eyes should be. It’s avian, its regular feathers replaced with blades, and there are some insectile components to its construction- but it seems mostly unbothered by the whole affair. It opens its beak (and then the beak inside that, and inside that, and inside that) to let out a squawk, and then a surprising mimicry of a humanoid voice.

  “Could. Won’t. Expensive. Pricy-you. Bettertime prices other-things.”

  “Mhm. And what do I call you two?”

  The avian ruffles its feathers, making a sound like swords clanging against each other.

  Manyblades Trade Of Value And Sight.

  The feline, on the other hand, says nothing. It simply rolls over on the patch of sunlight it’s laying on, playing its legs in a stretch.

  I Am Me. What Else Could I Be?

  She snorts. “Mhmm. I don’t suppose you would know a Dancer Between Layers, would you?”

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  The cat yawns, all six of its legs glowing with golden-yellow colors and reflecting the light as if through a prism around it. Dancer Between Layers Good Cat. Better Cat Me.

  “I don’t suppose that the rest of you have anything that helps clarify that?”

  The Sage shrugs, the movement alien and requiring a weird sequential sort of pattern for it to happen.

  Cats.

  Unfortunately, it seems that just about everyone else around follows along and just… shrugs. Or does the Intent-based equivalent of the same.

  “Mhmm. So! I’m Raiika. Seeing as we’re all introduced to each other now-”

  Her head snaps to the side, sitting upright on a pile of her own half-liquified flesh to look back in the direction she came from.

  “Ah.”

  A few seconds later the rumble can be better heard as someone stampedes forward.

  The world warps. It’s a technique, that much is clear, but not one of a style she recognizes. Like the cultivators she captured, Ko and Aria, when they sort of wrapped their Domain around close to their bodies, this feels like a warping of reality, a way that space is affected by one’s internal powers. She hasn’t met a Beast with a Domain yet, but… perhaps Lord Aurick is proving the exception.

  A hundred-hundred leagues of space are compressed and lengthened at once. The weight of a presence re-enters the world, one as high or higher than any of those she just fought, barring perhaps the Thief Of Many Wings, and space bends beneath the stride and gallop of a grand power.

  Not as fast as her- but fast.

  And, seemingly, not quite as neat.

  The world gets up and runs with him. Approaching from the horizon, the ground, the overgrowth, and even a series of animals are all emerging, fusing together into a pathway beneath his tread or running alongside him- and gradually coming apart, piece by piece, to fuse together into the path forward, each sacrifice beneath the hooves exponentially accelerating.

  Oh. Exponentially accelerating.

  Pillars of bone and Radiant Metal emerge from out of the slime of her Body, coming up from the deeper, undamaged parts of her and building a shield and anchor points in record time. She plunges stakes down into the overgrowth, down into plantlife denser than metal or stone, and-

  He stops, and he does so hard enough that the air breaks.

  A thunderclap, a concussive force so strong that it literally breaks things. Some of the plants catch fire from the sheer force they’re made to move at, a crater of kinetic impact pulverizing and turning to dust everything within a kilometer of arrival.

  “Ho, friends!” comes a clear voice into the deathly silence of his arrival. “It would appear I am not too late to avert true catastrophe, yes?”

  Raika emerges, the other Divine Beasts de-manifesting their own defences or re-manifesting out of whatever they dodged from. They each, in their own pace, look around the space around them, which was once a mountain of life so overgrown and densely packed that it became literal terrain. It is now something more like a crater dug into a mountainside, the already glassed terrain turned into densely-packed earth by dint of being crushed to dust and then compressed even further. The edges of it glimmer with fires from the sheer kinetic force of the blast, and everyone who made it through the impact are now standing inside a literal crater, the bowl of it high enough to actually mess with the sun’s shadows.

  “I suppose, in one sense, that you may have,” says the many-winged thief, its voice imbued with that strange ur-realness of Truespeak even without vocal cords. “In another, you remain capable of performing quite devastating feats yourself.”

  He snorts, shaking his head. “None of that, now! I’ve hardly exerted myself recently. I certainly took quite some time to get up to speed, no?”

  “Suppose you did,” Raika admits, forming a new body out of the remains of the old one, half-pulped even with her anchors and shielding. “I… kind of thought you’d be here faster. Or slower.”

  Aurick laughs, a surprisingly hearty sound. “We all have our own paths to Transcendence, no? The further we walk them (or trot, as it were), the further apart from each other we travel. Some travel by becoming weaponry, some travel by striding forth alongside the world, and making of it a path. Still, we arrive, and often at differing speeds. If you ever feel the need to test yourself, I am certain I could catch up to even your flight, given a proper run-up.

  “Now come along. Seeing as my Apex has yet to kill you, it would seem that you impressed them. Not sure what it is that you did, but I felt it from quite a while away. Come along, unless you’d rather cause another bit of wanton destruction?”

  She smiles, and shrugs. “Not at the moment. Was just fun to stretch my legs a bit.”

  He nods. “Good. I’m not sure that I could hold back our ‘friend’ if you decided to pick a fight now.”

  She cocks her head to the side, ready to ask-

  Oh.

  There’s a hand near her head. Long and pale, its fingers twitching softly, their edges… sharper than sharp.

  The Pale Thresher… no.

  The Pale Thresher stands there, its alien stillness challenged by something like hunger.

  She didn’t even sense it. Nothing at all. No hint of Intent, not even with the beast right here, almost like it’s… some sort of illusion. Like it’s not even there, not really.

  She doesn’t look deeper. She can’t. She can see the hand twitching, and around its edges, there’s the thing behind the Thresher, the thing of black and cold white and END.

  In an even fight… there’s things she could do. Tricks to pull, techniques that might make a difference. This thing isn’t an Apex, and her new technique apparently required one to deal with it, so that’s a positive sign. But here? Now?

  She knows, in the way that Intent communicates things, or Truth, that those claws will cut so much more than just the avatar she’s wearing here.

  “Good then! We’re all caught up. I recommend keeping your little friends well-shielded, at least for now. Best not expose them to all the leftover half-life here - it’s going to be difficult enough for you to heal from it as it is.”

  “Half-life?”

  He shrugs. “You’ll be fine for now. You’re strong enough. Come. We have an Apex to greet.”

  Aurick starts to walk in a vague direction, towards where she feels the pull still drawing her closer… and the world obeys.

  Not like his other technique- that one somehow made demands of the world, a pulse of his being in a way that created something that was both Domain and technique. This is just… walking. He’s not the one changing the world.

  The Apex is. Many-Mouths.

  It’s a Heart. Godflesh. It has to be. She can feel it pulsing, resonating with her own body, with the thing that is now both Soul and her Body and her very being. Nothing else that she’s ever met has been able to so thoroughly transform the world without a hint of cultivation.

  Something speaks, in patterns and sequences and subtle changes that make a conventional array look like a joke… and the world just obeys. Life blooms. The crater begins to fill out. The overgrowth returns, cracking through the glassed earth and dust, vines and trees and flowers and insects and animals all growing together into a pathway and reshaping the crater into a valley, a natural part of the landscape. Water flows in from… seemingly nowhere, filling in the bottom of the bowl until there’s a lake there, the angle of the crater making it spill down as waterfalls into other sections of the terrain kilometers away.

  Aurick walks the path, and, like a series of pilgrims or supplicants, the beasts begin to follow.

  Raika walks with them, deeper into the grasp of one of the great powers of the fourth ring.

  Struggling a bit the last few days! Hopefully back up to a faster pace sooner than later. Enjoy!

  And if you want to hear my beautiful and metaphorical voice on all your storytelling desires, hang out with an active community, or just sing my praises, here's the discord!