Chapter 63: Chapter 64: Lady Maj, Lady Kai, and an interlude with a giant stranger

Little changes emerge after our little reverie on the rooftop. Some are mine. A golden corona spills about my figure, centered on my head. Gentle like the tinsel we put on the trees at Noltuthir Yul. I feel awkward about it for a week or two. It seems more like an angel thing. So I take the sensation of that lucid self-image from the night of my closure, and hold it in my mind with the idea of the glow.

I invoke "angelic" and feel the cold clash of dissonance.

I invoke "succubus can be shiny if she wants" and immediately start happy-crying.

Some of the differences are in the ways others treat me, and... and I realize I don't mind. I do want to be treated differently from the other denizens. Just a little, in ways that feel right. No one bows or scrapes, thank my lust. That wouldn't feel good at all. Just a little extra gravity, a little extra focus. And at some point someone starts calling me "Lady Maj." It feels nice. I start walking with my hands folded and a strange dreamlike serenity.

Distantly, I know I'll need to talk to Kairliina. Ask the inevitable.

For now, I flow. Steps like this should be taken in moments with the right spirit. Now is a crisp spring-like morning, a few weeks of my time after the healing night and my rooftop reverie with the Overlady. The eyes on the distorted parking garages blink blearily. Gigantic slimes slide down spiral-blade towers, swatting each other.

My pensive steps carry me face-fist into a wave of cold so freezing it feels like my skin's burning. I shake myself to clarity and manifest more of me into the waking dimension until the symptoms of chorlag radiation taper down, Kai’s essence pushed out by mine.

It's harmless since Kairliina doesn't meant to harm me, but why here in the Lambent Quarter? She usually reserves this kind of power-projection for Saingediir. I press inward towards the center. I find the Lady herself, six horns glinting in the hazy light of the ten distant stars that make a Machrae Diir morning, facing a giant.

Bronzy skin patterned by black stripes, baggy red pants and a shirt both torn. Lots and lots and lots of muscle.

I draw even with Kairliina. "Need any help with this?"

Her tongue, that screeching mass of forked blue-white plasma trailing lightning, sweeps over her black lips. "Hm... no." Iron rasps and scabbard-rings rattle with the clasp of her claws on her threshold-blade's bio-engineered grip, freeing a few inches of the great god-slaying blade at her side--or at least, a dreamscape conception of it.

"I am asking you once, only," Kairliina calls. "Can we take this elsewhere? This is the Lambent Quarter. We raise children here."

The giant crosses their arms. Cocks their head up and back, tossing a mane of red hair. "Nah," they call out, an eye of green and an eye of yellow glowing. "We'll wing it. It'll be fine. Besides." That infuriating grin widens. "You mean demon-spawn, right? Who cares if a few of them get squashed? You'll just breed more."

Kairliina's black lips curl back far enough to reveal her metalloid fangs.

"Do you need me to give you space?" I ask.

"Neg." Her left foot slides back. "If you were any random person, sure. You, Maj? I'm not going to lose track of you."

And the entire courtyard erupts in a cacophony of glassy buzzsaw arcs, lightning snarls carving molten slag from the flagstones and burning statues off at the base that are--

--that are already frozen in time by the instant I register them.

My heart lurches.

I fear, as Kairliina coalesces from the halted storm of herself arisen in power, with a shell-shocked stare and an ungainly, staggering skid sideways, that she's underestimated the invader. I know that with the deep power such things are all too possible, even for beings like Kairliina.

But she straightens, manages to focus long enough to get her sword's point seated in its scabbard, and looks at me over her shoulder--no pain, no fear, no despair. Just slow, blinking confusion. "Uh... okay, so..."

She waves her hand. Her frozen attacks crystallize.

Frost-spawned fog drifts off the sculpture-garden formed from the solidified negative space of cuts. Lightning-bolts warp and grow to become a colossal ice-blue cage, twisting together at its apex where a little parapet grows to hold hanging fronds of pink and red.

And, lastly, a hissing blood-spout from the backward-toppling giant.

"Alright," Kairliina says, "let's see what we're looking at." She hurries to the fallen foe. Their hands, each as big as Kai's torso--or mine, even!--twitch in shock. A single brilliant red shear has laid them open from genitals to jaw-line.

"Do we stabilize them?" I ask.

Kairliina contemplates that. "Hm... no. Not this one. I'm not seeing the rehabilitation vector. Machrae Diir only takes evil scum who can fit in with the rest of our community." She draws her sword again. Steps quickly around the invader, dodging blood-spittle cast by labored breaths, and clamps a taloned foot atop their chest to hold them down. She raises the great nova-streaked blade up. Seeking.

Drifting the point above sweat-streaked skin.

Without using any of my own, I can imagine her soul-sight at work: looking through skin and flesh for the stubborn beating of an overgrown blood-pump.

"Gods," Kairliina breathes. "Look at them. What were they thinking? This isn't even a proper fusion. It's just two psyches mashed together in a body that doesn't really fit either--of them. Why do they keep doing this? Why do they think that forcing themselves to be one with somebody who wants completely different things will make them stronger, why--"

"Kai," I interrupt. "Is any of this new? Do you gain anything from forcing yourself to put it into words?"

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She exhales a quaking gust of cold-nova crystals. "No. You're right. Thanks, Maj."

I motion to her. "Give me the sword, I'll do it. Give us both the freedom to choose."

Kairliina nods, passing her myth-devouring threshold-blade to me before I can fully process that I just asked Kairliina to hand me her sword, THAT sword, like it was nothing--no. Not like it was nothing. Like it was natural, between us two.

Blue flesh, a silver backstrap, and white chitin settles into my hand. Kairliina's slip away as she steps off and I take her place atop the fallen invader.

"Oh, hells, this thing is heavy," I gasp.

"Is it?" Kairliina's big, girlish eyes blink. She purses her lush lips. "It only weighs... nine pounds, I think? Which as a human would've been a lot for a combat blade, even if it is a two-hander," she continues, as I heft it overhead, "but... oh, right, yeah. Existential weight."

I get the point over the same place she held it. I pulse my soul-sight once to confirm. Golden gleams of my power's echo in another's flesh. Back-and-forth ripples highlight veins, arteries, nerves crackling with red lightning, and that still-beating heart.

Right. Just plunge the point in. Just have to... right...

"Huh." My tail flicks. "Killing normal people... isn't like hunters, or angels, or..."

"Kai? Maroj?" Vost asks, padding out from an archway. "Is everything..." she trails off. Hurries over. "Please let me," she says, putting her own foot on the dying giant and holding a hand of glittering claws to me. "Neither of you looks like you want to right now. It's okay. Spent all morning cleaning some carcasses. I'm in the right frame of mind for this."

Kairliina nods. "Thank you, Vost. Maj, hand her my sword, would you?"

I, in turn, step off the carcass--I mean, the giant, oh gods, I'm really not up to this right now, am I?--passing the oh-so-heavy sword to Vost.

"Can I get an aim assist?" she asks.

Kairliina and I act at the same time--odd, since Kai's instinctive reactions ought to be orders of magnitude faster than mine--so there's both a blue silhouette and a golden corona emanating from within the giant, pointing out their heart's place in all that flesh.

"Oh." Vost lowers the sword and steps away.

The blue-and-gold highlights are static. Their heart's not beating anymore. Just to drive the point home, a growing fecal stink mingles with the fleshy iron of their blood and guts.

Wordless, Vost hands Kairliina's sword back.

Kairliina and I are equally quiet while she sheathes it. "Um..." She backs away. Pats herself on the shoulder. "Are we all feeling okay about this? Anyone need to talk?"

"I'm fine," I say. I'm staggered to realize it's true.

"All good here," Vost agrees.

"I am... also fine," Kairliina nods. "Huh. Yeah. I'm okay with this. Feels like the perfect resolution, actually." Quiet descends once more.

"Can I have this?" Vost asks, gesturing to the carcass.

Kairliina shrugs. "Sure. Dead meat's dead meat. I don't feel like sifting their body auras to... oh." She leans backwards a little from the corpse. "You'll want to test the quality, first."

The giant's face is sieving open, now two. Skin splits to reveal bones in odd places, layers of a second paler skin wrapping displaced organs wrapping veins.

"It'll make for an interesting experiment," Vost says. She steps neatly aside with a sweep of her hand to call a big cart through a portal. "I'll let you know how it goes."

Kairliina and I stand, watching, while she cleans the blood and other things with little eldritch pulses. We say nothing until she's gone. The transfigured courtyard, with all its creations born from transmuted destruction, sits empty.

"Now what?" I ask.

Kairliina rests her chin on an elegant fist, considering. Then she whips her head up to look at me, eyes blazing with the joy of impulse. "Wanna wander around the catacombs under the ADS and get railed by eldritch horrors together?"

"Oh," I groan, "oh, fuck yes."

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