Tombstones trampled in my wake,

As I see to a matter quite grave,

The earth is turned as my claim is staked,

Besoiling my pickaxe, trowel and stave,

Caskets pounded and splintered 'til they bust,

Flesh, bone and casket give way,

It smashes to ashes, crushed to dust,

Shattering the decrepit grip of decay…

-Excerpt from an ancient hymn, sometimes referred to as the Casket-Crusher's song

—---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The rules are simple.

She can't get hurt. Li Shu and Jin can't get hurt. The Cathedral can't be damaged.

She can only use fleshcrafting and assorted beings she can direct.

She has to make the most warlike of the three Bishops, the undead giant that is Seo En-Hyun, exercise his full capacity or the full depth of a technique.

Simple isn't the same thing as easy.

She feels the Gu connected through to her being, its essence orbiting around her own in the abstract meta-space that is the space where Death meets reality. It is partially her, born through feeding from her Deaths and her flesh, and she's used that to her benefit.

We Are What We Eat.

I Am Me, I Am Mine.

They're not as… solid as before. Weaker, somehow. Still, they work, and that's what matters.

It hurts to stretch the definitions, but she feels the nascent awareness of the creature, the stray thoughts and overwhelming hunger, and uses her connection to it and her Truths to overpower its instincts, forcing it to follow instructions. It digs insectile limbs digging into the flesh-clay of the two hex hounds she's wrapped over herself, its nature alien to ordinary physics and allowing it to hoist the thousand pounds of mass with its six inch body and its twenty foot wings. They beat hard enough to blur, turning the air behind and to each side of her into a humming haze that buzzes loud in the Cathedral.

All the accumulated Death, the infusion of Qi, the instructions of ritual and formations, all to create a being divorced from conventional rules.

It's not enough, of course.

She forces herself to block the attack coming her way, forcing dead flesh to multiply and dampen the impact as a shield in front of her. Waves of monochrome wraithfire wash over her shield, getting dangerously close to "her", foundationally unmaking the claylike armor she's wrapped herself in.

But, aimed up at her as it is, it doesn't carve through the Cathedral again. Which, frankly, is going to be the hardest part of all this.

The cackling laugh of a thousand dead souls echoes up to her as the three-faced giant launches himself skyward, flesh made of liquified ghosts flexing like living muscle to launch him a hundred feet straight up. A flash of will points her Gu away, and she darts back fast enough for inertia to become an issue, losing bits of her armor- but it just barely allows her to dodge the swipe of the thermal lances that have replaced his hands.

He cackles, dancing forward, and she has to block and parry, further drawing in her Death and using it to feed into the undead mass of her hex-hounds. Each swipe burns them down to almost nothing, but she keeps their skulls on her shoulders, acting like a final piece of armor and as an anchor from which she can reinforce the constructs.

Meanwhile, she sends commands below, pulling on the pieces of Death connecting her to Qi and to her summons. The Cathedral, slowly regenerating under the golden coins of Bishop Lu Karai, begins to wriggle, covered by an ever-expanding blanket of iridescent worms, and her hounds leap about, limbs reforming to grab at handholds on the pillars and climb.

Seo En-Hyun points a single finger at her, like an accusation, and she only barely moves in time to avoid the piercing beam of wraithfire that emerges. It cuts into part of her Gu's wings, leaving a burnt semi-circle carved out of it, and her flight stutters in time for the colossus to appear above her and swing down into her.

So, obviously, she dissolves her skull.

As she falls, she finishes analyzing the trials.

First: she, her companions, and the Cathedral can't be hurt. But what is damage to someone who is dead? If she's guessed right, if she can argue it, then technically "she" is the Death and flesh tied to her needles. Her awareness of herself as something dead, as having an identity beyond pure biology, an awareness taught to her by the very Bishops here, means that harming her has more to do with damaging her mind and the anchors she is tied to more than her body.

Second: she can only use the fleshcrafting that Lu Karai taught her, and is " free to face my brother with as many or as few entities you can manipulate".

There's a trick to that, though. Two, actually. The techniques she has for summoning and manipulating flesh revolve around the use of arrays, after all, and are powered by her Deaths. A limitation still, for sure, but not quite as crippling as it appears on the surface.

The other trick will have to wait.

Several of the hex-hounds are already breaking down where they crawl, the worms below feeding on them to reproduce rapidly and spread further across the cathedral floor, gradually building more and more partially-finished patterns. "Raika" falls, twenty-some needles wrapped in loosely-connected tissue melting out of her body and shooting down like bullets into a hex-hound below.

Seo En-Hyun's next blow evaporates much of the body she wore to the church, knocking her Gu off hard enough that it takes all it has not to crash violently into the far wall. There's an instant of hesitation before he notices her, whole and "alive" down below, and grins wide again.

"Good! This granddaddy is-"

One of the hex hounds that was climbing up to them throws itself at the ghost-lich, detonating in a shower of hardening bone fragments and corpse-flesh transmuting to chitin and biosteel. They evaporate into after-image Echoes of themselves well before they reach his flesh, but it serves to stop him talking.

His eyes, glowing in three fleshless faces and off of the many skulls hanging on his neck, never leave her.

Also good. It's important to keep his focus.

Then, instead of attacking her again, he waves a hand across the nearest pillar.

Fuck.

She commands the Gu into place, forcing its maw open and for it to feed. The flames of the wraithfire dissolve into echo-stuff again, absorbed by the ever-hungry beast, but the improvised defense lets a good amount of it leak past, carving into the miniscule thing's shell and leaving burning swathes across its wings.

The insectile abomination is wounded, but it barely even cares, Raika's connection informing her of exactly what it's thinking.

It's hungry.

The half-burned thing takes after its creator and launches itself at the Bishop, inhaling Death and echo-stuff like a mobile vacuum. He just laughs, weaving a barrier of the Death and Qi beneath reality with barely a movement- it doesn't block anything, but it slows the Gu down, keeps it still for a moment, and-

Two more hex-hounds leap up and detonate themselves, shaped shrapnel stabbing upwards into the Bishop only to dissolve again. They make it in a little closer, her commands forming them with less quantity and more density, but none of them even graze him. He just smiles, his eyes glowing as his hands wave down at her and at the space all around-

Fuck. He's just playing with her. He doesn't even have to try.

It's fine. It's fine. She can do this. This works in her favor, kind of.

More of her hounds sacrifice themselves, becoming amorphous blobs of shielding to take on the plating even as she sprints across the floor, circling around the levitating titan of death and leaping across the space. Clad in necrotic tissue and enhanced muscle, she's a blur, dashing across the ground and directing her remaining hounds like a conductor, using her hovering Gu as a heavy hitter to force Seo En-Hyun to occasionally block, evade, or form another barrier. The hounds leap, dash, detonate and shape themselves into drills and morph into many-limbed abominations of teeth and claw-

And Seo En-Hyun stops playing for a moment.

He flickers, his existence appearing ephemeral for a moment, and before she can so much as blink he's in front of her, his fists covered in the gore of her constructs. She feels a shudder through her deepest self as a dozen of her most complex constructs are torn to pieces, unmade fundamentally.

"You will have to do better, little ghost! My test might be a challenge indeed, but this senior would be insulted if you were to fail to even entertain!"

"Blow it out your ass!"

Damn, that felt good. And, to boot, it got the ghost to blink.

She sends a small command through one of her final hex-hounds, which lets out an ululating howl, far too deep for a living hound to produce.

An instant later a pulse of Death emanatates through the space, a smell of smoke and half-remembered conversations flooding out like a fresh burst of mist. Beneath their feet, the diagram she's been building this entire time suddenly spasms to life. As corpse-flesh touches to half-living worms, roiling like exposed intestines, and the Death they've fed upon, the floor in a hundred feet in every direction lights up.

The flesh dribbling from his fists moves fast enough to whip-crack through the air, wrapping his limbs tight to his body and launching itself out to a hundred different anchors. The remains of the hex-hounds roil in the air, a flying cloud made of bloody gobs of meat rather than corpse-flies, and begins to assemble itself into a broken mass of flesh.

Seo En-Hyun laughs, casually breaking out of the bindings, smiling and at ease- and then has to flinch and duck back as Raika swings a limb of serrated Blacksteel through the space he just occupied.

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Moving the Blacksteel from her dissolved body to her new one was as easy as thinking of it- the prosthetic is as much an anchor as any of the acupuncture needles she's using, and it half moves, half materializes back on her. A dozen claws and drills and a deployment of obsidian oblivion fly out, slashing through the air and forcing Seo En-Hyun to properly retreat at last.

Right into the Gu, recalled and forced to circle around to his back.

He hisses, the flames of one of his skulls briefly flickering as the hungering abomination tries to drink him whole. It chokes, its stomach bloating at the richness of its meal, and she senses its hunger shifting, bubbling tight against its skin at the rich feeding.

He swings a backhand that crumples the Gu's little body and launches it into a nearby wall, the force of it almost enough to shatter the skulls that make up so much of the architecture.

The keratin stops it.

Seo En-Hyun at last looks away from Raika herself, noticing the rest of their surroundings for the first time since he began playing with her. A thin film of keratin and chitinous spines has grown over nearly a quarter of the Cathedral's massive interior, building complex architecture and stable anchor-points over the marble and bones. At its center, Li Shu's thorns bloom ever outward, emanating out from an armored figure in white and red, surrounded by a cage of nail harder than steel. Biological material blossoms into medical tools that assemble themselves, pulling to each other and forming into complex, insectile constructs that skitter over the new landscape, pulling and repairing and cutting. Liquid keratin flows through them as blood, membranes of the material serve as skin and eyes and mucus, all the functions of Life absorbed by Li Shu's Sacrifice reflected in the keratin and Medicine she's imbued.

A Sacrifice grows when it is fed, imbued by its Crafter by the concepts they choose. Li Shu has always been rather straightforward about the concepts she's focused on. Raika's second-oldest ally, upon catching the eye of the wounded ghost-king, unleashes her cultivation at last.

The needles that Raika's hounds spread earlier, the shrapnel from when her bunker was struck, and the growing creep of pale white all explode into growth as a cultivator in the Nascent Soul Realm and a Witch of the Craft unleashes her Sacrifice and her Soul into the world.

It's not really a Soul yet. She only just finished stabilizing her core, after all, making it an ideal environment. She makes up for it in another way.

In the Craft, there are realms, much like in cultivation, and yet not. As an apprentice, a Witch learns of the world and its physiks, its alchemies, its concepts. In the Crafting of Self, a Witch will at last Sacrifice a piece of themselves to use as a tool. Li Shu's been working on the next step for a few months now, and she's a fast learner.

Blessed Union of Keratin, Healing, and Life is magnified by a still-working set of spiritual organs, a recursive impossibility held together by Truth extending out to coat half the Cathedral in one go in pristine armor and crawling, skittering architects.

Raika senses Shirai, Glorianna's Witch and assistant, shift in her stance far above. She feels the surprise emanating from the phylactery above, a hint of approval from the gold-clad corpse nearby, and a joyous sense of fulfillment from the titan before her.

"Glorious. You have such excellent assistants, my dear disciple, little gho-"

Approximately fifteen tons of corpse-flesh hits him like a falling meteor.

The swarms of floating corpse-flesh, reactivated and remolded by the massive array she's formed of her worms, empowered by her hidden student so as to surprise her opponents and imbued with some of his quiet energy, have conjoined. A serpent, or tendril, or biological drill-form, spears from directly above like a falling pillar from Heaven. Dozens of limbs surround its body, propelling it through a thousand spasms and repulsive convulsions, and where a face or head might be, the body simply winds tighter and tighter, denser and denser, a singular spike of flesh supernaturally sharpened and toughened.

The corpse-drill, festooned with the skulls of fallen hex-hounds and condensed past the point of conventional biology, hits hard enough to leave a concussive echo and a shockwave to accompany it.

Through a haze of keratin and dust, she watches, desperate to track the reaction.

Seo En-Hyun stares incredulously at the thing stabbing into him.

Approximately three inches of the sharpened spiral at the tip of her construct have passed through his superficial layer and down into ghost-muscle.

He holds the entire body of the construct with a single hand, chains of pale white swirling around it and trapping it in place as he takes his time examining the wound.

Then, without a word, his heads turn up to face her. And he smiles.

Not enough.

He crushes his fist, shattering the construct's head and sending rippling shockwaves of force and wraithfire through the rest of it as it is torn asunder. He steps forward and the last few chains of tissue and keratin around him shatter, a pressure emanating from him at last. The space around him warps, impression of black ooze appearing like heat haze in the air, the keratin beneath his feet straining with all of Li Shu's Qi not to disintegrate and expose the marble beneath it.

What remains of the usable tissue around her swarms back towards her, skittering on tendon-strings and flowing with skin and cold blood. Of the multiple tons she brought to the Cathedral to begin with, there's maybe enough for one or two new bodies she could anchor herself to, enough to defend against maybe one attack.

She pulls at the Gu, and growls as the creature squirms inside itself, the damage and bulging stomach keeping it from doing more than twitch.

She briefly checks on the worms, who at this point are half-buried by keratin and much too disorganized by the battle to shape into a new array, flesh crafting or otherwise.

She could start using runes, smaller formations and scripts, but that would break the rules. Flesh-crafting only. She can sneak in tricks and technicalities into how that flesh is shaped and what it can do, but to start using force runes, shields, or basic talismans would break the rules of the test.

She could manifest her Death, blossom ivory and obsidian azaleas into existence and enforce the murder and suicides she's experienced onto reality again. This, too, would break the rules of the test.

She can't go all out. It's not in the rules.

She sighs, waving a hand. The flesh around her shuffles away to one side, dissonant parts of corpse-tissue rolling off towards the middle of the Cathedral. Slowly, she raises up from a stance to a more casual posture, raising her corpse and Blacksteel hands up in a placating gesture.

"Damn, senior. No mercy for your favorite junior? I'd say I've done a pretty good showing."

Seo En-Hyun chuckles softly. "Kindness can be cruelty. I would no sooner dishonor you with my mercy than I would disappoint myself with its misplacement, Bishop Raika."

He starts walking towards her, some of the contentment from before draining away to something calmer and less excited. "Be proud, junior sister! You have shown such promise. Your progress is stunning. The Blessed Mortal is blessed indeed, to have a mother such as yourself, so clearly talented in the greatest arts of commanding Death. With such a handicap, after less than a year of training, you have impressed this granddaddy. Imagine what you will accomplish in another year! In another decade! What joy there is, seeing the path before you."

The keratin beneath his feet trembles with the potency of the barest hint of his true power. Skittering life-things desperately pile pieces of keratin around him, ever-growing needles forming coral formations that are forced to bend away as he continues onward.

"Shall you surrender?" he asks, almost in touching range, a ghost-king advancing inevitably closer. "Shall you offer this master face, standing until the end?"

One arm comes up, pointing a single finger at Li Shu, her form and cultivation still straining against him. Raika can't help herself- her eyes dart to her friend, glimpsing the blood leaking from her eyes and nose, the sweat dripping down her face, the way that she's putting everything she has into resisting the presence of an entity far beyond her Realm. The finger, a hint of wraithfire around its edges, is centered perfectly on her forehead, a small and too-large reminder of the jets of flame the Bishop can wield.

"Shall I induct your incredibly talented Witch into our ranks? Grant her her first Death? Would this be a pleasing enough gift, granted from master to student, to appease you with your defeat?"

Raika lets out a soft little breath of air. She pulls another one in. She lets it out.

Old habits. Useful for centering oneself.

Seo En-Hyun, ever kind and ever timeless, waits for her answer.

"I apologize, senior," she says, "but mine is not the defeat that we should be discussing."

She snaps her fingers, the Blacksteel of her prosthetic ringing unnaturally through the church.

The sound of still-living lungs heaving in breath echo in the space, a puff of smoke and whispered conversation dissipating at the sound. Seo En-Hyun turns one of his faces, the flaming pinpricks of his eyes shifting to his right, past Li Shu, to the far wall.

A young boy, barely beginning adolescence, clad in ornate black robes, stands there, leaning heavily against the wall. With the dissipation of his Qi, the secret he was hiding in his smoke and whispers manifests into reality.

Carved into the keratin covering the wall is an array, almost fifty feet in diameter, painstakingly arrayed with ornate calligraphy and intricate formulae. Runes for distance, for doorway, for opening, for shaping, for connecting, for thresholds and invitation, all decorating a delicate spiral formation.

He follows instructions well, but his calligraphy has always been much better than hers.

A dozen half-glimpsed ghosts dissipate back into his Qi as he pants, drifting from their positions at the wall- and leaving only a single disconnected line.

Jin raises a small carving knife and completes the array.

A single flower petal, born from stone, flutters down on a perfect arc to cleanly tear open his throat.

She didn't see it. She didn't sense it.

A single piece of a stone garden, placed perfectly. She doesn't need to look up to feel the smug satisfaction emanating from Glorianna from within her phylactery.

All thoughts of the test vanish. All thought of holding back dissipates like fog in the wind. Her hand stretches, she takes a step, every part of her will begins to move-

A sound like a stone sandal stepping on cobblestone echoes.

A young man, a few years older than Jin, his face a drifting shadow tinged with the smell of tangerines, plucks the petal from the air. A prince of green and gold, dressed in common rags, faceless and unforgotten, cradles the lethal flower, vanishing in the following moment.

The array, now complete, instantly powered by the amount of Qi and Death free-floating in the air, activates.

The space at its center thrums, bends, inverts in a way that eyes cannot follow, pulling through dimensions that should not be to match the runes it has been built from, reshaping reality to match the instructions therein. What was keratin and solid wall becomes void, and then becomes a glimpse of dusk sky and fields of black and ivory grass.

On the other side, Raika smiles, relief and fury and wrath all warring in her as the space across the field opens at last.

She has been here all along. She's been there all along. She was already moving when she saw Jin re-appear, and the portal, approaching impossibly fast, expands in her vision.

She doesn't need to say anything. A small black Beetle stomps on the head of the street-sized centipedal reptile, which stops its supernatural acceleration, braking in defiance of physics inches from the opening.

Half the landscape comes with it.

Raika isn't two brains and two bodies. She's one brain, two bodies. So to speak.

The entire time she's been fighting Seo En-Hyun, the entire time since she heard the conditions of the tests, she has spent building the weapon she is holding. Minutes, in a battle where milliseconds matter, condensing a single spear of obsidian-black metal and corpse-tissue. The tighter she condensed, the more Blacksteel spread through the material. The more Blacksteel growing, the more potency the corpse-flesh and Death it was touching gained. The more potency, the more she could condense it, the more it can defy the laws of physics and biology.

Approximately twenty tons of murder-metal and ghoulish viscera fit into a spear eleven feet in length, barely an inch in width.

As Centi-croc comes to an abrupt halt, she steps, heaves, transfers reality-defying velocity through her body and into the weapon in her hand- and releases.

Back in the Cathedral, in the instant of surprise at the failure of Glorianna's assassination attempt, in the millisecond of silence before movement resumes, a black flash vanishes through the portal and into the body of Godfall's ghost king.

All the keratin that Li Shu had been piling up around him, pretending to be trying to hold him back, reacts as if magnetized, all of it forming an armored dome behind the Bishop. Her Sacrifice collapses faster than thought into a single, perfect shell around the impact site.

A spear of obsidian black, a pointed pole of night-black decay, punches through Seo En-Hyun with a sound like a sharp rock cutting into a dying animal, multiplied by the sound of a hundred thunder strikes.

There is a flash of black and wraithfire and a glowing after-image of the many eyes of the Bishop Seo En-Hyun's skulls. There is a rippling shockwave that rattles the ceilings of the shining temple on the hill. There is the crackling of impossibly dense keratin shattering and reforming and shattering a million times, containing the very worst of the blow.

And then there is silence.

And then…

A cough. A strained sound.

It repeats a few times, until Raika's brain clicks that it's a laugh.

A hand made of echo-flesh and wraithfire grabs the edge of the concave dome of keratin. Then another. Then a third.

Pulling himself free, Seo En-Hyun is smiling wider than she has ever seen. Six-armed, rippling with a flame born exclusively of Death and ruin, all of the skulls around his neck instead orbiting in a halo behind his head, his eyes like beams of perfect pale pitch, the ghost king of the Cathedral of the Burrowing Saint emerges in his glory.

And staggers a little bit, one of his six hands coming up to touch the spear thrust all the way through his body, leeching black into the pale white of his echo-flesh.

He meets her eyes, the pressure of his existence like hearing the screaming of a million dying burn victims, of a thousand-thousand dead and remembered, the whispered chants of whole monasteries and the songs of entire cities worth of the now-gone making the world feel dark and small and loud and painful.

And then he laughs again, the sound booming and echoed with many voices.

"My sister!" he cries, his un-voice rippling with power now. "My dearest sibling! My honored and majestic junior! You pass!"

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