NOVEL NEXT 286 – Heaven-piercing Comet
A/N: I need to take a bit of extra time for polish, so no chapter tomorrow.
He wouldn’t have had the time to do any of this were it not for the bravery of a particular insane norseman, the giant man having brought his hammer to bear upon Ubul’s knee and shattered it, climbing atop the general and smashing away at his stone skin, freezing it and rendering it fragile, causing the water within it to expand and pull Ubul’s armor apart from the inside. Jorfr had drawn out the full power of his connection to the earthen spirits, armored in ice from head to toe, his hammer’s head constantly shattering and reforming as he smashed it into Ubul’s back and arms, swinging it about with the apparent effort of swinging a stick, hammering huge chunks of magical ice into stone. So forceful were his blows and so solidly anchored were his feet to Ubul’s Terra-aligned skin that it was as if he were standing on solid ground, merely sideways, and even putting his inhuman strength against one of Ubul’s arms wasn’t enough to move him.
No, it was the fact that the stone his feet were attached to gave before he did, Ubul’s ability to manipulate Terra allowing him to selectively soften that specific part of himself so that when next he swiped at Jorfr and the norseman smashed apart the arm at the joint, the force of the clash would throw him off.
Jorfr didn’t care, his job was done, he had distracted Ubul for as long as he had needed; he just got back up, retreated for a moment, smashing dozens of claymen as he flipped about using his hammer as a fulcrum against the ground, sending up great spikes of frozen mud with each earthshaking smash of his hammer.
In this time window that he had bought, Sigmund had settled into his vantage point upon a wrecked tank’s half-buried hull, hands held out with the beamwand in his grasp, the bodies of two islanders wrapped around him from either side, their own hands outstretched down his arms and towards the wand. He felt a nearly unbearable heat flood into him as he drew in a deep breath and focused every bit of fire in his body, the comfortable warmth of his own fire now stoked to one so intense it burned and began to become genuinely painful, matching the sensation he had felt on that accursed day when he had downed a bottle of Victory Wash and taken the first step on the path that led him here.
Even the islanders looked uncomfortable, their bodies glowing like stoked embers, while Sigmund was as though a miniature sun had replaced his heart, his hair not only glowing, but becoming entirely engulfed in blazing tongues of blue flame as the wand struggled to contain the elemental might poured into it. An umbrella of wild flames erupted from its tip, wide enough to cover the trio altogether, slowly converging into a cone that closed in as Sigmund emptied his mind, ignored the pain, and focused solely on concentrating every bit of fire within him into this. One. Shot.
Such an obvious display would have not gone unpunished, had Ubul’s attention not been occupied by the far more immediate threat of a two-meter norseman invoking the rage and rancor of his ancestors to smash apart the skin of Pateirian imperialism embodied. Even so, Ubul was fast and clever, and with the seven-fingered arms he had had the good judgment to protect, he invoked such a grand invocation of earthen magick that it produced a blinding yellow flash, smashing his halberd into the ground and stomping his good leg in order to force from the earth not a wall, but a great stone spire. The force of his magick was such that it split the earth itself, cracks spreading across the battlefield, cracks that soon became gaping fault lines as the seven newly-formed segments of the field drifted apart, some rising sharply above while others sunk, and others still remained as they were.
Zefaris, however, had planned for this, and it was her plan’s fruition that now shone in the heavens, a brilliant white beam from behind Ubul carving a glyph seemingly onto the clouds themselves. This signal in the sky was one which many had been warned to look out for, that they might retreat from the general’s location, lest they be caught in the crossfire. In the last moments, before the flame finally converged, as he felt this tsunami of blazing might flooding forth, Sigmund marshalled his strength and sharply angled his aim upwards.
At the moment of Ubul’s summoning the stone spire, Zelsys happened to be situated exactly where one of these fault lines formed, thrown to one side by the abrupt raising of the ground on one side, made to slip down into the gaping ravine as mud slid out from underfoot and denied her purchase. With the Butcher in hand she anchored herself in the wall, able to scramble up back to the surface in a few seconds, a stone’s throw away from Ubul, at least assuming she was the one doing the throwing, and just in time to witness the culmination of the others’ plans to create an opening for her.
To him, it was an outward flood, an all-consuming brilliant heat that suddenly gave way to tranquil warmth and relief from the immense internal pressure. To his assistants, it was a feat of elemental exertion which left them utterly drained of all but the most fundamental capability, the natural glow of their bodies flickering and fading like that of dying embers.
To outside observers, it was a backwards meteorite, a fulgent blade cutting through the heavens, the concentrated Ignis missile so energetic it was no more than a flash to all but those the keenest of sight. In a single flash, it rocketed skyward and bounced directly down, crashing down through Ubul from on high and quite literally breaking his back, the projectile’s energy so great it overpenetrated, annihilating two of the cores in his chest on its path into the ground, where it finally detonated, toppling his own stone spire atop the general. It was only the fact it was his creation that saved him from being buried and thus immobilized, as he was able to make it crumble to rubble with but a thought and a flash of his eyes.
