NOVEL NEXT 305 – Storm Conqueror’s Mantle
Zelsys could scarcely believe he had let her talk for this long. She wondered if he’d just let her finish this simultaneously complex and crude process unimpeded, wasting the trap Zefaris had set. Even she didn’t quite understand what she was doing, only the fact she felt an intangible precipice drawing closer as she drew upon the fulguric power that raged inside, using her second stomach to blend it with metallum and imbue it with intent before proliferating it all throughout her body by the same vectors that permitted her Thundercharger technique to function. For all the elemental might that raged inside her, it was very nearly useless if she didn’t put it to use - lightly imbuing her body down to the cellular level with the properties of metal and subsequently using tremendous Fulguric currents to make her muscles contract with the appropriate, inexorable force.
However, beyond this empirical understanding, something else was to be found in this self-induced metamorphosis, an archetypal, symbolic embodiment drawing upon ritualistic magic as much it did upon straightforward elementalism; the more she pushed, the more she grabbed around to gather the tremendous elemental might imbued into her alongside that which she could now generate with a mere breath, the closer she came to grasping something more than a mere morsel of Fulgur. Her efforts inevitably drew to the surface the very thing that facilitated her moniker of Thundering Engine Beast, the spirit of lightning which had now been placed at the center of a miniaturized storm, her own body playing the part of the vessel in the stead of clouds.
Honorable to a fault as he was, Ubul had only now convinced himself to interrupt her, raising walls from the ground to her left and right and smashing them together, which she didn’t even bother to dodge. The outsides of both her arms were shrouded in a layer of Fog by the time either wall impacted, causing them to violently shatter outwards. He raised up spikes from the earth to impale her with, unleashed torrents of hardened boulders, rushed her down with a flurry of boulder-crushing blows, but… His honor was proven right, when a flurry of glacierglass arrows flew in from right behind Zelsys, crashing into him and skewering his joints, slowing him enough to allow a great spear of this same material to fly past, bounce off a kinetic mirror behind him, and strike true, skewering him back to front and pinning him to the ground. A moment later it shattered, triggering a cascade that froze the general solid - a feat that would last for but a few seconds and that had occupied Zef’s full faculties, but one that bought the others vital time, Zelsys among them, for despite the fact her boisterous speech had been primarily a means of currying attention, it was a speech playing up the truth.
The colours of iron and bronze spread out from her metal horns, along the silver conduits upon her face and down the rest of her body, Zelsys seemed to grow a few centimeters as her musculature seemed to harden even more than it already had, arcs of lightning jumping between her horns as yet more serpents of that empyrean light slithered out from her skin and enveloped her, scoring the earth. Lightning and exhaled Fog seemed to form into a silhouette around her, silhouette outlining a figure strikingly similar to her own, yet easily half again as tall and muscular as she was, its face masked by a bear’s skull.
The manifestation grew clearer and clearer, eventually enveloping her entirely, before it simply vanished, sucked into her, revealing that Zelsys had herself somehow grown both taller and somehow even more muscular, her skin covered in vein-like lines of not glowing milky-white, but glistening iron and brass, her skin possessed of a literal bronze sheen as if it was permanently suffused with the properties of that metal, lightning serpents slithering out of and back into these conduits as smaller sparks played across her body’s surface, the Living Storm’s empyrean power barely contained, waiting to be set loose.
Her hair gathered into six distinct bundles, rising up as a ghostly beast-headed serpent formed around each bundle, six Wrathful Thundergods now swirling about her head and shoulders as these phantom thundergods snapped and hissed at the man who stood before her, the rage and hatred in their eyes more tangible than their semi-physical forms could convey. The seventh - the very thundergod she had devoured all those weeks ago, the central pillar around which the others revolved - now took its rightful place atop her head, the top half of a beastly skull formed out of congealed Fog. Its will having fully submitted to her own, the Seventh was no more than an extension of her being, as the others would become when she carried out the sole remaining task binding them to this accursed place.
“...I AM THE DESPOT OF SELF, MY VERY BEING MY EMPIRE, AND NOT A SINGLE SOLDIER SHALL BE UNACCOUNTED FOR!”
EGO INSTALL
THUNDERING ENGINE BEAST
INCARNATION OF SELF-CONQUEST
FORMLESS BUTCHERY: STORM CONQUEROR’S MANTLE
Ubul was fully aware that she had most likely used talking as a tool to buy time - it was a trick he himself had used a few times in his youth. He was willing to bet that the advantage he could gain by using that time was greater than she could, not because he underestimated his opponent, but because that was his only real option.
He had already lunged forward by the time her metamorphosis transpired, setting upon Zelsys with an assault so forceful that it very nearly overwhelmed her even in her empowered state, demanding every last bit of her focus to dodge. For a few seconds she chose to dodge, exploiting Graze Pulse to stockpile Fulgur despite the immense charge currently coursing through her body, the main purpose of this being to study Ubul’s pattern. For all his speed and power, for all the skill and effort he put into varying his strikes, the general’s very nature undermines his efforts - the stable, cyclical nature of the very earthen powers he had stolen for himself imparted a consistency into everything he did, a consistency that Zelsys could read far more easily than the emergent pattern of Arnys’ thunderwalking.
