NOVEL NEXT 306 – Re: Lightning Strikes the Mountain
From one second to the next, Zelsys switched from exclusively dodging to meeting some of the general’s strikes head-on, stealing the kinetic energy of some and reflecting that of others, even if his arms wouldn’t break under the reflected strength of his own strikes. Only the Lightning Butcher’s sawteeth had the power to bite into Ubul’s arms, short of an invocation of All-Severing Scream, an option that Zelsys didn’t have a wide enough opening to make use of. A few short seconds, yet sufficient to build a tremendous charge in her second stomach, temporarily rendered capable of containing a charge orders of magnitude beyond the usual by the Storm Conqueror’s Mantle.
Only when she was certain she had gotten a read on the pattern of Ubul’s attacks did she unleash that stored-up charge, lightning briefly enveloping the entirety of her arm as a deluge of the empyrean force flowed down the lightning-serpent that enveloped the limb, swallowing up the Lightning Butcher’s length in a blinding white. At the same time, as she swung her blade upwards, she countered all of Ubul’s right hooks at once, one with her own fist, two with thundergod-animated bundles of her hair, made able to stop his punches solely by the virtue of Rebound Pulse. Her own gauntleted fist was a whole other matter, its kinetic dispersal property enabling her to outright counter even Ubul’s punches without any further trickery. In fact, this was exactly to plan. Just as the butcher’s screaming-white edge glided through the stone of the general’s torso and severed two of his left arms alongside a good fifth of his trunk, the force of his punch translated to her entire body and threw her safely out of his range. It felt like being struck head-on by a speeding truck, true, but were that to happen in her current state, it would’ve been the truck that crumpled.
Ubul didn’t even bother to reattach what had been severed from him, merely willing the missing mass to reform from his body whole cloth, visibly draining clay and soil through his legs to bulk back up. The surface of his body hardened and developed solid plates, especially around his joints, his head becoming encased in faux-cold-iron.
“Fine. Single decisive strike it is,” Zelsys decided, forming a compressed mass of Fulgur both in her second stomach and in her mouth, while simultaneously charging both the Impelling Arm and the muscles of the limb it encased. Zelsys spread her arms wide in challenge, goading the general into attacking her, truthfully stating: “Come! No traps this time!”
In that same moment, she switched her grip on the Butcher, grasping its guard while willing its bladed edge to dull and reshape itself so it could rest against her arm, while its sawteeth grew to the size of daggers, their oscillation now supplemented by physical back-and-forth motion, the snickersnacking producing a noise somehow even more foreboding than the scream of cold-iron vibrating at ultra-high-frequency.
Taking her word for it, Ubul charged her in a zigzagging motion, summoning a spiked wall right behind her before the two clashed. With a dodge to the right, she propelled herself around Ubul’s side in an entirely unnatural manner by burning the contents of her Retributive Battery,
only for Ubul to follow through with his left hook into a turn of his entire torso, a strike which Zel was able to dodge only thanks to a timely use of Graze Pulse, and even then it stripped the skin from her back. The opening he left was a mile wide - all too wide, an obvious trap. Ubul wasn’t a good liar, and it seemed he knew this, as he went for a far more straightforward attack when he realized she wouldn’t fall for this, attempting to sweep her leg, which she jumped over, only to have a quadruple hammerfist come down on her head. Zelsys raised both arms in a defensive gesture, and was slammed down into the ground……Only, Ubul found himself unable to bring his arms all the way down, for they were stuck, Zelsys having made her cleaver cut into his crossed-over forearms in such a way that it now held them all together, forcing him to either willingly dismember himself or remain stuck as such. Though he made the decision quickly, the confusion that took place before he figured out what had happened to him was a wide-enough opening for Zelsys to dump a tremendous charge into her right leg, wreathing the book in a wedge of killing light with which she very literally swept his legs out from under him, holding onto her blade as she spun around, dislocating her shoulder in the process and only re-setting it once she had slammed the muzzle of her gun right under his chin. Even this was a small, efficient motion, a sharp 180° turn of her arm accompanied by a sickening pop. She could clearly see multiple smaller arms having grown from his back and beginning to merge, but her tablet buzzed. A message from Zefaris.
“Don’t worry about the second left arm.”
Ubul had reformed a second left arm by this point, but he wasn’t given the opportunity to make use of it, its joints impaled by glacierglass arrows the moment its constituent, smaller stone arms merged together, rendering the limb brittle and stiff, only for a screaming comet of concentrated Ignis to come ripping from the top of a tank, a white-glowing bearded figure having leapt atop it moments prior. The sheer destructive power of the projectile wouldn’t have guaranteed the destruction of the arm, but the thermal shock was sufficient to make it explode like a piece of dropped pottery.
The charge in her second stomach went directly to the Impelling Arm, a wordless casting as she focused the surge into her gun and pulled the trigger lever, while the ball-lightning she’d formed in her mouth would be a secondary attack - insurance, in case Ubul somehow managed to avoid the Thundercannon.
Click.
Click…
