IDOLATRY TRIGRAM

SUBCORE EMBODIMENT

CRIMSON COMMAND: RECREATION OF PAST SELF

“MAKE A SOUND IN THE EAST, THEN STRIKE IN THE WEST”

Following her gut, Zel glanced down at the statue’s base, only for a sudden alarm to shoot through her as she felt the mantis’ presence suddenly appear behind herself. It was unmistakable, the strange feeling of a Fog-walker in her immediate vicinity; one who could fully step into the Sea of Fog to travel as a ghost. She could scarcely guess why or how it worked here, in what she assumed to be a pseudo-dungeon, and therefore a place that was already submerged in that other-realm; perhaps it was akin to the difference between being inside a diving-bell and swimming on one’s own.

Zel whipped around just in time to stare right into Red’s eyes as she felt the mantis’ blade enter her stomach, but merely following the leftward spin all the way through allowed her to pull herself free and bury her heel right into Red’s side. Chitin and bones alike cracked under the force, and the horned figure smashed right into the walls of her own making. When the dust cleared, there she was; still standing. There came that ringing again, iridescent Fog erupting from the core and enveloping her; chitin rebuilt, flesh knitted back together, her left shoulder popped back into place, and all these wounds were seemingly inflicted upon the effigy in her stead before it crumbled to dust.

“Did you really think that would work?! I don’t need to breathe!” she spat, blood bubbling out of her mouth and running down her chin. Red, streaked through with iridescent ribbons.

“No yellow…” Zel thought. “So she really isn’t a bug mutant anymore.”

“...Honestly? No, not really,” she admitted, backing off for a moment. “There’s one thing I don’t understand about all this. Why not just ambush us once we get near the Meat Market? You’d have both the numerical and tactical advantage, plus-”

The mantis screamed in fury and frustration: “BECAUSE I INTEND TO RIP THOSE SCUM OUT BY THE ROOTS THE SAME AS YOU!”

Before Zelsys got the opportunity to ask another question, Red began gesturing wildly as she uttered a prolonged incantation. Iridescent Fog enveloped her yet again, congealing into pointed arrows as she continued chanting. One after the other they shot off in seemingly random directions, bouncing off the walls and floor in equally random patterns, but Zel’s gut told her something was wrong. This was’t randomness at all.

CHAOS TRIGRAM

CRIMSON COMMAND: ILLUSION OF RANDOMNESS

“FEIGN MADNESS BUT KEEP YOUR BALANCE”

Though it damn near made her go cross-eyed to look through the multicolour mess Zelsys managed to avoid the better part of Red’s barrage, finding that each arrow eventually found its way to where she was, and worst of all, perhaps one in five could actually lead. They only determined their own trajectory when bouncing, and vanished into little puffs of Fog after three bounces, though not quickly enough to outpace the rate at which Red churned them out. If she didn’t do something, she’d get drowned in bullets, and so she gathered several breaths’ worth of Fulgur in her second stomach, blending it together before she kicked up a cloud of dust and energized it by spewing out this mass of lightning without focusing it. The blue-white serpent turned grains of dust to little balls of lightning as it passed over them, and not a moment later did they zip off towards Red, forcing her to split her focus and thinning the bullet-maze. However, they didn’t suffice; this was a fast, low-level manifestation of the Dance of the Fireflies technique, low level enough for Red to just summon defenses to protect herself.

“So be it,” Zel thought, deciding to finally put to use the Fulgur she’d stored away in her retributive battery from earlier. Allowing one of her own injures to open back up, she bled a little into the palm of her own hand as she muttered: “Beast-butchering Arts: Dance of the Fireflies…”

She quickly shot the blood into her mouth, blending it with that tremendous Fulguric charge before she sprayed it out in a swarm of furious, blood-red lightning-spheres that zipped around in a truly chaotic fashion, yet just like Red’s arrows, they too found their target; not through deception, but through their relentless pursuit. Just as she had been forced to dodge for her life, so too would Red… And it seemed that just one striking was enough to make the mantis panic, or at least remind her that this technique had been wrought purely to kill immortals of her kind, and it held its unerring accuracy against those like her even now.

STORM SIGN

FORMLESS BUTCHERY: DANCE OF THE FIREFLIES

“A BURIAL RITE FOR IMMORTALS”

Indeed, just one of these spheres struck home before Red completely gave up her own offensive in favor of dodging and defending, for its detonation ripped a fist-sized chunk out of her back. Yet again she vanished, but this time Zel saw it happen: Red didn’t sink into the ground as she’d assumed, but instead disappeared in an instant, leaving only her effigy to be smashed apart while she herself moved invisibly, leaving only a trail of disturbed earth in her wake before reappearing.

“I’ve nothing left from before the Dungeon…” she spat, visibly struggling for breath as her horns pulsed with light and the Subcore shuddered, floating above her hand as it did. “No memory. No identity. I’ve even forgotten my name… Nothing save my loyalty to the Divine Maxims and the promise I made to you: To strike you down.”

The killing flame in her eyes roared back to life as she extended her arm-blade again, yet again charging at Zelsys head-on, summoning pillars and stakes of faux-blackstone the whole way as she zigzagged between them.

Zel had decided: She would allow herself to be run through to land a good strike. Cautiously funneling Fulgur into the Broken Butcher, she exploited the blade’s shape and unique elemental properties to form a short edge of pure lightning, erupting from between the Butcher’s prongs; it was a familiar technique merely adapted for the Butcher’s sorry state. It would only last a flash, but it would suffice. Blue-white arcs cracked between the Butcher’s prongs, becoming continuous arcs as the already-glowing lichtenberg figure covering its metal went from a faint blue to a seething, blinding white glow. The metal itself became red, then orange, then yellow and pure white, the electric arc twisting within its constraints and erupting outward into a violent torch, itself barely as long as the Broken Butcher’s physical blade.

Simultaneously, Zel saturated pertinent muscle groups with a volatile Fulgur-Pneuma blend, reveling in the growing heat and pressure. She knew her own limits, she knew exactly how far she could push herself without burning Metallum to reinforce her own flesh and risking self-injury, and she knowingly walked all the way to that edge.

A STRIKE TO HUMBLE THE GENERALS OF DIVINITY

FORMLESS BUTCHERY: ALL-SEVERING THUNDERCLAP STING

The whipping motion’s immense velocity sent her blade sailing right through the pillar which Red had conjured to defend herself and into her heart, the chitinous plate over it shattered by the force as the Butcher embedded itself in her flesh and its lightning jetted out through Red’s back and flickered out, leaving a gaping hole where her heart had been. Much the same, Red’s blade ran straight through a gap between Zel’s ribs, through a lung, and out of her back.

Neither of them fell; Red simply refused to die, there came a head-splitting ringing just before an iridescent blast of Fog erupted from her wound, obscuring vision without discrimination. Both women chose to kick the other away, and Zel felt her opponent’s stone prosthetic break a rib as she was thrown across the arena. For a few moments she remained in place, reacting Viriditas and Rubedo in her second stomach to produce Vitae, which she then burned to force her wound back together. She even deigned to touch her precious Metallum reserve, though only in order to cement her broken bone back together.

“Thundercannon!” she barked afterwards, a thin bolt of lightning sparking forth from her gun as she pulled the trigger-lever, but it was not an offensive measure. The arc latched onto the Butcher’s handle, and after she poured yet more Fulgur into the connection, Zel was able to rip the weapon free of Red’s chest, it flying right into her hand.

Yet again they clashed. Zelsys already knew that, at some point, she would win, but… She didn’t know how long it would take.

Again and again, Red’s iridescent, primordial magic was brought to bear against Zel’s lightning, blackstone barriers rendered into being and tossed aside once they had served their purpose as lightning-rods.

Again and again, chunks of the dome were smashed away, gaps forming as individual pillars broke.

“You, because of whose actions the Dungeon Core opened my eyes to His Divinity’s idiosyncrasies!” the mantis howled as she conjured an uncanny mechanism around the Subcore, otherworldly lighting bursting out from it as it was enveloped by an eight-segmented octagonal cylinder, the light seemingly reflecting off of the pieces and bleeding out through the gaps between the segments. With her other hand she formed a six-sided hollow rod, a barrel of sorts, which she attached to the mechanism as it closed shut around the Subcore, spinning up for a few seconds before there came a burst of ringing-noise and a concentrated ray of empyrean flame blazed forth from the rod’s maw.

CRITICALITY SIGN

SUBCORE EMBODIMENT

CRIMSON COMMAND: MASTER SPARK

“WHEN ALL STRATAGEMS FAIL, SURRENDER; EITHER TO THY FOE, OR TO THE FURY WITHIN”

The technique had enough windup that Zel hadn’t even considered that she might not be able to dodge, and she was glad for that when she felt it rip past her and smash the dome wide open behind where she had stood. It was easily as powerful as her own Thundercannon when used with a high-velocity shell.

Visibly struggling to fight the construct’s gyroscopic force, Red physically grasped it with both hands and swung it around to follow after Zelsys, screaming all the while: “You, who cursed me to this existence without a guiding hand!”

Zel dodged around the dome whilst throwing out Thundercannon after Thundercannon, spitting out lightning-sphere after lightning-sphere, working to find an opening so she could get into the cannon’s sole blind spot: Right next to Red. The mantis knew how foolish it would’ve been to let the distance be closed, so the moment Zel ducked under the all-destroying beam and rushed in, Red ripped the mechanism from the rod’s back, spinning around just as the now-unfocused deluge of iridescent destruction propelled her across the dome and right past Zelsys, missing her by several meters.

It was Red’s impact against the top of the dome that finally spelled its total failure, the entire structure crumbling as the Fog-sea’s inexorable silver mass rushed in. The structure vanished in a split-second, what little was left of its constituent faux-blackstone instantly sinking beneath the waves, and the two women found themselves - ever so briefly - atop a mercurial ocean shrouded in Fog. Red continued flying through the air for a moment more before her construct sputtered out and she landed at the Fog-sea’s surface.

This place… Zelsys had never seen it, but it was familiar, beyond just lining up with written descriptions. Was this truly the cosmological foundation of the material world? She scanned the otherworldly morass of her surroundings, keeping an eye on the mantis as she did so. She knew of two Fog-sea landmarks from her studies, and both were well within view; the gates of the Blackwall, manifested even here in the absence of the wall in its entirety, and the Floating City of Karga, shining beacon in the far east. Since there was no such thing as curvature here, it was clearly visible despite being halfway across the known world.