At the center of the desolate battlefield, there was a gaping crater, its edge surrounded by a great many dead from both sides, some left standing in an eternal dance, their bayonets each stuck in the other's ribcage, their bones still holding despite the absence of connective tissue.

The crater’s edge bristled with dozens of Ikesian field cannons pointed into it, and at its bottom there stood a Man of Stone, face twisted into a furious grimace screaming defiance to the heavens, his bottom canines protruding not unlike tusks and his hair framing his head not unlike a lion’s mane. He was surrounded by a veritable ossuary in torn-apart skeletons whose allegiance to Ikesia could only be discerned by the broken swords and tattered uniforms that accompanied them in the mud.

Even from her perch at the edge of the crater, Zelsys could tell that he was giant, at the absolute least a solid three and a half meters. His raised right hand gripped at a long-gone weapon, whilst his left was gone altogether from the elbow down, the razor-sharp edge of a broken bone visibly protruding from the stump.

His stone skin was draped by the tattered remains of luxurious clothing and covered in shallow bullet wounds, his back still bore dozens of bayonets, his chest still held the embedded projectiles of the very guns that encircled the crater.

Zelsys instinctively knew the Man of Stone was no statue, yet she still questioned Strolvath when he caught up.

“Who is it?”

“Ubul of Stone Skin. One of the Divine Emperor’s personal guards, said to have been made to freeze himself solid by the arms of mortal men. He is why the locusts fear this place.”

“His arm…”

“Blown off by focused fire. His polearm was so heavy even he couldn’t wield it one-handed.”

“Then where is it?”

“The Sage took it after the battle. Some think he hid it, others say he ground it into dust and scattered it to the four winds. He’d probably be shattered to pieces by now, but few dare even approach the crater, let alone him. It’s said he’s still alive in there, that it’s only a matter of time before he grows angry enough to break the shell.”

They stood at the edge of the crater for a good while, taking in the sight. After all, it wasn’t a sight to be seen every day. Then, all of a sudden…

Zefaris took a deep breath and stepped over the edge, trailing Fog as she slid down the crater’s inside right into the middle. Zelsys couldn’t help but let out a surprised laugh, whilst Strolvath just stood there, staring wide-eyed at the markswoman’s sheer gall. She spat into Ubul’s face, then walked around to his back and stood there for a few seconds, neck craned and eye squinted while her gaze darted around. She lowered herself, took another deep breath, and jumped, grabbing hold of one of the topmost bayonets and using those lower down in the divine warrior’s back as footholds.

She wrestled with the bayonet for a while, trying to pull it free from the Man of Stone’s body, but it wouldn’t budge.

With each yank, Zefaris grew more frustrated. She held no personal grudge towards Ubul, neither he nor the men he was affiliated with had done anything to elicit her ire. No, it was a sentiment of irreverent spite towards the Divine Emperor that drove her to this gesture of disrespect.

Strolvath’s voice thundered from the top of the crater, beseeching her to “Show at least a shred of respect!”

“Why should we respect them if they want us starving or worse?!” she spat back, pouring every drop of vitriol she could garner, every racist remark and promise of cruelty to come she had heard Pateirian soldiers bark during the war. “They want our home destroyed, and they think it’s the natural order of things!”

There was no answer. Zefaris took another deep breath, and with a furious howl full of Fog ripped the bayonet from his back. Its edge was pristine, gleaming in the sun. Zefaris jumped back to the ground and slowly waded up to the edge of the crater. With each step her anger turned to pride and satisfaction.

She was smiling by the time she reached the top and took Zel’s waiting hand.

Strolvath sighed heavily at the display of wrathful disrespect. “Respect or not, after that stunt I’d not risk staying here much longer. I’ve seen stranger things than petrified men coming back to life,” he rumbled, once more taking the lead in walking around the crater and towards the other side of the battlefield.

The two women followed his advice, with Zefaris hefting the blade and turning it over in her grip as she walked. It was a long, single-edged knife with a deep fuller, a strong guard, and a lacquered wood grip with a steel bottom piece, which extended out into a finger ring. At first sight Zelsys thought it might have to do with how it was mounted to the rifle, but that didn’t make sense - for one, because the Ikesian sparklocks had no such mounting mechanism, and for two because the top of the bayonet’s hilt had a deep groove with a locking stud that looked like it could fit with the rail on the bottom of an Ikesian sparklock’s muzzle.

Purely out of curiosity, she asked, “What’s the ring for?”

“Pretty sure it’s a holdover from the first pattern, when these used to have full knuckle dusters,” Zef explained with audible uncertainty, making more of an educated guess than anything else. “Good for keeping hold of it while reloading, not much else. Feels heavier than I remember.”

After a short delay, Strolvath couldn’t help himself but begrudgingly add his own knowledge, “There was to be a fancy new rifle that used metal cartridges which would also make use of the ring as an additional locking point, but Blackwall happened and it got shelved.”

Zefaris let out a bitter chuckle, “Makes you wonder if we could’ve won, were it not for Blackwall.”

“Win the war? No way, not without allies. Lose on more favorable terms? Possibly.”

Zelsys didn’t get it - she had no context. The more time went on, the more her cover of having been off in the tropics during the war seemed like a good choice.

“What’s with the wall anyway?” she asked offhandedly.

“The Sage’s last act of defiance,” Strolvath said with a chuckle just as bitter as Zef’s. “Encircles the whole country, can’t be flown over, can’t be dug under, you can’t even sail the Sea of Fog to get through it. Only way to get through is to find a dedicated transit point, let the Fog Gate read you, and hope it opens.”

A raised eyebrow and a befuddled question, “Does it just arbitrarily decide who can pass?”

“Oh, I’m certain there are specific things that make the gates open, but nobody’s figured out what those are,” he responded. The singer reached for his instrument and began idly plucking away at the strings as he spoke.

“It was thought it’d only open for Ikesians, but it wouldn’t let an all-Ikesian band of criminals go through. It opened for our dear Provisional Governor, even for his snot-nosed brat of a son, but wouldn’t let any of the Grekurian brass through. Maybe he figured out how the Dungeons were built and it’s some arcane construct controlling the whole thing.”

“Maybe the Wall itself is a gigantic Dungeon,” Zefaris said, jokingly.

“Gods, that’s almost as uplifting of a possibility as it is terrifying,” Strol laughed in response. “Y’know the Dungeons were originally built as an elaborate plan to topple the old feudal rulers, right? It worked, though the heroic families that replaced ‘em weren’t much better, good riddance to the fuckers.”

“How old are they? I thought they were ancient,” Zelsys lied.

“By some standards, they are. This one is…” he trailed off, raising a hand as he counted out years in his head. “I believe six-hundred and thirty-something? Hard to tell from public knowledge, and the only surviving records of how Dungeons operate are stuck in vaults locked to the soul signatures of people who died in the war, or even before it.”

“You know more than I would expect from a soldier,” Zel admitted. He reminded her of Sigmund.

“I was an intelligence officer,” Strolvath said with pride. “It was my job to know things like this.”

“You mean a spy,” Zefaris chimed in.

“My assignment was actually counter-propaganda, and let me tell you, convincing scared civvies that exposure to gunpowder won’t make them explode really starts to grate on you after a while.”

The conversation naturally trailed off and went silent soon after, as each of the three’s attention was drawn by the environment rather than one another. They each had things to say, questions to ask, that much was true, but the desolation surrounding them far overwhelmed any drive to speak.

This place was calmer than any grave, its silence juxtaposed in time with the carnage whose aftershocks were still carved into the very earth, whose victims still littered the fields. The further across the field they went, the less industrial it became - from the trenches, the artillery, the razorwire of the Ikesian side, the battlefield transformed into craters and the remains of tents.

Craters upon craters upon craters.

The landscape was like the ground had been turned to liquid, stirred to a roiling maelstrom, and then turned solid.

Myriad shells still littered the ground, some unexploded, the only safe path the narrow plank walkway that they trod. Once more into the treeline, once more out of the battlefield, yet it clung to them even as the three continued their journey through the forest.

The only noise to accompany them was the melancholic ring of Strolvath’s instrument. He began to hum the melody, and soon enough, humming turned to the same buzzing throat-singing he had used to manifest his bizarre sonic attack before. A slow, steady rhythm, the sound of their feet, the percussion.

Somehow, by some strange technique, Strolvath proceeded to maintain his buzzing tone whilst singing the words to the song in a soft vocal style, as if he had two sets of vocal cords to sing with. Zefaris joined in humming the tune, clearly familiar with it.

“Blood and war, when the world is no more, she's been watching us for centuries with hatred, and with scorn,” he sang, telling of a tale that Zelsys instinctively knew was ancient, older than anyone alive, older than the glimmers of Ikesia or the Sage of Fog. “If you know the slayer’s coming, then you hide or keep on running 'cause she's slain the gods before...”

Strolvath continued to sing his tale of a mythical god-slayer, smoothly transitioning to a song that lamented the deaths of the gods, then to a fire-hearted declaration of man’s independence from guiding deities. A single song stretched into a dozen, a few minutes stretched to more than an hour, and in the span of this single hour, Zelsys gleaned the true reason for why she’d heard people invoke the dead gods, even why the ruler of Pateiria was referred to as the Divine Emperor.

Zelsys couldn’t know how much of what Strolvath’s music said was true, how much was embellishment, and how much was simple falsity, but she felt that the conclusions she arrived at were reasonable enough.

Strolvath’s ongoing performance trailed off into jaunty tunes that largely consisted of creative slurs deriding Pateirians as cat-eaters and locusts in human skin, at which point she allowed herself to mentally check out of the trek until the sun began to set and they reached their next stopping point.

A clearing among the trees, old stumps still visible littered among the grass. Its centerpiece was, surprisingly enough, a small log cabin. It was built from roughly-hewn logs and even had a latrine out back, sure, but it was still miles above a tent. Small stones were embedded in the ground in a continuous line surrounding the cabin, rough glyphs carved into each one.

Stepping over the line felt to Zelsys like pushing through an immaterial membrane that offered momentary resistance before it let her through, though the others didn’t seem to take it so well, with both Zefaris and Strolvath shivering for a moment after they crossed.

By this point, even Zelsys was beginning to feel the exhaustion of a continuous march, in no small part because she hadn’t bothered to drink any of her Vitamax ration over the course of the trek, having mentally checked out for the bulk of it. She felt a tangible dryness in her throat, but after she tasted the Grekurian drink she made the choice to partake of fresh water straight from the hand pump.

Liquid Vigor already tasted aggressively herbal, but Vitamax was something else. It didn’t just slam into her sinuses with the powerful flavors and fragrances of Viriditas, but she could also taste several other herbs and some sort of sour bitterness, probably from whatever spirit was used to supply the elixir’s ethanol. Decisively unpleasant.

To the hand-cranked pump she went, and out the spout ice-cold mineral water came. Whilst she was busy quenching her thirst the others entered the cabin, and Strolvath soon peeked out the door asking her to, “Bring some wood from out back, wouldya?”

She gave a thumbs-up with her free hand, still downing gulp after gulp, sucking down small sips of Vitamax to replenish her strength and washing it away with water. It was just about bearable this way. A few minutes later, she had used her cleaver instead of the cabin’s rusty old axe to chop four logs into pieces of varying sizes from tinder for starting the fire to chunks for maintaining it.

Once in the cabin, she slowly and cautiously waded around the center of the room, peeking out from behind the obstruction of her burden to see Strolvath holding open a hatch in the floor whilst Zefaris had climbed into the hole and was retrieving what looked to be food components like dried fish and long-lasting vegetables.

Once she offloaded the wood next to the rusted cast-iron stove, Zel took a good look around at the place they would sleep for the night. A single room, one table with three chairs, and what looked to be four beds up against one wall. Well… Bed was perhaps a generous term. They were more-so wide benches with straw and pelts for padding.

The table held a few dusty wooden bowls, though its standout feature was a forged iron candle-holder still crusted with wax, though instead of a candle it now housed a milky-white quartz crystal. Its glow was weak, and when Zefaris noticed her looking at it, she remarked “Start the fire, if you don’t mind. And toss the lightgem on the edge while you’re at it so it can recharge, just make sure it doesn’t turn orange.”

“What, will it explode?” Zel asked half-jokingly, plucking the gemstone out of its mount as she walked to the stove. She looked to retrieve flint and steel or some other ignition source from Fog Storage, but it didn’t show up in the list. Scrolling through it up and down proved successful when she came upon it under the letter I.

x84 Ikesian Survival Sparker

A single one would be enough. The strange name was mostly justified - it wasn’t flint and steel, but rather a piece of bent metal with a tiny, malformed Ignis crystal in one end. The other end could be plucked and made to strike the crystal, producing sparks much like regular flint and steel would, only in a much greater quantity.

Even with this superior ignition source, the kindling wouldn’t catch - the wood was damp. In an attempt to brute-force it, she took her powder horn and poured a pinch of powder in her hand, tossing it into the small tower of kindling she’d built within the stove. A single spark was enough to send a gout of flame back at her, such that it would have scorched off the hair on her arms if she had any.

Quickly, she added more kindling and soon enough had a spitting, sizzling fire going.

Strol took over the stove from that point, rinsing out one of the copper pots that sat atop it to use for soup. A half-hour later, Zel fished the re-charged lightgem out of the embers and set it into its holder, setting it on the ground by her “bed”. Despite the searing heat, the gem itself was barely more than warm to the touch, even as it blazed with light as bright as any candle. Another half-hour passed, and the soup was done. Salty and fishy, heavily spiced to mask the funk of dried cod, filled with carrots that had gone floppy and potatoes that had long sprouted by the time they got here. Still, it was good - a testament to Strolvath’s skill in making the best out of lackluster rations.

As Zel ate her second portion, the impending storm finally came, with curtains of rain and raging thunder slamming the forest. The lightning diffused through the clouds in a strange way that lit up the night sky in its entirety, the brief flashes bright enough to rival daylight. Yet, they were safe. The cabin wasn’t particularly well insulated, it had no lightning rod, but not a drop of rain struck the roof, or even the soil around the cabin.

When she peered out the window, Zelsys saw an outline of the protective field that surrounded the cabin, outlined in rainwater and Fog. The glyphs carved into the stones glowed brightly, Fog rising from them continuously as their magic worked to deter that which was not welcome.

A lightning bolt struck the dome, only to be sent careening into the treeline by the invisible force. One of the smaller stones cracked and its glyph flickered, but the field held even as thunder raged above.

“Thunder n’ fury, did that just hit us?” Strol wondered.

“The circle deflected it,” Zelsys replied.

“Whoever built this place was a better aethermancer than a cabin-builder. Did any of the stones go boom?”

“One cracked, it’s still glowing though.”

“Damn, this place has better wards than most bunkers. Guess we don’t even need to stand guard tonight.”

She gave him a strange look, but Strolvath deflected her implicit accusation by saying, “You two can feel free to sleep in shifts, but I’m fuckin’ tired. Besides... It’s bad luck to stay awake in a storm such as this one.”

She didn’t feel any real suspicion - it didn’t feel like he was lying, but… A half-joking question still pressed its way onto her smiling lips, “What, are the storms here cursed?”

A laugh came, but it was sour. “You could say that,” he agreed. “Some genius in the capital figured we could rig the weather in our favor for the first major battle of the war. I’m not privy to the details of the ritual, but since they did it the lightnin’ here seeks out the brightest souls in the area. Doesn’t do much most o’ the time since trees still have the biggest souls in the forest. Even a human soul and the soul of a tree aren’t that different far as the storm is concerned, but folks like us...”

Strolvath reached for the lightgem, and flicked it to make it flash, making a faux-thunder sound with his mouth. Coincidentally and much to his amusement, a lightning bolt struck just outside the dome and sent a tree bouncing off the barrier.

“Walkin’ lightnin’ rods,” he said, still chuckling in surprise. “Ubul couldn’t even step foot on the battlefield for most of the battle ‘cause he had to hide beneath his indestructible polearm, using it as an actual lightning rod.”

“And how’d that turn out?” Zel asked, expecting an even more extreme answer. “Perhaps Ubul’s mythical weapon had absorbed the lightning?” she wondered, conjuring the most absurd circumstance.

Strolvath laughed again, this time genuinely, as if he were just getting to the best part of a joke, “Once the storm died down, the polearm had taken so many strikes it tossed a lightning bolt the first time he swung it! It didn’t hit anyone, but fuck me I’d pay to have a photo of that.”

A raised eyebrow, a faux-disbelieving question to try and coax actual information out of him, “Why only once? Wouldn’t such a legendary weapon take on the aspect of lightning?”

“If it hadn’t already been infused to bursting with the essentia of earth, probably,” Strolvath agreed. He gave her cleaver a strange look, then turned his gaze aside when he realized what he’d just done and continued eating his soup.

Inspired by the story, Zelsys finished the rest of her second portion and took to trying to manifest some sort of offensive Fog-breathing technique using her Cleaver, but… Nothing happened. The greatest effect she managed to achieve after over a dozen tries was to force it into a more exaggerated version of its existing shape, its teeth and the point of its blade briefly extending before they retracted to the sound of creaking metal. Strolvath observed, but said nothing. He looked like he had something to say, but also thought it would be foolish to say it.

Soon enough, the soup was gone and they had turned in for the night. She couldn’t sleep, still. Even lying there beside Zefaris she couldn’t bring herself to drift off, and when she was confident that the markswoman wouldn’t wake, she cautiously stood to her feet and walked outside. Zel stepped over a puddle on her way to the barrier, a brief shower of droplets hitting her head, but she ignored it.

What little could be seen outside the window had fascinated her already, but seeing the barrier at work up-close was truly entrancing. The rain couldn’t cross the barrier directly, yet the grass and bushes inside were perfectly healthy. Perhaps, it was because some of the water could cross over when it had already hit the ground and simply flowed in between the stones.

A lightning bolt cut through the night sky and struck one of the trees just outside the circle, the violent discharge causing most of its bark and branches to slough off the main body. Thunder roared. Another bolt. Another. And another.

Tree after tree fell to the raging storm, and small fires started in the distance, quickly choked by the curtains of rain. Zelsys wanted a better look - she’d never seen such a storm. In fact, she couldn’t remember ever seeing a storm, despite knowing what it was. In her trance, Zelsys approached the barrier to watch more closely, and felt the tangible static that surrounded it.

The air was tense, miniscule sparks came into existence as quickly as they vanished just beyond the barrier right in front of her… And nowhere else. Before she could react, a lightning bolt cut through the sky and struck the barrier right above her, once more careening into the forest. Another of the stones cracked.

Zelsys noticed, but she didn’t take this as a warning to go back into the cabin. She felt no fear from the forces of nature turned malicious as a weapon of war - she only felt the thrumming of her cleaver and a desire to climb higher. She set her sights on one of the cabin’s corners, the one closest to the puddle. Her gaze went a little higher, and what she had hoped for was indeed there.

A gap in the barrier. The circle was just barely too wide to cover its entire perimeter.

The Cleaver had no intelligence of its own, yet it still had a want.

It wanted to serve its chosen user, so it changed its shape to best fit her.

Zelsys lowered herself, taking a deep breath and compressing her legs like springs. An exhalation and a jump that ripped the ground, trailing Fog on the ascent. She grabbed the edge of the roof and pulled herself up with another exhalation.

His long years in the service even before the war had taught Strolvath to sleep with one eye open, much to his frequent annoyance. He could fall asleep to the pounding of artillery, to the perpetual roar of thunder, but even a minor irregularity in that noise would wake him, as it had just now.

Even through the rain, he could discern what had happened. An impact on the ground, a smaller impact on the edge of the roof, then a body rolling onto the roof. He already saw that Zelsys was gone, that she had become entranced by the storm. He’d seen many a swordsman become obsessed with the aspiration to split a lightning bolt, so that they may replicate the feat in a technique as fast as the lightning itself. He had even assisted in performing the feat once, ensuring that the aspirant was even able to do it in the first place.

The few who survived went on to become legends, that much was certain - but he wasn’t willing to risk such a thing. One required not just the sheer skill to perform the feat, but a body and a soul capable of withstanding the strain. Most importantly, even those who succeeded in the endeavor were crippled for weeks afterward, and they did not have that sort of time.

Strolvath’s Brass Eye, though able to peer into the souls of others, saw nothing within that woman - her soul glimmered like a shattered mirror inside a kaleidoscope. Perhaps she was warded against people such as him, but he wasn’t willing to risk it. Life had taught him to always assume the worst in the absence of intel.

So it was that he took a swig of Vitamax to wake himself, roused the blonde markswoman from her slumber, and rushed to the door.

The sparks were flashing again, and she moved across the roof just in time for the bolt to strike the barrier. It had the same exact timing as before, she could anticipate the blinding flash and deafening thunder. The Cleaver slipped from its holster, thrumming in her grip as its shape shifted, ever so subtly. The feather-like teeth of its push-saw side shuddered to the sound of ringing metal, as if in excitement.

The sound of the cabin’s door being slammed open. Two sets of footsteps. “Don’t be a fool, girl! You’ll just fry yourself!” came a half-hearted yell from Strolvath in an attempt to persuade her down from the roof, knowing that it was in vain.

Zelsys laughed, fully aware that what she was about to try was suicidal, yet unable to stop herself. She didn’t just feel that she could do it. She knew. Her instincts hadn’t led her astray before, and she trusted them now as before.

A deep breath, filling her lungs to their limits, her senses honed to a bleeding edge. Zelsys felt her thoughts slipping, her mind going blank. The world slowed to a crawl, she could see individual water droplets just as they crossed through the weak point in the barrier. She could even see the momentary sparks, flashing in and out of existence all around her to the sound of high-pitched chirping.

Zelsys cast her gaze skyward, and she saw it. The flashing in the clouds.

Even a storm sometimes telegraphed its strikes.

Just as she had back in the bunker, she had chosen to face down an unstoppable force that could annihilate her in a single moment. There was no fear in her heart, no thoughts in her mind. There was only a snarling grin on her face and a primal focus beyond the reckoning of conscious thought.

Strolvath knew his efforts were in vain. He could see the bestial silver glow in her eyes, as if she saw the lightning itself as no more than prey to be conquered. A beast to be butchered by any other name. And in the clouds, he saw the flashing, he felt the shift in air pressure, the building static all-around. It wouldn’t just be one lightning bolt. The storm’s uncontrollable malice had found a brilliant beacon, and just like starving beasts, multiple lightning bolts would strike at her all at once.

All he could do was make her odds a little better. He muttered a prayer to the Dead Gods in Old Ikesian, summoning forth his own sort of battle-trance. Blood-red strings of Fog escaped his right eye-socket, the Brass Eye beginning to glow a dull orange. He slammed the rest of the Vitamax bottle and tossed it aside, drawing on his skill and sheer vocal talent.

Strolvath’s music could do many things. Stop charging locust-men dead in their tracks, make a man’s head explode, even shatter boulders if he had enough time. He wasn’t so sure it could let someone take a lightning bolt and he had no way to plug the weakness in the dome, but… He could try.

Without either of his instruments at hand, the stomping of his feet and banging of his fists against the cabin’s wood would have to do as percussion. The only song’s words he could think of as fitting were… Yes, that one would do. In a tiny moment of loose time, he noticed that Zefaris wasn’t idly watching - her hands were locked into a rudimentary barrier sigil, silver Fog continuously rising from her lips as she struggled to plug even the small hole in the dome.

Strolvath didn’t have the time to question the circumstances, and in his self-induced emotional trance, he didn’t want to. Strolvath had no clue how he could stop a lightning bolt on his own, but he was more than familiar with strengthening someone else’s aethermancy.

The rumble of throat-singing rose from his throat, and to his satisfaction he saw the shimmering plug at the top of the dome become nearly as thick as the rest of the dome.

Then, the lightning struck and he saw no more.

Zelsys felt every muscle tense, she felt the electric tension in the air building with every passing millisecond, she saw the thunder flashing in the clouds. The air warbled and rippled above her as the gap in the barrier was briefly filled by a shimmering, paper-thin plug. The sound of Strolvath’s droning singing method began to echo, the barrier-plug became thicker, and then… Everything became light.

A torrential downpour of raging white-hot lightning came crashing down on the dome. The dome held, and surprisingly, so did the plug - for about half a second. That half a second was more than enough time, however.

All at once she emptied her lungs and swung her Cleaver skyward, right into the gap in the barrier, right as the plug finally shattered. A thought flashed through her mind as she did so, no more than a name for the feat which - in her bottomless sense of self-assurance - Zelsys knew would echo throughout her life from this point forward. Through this feat, she would butcher the lightning and take its constituent parts to use as she pleased, she would assert her blazing will to live over one of the most violent forces of nature.

“Beast-butchering Arts: Lightning-splitter!!!”

The Cleaver’s edge met the lightning bolt, wrathful tongues of raging plasma leaping across the outside of the barrier and even squeezing in through the gap to sear channels in the cabin’s wooden roof.

Zel’s blade thrummed in her grip, it shuddered and shook, its metal screamed like ten thousand braking locomotives and its shape was twisted by violent electromagnetism, but it held.

Furious sparks danced across its surface and torrents of superheated plasma split at its edge, but it held.

The blackened flat of its blade became blackened no more, etched by the lightning into a branching Lichtenberg figure more elaborate and detailed than any human hand could conjure.

Milliseconds turned to deciseconds which turned to seconds, and all throughout, the lightning coursed not only through her blade, but through Zelsys as well.

The tendrils of lightning that were not devoured by the living weapon arced across its surface and tried to strike the wielder, but once they reached Zelsys they didn’t so much as touch her skin. Instead, these violent arcs were inexorably pulled towards the lines of silver that covered her skin, even to the scarce gleaming strands that were mixed in with the rest of her silver hair. Through Osmotic Essentia Absorption her body took in the very essence of lightning, and through Metabolic Alkahest it ripped the primordial force of nature into its constituent essentia and digested them as no more than nutrition for the soul

In spite of this, a great deal of current still surged through her body, muscles twitching out of control. As Zelsys struggled to maintain steady breathing and fought the shocks something clicked in her head, and sheer force of will took control where the body’s self-regulatory functions failed. By the time it was all over, Zelsys had exerted willful control over her not just her own musculature, but over her heart and lungs as well, unknowingly controlling the beating of the former and the individual movements of the latter to maintain Fog-breathing. When the left lung exhaled Fog the right one was already inhaling fresh air, the two gaseous substances remaining separate, not unlike oil and water.

Then, the lightning was gone, and in its place Zelsys stood. Her body ached more than she had thought it could, her hair stood on-end, but she was outwardly unscathed, and the blade that sat in her hand was the Captain’s Cleaver no more.

It was the Lightning Butcher, its cutting edge glowing red with electro-induction and its sawteeth vibrating with oscillating magnetic fields. Both these violent effects faded just before she put it down and holstered it. With the lightning bolt’s current gone, the moment Zel ceased exerting control over her own bodily functions the regulatory mechanisms took over. She managed to deftly leap to the ground, even to step towards the door, before she felt herself lapse into unconsciousness.