This was amazing. True chaos. Death and destruction all around, rattling his bones and threatening to blow out his eardrums even though he knew his helmet would protect him against even directed sonic attacks. An environment where, under any other circumstances, he would’ve hid and tried to find cover. It didn’t matter. Inside this steel skin, pumped to the gills with alchemicals tailored to him and him alone, wielding his very own artifact weapon, Makhus felt invincible.

What the G-Kaisers had done to his sword, he didn’t care. They had not only repaired it, but embellished it with complex inlays on the spine, carved the wood of the handle with alchemical symbols, polished it with some sort of arcane lacquer. It now sung in his hand as if made entirely of cold-iron, swinging it felt like the weapon was swinging itself.

He had been using Sensory Enhancement for nigh on a full two minutes now, and he had yet to feel the slightest burning in his eyes, all thanks to the eyedrops that he’d made after petitioning Ozmir for advice. Even the pain of his tattoos was subsiding, and the suit obeyed, even if not as quickly as he would’ve preferred. Even still, the Swordsman found himself diving headlong into the fray without an iota of fear in his heart, reveling in how easy it was to bait these Clay Soldiers into attacking, giving him plentiful time to pick out their cores and run them through. Evil-Cleaving Slash after Evil-Cleaving Slash he carved his way ahead, counting how many cores he had destroyed while the suit’s built-in clock and stopwatch timed how long it had been since the charge.

Then, something truly magical happened. Finding himself flanked, he thought to retreat to get better positioning, but an intense thrum shot through his stomach and to his heart from the belt, the mere thought of retreat swept away in favor of… Operating one of the belt’s buttons? The manual had detailed this specific one as just “Special Function”, the only instruction having been, “DO NOT USE UNTIL BELT SIGNALS RESONANCE. PROCEED WITH USE AS APPLICABLE AFTERWARDS”.

And so, taking this as the prompt, he pressed the button. The boxy part of the belt snapped open, briefly exposing something brightly-glowing inside as all his stray thoughts were swept away by an all-consuming, thunderous voice in his head. It didn’t speak, as much as it echoed in his skull all at once, like a memory of the words being spoken were suddenly inserted.

“PARTIAL RESONANCE ACHIEVED. IRON RIDER CHARGE: READY.”

Before he knew it, he had instinctively drawn planted his feet wide, drawing back his sword and burned most of his lung capacity to fuel an Evil-cleaving Slash, only to find that a contiguous line of light seeping between armorplates could now be drawn between the belt and his sword, the enchanted metal thrumming in his grip as if he were pouring colossal amounts of Aether into it.

Makhus followed his instincts and made the cut, invoking Evil-cleaving Slash.

From behind the lines, the Krishorn Heiress looked on upon the chaos with a high-magnification telescope. Her attention was ever drawn to that alchemist, and her satisfaction in his performance could not be overstated, even if he could not rein Acala in just yet. The Nameless model would have to perform, and perform, it did.

Mere minutes in a real life-or-death battle, and already his soul was resonating with the belt’s core. Already, he had called upon that strength - she could clearly make out the bleedoff from the armor charging what it recognized as the wearer’s main weapon, the manifestation still a formless and undefined envelope of arcane light around the blade, but decisively there. For, if it were not there, he would not have had the reach or the cutting power to go through multiple Clay Soldiers and their cores in a single strike, let alone...

…After the single moment he allowed himself to marvel at what had just happened and take in the information that, somehow, the “resonance” was gone. There was no time to think, with dozens of Clay Soldiers closing in and a terrible, nearly formless Gestalt encroaching.

Clay Soldiers fell down all around him, bullets flying, beams of Ignis screaming through the air, Bherad’s Needle zipping about. In the midst of the chaos, Makhus found himself right next to the aforementioned Formless Gestalt, two others of its kind within eyeshot, and he decided to topple this one. It legs, made from the forms of multiple human legs vaguely mushed together, resisted him, only giving after two, in one case three Evil-cleaving Slashes. When the monstrosity at last lost balance, tipping to one side and crushing a half-dozen Clay Soldiers in the process, Makhus leveraged his own Fog-breathing and his armor alike, leaping atop the monster as he searched for the hardened patches that betrayed the locations of its cores.

Thirteen. Thirteen damned cores. And each one deep enough that he had to plunge his sword most of the way in to get at it. Just two of them took long enough that the Gestalt began struggling to reform under his very feet, so the swordsman-alchemist mentally drew a line that crossed as many cores as possible and, standing at one end, plunged his sword into the clay.

Esoteric belt magic or not, he had his own means.

“TB Nine: Inject!” he said inside his helmet, not having had the time to figure out how to implement a mnemonic trigger, let alone do so. The next best thing was shortening the trigger-phrase - from Test Batch, to TB.

Four needles pierced his skin. Fire flooded his veins. Bodily limiters were forced out of place.

The Gestalt had gotten back up, one of its tendril-like arms mere moments from enveloping him.

A low, long drag cut. It would demand continuous power rather than a snap movement.

Lunging forward and pushing his sword in a single, prolonged, Herculean slash, Makhus felt an ache building in his sword-arm that he hadn’t felt before, but one by one eight out of the Gestalt’s thirteen cores shattered under his force.