This could not come to pass.

Even if Ubul could survive, even if he could pretend to be defeated and lie in wait again, there was no doubt in his mind that by the virtue of this defeat alone, the Emperor would see him as a liability, a failure, a sacrificial pawn at best. It was true that he had eliminated one of his priority targets, but that was only one of several components to his task. Even if his position were to be returned to him, he would never again be allowed to live this failure down.

So it was that the general resolved to be victorious here and now, even should he need to draw every desperate card in his deck.

Even if he had to sup upon the strength he had dredged from the deepest depths of the earth, putting his own soul at risk of being overtaken by the earthen spirits, perhaps forever stuck in this stone body, perhaps rendered into little more than a walking proxy for the will of nature.

Anything for the Empire.

No…

“Anything for the Emperor.”

Deep beneath the battlefield, at the center of a tremendous geomantic core, the very source of the Terra that had served to animate the clayman and Ubul’s golem body alike, there was a man.

Once, he had been Ubul Feng, great general of the divine army, destroyer and redeemer, beginning to as many vassal states as he had been an end to upstarts.

DIVINE ARMY GREAT GENERAL

THE DOWNFALL OF ANCIENT CITIES

UBUL, THE BEAST REBORN IN STONE

The structural failure of Ubul’s cold tomb was an inevitability, but Zefaris couldn’t have taken into account a contingency that the general had shown no sign of possessing. Even still, she had considered the possibility, knowing better than to let her guard down.

She was by Makhus’ side, having aided him in removing a damaged armor segment and unjamming a portion of exoskeleton. His entire left side had been immobilized by damage to a critical exoskeletal structure, forcing him to crawl in a half-kneeling position. Despite the broken ribs he had suffered, the swordsman just got back up after the obstruction was removed, his eyes bloodshot and veins bulging with luminescent yellow fluid. The amount of alchemicals in his system ought to have melted him from the inside, had he not gone to such painstaking effort to balance the mixture for himself. For all the measuring systems of alchemically induced blood toxicity, he was near the very top of lethality for all of them… And he felt great, even with two broken ribs.

The earth shook underfoot, the sound of cracking ice accompanied by a furious growl and a yellow glow converging from everywhere underneath the battlefield onto Ubul’s frozen form. He felt something was off, so he placed his hand against the ground, focusing to open up his essentia storage glyphs so that any particularly dense ambient essentia would seep into them. A useful test he’d grown to dislike from using it in the E.Z. and always tasting a mouthful of rotten meat.

“Massive surge of… Well, it’s Terra, but it’s dense, far too dense, carrying entire colonies of monads. Primordial, from way down below, probably one of the continental leylines fifty klicks down. The bastard must’ve formed an emergency stockpile within reach just in case,” he said, reaching into one of his armor’s compartments, pulling out a small, silver phial.

“He mustn’t have wanted to use it so as to not risk becoming an elemental avatar. If he’s doing something this desperate…”

Makhus opened the ampule, kicking back its white-glowing contents. The glow of his veins only intensified, but his eyes suddenly returned to normal. Before Zefaris could ask whether he had just drunk Fivefold Philter, two simultaneous noises interrupted them. The terrible sound of Ubul’s prison shattering all at once, and the sudden strike of lightning. It was well outside the wall, a tree made to explode. Another, then another, and another yet again.

From barely any lightning strikes throughout the entire battle, to several within the span of seconds. It was obvious why - Zefaris had created an essentia imbalance within the cloud formation when she invoked Eternal Snow. At least, that was her snap assumption, before the dust cleared, and they saw no figure where Ubul had been.

Just a hole in the ground, roughly the diameter of his core, the shape of its mouth suggesting it was made by something rapidly forcing its way into the ground.

The ground shook, the tremor intensifying for a few seconds. Lightning struck the center of the crater at whose bottom Ubul had once stood. Again, and again, and again. Moments later, a humanoid figure erupted from the crater’s center, soaring through the sky, its silhouette juxtaposed against the moon.

Landing atop and crushing with his weight a hapless tankman, it was immediately obvious who it was - Ubul. Lightning struck him. A stone arm lashed out from his back to meet the spear, shattered by the impact, only to retreat back into his mass.

The general’s cracked, jagged countenance had lost some of that meticulously-crafted human image. His core was gone altogether, his chest lacking the expected gaping hole where it had once been. Neither did he show any signs of having filled that gap in. In fact, there was not a single part of him that looked like he had only seconds previous, with the sole exception of his replacement left arm - now floating next to a stump, connected to the rest of him by yellow-glowing tendrils of earthen magic. He had become simultaneously more like a beast, and like a moving rock formation, covered in uneven stony ridges and spikes, the numerous cracks that covered his surface filled with a baleful yellow glow.

Zefaris couldn’t help but notice two seemingly contradictory facts:

First, the absence of any bayonets embedded in his back.

Second, his presence. It had been immense before, but this… This was crushing, enough to steal the breath from lesser men. A number of tankmen completely lost their composure at the sight of him, fleeing and trying to hide.