His eyes, there was something wrong there. So terribly, terribly wrong. Von Wickten’s metamorphosis had been monstrous, truly, but what he had made himself become was beyond a transformation. Zelsys could sense it - there was nothing behind his eyes. His demeanor subtly shifted, moment by moment, as if the Gu had scooped out and devoured the infinitesimal scraps of humanity still left inside Von Wickten’s rotten soul.

The Entomodragon’s chest began to shine once again, tongues of flame erupting from his wounds before it flooded forth from both his maw and his hands, blasting out all around Zelsys. Her only possible path of escape was directly upwards, but she didn’t bother. Of the two metals to whose properties she could align her Metallum, Bronze was one she had gone out of her way to grasp in addition to the aspect of Iron which had come naturally, specifically for situations such as these. With a spark of will and a marginal quantity of Pneuma burnt to facilitate the realignment, she willed the Metallum which suffused her skin to Bronze, dredging up yet more to reinforce herself just in case.

A scorching heat swallowed her being, stone melted beneath her feet and the very edges of her armor took on a cherry-red glow, yet she remained unburnt. The mechanically inferior properties of Bronze were by far offset by its properties as a magical insulator, conducting within itself without issue, but putting up extraordinary resistance to outside arcane influences. As such, Von Wickten’s flood of flame was all but rendered impotent.

Upon seeing the failure of his attack, the entomodragon’s compound eyes shifted in place, moving from Zelsys to her compatriots as the Gu darted in and out of its forehead like the flicking of a serpent’s tongue. She was willing to play with Von Wickten for a while longer, but not like this. His lower jaws click-clacked and he opened and closed his hands, the muscles of his forearms visibly shifting. He intended to create some triplicate form of the Blaze Schneider, that much was clear, but Zel also predicted how he intended to land it: By distracting her with an attack on her compatriots.

“What’s wrong? Did you expect this’d work after how badly it failed down in the pit, just because it’s a few hundred degrees hotter? Ankhezians used to make shields out of bronze to defend against artillery mages, and you thought your glorified blowtorch would work on me?!” she mocked to grab his attention once more. He met her with furious, flame-empowered fisticuffs, of which she defended or countered the vast majority, tapping into her waning reserves to invoke Skin of Iron, hardening her fists even beyond their already-hardened state. Besides this, she harnessed the great geyser of Fulgur which sprouted forth with each of her breaths not merely to accelerate and empower her own movements, but to form momentary coats of white-hot lightning around her fists and legs. With each ground-shaking punch, one of Von Wickten’s scales cracked or broke; with each left hook, she fired a low-powered Thundercannon to deepen the wound. With each thunderous kick his flesh split open, and with each right kick, the dozer-blade around her leg burrowed into him. He just… Wasn’t slowing down. It was all surface damage, his flesh not as tough as hers, but magnitudinous beyond reason. The sheer amount of muscle on him meant that, at this rate, direct unarmed attacks would take too long to bring him down for her liking, leaving him all too much time to hatch some new plan or come after the others, or even try to escape.

So it was that she created some distance, and channeling into her left arm, fired another Thundercannon, calling out: “BUTCHER!”

As before, the arc latched onto her blade’s handle, and as before, it was yanked back. But as it was, it was too short unless she cut his neck arteries or somesuch, and even then the arrangement of his scales would demand their removal before she could get at a vein. In the sparse few seconds which she took to think on her next course of actions, two things happened: First, Victor came-to, confusedly poking his head out from behind Red’s tidebreaker. Though he ducked back into cover swiftly at the sight of Von Wickten, the reminder of the young man’s presence was enough to motivate the opportunistic thing that he was into action.

Red and Jorfr had both proven they could stand up to him, but Victor was still nothing more than a victim in his mind. After all, nothing the redhead had done could realistically harm the entomodragon. His fingers twitched a bit before semi-liquid flame sprayed out of the nozzle on his left arm, and as he raised one arm to Zelsys, he raised another left and upwards such that the spray would fall upon Victor.

“No you don’t,” she uttered, funneling a surge of Bronze-aligned Metallum into her right arm until it was so saturated with it that a layer of green oxide formed on her skin up to just above the elbow. Sprinting and leaping upwards, she stabbed the Butcher into Von Wickten’s arm at such an angle that it pinched the tendons, veins, and tubes inside his wrist, running a tremendous surge of Fulgur through the blade as she grabbed his arm-nozzle. She stuck her thumb in the opening to plug it just long enough to rip the nozzle clean out of his arm, burning venom running out over her arm and splattering onto the ground.

He pointed his other arm to her, spraying more organic napalm as he obviously charged a Blaze Schneider, leaving her plentiful opportunity to break the stream with her still-hardened right arm and just grab the other flame-nozzle as well, breaking it in half with sheer grip strength before she ripped out one of the scales on his wrists and slit it - or rather, sawed through it with the Butcher - severing the flow of flame-venom to this extremity as well. She thought to just destroy the entomodragon’s heart and be done with it, since the Butcher’s reduced state wouldn’t matter much if she used it to strike there, but… No.

That wouldn’t suffice.

Von Wickten had to live long enough to be punished properly, as she had planned. She would make him puke up every ounce of impurity in his soul, and that was that.

But… Zel found herself faced with an all-too-familiar problem: The Butcher just wasn’t big enough to do its job of dismembering her foe. Having anticipated this very situation due to the fact there had been times when Butcher’s full length didn’t suffice, she had devised a means of temporarily restoring her blade to a mirage of its true self. In fact, the blades which tipped her braids were fragments from the Butcher’s original blade which she had originally tied to her hair for this very purpose.

She briefly glanced towards Victor, her face flashing with a smug confidence that said: “Watch closely, now. I’ll show you something you won’t find anywhere in the books.”

And indeed, that was just what she did, gripping the Broken Butcher by its guard whilst working her arm-cannon’s bolt with one of her braids, closing up the chamber after the spent shell popped out. With a smooth motion she slotted the Butcher’s handle into the arm-cannon’s muzzle, lightning arcing between the blade’s prongs the moment its handle was fully seated.

There were few arcane techniques which demanded such mental focus from Zelsys as to necessitate multi-line incantations; besides Dance of the Fireflies in its fullest manifestation, this was one.

“Butcher o butcher, ye cleaver of wrath baptized by the blood of the undying…”

Two of her braids wrapped themselves around her arm, their phantom heads biting her arm-cannon’s trigger lever.

“Sup of mine power, usurped from the heavens above and earth below…”

Two more yet followed, these biting the gauntlet.

“...And bare thy fangs of defiance ‘gainst the skeins of fate!”

The last two, spiraling down her right arm, bound her hand to the Butcher’s crossguard and bit the blade itself. The seals wrapped around much of the Butcher began to burn at the edges as arcs of electricity raced between its prongs and its structure began to distort, the fragments of its original form resonating with the weapon. There came a terrible creaking and snapping as the Butcher’s twin prongs erupted in growth, forming a thorny, malformed thing that by some grievous miracle possessed a vaguely congruent blade edge on one side, while most of its length bristled with innumerable screaming sawteeth. Its crack-covered surface pulsed with a pale blue glow.

SIMULACRUM SIGN

TUNING FORK OF SEVEN STORMS

FORMLESS BUTCHERY: GESTALT REBIRTH

Each time she used this technique, the form taken by the short-lived blade could be completely different. Once, it was nothing but sawteeth. Another time, it was a gigantic, inwardly-curved blade, akin to a scythe. The only constant was that it was always an appropriate implement for the battle at hand. This reforged Butcher was short-lived, doomed to return to its broken state, but the brief time in which it resembled its past self would more than suffice. Lightning surged through the Butcher, its sawteeth screaming as its cutting-edge became white-hot.

In the timespan it took Zelsys to transform her own weapon, the entomodragon’s Gu parasite emerged to nearly its full length. Both it and its host writhed in place for several moments, the mass of of his tail and many of his broken scales being re-absorbed. A moment later, the scales around his hands thickened and proliferated until they were utterly enshrouded, his fingers fusing from four down to two, plus thumbs. With blades and flames both having failed, he meant to try bludgeoning his way to victory as a last-ditch effort.

They met in a furious clash. For each punch Von Wickten threw, Zelsys swung her massive saw-cleaver twice over. The horrendous, raucous clanging and metallic resonance of her blade melded together with the entomodragon’s growling and screaming, bolts of flame from its maw splattering against the cleaver and being struck from mid-air by Zel’s braids. At this moment, she became further removed from humanity than even Von Wickten - a fleshly embodiment of a storm’s unceasing fury, a vaguely humanoid blue of cold-iron and lightning, smashing apart the body of a man-become-dragon. Such was the terrible fury and rancor of their battle that they carved and burned a visible sphere of mayhem around the site where it took place, with rubble, scales, and gore piling up around them and being tossed about the chamber as the beast-slayer brought her fury to bear against the entomodragon’s last, desperate push. She cut, sawed, and smashed apart not merely Von Wickten’s hands, but much of his armor as well, going so far as to sever even this form’s horns solely to make it absolutely clear that he was her lesser. A desperate right hook of his opened up a wide gap in his guard, and Zel exploited it by darting in and taking her hooked blade to his stomach, wrenching it deep enough that it ripped through skin, flesh, and bone, spilling out a serpent-like tangle of yellow intestines.

This grievous wound drove the entomodragon to twist sharply upon one heel, stepping forward as it turned its side to Zelsys, holding out its more intact left hand as it held in its cut-open stomach with its right. To say it was intact in any appreciable sense, however, was a compliment; his left arm still had fingers and a fist, but it was nevertheless stripped of armor and covered in deep cuts. The right half of his lower jaw hung limply, the joint broken, many teeth missing from the upper row as well; the burned gash in his right side had grown such that one could plainly see his ribcage and lungs underneath.

Zel was just about ready to finish this; a terrible fatigue was dawning upon her, an inexorable sign that she would soon need to rest. Even if she could withstand this more refined, but lessened form of Storm-conqueror’s Mantle for much longer than the original, that was still only a short while. She pulled back her blade, adjusting the position of her feet...