The smell of iron filled her nose and the taste of it her mouth, mixed with the acidity of her own stomach. The Iron Pills were needed as a catalyst, to help repair and reinforce her right arm and to shore up the tremendous Metallum cost for what she intended to do next.

With the two of them separated for at least a little while longer, she found herself watching and listening; Von Wickten either knew that taking potshots at her wouldn’t help, or he didn’t care to try taking that opportunity.

“Hrrrn… I defy you to explain what is wrong with possessing slaves, both of you!” he howled, his eyes darting around the room to search for the Lady in Red, who had just emerged from behind her shield of pillars. “Newman! Karmesin! Why do you pretend that this is not the rightful way of things? That we are able to capture and hold those weaker than ourselves and exert our will over them, is that not the purest expression of cultivation?!”

Zel could scarcely believe how genuine he sounded; truly, this man-shaped impurity tumor couldn’t process the idea of ever being in the wrong. She was willing to bet that he wouldn’t concede the point if she defeated him with brute force, that his talk of power was predicated solely on his own desire to exert power over others rather than any sort of real survival-of-the-fittest philosophy.

“We are not animals. A cold, beast-like world where weakness is a sin, where the weak exist to be exploited…” she began, only pausing to contain the rising disgust, to stop herself from veering off into a derisive rant… An effort in which she mostly succeeded. “That you hold such perverse ideals is only proof that you are hollow, that you so utterly lack in all else you feel the need to form your entire being around what power you can scrounge up and steal, knowing deep down that you lack what it would take to actually become strong.”

As the exchange went on, she willed her Tablet to send out a short-range message on Tablet-specific frequencies, effectively informing all four of her compatriots. It wasn’t an actual, worded message, but rather a mnemonic impulse signaling her intent to use a single, specific breathing technique; It was something that she had devised in the months after the Blue Moon War in her efforts to replicate the supremely pure and supremely concentrated form of Fulgur that she’d been imbued with when she had channeled the Living Storm, solely for the purpose of achieving a likeness of that same heightened state.

STORM CONQUEROR’S BREATH: SEVEN STEPS TO PETRICHOR Type Breathing Technique Support Trigger At-Will While Fog-breathing Effects Ultra-High-Purity Fulgur Synthesis Advancement Nourish Thundergods “Seven gods, seven seals, seven steps taken on the path to truly usurp the heavens. This is the mountain-shattering triumph of scientific cultivation.”

Where Engine Breathing - and near enough every other breathing method - processed a breath once before proliferating it into the body as usable essentia, this method would pass a single breath through each of her seven Thundergods in sequence, gradually purifying and distilling the power produced until, at the end, would emerge a primordial storm-force purer than any found in nature.

With each metaphorical step she ascended one of her braids would come alive, each animated solely by the continuous essentia bleedoff from its respective Thundergod.

It was slow, impractical for combat use, and entirely impossible to conceal, producing bright flashes of lightning inside her chest and the unmistakable smell of ozone from the very first moment. Zel just needed to keep him busy for a short moment, being painfully aware of how difficult it was to actually begin the arduous breathing exercise, which she chose to snag by deceit. Another issue was that the breathing exercise took some time to complete, during which time her lungs would be almost completely occupied, with a single breath burned for another purpose setting her back. This was among the reasons for her transmission: A call for help.

“I shan’t justify myself to you! What do YOU know of how I’ve struggled, what I’ve given up for my post?! All these things you accuse me of, these demons, I’ve tried fighting them, but they never stop! These urges, they never subside - they only grow stronger as one progresses upon the Path of the Dragon! This alone is sufficient proof that what I am is the very embodiment of a true cultivator, that you are but a pretender!” came Von Wickten’s reply, accompanied by the redoublement of his efforts to smash down Red’s pillars, one which was patently successful thanks to the sheer bulldozing force of his tail. A pillar finally gave in under his force, and he grasped its crumbling mass in one hand, swinging it about in uncannily good synchronization with his tail and other claw as he tried to crush, slash, or otherwise kill Zelsys.

Dodging for her life as she loaded a fresh shell into her arm-cannon, she had already taken the first step: One of her braids had come alive, and the smell of ozone was about her. The pillar crumbled in Von Wickten’s grasp when he tried to swing it, and in his rage, he just smashed down one of the four stone columns of this chamber and grabbed it for a club instead, leaving Zelsys with enough time to take a shot at him, the slug embedding into one of his already-cracked scales, widening the gap. She leapt over a low swing of the pillar and jumped off it, just barely avoiding being splattered by a blast of flame, only for the entomodragon’s tail to come darting in… And to be smashed aside by a rapidly-rising pillar. Zel had already reloaded by this point, loading another Type-1 shell and firing it mere centimeters above the previous one’s spot.

The scale was completely split in half, now only held together by its attachment to its wearer’s flesh. As she worked her arm-cannon’s bolt, the Fog spraying from its exhaust port obscured her fall to the ground, where she took cover behind an intact pillar while she reloaded a Type-2 shotshell.

A second braid came alive. The stench of ozone in her nostrils overwhelmed all over olfactory sensation and minor muscles all over her body twitched incessantly at random intervals. She was skimming off the top of her Engine Breathing’s output to keep herself at a just-acceptable performance level, but unable to gather any meaningful amount of energy for a technique, she worked with what she had: The Impelling Arm, the armored kinetic dispersal harness which her gun was mounted to, recycled a significant portion of the recoil of any given shell into usable Pneuma, storing it in the pauldron. Two Type-1 shells weren’t much, but if she fired two high-powered Type-2 shells, she figured she’d have enough juice to do something meaningful enough to buy her the time she needed.

The pillar came down right by her side, and as she felt it coming, Zelsys took a chance: She burned the Pneuma stored in the Impelling Arm to cast Graze Pulse on the palm of her hand, intentionally holding it out. Von Wickten was nothing if not predictable in how he swung a weapon. She could scarcely contain her excitement as she felt the influx of Fulgur build, that familiar pressure behind her left eye. As Red uttered some sort of incantation over her Subcore, Zel just turned on a heel and sprinted headlong across the room as fast as her legs would carry her, sliding closeby right under Von Wickten’s left arm and firing her arm-cannon straight into his rear, the recoil sending her skidding backwards, her boots sparking against the stone floor and gouging it with their climbing claws. It produced less of a shotgun effect and more of a directed shrapnel explosion, potent enough to more or less evaporate several grown men or otherwise blow away armored knights with sheer force and volume of shrapnel.

At the angle at which she’d fired that shell, Von Wickten’s scales offered little protection, and a flood of hardened shrapnel burrowed its way right into his skin, breaking what little focus he had and forcing him to pay attention to Zelsys… Who was already all the way across the room by the time he got his eyes on her, much to the mutant’s howling fury.

“Fight me head-on, coward! Do you not believe in true strength when you are not the stronger one?!” he screamed, throwing down his makeshift weapon in petulant rage. He reared back, the ominous glow rising in his chest. Zel didn’t feel the need to answer him, instead only reloading another Type-2 shell. One more and she’d have a resounding answer. She only wondered if she could use this shell to directly negate his breath weapon… Its bolts didn’t move too quickly for her to react to, so she raised her arm and, poised to dodge at the last second, waited.

A bright-burning glob of congealed flame erupted from Von Wickten’s maw, but before Zel could try shooting it down, an iridescent, screaming beam smashed it out of the air, sweeping across the chamber and scoring a wide slash down the entomodragon’s chest before recentering on him, forcing him to raise his tail in defense, upon whose immense plates even this beam splashed.

It was Red.

CRITICALITY SIGN

SUBCORE EMBODIMENT

CRIMSON COMMAND: MASTER SPARK

As her beam began ripping into Adalbert’s tail, he turned to his true nature: Attempting to establish dominance through brute force. His chest erupted with light once more, burning venom dripping from his mouth, the flame seeming to sputter. Despite his foolishness, he at least knew well enough to constantly shift his tail and to move throughout the room to make it as difficult as possible for Red to hold aim on one spot. Not one to turn down a break in this situation, Zelsys willingly stepped back and watched it unfold; her third braid had already come alive, and she could feel the fourth’s awakening quickly approaching. She noticed a strange thing, besides Vic’s injured state: A faceless effigy of Red, still there right next to the young man, concealed by her blast shield, the Subcore slot in its forehead gaping and empty.

The Gu centipede emerged from Adalbert’s forehead, and as if answering a question only he could hear, he roared: “ACCEPT.”

The centipede extended yet further, so far that its “eye” could look into one of Von Wickten’s actual eyes. He stared it down, and answered again with a roar, shoving the centipede back in as he did so: “OBJECTION OVERRULED.”

He clearly meant to meet the Red Lady’s empyrean might with his own, brute kind of magic, the light in his chest rising to a blinding brightness as he came to a halt and dug his heels in.

ACCURSED SIGN

LIFE-BURNING FLAME

KODOKU RITE: BLAZE SCHNEIDER

An immense beam of bright-yellow flame erupted from Adalbert’s maw, his jaw opening far past any reasonable limit, the two halves of his lower jaw unfolding so completely they sat perpendicular to his chest… And Red’s Master Spark was not merely being pushed back, but split down the middle. Burning, caustic venom kept splashing off of Von Wickten’s flame, melt-burning pits into the stone it landed on. A look of satisfaction flashed across Red’s face, and with a gesture, her beam winked out. The venomous yellow flame blasted right through her chest, ripping a gaping hole right through where her heart ought to be, much to Von Wickten’s satisfaction and… Relief? He looked terribly relieved when he closed his mouth and put a stopper on the outpouring of flame; relieved and exhausted, out of breath even.

His relief was undermined by the bell-like chuckle of the Lady in Red, from whose injury erupted a deluge of iridescent Fog as the hole just closed itself, leaving nary a mark to suggest it had ever been there. From where she was, Zel clearly saw the injury being transferred to the effigy before it crumbled to dust altogether, the Subcore returning to Red’s hand.

“I’m the duke’s cohort, you can’t hurt me Adalbert!” she cackled. It was obvious she was just making things up, Zelsys recognized that tone anywhere, because it was a tone she herself used when she used this exact trick. “Did you really think you Dragon Knights weren’t implanted with failsafes against such treason?!”

Red continued, to Zel’s great amusement, by copying her: “However… It seems that we are at an impasse. You cannot truly harm me, and exhausted as I am, I cannot strike you down either.”

Stomping footsteps could be heard approaching, and obviously making it up on the spot, Red gestured to the snow-pale figure which stomped through the entryway: ”Fortunate it is then, that I am not your executioner!”

On the lower floor of the former temple, in the chambers beyond the sight of those who had come here as buyers, Jorfr and Zefaris were themselves facing off against a grave foe: A desperate beast-tamer who had released all nine of the False Drakes that were being housed here, a good five of them in good-enough condition to spit lethal flame.

Upon receipt of Zel’s message, Zefaris remarked: “I suppose that means Von Wickten pulled some desperate ploy, if he became a sufficient threat to warrant that.”

She glanced sideways to Jorfr, unloading her shotgun down the hallway as she did so, skewering and freezing the head of a charging drake with glacierglass stakes before shattering it with slugs.

“Go, I have it handled here. If you move quickly you might get there in time to watch her disembowel him,” she said to the norseman with a tinge of humor. He nodded, hoisting his massive hammer onto one shoulder and storming off.

Zefaris locked her mask to her face and took a deep breath, reloading Tempesta before she pulled out a handful of coins. She breathed on them, throwing them all into the air, the chamber’s vaulted ceilings permitting their long ascent. Time compressed. The world stopped for a moment - a breath’s span - then resumed.

“Praise gun, our savior…”

Pentacle came into her now-free right hand as a stake from Tempesta pinned a second drake to the ground. The first half of Death’s Lieutenant took form. Another deep breath through the mask.

“...Hail death, the master!”

Jorfr sprinted back through the auction room, now littered with corpses; the Dragon Knights on the upper floor had reacted when Zefaris began executing the buyers, giving each of them a chance to explain their reasons to be here before killing them. He could hear the battle raging clear as day, the unmistakable boom of Zel’s arm-cannon going off contrasted by monstrous roaring in a version of the knight captain’s unmistakable voice. Then, there was the scream. The high-pitched screech of some empyrean force ripping through the air. Through already-opened doorways, he could glimpse an iridescent beam clashing with the horrifically mutated Dragon Knight’s own beam of flame, seemingly being pushed back before it suddenly flickered out. The voice of that woman - the Red Mantis - then resounded, but Jorfr had already slipped into a battle-trance and extraneous sensory input faded out of focus, his attention utterly fixed on his target: The Entomodragon.

As he ran, the norseman reached for his chest, and forming an iceborn claw around his thumb, he cut a vertical line downwards, the wound freezing shut moments after it began bleeding. After the first line came another, and another, until he’d carved a ritualistic glyph into his own skin: two crosses overlaid to form an eight-spoked star, with three lines across the midpoint of each spoke and a U-shape at the tip of each spoke to form a trident. Despite its complexity, the glyph was completed before he passed the last open door. It was a magnified representation of the self-same glyph which shone upon his forehead, inlaid into the bone in meteoric iron: The Helm of Awe, a glyph of his clan which magnified the user’s presence and inured them from harm. Never before had it failed him, as unlike many, Jorfr had the knowledge, strength of will, and rapport with the earthen spirits to manifest the glyph’s power in full. It was the very reason for his foregoing a shirt, in fact: The magic required that his skin be laid bare.

“Let the glaciers be my weapon, the permafrost my skin, the scouring winds my breath…”

Water froze upon him, forming layers of frost that shaped themselves huge plates of armor, while his exhalations blasted forth hot steam alongside Fog, and a jagged beard of frost grew upon his jaw, his own wiry hair the scaffolding. The immense bulk of solid, rough cold-iron which Jorfr chose to be his weapon - his hammer - froze in his hands, becoming enveloped by jagged spikes of translucent glacierglass.

Sprinting right past the red woman and fully anticipating the same exact flame-beam to be set upon him, he already began zigzagging left and right, using his hammer as an anchor to make hairpin turns and even running along walls with the assistance of the runes which were carved on the soles of his feet. Though their purpose was to anchor him to the ground for wrestling, they could be turned to more mobile purposes in short bursts, as long as what he was trying to run on was stone or soil. Bolts of flame came flying all around him and a tremendous bladed tail came at him like a gigantic whip, not to mention the bug-dragon’s claws, but Jorfr had fought beasts that moved like this. He managed to dodge enough of the beast’s strikes to get above it and come crashing down like a man-shaped meteor, spinning downward and smashing his hammer upon the dragon’s back with such force the beast’s feet cracked the stone beneath and two of its scales shattered, yellow blood spurting out of its mouth. He found himself grabbed like a ragdoll and thrown across the room the next moment, smashing back-first into a wall. His vision briefly flickered out, and when it returned, he caught sight of Zelsys - hiding behind a pillar, twitching in place, visibly struggling with five of her six braids already alighted with a manifested Thundergod.

“Two steps left. A minute at most. I can do that.”

He freed himself just in time for a blast of flame to strike the wall where he had been moments earlier, once more meeting the abomination in a melee. Not knowing of the anchoring-runes on Jorfr’s feet, the dragon thought to meet Jorfr’s hammer-swings with strikes of his own, and though the force of Von Wickten’s tail was by far greater than that which Jorfr could generate from a standstill, the norseman remained unmoved even after the tail smashed his hammer aside. Desperate, the monster grabbed for him once more, but Jorfr had slipped between his legs and was just about to smash one of his knees from the side, only for that damnable tail to get him again. His reactions were just quick enough to will his anchoring-runes to release, and he was thrown across the chamber once again, but this time he righted himself in mid-air.

“Come, show me how a pretender-dragon’s flame splatters upon a glacier!” he exclaimed as he stood up after landing. “You shan’t move me.”

He saw the bug-dragon’s chest expanding and an ominous glow between the scales as he reared up and flame sputtered from his mouth. It was a tell so obvious he didn’t need any more than that to dig his heels in and smash his hammer down, invoking the spirits of his ancestors. The stone cracked beneath its force and a great mass of ice erupted forth, forming into the visage of an immense norseman holding a shield in one hand and a sword in the other, a backswept wall of frost in his wake. Upon that snarling, iceborne visage the terrible beam of flame splattered.

ANCESTOR SIGN

REPRISING THE FEATS OF ONE’S FOREBEARS

HULSON CLAN ARTS: WIDE-WUTH OF THE UNBROKEN SHIELD

The face of that statue meant nothing to anyone but Jorfr, for only he knew who it was: His own grandfather, whose spirit Jorfr had invoked in the casting of this defensive technique. He cared not for the methodology, for the how and why of it, all he cared about was that the ritualistic invocation of his ancestors’ spirits amplified his magic as long as he did so with full conviction. He knew exactly how the feat had been achieved; the tale of it had been drilled into him since childhood and the shield defense form his grandfather had used was as familiar to him as his own hammer. So it was that, despite not practicing the usage of cultivation assist devices like Tablets, Jorfr had attained the very thing those devices bestowed on anyone to use them: Spiritual muscle memory by way of ancestor-worship.

What he had just done had also ripped a chunk out of his already-waning reserves, of which he had spent a portion helping to fuel Zef’s Eternal Snow technique and in the convoy battle. Jorfr cared not if he depleted his own reserves, only that he bought Zelsys enough time to take over for him and finish the job… And so he charged ahead, dragging his hammer across the stone floor. Smashing down his hammer once more, Jorfr used it as a lever to throw himself upwards, spending everything he had on a last-ditch effort, a technique which reprised not the feat of an ancestor, but one of his own feats in the Blue Moon War.

The ice-mass encasing his hammer grew to the size of boulder, ominous runes alighting upon its surface as it threatened to smash Von Wickten’s head through sheer mass, being a sufficient threat for the entomodragon to raise both his arms and his tail in a guard. It shattered like sugar-glass on impact, its spray of fragments turning to a rapidly-expanding mass of solid ice that utterly encased the accursed beast of a man.

ABSOLUTE ZERO SIGN

BY WHICH A MOVING MOUNTAIN CAN BE HALTED

HULSON CLAN ARTS: GLIMMER OF LOST HYPERBOREA

The sixth of her braids had come alive, and Zelsys could scarcely contain both the building power and the excitement swirling within her breast. She stepped out of cover when she saw Jorfr get that look on his face before he sprinted off again, having anticipated that he would do exactly what he did.

She could do naught but laugh when Jorfr stumbled out from behind the frozen bug-dragon, struggling to catch his breath as he dragged his hammer in one hand and leaned on the mass of glacierglass with the other.

“That…” he sighed, knocking on the mass. “Is so much harder to do without the preparatory ritual. You have twenty seconds before it gives.”

With that, he retreated to the side of the Lady in Red, squatting down next to her. He briefly glanced over to the still-unconscious body of Victor, still shielded by Red’s unmistakable black pillars, then looked up at the mantis with a questioning gaze. She refused to answer why these constructs conveniently didn’t crumble, as if they were being actively maintained.

“Now, little man, let me show you the difference between your borrowed power and something real…” Zelsys uttered, looking up into Von Wickten’s eyes. Despite being frozen, he twitched in his temporary tomb, visibly struggling against it as his eyes shuddered in place even as they remained steadily affixed on Zelsys.

Breath in, breath out, she fed the final - or rather, first - and largest of her Thundergods, fighting with all her might to keep the bead of cosmic lightning in her second stomach from just flooding into the rest of her body prematurely.

With the seventh step, the very air around her seemed to become lightning, a flash of blinding blue consuming her surroundings as arcs of lightning lashed the ground and gouged channels of molten rock beneath her feet. As the upsurge subsided, lightning and exhaled Fog both swirled together into a looming figure right behind Zelsys, mirroring her stance; it could only be described as her true persona given form, a musclebound embodiment of violence half again as tall as she was, a mane of white hair framing a face shrouded by a bear skull mask, the figure’s nudity concealed only by huge red braids, each as thick as a grown man’s arm.

A tangible manifestation of the Primordial Self.

“Slave to your inner animal that you are, you could never conceive of the control I possess. I tread the Walking Way of the Despot of Self! My very being is my empire, and not a single soldier shall go unaccounted for!”