It took a concerted effort to put holes in his heart, and yet more to bring it to a halt, forcing her to burn a lungful’s Fulgur and surge it through her hand just to cease its beating.

With a gurgling, coughing inhalation, as bubbles of black blood foamed around the corners of his mouth, the old man smiled.

“I’ll be watching you from beneath the Fog-sea’s waves,” he gurgled, then went limp. Before she could even prise her hand free of his torn-open ribcage his body had already begun turning to dust, releasing great gusts of silver Fog that shot up into the sky as though great serpents. His sternum, too, was falling to pieces in her hand, leaving behind only the key it had once contained. Moments later, it was difficult to discern where the corpse ended and golem rubble began… But it was still not over.

It would’ve felt wrong to not open the sect’s doors anew.

Her body aching more and more as it consumed the surplus of Vitae from Makhus’s elixir, Zelsys raised the key aloft as she strode towards the sect building. The cheering of onlookers resounded whilst the band played a triumphant song, but Zel paid them no mind. She only gave Zef a look and a smile as she scaled those stairs, who responded by smiling right back and raising the fotoapparat.

CLACK

The fotoapparat sounded. She briefly wondered how many pictures the blonde had taken just during the fight, and how many of them were indecipherable blurs. Still, she could probably sign and sell them to some Kargarian collector… Though she wasn’t sure why she knew that there were probably such people in the caravan. That brief mental tangent was swept away by the sheer imperious magnificence of the sect entryway.

Towering thrice her own height, the gates stared down untouchable and uncompromising, separated from her by that bubble-like wall of force. When she reached out to prod, it gave way - it was with tangible resistance, bending and stretching before the arcane membrane let her pass, but it still gave. It spurred ideations of what such a barrier would be able to withstand, if this was the resistance it put up when letting someone through.

There was no keyhole. Not on either of the doors, not on the pillar separating them, and yet the key thrummed in her grasp.

It took but a spark of will - the intent to open those ancient doors - to make it come alive. Thrumming more and more forcefully, shining lilac, threads of Fog pouring out of it and slithering into the mouths of the massive horse-headed door handle mounts.

There was no need to say anything, to do anything, and yet she was compelled to anyway.

Zelsys drew in a deep breath and raised the key aloft, burning half a lung to make tongues of lightning jump from her skin and another lung still to proclaim with such inhuman volume that she knew her vocal cords would ache from it for hours to come the moment she made that decision.

“To surpass one’s own limits, to defy the natural weakness of man - that is the path I have chosen to walk! Whether it is to strengthen yourself or in defiance of the Divine Emperor’s attempts to weaken the people of this land, none who are willing and able shall be denied the opportunity to learn!”

In the front yard of a hidden mansion high atop the Ikes Mountains, far beyond the reach of any mortal mind, a purple-skinned Ankhezian hermit in white robes smoked from a pipe that he had stolen from the Divine Emperor’s vaults on a whim. He looked into a scrying mirror wrought from the polished scale of a dragon that lived at the bottom of the sea, watching events unfold through the eyes of a flesh puppet - one among dozens - that he had planted in one of the cities of mortal men. The puppet went about its daily routine as if it were a living human, yet lacked any true agency - a philosophical zombie in the truest conceivable sense.

“Such prodigal violence, such ready forging of theory into practice through the heat of battle… What imperious edifice of a foundation has this mortal built? I’ve seen sages a century old turn their foundations to dust with a tenth of the carelessness this one has exhibited, and yet she thrives so readily even in her self-inflicted suffering. Could we have another Struggler on our hands, I wonder?” pondered the ancient man aloud.

In a burst of black smoke, a second Ankhezian appeared beside the first, his robes dark and his skin like jade.

“Do not tell me that your standards have fallen so far that such trifling strength is enough to impress you,” he sneered at the former’s remarks.

With a smile, the White-robed one rebuked: “A mere display of strength is nothing compared to what she did - something new.”

“I’ve seen some variant of this archetype at least a half-dozen times before,” bit back the Dark-robed one.

“Oho? Then surely you will not be opposed to a bet of ten-dozen Soul-seeds?” the first raised an eyebrow, knowing that his brother would not refuse.

“So be it.”

“Show me an example of an individual subsuming a Wrathful Stormgod by force, using its power to excite a livingmetal saw into oscillation, then further extrapolating the technique and melding it with kineticism to launch the aforementioned livingmetal saw as a crude Swordlight analogue.”

“...I admit, that is new, if only due to its crudeness,” grumbled the Dark-robed Brother, pulling a silken sack from the sleeve of his robe and handing it over. From within it resounded the telltale clinking of the crystallized remnants left behind after the ascension of monks who had transcended earthly bonds; not souls in any true sense, but supreme seeds for new souls to form around.

“Are you certain that this is true resilience, and not merely engineered by heretical sorcery? We’ve seen such things before, lest I need to remind you. Demonspawn, shadewalkers, false oracles, mutant sages, even those creatures with skins of metal and bodies or motile wood - all inevitably fail to live up to the growth potential of a human, or are consumed by their own burgeoning abilities.”