A deluge of smoke and ash escaped from every-which orifice and the very pores of his skin, and as he spoke his proclamation, his hand shot out to point first at Alcerys, then at the Red Mantis.

A moment later the general’s body was enveloped in this tenebrous substance, horrendous fleshly noises emanating from within as the shape of a lying-down man slowly rose into an upright position, leaving the sword which had pinned him in the ground. Within the smoke, uncountable faces of pain and torment could be seen swirling about, pushing against an immaterial membrane within eyes as glowing coals, and at its center, his own eyes serving as the arcane construct’s, the general floated.

His body was twisted, skin sloughing off in long strips, musculature unwinding, veins and nerves visibly stretching out throughout the smoke-thing.

Cao Hu was broken, twisted, ripped apart alive, and yet his voice was that of victory.

Manic, deranged, driven-mad by pain victory.

“And like the mindless beasts who created it, so too does the curse abide by a strong master’s command!” boasted the curse-bound general, his horrific form gliding across the floor. “All this hate, all this wrath, that which my actions had so exquisitely cultivated… It shall be my armor and my sword, and with it, I shall-”

“-usurp the stars of calamity which shine in the heavens!” finished the Charred Judge, raising the Fiery Eye of Judgment once again that it might clearly see the general, and in that moment, her sword instantaneously burst into a writhing inferno of blue fire, spines, and briars.

So intense was the Eye’s reaction to the General’s act of reveling in his guilt that Alcerys was herself enveloped in wisps of blue fire, the First Arm itself growing to grotesque, distended proportions and her halo stoked into a blaze such that briar tendrils swirled around her head. Its thorns grew to be so long they wedged themselves between the plates of her gauntlet, scraping against metal and digging into her flesh, but the inquisitor cared not. She burned lungful after lungful, re-manifesting her halo all over between invoking the Calamity Sword.

She looked to Red Mantis, who, without a word spoken, gave a simple nod, herself springing into action and performing a series of gestures, invoking a series of unintelligible utterances under her breath. The horns upon her head shone with iridescent light that hurt to witness even in the corner of one’s eyes, herself grimacing in pain, and yet, it was not she who cried out.

It was the cursebound general, whose curse was being given material form, turning from ephemeral smoke to physical entities of conjoined limbs and screaming mouths, wrought of tar-like liquid - spiritual impurity rendered down to a material form. They erupted from his form onto the ground and rose up to claw at him. A half-dozen malformed bodies, all piling on top of one another and clawing at his already fraying material form. In the end, the curse’s objective was still to torment him, and in facilitating it, Red directed its ire away from herself.

“CEASE YOUR HERETICAL MAGICKS!” howled the general, reaching out for Red, smoky tendrils lashing out from his arm that the mutant cut from the air as if they were physical whilst moving out of the way. Whence her golden arm-blade severed them, smoke became as though tar and splashed across the polished floor.

“I barely need to do anything to give the curse tangible form, now that you’ve so graciously drawn it to the surface for me!” she rebuked between lines of incantation.

In these few precious seconds when the general’s attention sat elsewhere, Alcerys burned lungful after lungful of Fog, building up a massive Second Arm charge, reinforcing her constructs, and stoking Emberthorn’s flames in preparation to set it loose. She gripped her sword with both hands, and exploiting the general’s provoked state, took a shot at him with the First Arm, feigning a detonation from behind to get him to move before whipping it around even further and hitting him from the front.

The deluge of blue fire briefly washed away the smoke that enveloped his frayed flesh and set his body alight, and yet the smoke returned a split-second later. At first the fire raged as it burned the impurities for fuel, but soon enough, it was smothered by the overwhelming outpour of impurity… But the distraction had achieved its purpose, giving the First Arm enough time to wrap all the way around and its individual threads to tangle together, immobilizing the general.

It was bound to break in the span of seconds. That was time enough. One last lung of Fog to feed the flame, the other spent to fuel the beginning of her charge as she howled, invoking a new incantation that was no longer a mere copy.

“...THEY ARE THE CALAMITOUS MIRACLE, AND WITH ITS MIGHT THE TYRANTS OF THIS WORLD SHALL BE CAST DOWN!”

To refer to the manner in which she wielded this magic as a sword would’ve been… Inaccurate to say the least. Despite the sword that acted as its focus, the technique was no sword, not even in the already loose sense that the Estoras family used.

It was a deluge, a writhing, slithering outpour of righteous fury, winding around itself and forming a devouring maw.

A veritable serpent wrought of flaming briars and barbed wire, Alcerys’s own power amplified by orders of magnitude through the Eye’s fulgent, divine hatred of tyranny.

Even as the Calamitous Miracle surged forth far faster than Alcerys herself could move, however, Cao Hu struggled. He struggled, and soon broke free of both the First Arm’s entanglement and the materialized curse-things grasping at his legs, shattering the former and splattering the latter as his curse-armored form surged away.

Past the throne and towards the great windows that lined the wall behind it, Cao Hu fled from the blazing livingmetal serpent that pursued him, and even in this act, he cursed their names.