Thereafter followed a sound that resembled none heard by a living soul upon this earth, a tremendous KCHRACHCK, a noise so terrible and profound it shook the earth as easily as Ubul’s own quakes and made the animal inside all those who bore witness think that the world itself was ending, that the firmament was being torn asunder and would soon come crashing down. For Ubul, the sky was falling, as was he, trying to get in contact with the ground and marshall his strength on the way down, even now. Even blinded and deafened by this all-consuming display, he still kept calm, planted his feet, and burned through a very nearly comparable amount of Terra. His body hardened beyond hard, stripped of any brittleness or weak point, one stone arm after the other sprouting from his back until he possessed a full six just as a fierce demigod ought to.

To describe it as a lightning bolt would have been about as accurate as calling the sun a candle. It was a downpour, a deluge of fulguric power, hundreds of beast-headed serpent spirits visibly coming down from the clouds seemingly for the sole purpose of converging upon this woman. Ubul’s first thought was that she had foolishly invited her own death, but the small voice of fear in his mind knew better.

Zelsys was dragged into consciousness by pain - brilliant, searing pain that superseded the physical, surpassing even the contingencies she had made. That brilliant heat, the blinding white, the all-consuming tension, and deep inside, deeper than flesh would allow, a burning, melting sensation. Vague, dream-like memories and sensations flooded her mind.

Struggle, fighting, family, childhood, love, sorrow, pain, rage, fury, rancor, hatred, death. Entire lives captured in snapshots that spanned milliseconds, made perceptible only by her nerves’ inhuman speed of transmission, as if a projector reel pulled through the aperture at a hundred frames a second, illuminated by the empyrean glow of not mere lightning bolts, but the very source of that lightning itself, burning them into her mind as pale shadows. Despite that burning, melting pain, it somehow felt as if she were becoming more whole than she had ever been, were that at all possible.

As quickly as they came, they were gone, left only as imprints. Burning memories.

Scorched away, melted down, subsumed into the whole that she was, the errant mosaic-pieces of her soul shouldering strain that would’ve obliterated any other.

Washed away by the empyrean might she had allowed her Primordial Self to call down while she was asleep, having known full well this would happen. No regrets went through her mind as she allowed the storm’s entirety to pass into and through her, channeling the earthen spirits from underfoot to become as both iron and bronze, for even she was not fool enough to attempt devouring the Living Storm in its entirety. In spite of the blinding light that burned even through her eyelids, she felt her surroundings, and most of all, she felt her body. She felt the metal-sealed wounds of her dismemberment, the tremendous energy being forced into and through the Butcher into her hand, grains of blackstone falling on her face as its blade rang like a bell. Though she could not see them, she felt phantom antlers upon her forehead.

Indeed she was well aware of her surroundings, the last sights of the myriad stormgods that passed through her now flashing in her mind in the stead of her progenitors’ fragmentary memories, images in no more than colour. The ground was brown and mottled with yellow, her body was a mixture of various metallic shades, and off to her left, there was a blazing, brown-orange figure with six arms and a familiar silhouette. Even as the Living Storm flowed through her into the earth beneath, Zelsys raised her free hand and pulled the trigger of her gaunt-cannon.

The very real thundercrack was accompanied by a disruption in the musical note, a piece of metal striking her face, cutting it.

Simultaneously, the bolt struck home, smashing apart the entirety of the silhouette’ upper-right torso, two arms flying off. Ubul’s silhouette fled from the torrential outpour of lightning that surged forth from her left arm, piercing even through the maelstrom of thunderous tendrils that scorched the earth all around her and carved it into an o-shaped moat of molten earth. She felt the band that held her hair together come apart, burned through by an errant tongue of lightning, unable to mend itself in time the way the rest of her clothing could. The Impelling Arm’s metal heated around her arm to the point of burning, but she cared not, she merely spun around to follow Ubul’s unmistakable silhouette. Again and again it smashed him and his defenses apart, and all the while he raised yet more defenses and pulled himself back together, wisely retreating… Somewhere. She couldn’t sense him anymore, and so ceased focusing the outpour of lightning, allowing it to pass through freely so that it might lash the ground asunder.

It was an eternity of pain and blindness, the world revolving as she usurped and channeled the might of the heavens themselves… And Zelsys laughed.

Knowing that it would go unheard amidst the deafening noise, in spite of the terrible pain her mended ribcage caused her when she merely breathed - let alone laughed - Zelsys let out a bellowing cackle. That burning in her soul, it was a good pain, the same pain she had felt back there at the warded cabin. For all the beast-headed serpent thundergods that flowed through her to rejoin the cycle of nature as was their right, a single one was caught, caught in the spiderweb of her soul, while her body’s tremendous resources were marshaled to producing alkahest. Every cell, every fiber of her being not currently being used for something else was made to produce alkahest, to digest, devour, and usurp as much of the Living Storm as she conceivable could. The Primordial Self knew how dangerous this was, how drained she would be at the end of this, and it chose to trust her in pursuit of supremacy over nature.