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353 - Violence of the Flame Pt. 2 [Sturmblitz]
🕑 Added 2024-04-18 03:13:54 +0000 UTCZel came crashing down onto the beast’s back, grasping Carnifex with both hands as she buried its sawtoothed back into a particular spot. Instantly, she was engulfed in fire as the dragon focused the full weight of its aura onto her exclusively, yet she seemed unscathed. With a shift of her posture, she dragged the saw all the way through, almost effortlessly. A great geyser of pulped flesh and nervous tissue sprayed out of the wound, and the Wildfire Kite crumpled to the ground — its legs gave out under it.
An earth-shaking scream followed, and the air became almost too hot to breathe. Zefaris had no choice but to compensate by cooling down her immediate surroundings. In spite of everything, the dragon continued its struggle, summoning blades of fire to cut through its own wing membranes so it could free them. A dozen fiery arcs erupted all across its body, each detaching at one point and joining its wings in a backwards strike towards the spot where Zelsys stood. The degree of flexibility the feat required was such that Zelsys hadn't expected it as a possibility, given the kite's muscular bulk.
None of them got the chance to land, as Zelsys had already leapt high into the air, simultaneously burying two more Thundergods into the ground as anchors. The last two, she had slung around the dragon’s tail, using them to force it back.
At the apex of her flight, she froze in mid-air, seemingly weightless. A sound pierced through the Wildfire Kite’s roar. A high-pitched, furious sound, the air itself screaming. Carnifex had grown to twice its normal length, and ever so vaguely resembled a row of upper teeth. The Crown Fang’s beak had elongated, and was joined by a second, temporary outgrowth from the Root Fang’s shape. Fierce lightning writhed between these two fangs, coating the monstrous weapon’s edge in its entirety. Zelsys had braced her feet against it, grasping it both by its handle and by a sawtooth reshaped into a handle — all of the back edge’s other sawteeth had receded so as not to risk harming her.
Out from the ground beneath the dragon’s neck, a matching bottom row of teeth took shape, the Truth of Fangs twisting it into shape out of smoldering charcoal and hardened soil.
Half a second. One second. The kite writhed, thrashing against its restraints.
In a flash of truly inhuman violence and with speed akin to a true lightning bolt, Zelsys fell upon the Wildfire Kite’s neck, dragging herself downwards by her Thundergods. A shockwave of thunder ripped through the clearing, and in an instant, the dragon’s aura scattered, as if its very will had been severed.
FORMLESS DESTROYER SCRIPTURE
SKIN OF BRONZE WITHOUT
AND LIGHTNING COURSING WITHIN
WITH PURITY OF VIOLENCE
SHATTER THE LIMITS EARTHLY
REND THEM ASUNDER
A DESCENDANT OF DRAGONS
BEHEADED WITH ONE BITE
BUTCHERING ARTS
THE LEVIATHAN’S MAW
A royal-purple geyser of liquid life geysered towards the sky, casting the scattered dust to the ground. Instantly, the dust was replaced by a curtain of rising steam, the beast’s blood hotter than boiling water.
There, in the midst of the carnage, she stood, rising from a crater of blood and carnage, the dragon’s head at her feet.
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In an instant, it was over.
Zelsys felt the dragon’s life simply stop, she felt it strain and break in the midst of her dragonsteel fangs. At the moment Carnifex passed through the beast’s neck, her aura completely overpowered the beast’s, her existence asserted itself over the Kite’s without leaving any space for question or further struggle. With the slightest mental command, her Thundergods took to snapping up the vestiges that remained of what aura the dragon had manifested.
A part of her wanted to stay here and bask in it, to drink the blood from the beast’s severed neck and tear raw meat straight from the carcass with her teeth, but there was no time for that. The retrieval caravan wouldn’t arrive for another couple hours, even given the fact she had sent the retrieval ping the moment she saw the dragon. The slaying wasn’t the end of her work with the dragon — in terms of time spent, it was only the beginning. She had already picked out suitable stones in the area, and reached out to the first. A trio of Thundergods jolted out from her, winding around the multi-ton mass of rock, dragging it out of the soil while she brought numerous glyphic glass jars out of Fog Storage. She cleft it into slabs, casually spreading them about the clearing. The same fate befell two more, leaving gaping holes in the ground. After gathering as much of the kite’s blood as was plausible, she took to dismantling it, laying out its limbs and most easily-extracted organs on the slabs. She couldn’t carry out a proper, full dissection, but she could do this much.
Its dragonstone was the only thing she left alone, as the bestiary had warned that the extraction could be deceptively delicate — not due to risk of damaging the dragonstone itself, but the surrounding tissue.
Eventually, she cut a smaller slab from one of the stones and brought it back to the campsite. It took less time than expected for the retrieval team to arrive. By the time they did, they arrived to find the dragon slain and the elders dining upon its meat and liver grilled upon a heated stone, drinking Winter Peach Brandy.
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Four figures sat around a table. One held a long pipe between calloused fingers, and another delicately poured tea with an equally delicate hand. The third floated above her chair just high enough to put her feet up on the table, a bird perched on one shoulder and a three-eyed toad on the other. The fourth listened to the first two argue, notating their exchanges as they took place with inhuman speed.
The first two were the Grand Elder of the Black Horse Sect, Edmund Branstein, and the Patriarch of the Sanger Sect, Alexander Sanger. The other two were the self-same Witch and Wizard who had been present at Eberheim — Isidora and Cyrian respectively, their shared family name purposely buried.
Edmund and Alexander had been arguing for three days now, going over centuries of grudges. The other two had only arrived a few hours ago — the Wizard had discerned how long the martial cultivators had been arguing based on which part of their long history was being argued over.
Comments
Tehd11
Clearly the Wizard has seen them argue often
