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325 - Contact With a Deity [Sturmblitz]
🕑 Added 2023-11-11 20:07:53 +0000 UTCA/N: This one's a bit shorter. Next one will be a bit longer.
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Moments earlier...
With each pylon, Victor had felt a quasi-divine pressure building, but he had thought it was just a side effect of the disruption array. It wasn't. It was the Oculus. Like a hungry abyss, it drew long ribbons of fleshy-red aura into its ring, which was now completely filled by a seething star. It seemed like the ring would burst at any moment if Victor didn't marshal every iota of his remaining strength to compress it, and so he did. The Oculus' jade secondary rings began violently jumping back and forth in a rhythmic, clacking ruckus, and the bloody star collapsed with the same ease as compressing bonefire to prepare a cast of Fight the Night. When it became the size of a marble there came a thunderous sound, and he found himself sinking. Boom.
The Oculus' aura suction redoubled, and Victor decided to move the two servitors in front of him out of the way. A geyser of dislodged aura erupted as if to sweep him away, only to be consumed in its entirety, with the Oculus' star once more growing to fill the ring.
Victor repeated the compression process. Again, and again, and again. Each cycle took only two seconds, but he felt his entire soul straining with effort. Inevitably, blood began dripping from his nose, but he kept going. He didn't know why, but he knew he had to do this. It wasn't a matter of whether he could do it - he would do it, because there was no other choice.
Boom. Boom. Concentric, circular impressions were blasted into the ground where he stood. One after the next, moving outward, the one wherein he stood growing deeper with each blast. With each one, it felt as if something was coming closer, as if something was reaching out.
He remained keenly aware of the goings-on, and it took truly superhuman willpower to remain fully focused and ignore Mistress Zelsys' incredible combination technique which shook the earth, the heavens, and the air in between. This was not an overstatement; unnatural, pitch-black clouds gathered overhead just after the Dragonslayer Thundercannon went off. His awareness collapsed into the task at hand, and remained so until the moment the Third Truthseeker howled in rage and defiance:
"Then I shall burn it all, and you shall perish in the flames!"
The Third Truthseeker tore the Dragonslayer Spear out of his chest, and with it, a mass of flesh that would have killed any mortal. The moment it was out, however, his flesh returned to its rightful place in reverse-motion, the injury undone rather than healed. He tried to throw the spear at Zelsys, only for its constituent metal to unfold into a pair of inward-facing Three True Fang Rippers that shredded away at Third's arm. With a howl of anger, he lashed out in a random direction. Thousands of tendril-arms made of burning-red aura exploded out of him in that direction, scattering the Fang Rippers and flattening everything in a twenty-meter diameter.
Well, everything except for the red-haired wizard whose presence was comparatively so diminutive that Third didn't even acknowledge him. He was a threat, yes, but not nearly as much of one as Zelsys, Zefaris, or Strake. For this reason, he didn't notice that the portion of his attack that would've obliterated Victor was seemingly erased out of existence.
Just as it seemed like the power of the Third Truthseeker's outburst had vanished for no reason, an iridescent tear opened in the staff’s eye. It was nearly identical to the strange spatial tunnels down in Agartha, but shimmering and unstable, and leading to… A destitute ruin. There was nothing there to be found, only the feet of a wrecked statue overgrown by grasses. And yet, a mighty voice thundered forth from the spatial tear, a voice that rang out like a giant iron bell struck by a battering ram, echoing inside Victor’s head.
“YOU KNEW THIS DAY WOULD COME, BEARER OF THE ONBASHIRA, SUCCESSOR TO HE WHOM TIAN FENG, THE DESTROYER OF MY SHRINE, SO HATED. YOUR PUPPETS. GATHER THEM. ALL OF THEM. EVEN THOSE OF FLESH. I REQUIRE A VESSEL."
“They are not mine to command.”
This was true. The Flesh Unions were on his side, but he couldn't control them. At best he could try to steer them in their vengeful anger.
“CALL TO THEM WITH MY VOICE. THEY SHALL LISTEN. I REQUIRE A VESSEL.”
Victor had designed his Servitors so they could combine and interlock in order to take larger forms and fulfill a wide variety of roles, but he hadn’t been able to get them to cooperate properly in anything larger than a two-servitor combination for the complex, full-animal designs. But now, they were all coming together. Every single one, gathering at his call, their embedded servitor-spirits being overridden by something altogether greater.
And it wasn’t just his servitors.
The Unions, too.
All driven towards a single point, merging together seamlessly with only some effort on Victor’s part. All he had to do was guide it, and guide it, he did, forming his servitors into the composite giant’s helmet-like head, while the faces of the many people who constituted the giant all gathered on its chest. The vessel's form, in the end, would be a twenty-meter humanoid of merged flesh, with Victor's servitors forming the head and some reinforcing plates. Its size was simply too great to armor in full.
As he worked, and as fear once more built within his chest, he once more heard that voice. It suddenly felt as though an inconceivably large presence was staring at him through the spatial bridge within his staff's ring, but there was nothing there. Just the vast, trunkless legs of an ancient idol.
"DO NOT FALTER NOW, YOU HAVE COME THIS FAR. FOCUS."
With that command, his focus snapped back into place.
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