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315 - Empire of Self/Dragonfire [Sturmblitz]
🕑 Added 2023-10-21 20:58:57 +0000 UTCThe mindscape shifted. The rolling dunes fell away, becoming a level plain of sand.
A small army rose up behind the twin thoughtforms of Zelsys Newman and her weapon spirits.
Hundreds and hundreds of humanoid thoughtforms, differing wildly in build. At first they seemed vague and formless, poorly put together, but he soon realized that was not the case. Despite the fact most of them were merely shapes, they were sharp and solid. A fair few were recognizable, but only perhaps fifty in the very front were clear and distinct, fully defined. In the very front, Third saw two individuals: The first was a short-haired woman in Grekurian Inquisitorial Full Plate, with a face unsettlingly similar to Newman's. The second was an unassuming, thin Ikesian man in glasses, messy black hair hanging down into his forehead.
"I am an army unto myself in more ways than one. What you seek to achieve in this city - this pathetic endeavor of yours - is an insult to the arcane science from which I was born. Knowing that you care not for morality, consider this my reason to erase you: Your continued existence offends me."
After the first few hundred, countless more thoughtforms spawned, these being truly just humanoid silhouettes without faces or distinguishing features. An endless sea of bodies suddenly sprawled out in every direction. Not thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or millions, but billions of them. They felt different from the first few hundred, somehow.
The Primordial Self and Thinking Self spoke at once, and Third felt an overwhelming killing intent. He had never felt a pressure so intense even in his days as a mere disciple when he had angered the previous Third Truthseeker.
"UNDYING WORM. EATER OF CHILDREN. CONCEITED WEAKLING. SUB-HU-MAN. BE GONE FROM MY DOMAIN."
All at once, in a singular instant in time, the mental energy of every thoughtform Zelsys Newman had conjured came crashing down on Third. Were he anyone else, the mental backlash would have struck him dead. His eyes rolled into the back of his head and bloody tears burst out of them, but he was alive, and his half-broken mind was already gathering back together.
Zel's awareness seamlessly returned to reality just in time to see the shockwave of backlash blast out from the line of eye contact between herself and the Third Truthseeker. It closed up in an instant, but Third now floated frozen in place, seemingly maintaining the ritual, but not doing anything to advance it. A small part of her was equal parts disappointed and unsurprised that obliterating his thoughtform hadn't killed him, but she wasted not a second longer, bearing Thundercannon to bear.
At the instant just before the trigger lever clicked for the third time, Zelsys pulled Carnifex back to herself, leaving an umbrella-shaped swarm of False Fangs to fend off the maelstrom's flow while she used the cleaver itself as a recoil anchor. She felt Thundercannon twisting, its maw opening wide and its eyes blazing with light. The gun roared in Eisengeist's voice as a torrent of golden flame came pouring out. It pushed her back as it burst forth, her Thundergods tearing out of the ground as the stone failed. Carnifex dragged for meters through the ground despite having dulled itself to better act as an anchor. For the first time in over a year, the recoil impulse was outright painful.
The flame, it felt… Right. As it poured out of the maw that was her left arm, Zelsys felt it arouse the faint vestiges of draconic heritage she had inherited from the Monk-nobles of the far south. Despite the terrible violence with which it poured forth, never for a moment did she fear being burned or blinded by it.
It wasn’t enough.
Such empyrean power, and it wasn’t enough.
The maelstrom swept away much of the golden comet's flame, the screeching spirits of the sacrificed clashing with quasi-draconic serpents that manifested from the stolen flame. The bullet itself, however, reached the Third Truthseeker. With force enough to tear through numerous buildings or to directly overpower Ubul's defenses, it seemed to trigger Third's self-preservation instincts. Even with his conscious mind out of commission, he still raised his free hand in a twisting gesture, whilst using his sacrificial knife to perform a long, shallow drag cut through his robes. His own aura flared to an intensity that, compared to the soul-maelstrom, was as a raging inferno compared to a campfire. His hand suddenly erupted in blood and flesh, exploding out of his skin as a deluge of gruesome, bladed tendrils. The Dragonfire Bullet, violently drilling through vast masses of conjured flesh, eventually broke through... But it had lost so much power by then that it merely ripped through Third's clavicle. All that power, for a bullet-sized hole. Even so, this was enough to strike him dumbfounded his eyes going wide as the soul-maelstrom began to destabilize and flow in discordant directions. Panic - and awareness - flashed over Third's face, and he redoubled his efforts in finishing the ritual, once more returning to gestures, chants, and strikes upon the bell.
She pulled Carnifex back out and began defending herself with it once again, the maelstrom's pressure and viciousness having grown nearly thrice over. Her focus shifted solely towards devising a means of penetrating Third's defenses, and she felt a cold hand gripping her own. In the swirling maelstrom of aura and essentia that surrounded her, the spirit of Thundercannon had willed himself into being. Tinged golden by what remained of the dragonfire shell’s firing, the iron soldier’s stern gaze met her own.
The next moment, she felt another presence to her right. It was Fulguris, manifested of her own will just the same as Thundercannon.
Zelsys instantly realized the solution, working Thundercannon’s bolt and loading her second dragonfire shell right away. The eruption of golden, fiery Fog was such that it utterly consumed her surroundings, and would have doubtlessly spread for at least twenty meters if it hadn't come to clash with the maelstrom. Even the Impelling Arm’s concepts of “Purification” and “Concealment” had been empowered by dragonfire. In turn, the golden fog responded readily to her aura and took on the appearance of numerous mawed serpents writhing about within it, waiting to strike at any invaders. Waves of crimson death crashed against it, but the higher-order energy of dragonkind carved a swath into the expanding vortex.
