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299 - Array Patterns [Sturmblitz]
🕑 Added 2023-09-18 00:39:01 +0000 UTCZefaris herself wasn’t sure how, but the great array unfolded before her eye as if it were far simpler than it truly was. She kept noticing patterns, one after the next, half-consciously picking out smaller glyphs whose functions were only made evident by their placement in the greater whole. It was half the labour of her eyes, and half mental conditioning kicking into overdrive.
She’d felt this before.
Back then, in the killing fields. She had known a handful of techniques, techniques she had burnt on the pyre of freedom when she rewrote her own soul-signature. Looking back, it was the most obvious possible instance of destroying one’s own cultivation, basic though it was. One of these techniques had been born from repeatedly identifying human silhouettes at a distance, and it felt almost exactly like this.
An eye technique for recognizing both patterns and breaks in them. The gap in her spiritual muscle memory had naturally mended, just as a man who had once been strong could more easily rebuild his strength than one who was building strength from nothing.
What she’d possessed back then didn’t even hold a candle to this, of course.
“...Lady Zefaris?”
“Shush. Almost done.”
Almost done discerning the rough positions of the disruption pylons. They wouldn’t be resonators, but something else. It was fine. She would figure it out on the spot. The array had gaping holes and vulnerabilities; masked, but undeniably there. At first she’d thought it was just not finished, but that wasn’t it. The Order of Six Truths was trying to replicate a greater, older formation, filling in the many gaps with their own glyphs, ones which were unsettlingly similar to the Black Rod’s Antediluvian Glyphs. They didn’t pull at the eyes, didn’t pulse with ancient power just from merely being written, and they certainly didn’t brand their meaning onto the world, but a trace of the real thing still remained in them. They were echoes of something greater and more real, just like the entire array.
“Alright, bring me down. Did you notice anything that stood out about the array? Besides the gore.”
“Uh… The spiral structure? It will likely generate a whirlwind of some description, or a whirlpool.”
“What of its construction? Not the design itself, the way it has been made.”
“Oh. That? I thought I was seeing something incorrectly, but I suppose it looks… Unfinished? I struggle for words, my eyes are not as good as yours. Perhaps a closer look will help me.”
That, he did, once they had advanced far enough. It was still a good distance from the Inner City; Victor’s sight was, after all, still far beyond that of any mortal. They stood atop glyphic platforms carved into the thin air, a swarm made up of Phantom-possessed Servitors, Tankmen, and Flesh Unions carving a bloody swathe forward. Across the city, the carnage and chaos of Zelsys’ advance was still easily tracked by what seemed to be a localized storm. She was well ahead of them in terms of proximity to the Inner City.
Even as they watched in relative peace, the both of them rained death on the enemy; it was merely not their full focus at the moment. The cathedral’s state was among the first things to become clarified with a nearer vantage point; a vortex of crimson aura already swirled around the building, its source undeniably at the cathedral’s highest point, the belfry. This, combined with its elaborate, grekurian architecture, masked certain things, but from up close, it was unmistakable. What had, at first, seemed like a handful of fleshy tendrils crawling into the front door and up the spire, was in fact an elaborate latticework of flesh covering the whole structure.
He turned his gaze towards the great glyph itself, and, just the same as the cathedral, so too were previously unseen aspects of its construction revealed with a closer-up look. Victor focused his gaze, dialing it in on the flow of the same accursed energy that still blazed inside both his staff and the Flesh Unions, stubbornly unwilling to depart until its resentments were sated. What had been quite tricky to pick out before now jumped out at him, highlit by the manner in which that resentful energy coursed through it.
“Well? Do you see it?” Zefaris questioned. Her tone of a teacher trying to tease the right answer out of a student was becoming increasingly more prominent.
“It looks like a tapestry I once saw in my family’s home. It had been half eaten-away and patched up just well-enough, with fabrics that were barely good enough, themselves not woven into the correct patterns, but dyed and embroidered to fit. The more you look, the more the patchwork jumps out and overshadows what is left of the original…”
Before he could even finish speaking, a thunderous, yet familiar CLANG resounded from the belfry.
An amused laughter sounded to the side. Zefaris merely shifted her focus, but Victor felt it. He felt that thing, well before he heard its warbling, sexless voice. The Skinless One.
“IT IS STARTING,” rang out its voice, amused beyond belief. It vanished from awareness, but its presence was unignorable.
A pulse of crimson light issued forth from the top of the cathedral’s belfry. It crawled down the cathedral and into it. Victor, thinking quickly had already grabbed Zefaris and came careening toward the ground like a comet. She barely seemed to notice, throwing coins and firing Pentacle. The landing site had been guarded by a contingent of Red Robes, even shielded by a crimson vortex shield similar to the cathedral, but it was as if her bullets just didn’t care. They struck the barrier, but all the barrier achieved was turning precision kills into spears of molten metal that scythed their victims apart. A few more shots served to finish them off. Truly, Forgehand’s work in worthy hands was a gracious terror to behold. In the middle, a man within a cocoon of his own twisted flesh writhed in unimaginable agony, sigils carved into him powering the barrier.
“Of course, the god of sacrifice wouldn’t miss out on something like this…” Zefaris deadpanned as they landed, moving in to close in on the vortex barrier.
