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293 - Vs. Flesh Sculptor [Sturmblitz]
🕑 Added 2023-09-07 06:15:12 +0000 UTCA/N: In case you're worried about the focus being away from Zel for now, don't fret. The reason is that she will get all the focus in the back half of the arc when it ramps up.
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Eyes wide, the Flesh Sculptor pulled the weapon’s course away from herself and made it smash into a nearby house, tearing right through and coming out on the other side. By then, Manus had already followed through on the motion and launched a flaming spear from his blade. At that same moment, two more Inquisitor Phantoms took form flanking him to either side, firing off a barrage of pepperbox fire while also setting loose waves of flaming sword aura from their blades. The Flesh Sculptor effortlessly evaded the onslaught, but that was not an issue. The Sculptor’s twisted creations gradually encircling Zefaris whilst firing potshots of acid and organic needles, however, was an issue. These things were well beyond any mere meat-abomination, above and beyond the capabilities of mere locust-men. Their acid was potent enough to cause explosions of steam and molten clay wherever it struck, and their natural projectiles tore forth with force more akin to a high-powered sparklock rifle than a pistol, embedding into the masonry without much issue.
For all her screeching and visage of petulant fury, the Flesh Sculptor had utterly meticulous control over her small army of abominations. She prioritized harassing Zefaris with her flying knife and damaging her Phantoms as much as possible, moving her abominations in and out to give them time to recover and remould themselves, as if they were mere clay. Even those which were seemingly decisively struck down reformed and got back up, shedding unusable biomass as the only evidence they had been struck down. Both Mata and Vaceran quickly noticed this, and shifted their tactics from efficient, clean elimination to mangling the beasts as much as possible.
Zefaris shifted focus to Tempesta, letting off bursts of dragonsteel shot that turned one beast after another into shredded gore, flash-freezing and shattering sections of them thanks to being imbued with gelum. In combination with the firepower of her own Phantoms, it was enough to push back against the tide, but not with any reasonable speed. Every couple shots, at irregular intervals, she had the Black Cylinder load a slug shell into Tempesta’s quickloader tube, which she popped off towards a kinetic mirror so that the Flesh Sculptor always had something to worry about. The arrival of Victor and his servitors served to tilt the tides of battle in their favour; just like her phantoms’ spiritual bullets, so too did his Terminal Fangs temporarily cripple whatever flesh beast they struck, pulling away a shred of the Flesh Sculptor’s attention to have the beast’s mass expel it. He soared overhead with a deep rumbling sound, dozens of these drill-missiles zipping out in his wake, interspersed with globs of sticky bonefire and blinding blasts of Fight the Night directed to the Flesh Sculptor.
The servitors, though not many in number, proved invaluable. Their agility and small size by far outstripped that of the Flesh Beasts, and their ceaseless blasts of bonefire served to slow down and permanently, irrevocably damage the beasts.
In his few and brief clashes with the red-robed woman, the fact that the redhead was punching well above his weight class quickly came to light. For all the factors playing to his favour, he just wasn’t as developed as his older, more experienced counterparts, be it in tactics or in strength and refinement of spirit. He had, in a spiritual sense, gained a giant, inhumanly strong body, but he hadn’t come close to making full use of it. He had just been throwing his spiritual weight around in displays of arcane might, but against someone of similar spiritual magnitude with decades or even centuries of experience, he was barely able to harass her, and certainly couldn’t keep up in a straight up one on one… But what he could do was distract her. And that worked, long enough, until, out of nowhere, she had several flesh-beasts launch their projectiles skyward, while some just jumped, all in an obvious effort to throw him off. Her flying knife grazed him and took with it both a chunk of flesh and bone - not from him, but from his armor. Like a monochrome comet, he went careening out of the sky, and only through use of his staff managed to land semi-safely, several precious seconds later.
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Victor stumbled as he landed, his armor sputtering and struggling to pull itself back together. He had spares, prepared ahead of time specifically in case his suit got damaged, but the repairs would still take some time - and mere seconds could turn the tide in a battle like this, while his repairs would be on a timescale of a few minutes.
He ran over what he could’ve done differently as he began the laborious process. He’d tried, time and again, to grasp for the seemingly unaccounted-for meat, but even what that seething madwoman’s creatures had discarded remained… Hostile to him, was the easiest description. Sure, there were corpses on the ground, but that was the problem. They were on the ground, thirty meters down. The cost-reward of bringing them up here to use, plus the risk of the enemy cultivator just taking them over first, made the proposition not worthwhile. Fighting the Flesh Sculptor for control over her own beasts felt a pointless endeavor for this same reason, it was pointless exercise in mutual struggle, too straightforward compared to harassing her and destroying her beasts; that is to say, Victor hadn’t yet devised or remembered a technique for usurping the works of other practitioners who used arts like his own.
Mind racing at a million miles a minute, he focused every ounce of will he had and brought his own perception of time to a near-halt. No such thing truly took place; he merely pushed his Hypercognition to that point so he could get a moment of absolute clarity. The stress of it would have him nursing a migraine later, but that was a problem for later.
Out of the tangle of memory, he picked a viable tactic: Bid Lady Zefaris to impose her Phantoms over his constructs.
