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228 - Red Duel: Versus Re-Reprise Pt. 3 [Sturmblitz]
🕑 Added 2023-05-07 21:39:50 +0000 UTCIt took several of these terribly demanding swings to exterminate the veritable construct-army, but now Zelsys had the constructs' slightly-delayed detonations to worry about. As thousands of northlight arrows came raining down, she didn't stop swinging, instead changing her swing pattern and adjusting Carnifex into a spiraling, parasol-like formation overhead. She exhaled great gusts of swirling Fog that were caught up in the motion, forming a solid cover off of whose surface Red's arrows simply bounced off. For how horrendously inefficient it was, Zelsys couldn't help but hold out favour for this external application of Rebound Pulse. Only now did she have the output to seriously consider using it, and even now, its gluttonous power demand stifled her willingness to use it. All in all, it was an unbelievably powerful defense, but... It only worked fully against purely physical attacks. She could sense many arrows slipping through the barrier and striking Carnifex. The flaw partially extended to the technique proper, but for some reason which escaped Zelsys, that flaw had expressed itself to a far lesser degree with her usual skin-surface application. Kineticism already being an extremely user-specific form of magic, she didn't expect to get any answers anytime soon.
Besides, the rain of death had stopped and it was time to put away the parasol.
Dozens of False Fangs fell to the ground, released from the arcline as Zelsys pulled Carnifex back into its normal configuration.
Karmesin descended before her, and for a moment, the two faced one another down.
"You should not have discarded your constructs so soon," said the Lady in Red. Her octagonal death-ray cannons arrayed in awkward directions as both them and her directed a deluge of death at her daring duel-partner. None struck her, of course. Many she dodged, since most of those rays and arrows were just meant to occupy Zelsys' attention. However, those few which had a hope of striking true, the only ones which Red had actually intended to strike true... Those found themselves dispersed when bolts of lightning struck the ground and, in an instant, segments which Carnifex had shed leapt up in threes as spinning discs of death, discs off of whom Red's northlight bounced without harm.
The Walking Tribulation, bent over backwards in an awkward position after dodging three different attacks at once, turned to look at the Lady in Red with a smug, razor-fanged grin on her face, a ball of lightning seething in her right hand while her blade comfortably rested in her left.
"You should not have assumed that I had discarded them."
Yet another aspect of her recent growth which Zelsys didn't think she could appreciate enough: Range.
Before, it had been a whole process of carriers and proxies to act upon the external world with her own magic. She had even come to believe that the manner in which she harnessed magic was simply limited in that way; she was, after all, an outsider doing things every-which way other than the established one.
But now... Now Zelsys could just reach out and touch anything within a twenty-meter radius of herself, give or take depending on various factors. That range doubled when she ignited her Mantle, and doubled again in Fulgur-rich atmospheric conditions, to an effective maximum of sixty meters. This was what it had to be like for Fryg and the Smoke Witch.
Great tongues of lightning lashed out from the maws of her Thundergods and from the very surface of her skin, washing over her surroundings. False Fangs slammed together in threes. She had, after all, purposely made their number divisible by that fraction, she had purposely dropped them, and she had begun forming a whole new Fulgur core right after initiating the Uncoiling Scolopendra.
The Lady in Red fled. Both of them had done so many times up until now, and the chase was, in Zel's opinion, the best part of their fight.
This particular chase wasn't long, though not for Karmesin's lack of speed. By the time she realized that the number of Fang Rippers chasing her didn't line up with the number Zelsys had formed, it was very nearly too late. She just about managed to throw up a defensive formation, enclosing herself in what was effectively an inverted Pandora 66, with its suppressive trigrams replaced by reinforcing ones. From the exterior, it appeared as a tangle of trigonal pillars formed into a sphere.
Dozens of Fang Rippers revolved about the perimeter of that ominous floating sphere, most of them carving channels into it before their power ran out and they fell away.
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The truth was, this whole maneuver was Zel's own version of one which Red had used to catch her out on the first day. It had put a hole through her liver the width of a fist, and two more straight through her stomach. One death-beam struck her Carnifex Fulguris Sigil, only to ricochet back and nearly hit Red herself. What Red had hoped to be a weak point was, in truth, possibly the least susceptible part of Zelsys.
The tactic was as simple as cutting off the escapee at an unexpected point, tricky to pull off with Fang Rippers, but Zelsys had managed to do so by letting the main chasing group go on independently while giving the ambush group the needed extra speed with direct arcline connections to constantly feed them the needed extra power.
Red's defensive sphere, however, resisted... And so Zelsys let all her False Fang Rippers fall away, instead removing Carnifex's five central segments and forming from them the Five True Fang Ripper. Her plan to break that shell wasn't as simple as this.
It also involved Thundercannon.
The process of setting the Five True Fang Ripper on the sphere and having it gradually carve a line around its equator demanded a constant stream of Fulgur; the structure's pseudo-antediluvian reinforcing magic wore away at the ripper's power in the same way it had suppressed Zel's effective cultivation level. It was even less merciful to the False Fang Rippers, breaking down the constructs from the first in a manner entirely unlike anything else she had seen. Nonetheless, being grown from supreme stock, they had held up well enough even without any extra Metallum.
