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289 - Toppled
🕑 Added 2022-03-12 17:51:00 +0000 UTCIndeed, a gust of wind, one so terribly powerful and focused it even made Ubul step back. The wind mage detachment had followed Sigmund's example, concentrating all their capabilities into supporting the Hobbyist Wind Mage, allowing him to once more form the anthropomorphic dervish that was the Howling Wind God. It ripped across the battlefield, picking up flame-possessed and claymen alike, becoming filled by green flame as the skeletons within it endlessly spewed forth the draconic magic animating them. It smashed into Ubul, enveloping him, holding him in place as it buffeted him with its contents, the green flame within it wearing away at his exterior and some of the skeletons even grabbing onto the general.
If this wasn’t an opening, Zelsys didn’t know what was. As swiftly as her legs would carry her she sprinted towards the general, charging her leg muscles, burning another lungful even afterward, as she, with a flash of light bright enough to be seen through the fabric of her trousers, leapt ten meters vertically and got onto the stone titan’s back once more. She took hold on the Butcher, still stuck in Ubul’s back, throwing caution to the wind as she burned everything she had and sent it directly to the Impelling Arm, stacking it atop what Aether the recoil recycling from the previous shot had already charged into the pauldron.
Her body burned, lightning’s searing-white brilliance expressed through the pure sensation of pain, terrible serpents of it slighering all across her arm, her hair whipping about as the static made it bunch up into thick ropes whose charge, in turn, made them repel one another, whipping about much like snakes.
Everything she had. Every ounce of Fulgur, even that which she had gathered in her mouth, now transferred via an arc from her tongue to the arm-cannon. The Howling Wind God had nearly faded, its short-lived nature indicative of the state of its creators, all members of the wind mage detachment utterly drained and struggling to even remain conscious, while the Hobbyist Wind Mage was entirely out of commission, the gemstone of his inherited staff having grown dulled and desaturated. It would remain so for some time, siphoning off arcane exhaust from the user’s magic and even drawing out of the air to recharge itself. In truth, the gambit had succeeded not because of the Wing God’s raw power, but because of the mass it had picked up in its travel, combined with the scouring effect of the green-flame which the flame-possessed had suffused it with, and the fact its mere presence ripped up the ground and threw Ubul off-balance, playing his great bulk against him such that not even his tail - which he had been using solely for balance up until now - could keep him entirely stable.
A push down on the trigger lever as the general’s rock-solid strength at last prevailed over the fleeting creature of wind. Click. She felt impending danger, the shifting of his body underneath her feet, his tail moving out the corner of her eye. No. Not now.
With one eye on the wrecking ball at the tail’s end, she diverted some Fulgur and Aether towards her right arm, bending it backwards at an unnatural angle as she felt the joint and ligaments stretch, fist closed, elbow bent at a nearly ninety-degree angle.
A simple punch, siphoning the tail’s kinetic energy and instantly imparting a reduced portion back into it so that it would slam into the ground rather than being able to just squish her moments later. The terrible maelstrom of lightning that whirled about her scorched channels into the appendage even in the brief moment it was close enough.
Finally, she braced her left arm with her right, pushing the lever down further, invoking Heartbreaker to right her aim, shifting her arm by a good half-meter in the process.
Click.
She opened her mouth and invoked the technique’s name, but the sound was drowned out by the blastwave, the projectile carving through rock and crystal alike unimpeded, smashing into and through the ground as it traveled on downward. Ubul’s body deformed and cracked apart, flashes of yellow light escaping the cracks with each core that was destroyed. The shell’s tremendous Fulguric charge finally escaped it dozens of meters underground, sending the form of a great beast-headed serpent soaring up out of the ground, back through Ubul’s body, and into the clouds overhead, as Zelsys flew through the air, carried by the recoil, the horn over her right eye gone entirely, the horn over her left fading as she burned the contents of her kinetic battery to ensure she landed safely. The Butcher had, unfortunately, been sent flying by the shockwave, now stuck in a tree several hundred meters away.
For a short while, there was silence, Ubul standing unbowed and stone-still even now. Zel’s first thought, even now, was to reload and get her weapon back, seeing as there were still claymen to be dispatched, and that was what she did.
The light in Ubul’s eyes died, and then… The ground shook, terrible noise issuing from the earth, best described as the cries of a wounded animal. Ubul was swallowed up by the earth, the mud and clay turning to liquid beneath him. Those with the sight to see knew what horrible thing was transpiring, how the tremendous concentration of Terra that had been artificially gathered in this place now converged upon Ubul, his own claymen sprinting at full tilt across the battlefield to throw themselves and the contents of their cores into the accursed pool of churning earth.
The ground shook, the discordant sections of the battlefield wrenched back into a relatively level field as seven towering stone pillars rose up around the edge of the central crater.
“It’s not over yet…” Zefaris uttered under her breath as she loaded another full tube of hardened slugs into Tempesta and five leaden slugs with cold-iron penetrators into Pentacle, using Atrine-enriched Nitro Powder.
From the pool of churning earth a golden glow now shone, and a moment later, a great man wrought of stone leapt from within the pool, landing atop one of the pillars. It was Ubul, and despite his size now being at least human-adjacent, his presence had only multiplied.
