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288 - Reignition
🕑 Added 2022-03-11 18:12:59 +0000 UTCLilac glow was overtaken by green flame, flooding out of the Guardian’s eyes and filling the many cracks now spreading all across the statue’s form, burning the arms which grasped it and forcing Ubul to drop the Guardian lest he lose more limbs.
Zelsys, meanwhile, embedded the Lightning Butcher into Ubul’s back, bracing her feet against it as she meticulously charged the muscles she would need to withstand the immense recoil, simultaneously enriching and refining the contents of her second stomach and forming a sphere of lightning within her mouth, using every single avenue available to her in an effort to push her possible output ceiling higher. She could feel Ubul’s cores from where she was, their immense presence, and she knew something that only a miniscule few others did. They were reforming, their broken forms being put back together inside Ubul’s body. Unless all of his cores were destroyed
Great chunks of rock shed from the statue’s form as it stood up once more, spreading its arms, its head seemingly falling apart only for the stone fragments to shift into the shape of a dragon’s head, spewing a geyser of green flame skyward in accompaniment of the incantation which issued forth from every inch of the statue, the stone itself resonating to produce the sound.
“HEARKEN TO ME, BRAVE SOULS WHO HATH FALLEN UPON THIS FIELD OF BATTLE!”
“SEE HOW THINE MEMORY IS BESMIRCHED, HOW THINE KLLER YET WALKEST THIS LAND AND SEEKETH TO WIELD THY REMAINS AS TOOLS!”
“HEARKEN TO ME, HONORED DEAD WHO YET BURN WITH THE WILL TO DO BATTLE!”
“BY THE IMMORTAL BLOOD OF TRUE DRAGONS I BID THEE, RISE UP!”
A great many dead had laid upon the battlefield now called Ubul’s Tomb, and a great many now stood as mindless golems in service to him - tens of thousands had fallen in this field to bury the Walking Mountain, whittled down to twelve thousand by the failure of his attack on Willowdale. Nearly twice as many had fallen outside his reach, now littering the woods around the desolate field.
A great many, indeed.
“DRAGONSLAYER ARTS: REIGNITION!”
The geyser of green flame became a jet, blasting into the clouds overhead, saturating them, green visibly spreading throughout them as a sudden rainstorm broke out, and the rain, too, was green. Wheresoever it fell, it sparked into liquid flame, falling upon the battlefield, trickling down the trees, into the very gaps in the earth Ubul had created, onto the myriad dead soldiers that laid on the forest floor, in ditches and craters, half-buried in rubble and topsoil, the burning rain forming streams and small rivers as it flowed towards any corpses at all.
Mere moments later, when the display of blazing magick stopped and the rain went on, when the Guardian of the Wall now stood truly statuesque and motionless, a skeleton draped in tattered Ikesian uniform ripped itself free of the burial shrine that had been built for it. It gripped the war-knife that had served as its headstone, setting the sword aflame with that self-same green fire, and sprinted towards the battlefield with such vigour it may as well have been a living man, its jaw chattering the exact cadence of a popular Ikesian marching song. The flame-possessed dead rose up from the cracks in the ground, the mud underfoot, the half-filled trenches that littered the field, for so many dead littered this place that not even Ubul could render all of them into claymen in such short a time.
Not only Ubul stood stunned at the display, but so did his claymen, a single utterance escaping his mouth as he - and all those present, for that matter - witnessed an army of dead men march into battle, their jaws collectively chattering an all-enveloping marching beat, cutting down claymen with their flaming war-knives, shooting them down with sparklocks that spat that self-same green fire, or else just grabbing the clay monsters with their bare bones and spewing flame from their gaping ribcages. It acted upon the clay so forcefully as to entirely skip baking it, turning it to dust.
Even the odd clayman could be seen being possessed by the baleful flame, its supporting skeleton ripping itself out of the body of clay, grasping for the core, and stomping it underfoot before it turned its arcane fury upon the claymen beside it.
Indeed, a disbelieving utterance underlined by rumbling laughter escaped the great general’s mouth as he finally snapped out of his stupor: “THE FELL DRAGON-EATER, HERE? THIS IS WHERE YOU’VE BEEN HIDING ALL THIS TIME?!”
Just as Zelsys finally gathered herself, preparing to chant the incantation, feeling the great tsunami of lightning flood down her arm, the general grabbed her off his back, two of his remaining tendril-arms tossing her away. She hastily directed a surge of Fulgur down her right, free leg, the eyes of the lion on her knee pad crackling as the support structure within the boot aided in nearly instantly forming a wedge of killing light around it, with which she kicked through both of the tendril-arms holding onto her. As the momentum carried her away from her target, she released the Thundercannon technique early, quickly aiming at him as she proclaimed: “THUNDERCANNON!”
The recoil threw her backwards with yet greater velocity, a great beast wrought of lightning erupting from the muzzle of her gun, slamming into the wall which Ubul had already raised, piercing through it, and embedding itself halfway into the general’s torso, annihilating the core which Bherad had damaged in its entirety. Zel managed to land upright, working the bolt, venting a great cloud of electrified Fog that obscured her exact position and allowed her an easier escape from the ensuing barrage of boulders.
It was a small mercy that the lion’s share of the Fulgur she had burned had come from her own output, rather than her battery, but she had still burned a third of its peak charge for what she considered a failure. Even as she swiftly popped out the spent shell and slid another into the chamber, already her mind raced in search of some solution, some way to get the necessary time to prepare and fire the technique. Then, as if an answer to a prayer from on-high, there came a gust of wind and a flash of bright green light, cutting through the fray of the battlefield upon which an armada of flaming skeletons spitefully battled the claybound perversions of those they had fallen fighting alongside and against.
