Even if the statue couldn’t overpower Ubul in a contest of strength, Blackstone reinforced with Azoth-auric Amalgam superseded any mundane rock no matter how richly infused with Terra, and the edge of the Sister’s Sword bit into the haft of Ubul’s polearm, enough for the general to feel the need to kick the statue away. It sailed overhead as Zelsys strode onto the battlefield, crashing into the treeline behind her.
Ubul’s eyes scanned over the battlefield as his claymen came to life once more, entirely new ones being formed out of the muck at his feet, skeletons and corpses dredged from their shallow graves. Out of the corner of her eye, Zel saw tidal waves of blue fire wash over the claymen, the fury of the governor’s flaming sword swallowing up dozens at a time. How he made the living fire exclusively target the claymen, she didn’t hazard to guess. Zero, alongside several other tankmen, circled the man-mountain firing continuously, their high-penetration anti-cultivator cannons one of the few weapons able to reliably harm the stonebound titan. It was one of Zero’s shots that struck a joint and severed one of Ubul’s arms a third of the way from the root, drawing the titan’s attention to the bloodred tank. Even as Ubul bounded across the battlefield in pursuit of the tank, he kept on ripping up chunks of terrain, even trees, throwing up a constant hell of projectiles.
Zelsys flipped a mental switch. Blood circulation altered, a hormonal cocktail that would kill any normal human flooded her body, bodily reserves were sent to the metaphorical boiler room with regard only for the short-term. The body metabolized Viriditas and Rubedo into Vitae in preparation for injury. Immense currents surged through her nervous system, in her skull buzzed brain activity analogous to a total seizure in any human, the primary neurochemical pathway supported and partially supplanted by near-light speed electrical signals, limited only by her body’s alignment with Fulgur and ability to encode information into this format; a zero-latency secondary information highway with relatively low bandwidth, but more than sufficient to render the beast-slayer’s perspective on battle incomparable to that of a normal person.
Wondrous though it was, the human body was still a biological machine; one which wished to survive and avoid the risk of death as much as possible, only marshalling its cells to violence as a reactive measure, to hunt, or to eliminate perceived threats to survival, requiring external stimuli to dedicate vital resources towards violence. Even with the clarity of Man which permitted one to act out violence with intent, this remained truth for ninety out of a hundred.
The body of a normal human, even in a life-death fight-or-flight situation, tended towards extreme and reactive behavior, the lack of direct communication between Ego and Id creating the effect of a terribly designed drive train, automated gearbox with precisely two gears, and a lack of proper gearing controls.
In a fight-or-flight situation, as a hormone-lacked, Rubedo-rich cocktail flooded the body, a human’s mental faculties sped up to the point of perceived time dilation, upwards of an “extra” perceived half-second added to every second of real time. One’s thoughts sped up by up to fifty percent. Even in these situations, the body often wouldn’t allow one to access their full strength, for fear of self-injury, conserving precious energy and resources, even if these limiters more often than not led to the person’ injury or death anyway.
As her body kicked into high gear, the Primordial Self took the place of an engine regulator, but one which would submit to the authority of the governing control, the Thinking Self.
Her perceived time dilation was not fifty percent, but over two-hundred. For each second of real time, Zelsys was able to perceive as if it were three, even if it did not feel as if time literally slowed down.
Ubul’s many arms began ripping up pieces of terrain in rapid succession, infusing them with Terra and throwing them all over the place, sweeping away clayman and human alike, smashing against the barricades and threatening anyone that stood still for more than a moment.
The great general’s limbs were fast. Blisteringly fast. Faster than stone had any right to be, smashing down and throwing boulders with force easily comparable to cannonballs. Whence one arm tossed a boulder and opened itself up to counter attack, another seven-fingered counterpart was there to perform immensely complex arcane gestures and raise a short-lived, yet nearly indestructible wall in defense. He wasn’t even actively focusing on her, and still she had to take care not to get hit.
But she had seen faster and fought faster.
No matter how many boulders flew at her, she felt she had sufficient time to estimate when they would hit and prepare accordingly, choosing to stop them dead or graze them rather than dodging altogether. Again and again, building more and more kinetic energy and more Fulgur, until she would be wreathed in lightning and spectral horns would shine over her brow. It would take a short while to reach the critical mass she desired, and in the meanwhile, she balanced the volatile mixture of energies inside her body by dipping into the fulguric side of her Retributive Battery for Thundercharger and skimming off the top to form a sphere of ball lightning in her mouth, one which she later spat out in order to obliterate a composite’s cores before it could even form.
There was only one thing that drew Ubul’s attention away from Zero, and that was Ozmir - rather, the gruesome transformation he underwent, his body enveloped in vines and briars as he grew to a four-meter forest monster, wildly bounding after the stone giant while spouting a high-pressure stream of some strange liquid that seemed to melt solid rock on contact. Ozmir’s beastly form traversed the battlefield in a flash, circling the general and covering him in this corrosive, melting his many arms together at the roots before he seemed to run out, leaping atop Ubul and tangling Ubul’s arms in vines.
Patreon
leif18· Mar 21, 2023
FindingClock4· Jun 27, 2022
