Ubul lunged forward, even now generating force enough to pulverize the ground behind him and anything that stood against him, pulsing with preternatural earthen magicks.

Makhus allowed his instincts to guide him, trusting his armor and his blade, feeling the surging flow of arcane power flood in from the belt, rendering out a series of blinding-white glyphs across his sword’s flat, recursively repeating until his sword was entirely enshrouded in this five-symbol phrase whose meaning Makhus did not know, yet innately understood.

His blade flashed through the air, and the world parted before him.

Ubul wasn’t merely split down the middle, clavicle to pelvis - amber-coloured Fog erupted from the matter of the general’s body around Makhus’s sword, hardened stone turned to inert dirt and clay in an instant.

DHARMIC SWORD OF WISDOM

POSSESSING TRUE CLARITY OF MIND

THERE IS NOTHING ONE CANNOT CUT

PURGATION ARTS: DISPELLING BLADE

Ubul’s monstrous top half sailed right over him, giving the swordsman a narrow window of opportunity to get out of harm’s way, an opportunity he gladly took, feeling the static around himself as the sound of screaming cold-iron started back up right alongside Zelsys’s beastly battlecry. His armor seemed to suddenly struggle to even pull its own weight, the belt spitting sparks and flashing while he did all he could to create some distance. As he did so, Makhus saw that the general had somehow reformed a body the size of an adult man in the moment after he passed over him and before he collided with Zelsys, his right arm still terribly oversized and impossibly strong in equal measure.

As much as he wished he could intervene, to make himself more useful, the sheer magnitude of violence that unfolded before him was a great big “CHARGE IN IF YOU HAVE A DEATHWISH” sign, obvious enough the armor’s foresight was pointless in predicting it. So, not unlike a henchman in a poorly choreographed stage play, he remained at the edge, ready and waiting to cut in when the opportunity presented itself. He had to guard himself not from Ubul’s strikes, but from the pieces of terrain that the general’s clashes with Zelsys sent flying, the ground around them bone-dry even in the pouring rain. Then, out of the corner of his armor’s prophetic third eye, he saw it - the impending approach of a white-glowing streak, a man on fire rocketing through the mud, trailing steam and burning footprints. It transpired a second later, and Sigmund threw himself headlong into the fray, wrapping his legs around the general’s head, the force behind the move sufficient to actually stagger the general for a moment, a moment long enough that Sigmund managed to get away unscathed, leaving the opening right there for Zelsys to exploit.

She saw the opening, the window in Ubul’s defenses - rock-solid even in his reduced state - being pried open, like a mountain being torn in half down the middle. In that moment, wracked by ache and assailed by rising exhaustion as she was, Zelsys opened her mouth wide and channeled from her tongue a lightning-arc, dragging it across the Butcher’s edge in one swift, near-instant motion.

“All-Severing Scream…”

She charged the pertinent muscles, saturated them with Aether, and decided to simply let her arm move as it would, regardless of what it would do to her joints.

“Thundercharger…”

The feelings of exhaustion and pain subsided, replaced by a flood of vigour. The Primordial Self, releasing the very last of its stockpiles. A step forward. A whipping motion of the arm accompanied by rotation of the trunk, the majority of the body’s muscular power transferred into the crack of a whip tipped with screeching cold-iron.

FORMLESS BUTCHERY: ALL-SEVERING THUNDERCLAP STING

A flash of steel. A thunderclap. Cold-iron piercing cold-iron, then the cracking of flesh-made-crystal. The sudden stop that didn’t belong.

By some miracle, Ubul had caught her cleaver just as its point penetrated his forehead, the container for all that was left of the man inside the golem. The many quickly-forming cracks across his form glowed with a rising, yet faltering glow, as though a dying ember someone was blowing on in a desperate bid to keep it alive, and short-lived though it was, Ubul’s strength sufficed to pull her blade free of his head, its metal creaking and cracking under his grip, threatening to shatter altogether as pieces of the cleaver flew in every-which direction. He lashed out with his larger leg, just as quickly and forcefully as his strikes when he had first shown himself in his true body, catching Zelsys off-guard.

Three side kicks in rapid succession, going up her leg, shattering bone even through armor and instinctively-summoned Siphoning Pulse. In a flash, Zelsys was forced to stand on her right leg, the thigh bone of her left broken in such a way that its grisly cross-section stuck out right through her inner thigh, having severed the artery. It would’ve been a swift death by exsanguination for anyone else. She leapt back just out of his reach, and with her bare hands, she set the bone, burning what Vitae she still had left to force the wound to close. Even still, the leg was nearly useless in combat now, demanding constant attention and effort just to keep the bone stable by effectively binding it with the very muscles it was supposed to support.

A revelation dawned upon her. Of course Thunderclap Sting wouldn’t be enough, even empowered by All-severing Scream - expecting just this to suffice was an insult to her opponent. Zelsys sheathed her blade for a moment, raising a hand as she pooled as much Metallum as her already nearly-depleted connection to the earthen spirits would allow, stockpiling it in her second stomach while she meticulously imbued the bones of her right arm with the aspect of “Iron”. After bones came muscles, after muscles tendons and skin, and so on. Every last bit that the spirits could give, she dredged up.

The limb steadily took on a harsher, stiffer shape, Ubul observing all the while as he used the time Zelsys had afforded him to pull himself back together. When, and only when she had done what she could, she burned the rest of her accumulated Metallum - a paltry sum - to reinforce her broken leg. It wasn’t ideal, but it would hold, allowing her to divert a bit of focus from keeping it from re-breaking.

Akaso