Prologue Pt. 4 - Ankylodragon

“That thing has killed more molemen than humans at this point…” she thought. A shrill shriek came from the Ankylodragon’s direction, and before she landed again, she saw the moleman that was likely commanding the creature. He carried a glistening, iron shortsword, his diminutive form was draped in animal skins and jewelry.

Ever so briefly their eyes met, and Zelsys saw the spark of thought behind those beady little staring-orbs of his. He wildly gestured upwards at her, stabbing a gaping, crusted over wound in the Ankylodragon’s side.

Rolling forward on the landing, Zel burned what kinetic energy she’d stored up from using Siphoning Pulse against dozens of attacks, throwing herself forward into a mad zigzagging dash - not to avoid the beast’s relatively clumsy aim, but in case the Deep Dweller Commander had any tricks up his sleeve. Proving her assumption right, he did: The little man pulled a golden, gem-encrusted, conspicuously gun-shaped talisman from somewhere, screaming an incantation as its “muzzle” began to glow. Red beams of arcane force erupted from the trinket, sharp snapping audible as it turned the rocky ground to slag wherever it struck.

With the little man’s eyes not being able to track her movements, Zelsys closed the distance, sliding between the Ankylodragon’s legs, her momentum sending her into a spin. As she emerged she heard the beast slam down in an effort to crush her, but she had already grabbed the beast-master’s leg, and was currently halfway through the motion of smashing him against a tree as one would a sackful of rats.

There came a satisfying crunch, and the forest-edge undergrowth was painted by moleman blood. A significant detachment of molemen had followed in her wake in some vain hope of cornering her, or perhaps out of concern for their superior, but this act of ultraviolence had whipped both them and the Ankylodragon into a frenzy. While the molemen sprinted after her, the dragon swung its tail, its wings still moulding a new boulder.

Truly the Impelling Arm was a marvel of arcane smithing, but its greatest feature was its ability to disperse received kinetic energy across the wearer’s entire body. It also converted one-third of a fired shell’s recoil into usable Pneuma for her to use, storing it in the pauldron.

She met the swing of the Ankylodragon’s tail with a left-handed punch, invoking Siphoning Pulse without too much worry for timing. It struck her, yet merely threw her to the side; she’d stolen one-third of its kinetic energy and the remainder was evenly distributed across her body and thus insufficient to cause injury. It felt no worse than Jorfr tackling her, which admittedly was comparable to being hit by a tractor, but nothing serious. The molemen had closed the distance by now, but she didn’t feel the need to use Thundercannon for this small cluster.

Click. Click. Boom.

A maelstrom of fire and shot erupted outward, painting a cone of gore where over a dozen molemen had once stood and pushing Zelsys back several meters. With a yank on the lever, the bolt popped open and a geyser of silver Fog erupted from the vent on the gun’s side, obscuring her position; arcane exhaust from the recoil mitigation mechanism’s operation.

She had no time to appreciate the sound, however, as the Ankylodragon brought its full wroth against her, swinging its tail at her while it tossed aside a half-formed boulder, its singular eye flashing and walls of false stone rising up around it in defense. Zel jumped over the tail in a rising backflip, forming a dozer-blade of lighting around her right leg as she did so, having expected the beast to use its wings against her.

When she landed atop the Ankylodragon’s back its right wing was short a digit, the finger dangling by a strip of membrane. The screeching, chittering construct around her leg fizzled out; it was prohibitively expensive to form and maintain, a niche tool compared to the straightforward brutality of a good cleaver… Though, the one in her hand was already covered in cracks and clearly on the edge of breaking. The Ankylodragon’s wings and tail alike came down on her, but she just rolled forward on the creature’s back, towards its head. It clearly knew what she intended to do, as its brought its wings forward as far as they could go, trying to grab at her. Its reward for this effort were stumps where fingers had once been. Five seconds and several brutal moments of vibrosaw action later, even these stumps had been cut down to the point of ineffectuality.

The beast swayed in place and tried to buck her as she knelt down over its head, snapping its jaws and closing its eye in panic, but none of that could save it. Zelsys buried her cleaver in one of the gaps between the beast’s armor plates, wrenching it downwards saw-side first as to crudely cut through its spinal column and into its chest cavity. Its head fell limp while the rest of its body stiffened.

Zel coated the Impelling Arm’s clawed fingertips with lightning, digging her fingers through the calloused, thick eyelid, ripping away at it until she got a hold of the creature’s crystal eye, and at last wrenched it free of its socket. The nerve dangled from one side of it, but it wasn’t truly attached, slipping off the crystalline orb with little resistance. It filled her hand the way a large apple might, and she immediately stowed it away into her Tablet. Satisfied, Zel glanced towards the convoy. The molemen’s ranks had broken; it was a wholesale slaughter, now.

“I see that you’ve a good eye for valuable beast parts. Third-Order Terramantic catalysts aren’t easy to come by, after all,” came a light-hearted, almost smug voice from the treeline to her right. She whipped around to catch a glimpse of the person who had slipped beneath her notice, and was met by a man in Arkaley Branch garb. A practically-sized sword was in his hand and the corpses of several molemen surrounded him. A second, much tenser-looking man with a mustache stood by his side, hefting a blade much more like the Sangers, being one of the single-edged, huge greatswords.

“And here I thought myself wise for taking the long route around in an effort to flank the beast, not knowing that our reinforcements would include the Newman Sect Elder herself,” the old man continued.

She kept digging, smashing open the creature’s skull and plunging her gauntleted hand into its alien, purplish brain, digging in search of an Azoth Stone.

“I’m afraid you won’t find an Azoth Stone, if that’s what you are searching for. Dragon Descendants do not develop them,” came that voice again. He was right, there was nothing.

Letting out a sigh, Zel shook the brain matter off of her hand and stood up, yanking her cleaver out of the beast. There were still molemen to kill, but… The moment she ripped the cleaver free, chunks of it began falling away. In moments, the mass of cold-iron was reduced to a jagged, two-pronged dagger. If anything, Zelsys was impressed that it had held out this long. She tossed it aside.

She jumped down from the corpse, pulling out her Tablet with the intent of retrieving a mundane blade for now, but that younger man annoyed her again.

“Why discard it?” the younger of the two men questioned. “It’s broken, but it should grow back in a few weeks even if you do not want to spend the money to have it repaired.”

Zelsys shook her head, pulling a long, curved butcher’s cleaver out of storage, its huge bulk belying a razor’s edge. It was decent steel, but not any better than that; good enough for government work by any other descriptor. This mundane metal would melt in her hand if she poured Fulgur into it, but it would last at least a little while.

“Pick it up, see if it sings,” she gestured with the new cleaver, walking to the corpse of the commander moleman as she did. “It’s dead metal now, just like this thing in my hand.”

The antsy-looking man did so, giving it a light swing in an effort to tease out the telltale resonance of cold-iron. His brow furrowed at the sound’s absence.

“Well I’ll be… I have never heard of a cultivation method that kills living weapons, but I suppose it’s no surprise with you lot,” the younger man said with a vague tone of disdain.

“It’s not my method, brain champion,” she snapped back, having picked up the moleman’s talisman. Up-close, it looked like a garish, gold-plated gun, just missing a physical operation mechanism. “This issue is inherent to the way Storm-soul Cultivation functions, it can’t be side-stepped without fundamentally altering the method and thus creating a new one, with its own issues. Ever wonder why Kargarian sword-saints are so obsessed with one sword? This is why.”

“Brain wha-” he began.

“I’m calling you a moron,” she interrupted, fiddling with the weird magical firearm-equivalent. It finally fired, a beam of flame erupting from the muzzle with a snap. A useful trinket, but it would need further study before she could decide whether to keep it or relegate it to storage.

“Moron? You dare, junior?” came a faux-indignant question from the elder, utterly steeped in facetiousness. Zelsys chuckled at that, punting the head off of a lone charging moleman as she walked. A glance at the man’s clothes again, then up at his face. Old, but lively. He answered before she could ask the question: “As you’ve likely guessed, I am the Arkaley Branch elder. My name is Gideon Strickers, and this is one of my lieutenants, Ernest Maulers. I was warned about you and yours, Zelsys Newman. Dangerous lot, barely better than mercenaries, the main branch called you. They said you practiced heretical cultivation methods, the likes of which are seen only in primitive far off lands. Do you?”

There, in the middle of a bloodsoaked battlefield, the two sect elders stood face to face as equals, and Zelsys answered as she would answer an equal: “If by “heretical methods“ the main branch meant methods which we actually understand and which bring results without turning the practitioner into a tumor-ridden sociopath, then yes. Storm-soul Cultivation, Victory Demon Cultivation, The Windswept Road to Xi’ba’qha, the Walking Way of the Despot of Self. We even have members who practice a more practical derivative of the Sanger Family’s own Sword-Soul Cultivation, along some of the methods of our Black Horse predecessors.”

“And… To what end is that, might I ask?” he questioned.

“Ikesia’s cultivation has been overly steeped in mysticism, myth, and purposeful disinformation, at least the better-known forms of it. The noble cultivator-families are mostly inbred degenerates snorting noon dust and injecting mutagens, or at best fools drunk on the initial power gains of False Paths like Azoth Stone Cultivaton. Major sects like you Sangers or the Black Horses aren’t much better, even if your Paths are at least true," she answered."

“Do you seek to create a unified, supreme theory of cultivation, then? To understand the underlying principles of it all, even knowing that you only stand to gain the hatred of those who benefit from the status quo? It is a path many have tried to walk, the Three Kings among them, and it brought them all to ruin,” mused the old man, his mask slipping; it couldn’t be clearer that he was quite a bit older than his mortal countenance suggested.

Zel chuckled, giving a brief nod.

“It makes no difference,” she said. “I’ve already made an enemy of the Emperor; if the remnants of Ikesia’s old sects wish to break themselves upon me and mine, I will not stop them. Now, if you don’t mind, there are still quite a few molemen that need exterminating before my work is done here.”

“That, I cannot disagree with,” Gideon agreed. His eyes shifted around two meters to the left and down. He took a breath, and in a heartbeat’s span, swung his blade upwards, quickly enough that Zel just barely saw it happen. There was a flash of light, and when she turned around to look, she saw two halves of a moleman slide apart and topple to the ground.

At the same moment, Jorfr could be seen careening out from within the encirclement, spinning through the air before he smashed down hammer-first into one of the larger remaining moleman swarms. Great stakes of ice erupted from the earth, skewering many of them and eliciting a light smile from Gideon, as well as an indignant look from Ernest.

“In the end, this incident may yet serve to humble those foolish disciples of mine; to remind them that if we stagnate we will be left in the dust, in this age of upheaval,” Gideon said as he walked past Zelsys. She didn’t stay behind, rejoining the fight alongside him.

The slaughter went on for the next hour and a half. By the end of it, all but Zefaris were out of ammunition. Both material and human losses had been minimized, with only four Tankmen suffering serious injuries, while every sect disciple except Zefaris and Joseph suffered minor, incidental wounds that could be taken care of with basic restorative elixirs. The Arkaley Branch wasn’t quite as well-off, but their human losses could be counted on one hand, and all of them were lesser disciples by Gideon’s reckoning, as callous as it sounded. Next would come the arduous task of gathering any scattered Damasite, patching up damaged trucks, and getting the convoy back to Willowdale. While this wasn’t the Newman Sect’s job they were initially willing to help, but the Arkaley Branch members didn’t seem at all as happy to work with them as they rightly should have been; as such, Zelsys made the decision to depart right then and there, and they got to hear Gideon slave-driving his disciples as they rode off.