293 - Severance Pt. 2

Even with his strength, it took considerable effort to make the woman’s flesh come apart, to make the joints of her thigh and shoulder pop out of their sockets, to garotte and sever the spinal cord right at the bottom of the neck. Letting go with one of his arm-tendrils, he formed an edge at its tip and disemboweled her, piercing her lungs and her heart as well as severing the spinal cord in two more spots just to make sure. The amount of force he had to exert just to cut through her muscle and tendons, combined with the fact her blood seemed to still clot nearly instantly spoke volumes of how thoroughly refined the body was, a terrible waste of good cultivation in sacrifice for the enemy.

He left the body in the mud, tossing the head, arm, and leg a few meters away as blood geysered from the wounds, the cultivator body rejecting death and struggling for survival even in this doomed state, a fruitless struggle the sight of which Ubul was so gravely familiar with. The body kept trying to breathe, the heart kept trying to baet in a controlled manner as if trying to minimize exsanguination, even as the severed head’s eyes still moved. It was said that a lesser body cultivator’s severed head could remain conscious for minutes without any intervention, and even cultivators of a standard well beyond this barbaric prodigy could not reverse lethal wounds under their own power. It was simply how Ubul understood cultivation, his viewpoint entirely rooted in western practice.

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Zefaris saw the entire exchange transpire in perfect detail, even from nigh-on half a kilometer away, having kept her eye on it as she continuously laid into the general with hardened slugs to distract and maybe inflict marginal damage.

The realization of what had just happened didn’t really sink in for a good few seconds, in which she stared blankly into the middle-distance. There was no feeling to come alongside it. There never had been. She’d long taught herself to feel only a numb, calming cold wash over her whenever she saw a comrade shot or cut down, thrown into the mud.

Just as all those times, so too did that comfortable, cold numbness wash over her, and it consumed everything else there was. Thoughts, emotions, even her anchor to reality, all gone, swept away by total dissociation. A blood-red death machine roaring back to life halfway across the battlefield, its frame expanding and distorting as it dropped onto all fours and sprinted faster than any human could hope to in Ubul’s direction. Her mind, not unlike an automaton, decided the most tactically sound course of action and decided to strike when the two clashed.

A cylinder full of Mogralt and Atrine. A handful of coins, held between the fingers. A deep breath, and another still, all shunted to the Philosopher’s Eye. An Impact Driver seal carved into both sides of each coin. Another breath in, an exhalation out through the mask’s vent, enchanting all at once, as though tiny silver serpents slithering into the metal.

No emotion, no rage and rancor, just calm cold, spreading all throughout, freezing the very soul.

Zefaris threw the coins and fired a series of low-intensity Concussion Impact missiles at them, propelling them yet further skyward as Ubul smashed aside tankman after tankman in pursuit of Jorfr, planning to strike down upon him at the exact moment when Zero finally clashed with the general.

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Ubul would finish off the norseman, take that washed-up nobleman-hunter Rushing Dandy hostage, and put Willowdale to the torch. Then, he would return here, and give that Newman woman a proper cultivator’s burial, by utterly destroying what was left of her so that her remains might not be repurposed by cravens.

These were the thoughts that went through the general’s head before he locked eyes with Jorfr and chased after him.

Even as he did so, one after the other, men in machine-armor came after him. One after the other, wielding weapons meant for their betters, swords as tall as themselves, great clubs whose sheer mass could conceivably crack apart Ubul’s skin with enough force, even just hoisting field cannons off their frames to try and fire on him at point blank.

Magic knights, they were, even if magic knights of a new era. This had been done before, this desperate effort to replace cultivation with industrial and technological prowess. Again and again, Ubul had seen it, fought it, broke it. The same absence of time and spiritual resources for cultivation that necessitated such focus on equipment also made the users lacking, unable to become truly one with their own armor and weapons as a cultivator, or even mundane, experienced swordsman could.

One after the other he smashed them to the side, picked them up and threw them, or just punted them across the field. The larger among them, the so-called “First-models”, were a little more impressive, clearly in sync with their vehicles by necessity, but even still, most of them moved like… Well, machines. Reliable, uncompromising, but predictable.

“MACHINES? IS THAT THE BEST YOU HAVE?! SUCH SOULLESS THINGS CANNOT EVOLVE! YOUR WORSHIP OF MACHINERY IS DOOMED TO FAILURE! NO MACHINE, NO MATTER HOW ADVANCED, CAN EVER MAKE A MORTAL EQUAL TO A CULTIVATOR.”

Strake had been procedurally going through every conceivable method and contingency to try and get Zero’s engine running at a workable output level, but there was no getting around reality. It was severely damaged, and it was a miracle that it still ran, let alone that its output was sufficient to let the machine walk, albeit slowly. He felt Zero shuddering around him, the metal creaking and ringing as the machine’s spirit exerted every bit of power it had in an effort to move, its righteous anger seething and filling the cockpit with an aura of bloodlust.

After witnessing what had just transpired, and to a degree, hearing that filthy fucking zipperhead mock superior Ikesian engineering, Strake got over his aversion towards a certain last-resort option. He reached for the Victory Wash, downing one, two, three full doses, before slotting a fresh Fulguric cell into the Thundercharger module.