292 - Severance

Ubul wasn’t a fool. He was extremely and rightly so confident in the capability of his new form, but he wasn’t a fool. He knew when to go on the defensive, and that time was now. His fortune was the fact that spraying blood from one’s mouth somewhat prevents one from invoking the name of a complex Fulgurkinetic technique, thus affording him the time to form the necessary sigils with his hidden hand even as the skeletons crawled all over him, preferring their slowly-scouring flame to whatever heretical blood magick this mad woman was about to unleash. He suffused the earth around himself with Terra, willingly sapping away his own strength in order to prepare an earthen shell, one which he willed to manifest when it was too late for the woman to back out of her technique.

Despite his foresight, the first wave slammed into him like a wave of superheated air into a wax statue, the unstable lightning shredding away the outermost layer of his body with the metal penetrating a good few centimeters deep, while a swarm of blood-red lightning-spheres floated overhead menacingly. He saw them descend upon him with zigzagging motions as his shell closed up around him, slamming into and eating away at it bit at a time, but even such a small amount swiftly added up when there were hundreds of the godforsaken red fireflies.

It sealed the decision in his mind. She had to die.

The greatest threat on the battlefield wasn’t the norseman, the living suit of machine-armor, that skull-masked gunwoman, or even the bald beardo that had somehow grasped the lost arts of the islanders through the means of heretical Ikesian alchemy.

It was her.

The madness in her eyes, the constant changing of ways, the way she seemed to just pull new moves techniques out of nowhere or combine existing ones on the fly, the mere fact she survived and so quickly recovered from his Breath-destroying Strike with seemingly no serious aftereffects, it was proof that she was a true monster, regardless of how seemingly mediocre her physicals were. The possibility of her being a high-tier body cultivator early on in the journey to physical perfection sparked in his mind, but was snuffed out by the reality that such a thing was impossible, especially after the half-millennium spent working so hard to snuff out the arts outside of Pateiria.

No, she was a monster, a homunculus, an abomination against nature, plain and simple, and Ubul would reinstate the natural order by ending the life of this monstrosity.

He felt the Terra of his defensive shell waning, and he felt as it ceased waning too, telling him that the onslaught had stopped. Ubul mentally calculated her current position by taking into account her velocity and position the moment before he enclosed himself, plus the physical recoil of her technique which he had derived from the previous time she had used it. Even if this shell had a different, weaker, or stronger recoil pattern, it didn’t matter much.

The general dropped his focus on the shield, allowing it to dissolve into dirt as he pushed his head out, already digging his heels into the soil, suffusing it with Terra, before he commanded a pillar of earth to rise up as he pushed down and took off skyward like a three-meter tall stone cannonball. Zelsys was already in his sights, still mid-air, and well within acceptable margin or error of is mental math - the fact the direction of recoil was directly away from him and that it was distributed evenly across her body made it far easier to predict, and such, he barely had to make any adjustments to catch her…

…Or so he thought.

Just before he could get that damnable homunculus in his hands, she just moved to the side as if an unseen force propelled her, working the bolt of her strange arm-cannon and releasing a great cloud of unstable Fog that blinded Ubul’s arcane sight.

Despite his vastly superior speed, she pulled out some way to evade him again and again, peppering him with lightning-bolts that wore away at his skin just a bit faster than he could repair himself, throwing in his path screeching, flying, electrified bands of chattering cold-iron teeth. She met him in an open clash once, and only once, for the mistake of accepting it led to his punch being met with a kineticist trick that robbed it of all momentum, instantly followed by lightning-wreathed kick to his side, the violent spin of her body propelled beyond his ability to counter by the stolen velocity of his own strike. It split him down the middle at the waist, shaving off a good few centimeters off his height and forcing him to once again resort to dismantling nearby Ikesian war scrap to hold himself together while he performed lengthier, more thorough repairs.

Ubul’s anger only rose throughout the exchange, but he had to begrudgingly admit that she wasn’t just a living weapon relying on monstrous physiology and an apparent immunity to pain. Fighting her felt more like fighting a smug, old, wandering martial artist, or one of those “peaceful” monks that made a religion of their own capability for violence, combined with the choice not to use it unless provoked. It was clear that there was some semblance of martial morality within this woman, and so a small part of the great general mourned her as he sprung his trap.

Through the stone-cat-and-mouse-with-a-gun chase, Ubul had drawn a complex seal within the soil underfoot, manipulating the dirt into forming the sign just a few dozen centimeters beneath the surface. Now, with a stomp and a burst of Terra, he was able to make the ground drop out under the woman’s feet, only for a stone pillar to shoot up a moment later, throwing her into the air. As she began her ascent, Ubul was already prepared, propelling himself using the self-same seal, altering his arms into two pairs of many-jointed tendrils as he flew, and snatching her out of mid-air. With his limbs securely wound around her right arm, right leg, and neck, crushing her windpipe and snuffing out the possibility of resistance, Ubul didn’t take the mistake of monologuing or taking his time in torturing his foe.