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144 - Citadel of the Self [Sturmblitz]

A spark of will. Water and bone gathered from all around, rising up and freezing into a perfect bone-backed mirror before him. He already saw ways to improve, myriad changes that would need to be made to make such an armor function in reality, but… It didn’t matter. This world was his own, and here he was not limited by physical reality.

With but a snap of his fingers and a jangle of his staff, he turned the half-demolished former prison of his own instincts into an impenetrable kee...

143 - Boneyard Mantle Prelude [Sturmblitz]

And lo, the vile monster arose from the boneyard and set upon the both of them, a silver comet trailing a tail of purple flame and spraying venom that set ablaze and burned like CP-T, sticking to everything it touched. The Thinking and Primordial Selves did great battle with the thoughtform; innumerable scars were carved into the boneyard, its vast fields were charred and its lakes boiled, a million undecaying Devil’s Teeth littered the ground, many shattered by impacts against the Memory o...

142 - Koschei the Undying Pt. 3 [Sturmblitz]

The expedition departed covertly before sunrise from a hidden depot using lightweight sleds. They were pulled by tamed Razorflayers and devoid of the clan’s markings, the sleds’ rails shod with special, short-lasting covers that would cause them to leave no trail. The expedition members wore masks styled after predatory beasts, some wood and others bone, alongside clothing devoid of the Hulson Clan’s marks and typical stylings. Even Zefaris went so far as to dress the part, though she s...

141 - Koschei the Undying Pt. 2[Sturmblitz]

To illustrate her point, Zel willed a trigonal tower of blackstone to rise from the sands behind her, its unimpeachable form covered in eldritch evershifting glyphs pulsing with magenta light. She truly played up the glyphs’ unreadability to compensate for the fact she herself didn’t know a single one, and in this realm where her will was reality, it was an impenetrable bluff.

“Oho, you catch on quickly… But not quickly enough for my liking. It is true that Victor and I must do ...

140 - Koschei the Undying [Sturmblitz]

A/N: This chapter is 100% SFW, but it does have a lightly NSFW artwork associated with it. The art is by Kuromoro.

Variant 1 - Censored 

Variant 2 - Uncensored
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Zef gave a second and a third glance, diving down and realizing that the water...

7 - Cherno Caster [Cherno]

Krahe wondered what the hell terms like Anathema or Thauma Fusion meant, or even just Thauma on its own, thinking of the supposed feature of her first boon. It didn’t go off. She tried focusing on the idea of Thauma Fusion as it related to the boon, and this time, it worked.

Knowledge that wasn’t her own flooded in, like someone had just given her a back-alley memory implant operation. It was in flashes of thought and mental association, but slowly coalesced into a coherent thought-...

139 - Prostrate Yourself [Sturmblitz]

“You, who have never been told no. You, who have been born into riches. You, who have been given freely the means by which to extricate yourself from the limits of nature. If you would have the gall to look down upon me and mine, I would meet you in holmgang. Refuse if you will, but if you do so and still think to act as if you were above me… I’ll be more than happy to incur the penalty for smearing you across that wall over there right now.”

“My mother-”

“Your mothe...

138 - To Know One's Place [Sturmblitz]

The one Bjorn Clan member she got to fight was the most challenging, a large woman who put up a truly impressive defense against her strikes by using her own fat as a medium to absorb kinetic energy. Combined with sonic attacks in the form of bear roars and the woman’s bear-based, incredibly strong transformation, it made for a spectacular battle lasting over ten minutes, albeit because Zel purposely didn’t use many of the tools available to her.

The Bjorn woman’s sheer body mass ...

137 - Wargames [Sturmblitz]

“Come on, I’ll carry you the rest of the way if your legs give out,” she added. It wasn’t as if she needed to convince him - Zel knew that there were very few things on which Victor wouldn’t defer to her when it came to his training, short of the blatantly unreasonable and harmful. No, this was solely to try and rile him up - and it worked, though his reaction made it clear that he knew she was just winding him up.

The route was such that she honestly didn’t expect him to ru...

136 - Victor's Breakthrough [Sturmblitz]

It had taken two days and some spare change for Victor to go through his Azoth Stone Dissolution, and the symptoms he suffered were markedly similar to Zef’s. His symptoms were understandably a fair bit milder, since he hadn’t spent the better part of his life as a professional soldier.

The boy’s greatest trial thus far had, indeed, nothing to do with cultivation, but his prolific exploits with Oasis City’s female population. One of his partners’ brothers took the redhead’s ...

6 - Deathsmoke [Cherno]

Working off of decades of tactical instinct, she ran into the center of the square, towards the fountain, intending to use its height for cover while she cleared out some of the beasts and made her way to a better tactical position. At worst, she could scale the fountain itself and play king of the hill. They were trying to make her panic and run as predatory beasts or pack-hunter drones were wont to do. She gripped her pistol in both hands, diagonally offset in a center axis relock position....

135 - Re: Ingvald Pt. 2 [Sturmblitz]

“You still haven’t answered my question,” Zel grinned at him. The smith’s answer hadn’t surprised her in the slightest, and thus hadn’t dampened her spirits either. She viewed Eisengeist as a one-in-a-million shot for the moment, as well as something to plan for in the future. Seventy-seven years; by then she would be doubtlessly strong enough to fight the dragon one-on-one without meeting Wide-wuth’s fate.

“Purely theoretically, yes - Eisengeist’s tails are most likel...

5 - Scornful Abominations [Cherno]

In the corner of her vision, no more than a few hundred meters up this revolution of the city’s spiral layout, she spotted a towering structure reaching all the way to the surface - an elevator, obviously put here by whoever had hauled all that lab equipment into an ancient temple. She continued to follow the black hose, even though it went deeper into the city, passing by spine-chillingly organic buildings, the taller among them displaying downright phallic designs. A short distance down t...

134 - Re: Ingvald [Sturmblitz]

Hours passed. Meanwhile, in another bath, Victor had consumed a small, white pill, and was currently coughing up black sludge, which not only didn’t foul the water, it dissolved in seconds, so potent was the water - or perhaps so weak was his impurity, or perhaps both. Jorfr basked in the water and the wholehearted belief that soon his own home’s baths would be filled with this miraculous water. The northman had promised Victor to watch over him for as long as it took, just as Zelsys had ...

133 - Primary Spring [Sturmblitz]

A/N: Next chapter on Wednesday, 21st of December.
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“Do you?” Rikke asked.

A part of Zelsys wanted to say yes; to change her victory condition to Rikke leaving her clan and joining the Newman Sect… But that was just begging for treachery down the line, and she assumed the Boreans had rules in place to prevent such poaching to begin with. Nevertheless, she decided to make it ...

132 - Simultaneous Cultivation [Sturmblitz]

Something unfamiliar, however, followed; after downing the elixir he retrieved a small jar from amidst the mess, smearing some of its greasy contents on each of his wounds in turn. They each closed in turn.

“Where’d you get that? The cream,” she asked, curiously. Zel had meant to procure that cream and the recipe for it eventually, using the Smoke Witch’s improved elixir formulation as leverage, but she found her own plans expedited by the redhead’s ambition.

“This? I ...

131 - To Give a Thundergod a Body [Sturmblitz]

“Y’know… Couldn’t you just use Arcline as a scaffold to build the snake construct around?” Zefaris suggested, seemingly out of nowhere, after they had already returned to their chambers. Her face was still somewhat flushed, but as far as Zel could tell, she wasn’t outright drunk anymore, at least not on mead.

Zel froze in place, stone-still, not even breathing as she processed those words.

“By the Dead Ones, it was in front of me all this time…” she laughed at he...

130 - Innocent Sin [Sturmblitz]

A/N: This chapter has sexual content. There are also two artworks associated with it, each of them with two variants.

The following artworks are associated with this chapter:

Zel Pinup 1 Variant 1 (SFW) - by ValnikR

Zel Pinup 1 Variant 2 (NSFW, Tasteful Nudity) - by ValnikR

2022-12-16 21:33:23 +0000 UTC View Post

129 - Holmgang Intel [Sturmblitz]

As the feast petered off, most of the surviving hunters retreated to rest and recover - as did Zef, dragging an unconscious Victor off to his chambers. All but Gunnar and Yvonne had some degree of injury; as Zel learned, Gunnar had in fact sustained many injuries, but they had been dealt to his bestial berserk form and thus had not gone go deep enough to hit his true body. Conversely, Yvonne’s ranged combat style and heavy leaning on crowd control had allowed her to just stay out of harm’...

128 - Eisengeist [Sturmblitz]

“Reidar, Katarine, Sinne, and Morten… They’ve been badly injured. We had to inter Reidar and Sinne in ice. Merete and Torhild are tending to the other two.”

There was something under those words; a dark implication, Zelsys could tell. She just couldn’t discern what it was. A grave countenance came over Jorfr as the implication sunk in.

“...What of uncle Agnar?”

Gunnar sighed.

“He fell in battle against a Sapdragon. A glorious death, at the least… Desp...

127 - Meeting Jorfr's Parents [Sturmblitz]

“Would it not be a waste?” Fryg argued, having just risen from her seat at the head of the table to walk over. “Splitting such a large tusk will slash its value when we could sell it and buy a pre-formed chunk of ivory with a fraction of the proceeds.”

“This is not about money,” said Gunnar. “My son has become a true man. He chose to stake his life on his convictions and he returned having seen such battle that not one among a hundred of his countrymen can claim to be his ...

4 - The Gun [Cherno]

There were, indeed, more rags in one of the drawers - two of them. Better than nothing, she supposed. Wiping off the most egregious muck quickly fouled them, and seeing this, Krahe looked around in the hopes that the lab would have a source of water. It did. One of the wheeled cabinets had a small, copper sink, a particularly thick cable or perhaps hose running from it and out of the chamber… Only, no water came out. Turning the faucet only elicited an impotent wheeze from the pipes as the ...

126 - Silverhand [Sturmblitz]

A/N: Edited the end of the chapter after they enter the longhouse.
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“Newman. Why go this far? You could always reforge your blade again, when you are tougher and have the resources to make it easier for yourself.”

“I… Feel the need to slay the vile beasts of this world. Regardless of how many legs they walk on, what honeyed words they speak, or what misbegotten delusions of divinity th...

125 - Discourse Between Bullheaded Fools [Sturmblitz]

“This feels too convenient,” he said. The smith’s suspicion of just how much Zelsys knew was near tangible. She herself couldn’t tell how much he thought she knew, so she left that conversational thread alone.

“You underestimate my compulsion to hoard anything that I think could be useful later,” she grinned, using the moment to retrieve a plum-sized cherry as well, biting off half. Tiny arcs leapt between her lips and the fruit as she pulled it back, its Fulgur reaction wit...

3 - Return to Flesh [Cherno]

The thought that this suffocating encasement might be some sort of hellish afterlife came into her mind, only for a few seconds of struggle to prove otherwise. Whatever was trapping her came apart like some sort of rotten, waxy polymer. Chunks of the stuff plummeted into nothingness below.

Krahe’s first breath in this world was one filled with the stench of decaying flesh and sting of chemicals in her nostrils. She fell on her hands and knees and pain jolted through her body - pain th...

124 - Cultivation Pills (At Last) [Sturmblitz]

“...I have two suggestions. First, you may be able to temporarily modify your sleeve to be more conducive for your needs; it is an artifact of protection, so the concepts which drive its magic are adjacent to what you need it to do. By creating specialized talismans and affixing them to the armor by binding them to it with certain seals, you may be able to finagle the artifact into working the way you need it to. I must warn you: The preparations for this alone will be diff...

123 - Logic Automaton Assisted Design Pt. 2 [Sturmblitz]

“Make each segment like a tooth,” the Primordial Self stated plainly, forming a floating mockup of its suggestion out of sand. It then made a copy of the mockup, forming a skull with the two butchers as its lower jaws; a visualized mental tangent based solely on the altered design’s vague resemblance of a fanged lower jaw.

“The cutting edge will be a bigger saw while remaining able to cut, and chopping strikes will gain additional anti-armor capabil...