akasoindustries

300 - Iron Rider, Fleshly Crawler

A/N: I've unfortunately been struck with a bout of hay fever (rather, cat hair fever). Were the circumstances different I would've tried to power through and grind out a chapter regardless, and would've only done this had I been unable to reach my writing goal for the day, but I am not willing to risk a drop in quality in this critical part of the book. As such, there will be no chapter tomorrow.

Sorry for the cliffhanger.

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299 - Ubul, the Beast Reborn in Stone

This could not come to pass.

Even if Ubul could survive, even if he could pretend to be defeated and lie in wait again, there was no doubt in his mind that by the virtue of this defeat alone, the Emperor would see him as a liability, a failure, a sacrificial pawn at best. It was true that he had eliminated one of his priority targets, but that was only one of several components to his task. Even if his position were to be returned to him, he would never again be allowed to live this fai...

298 - AbsoЯute Zero

Raising a hand, the great general produced several dozen hardened stones, shaped into fine points and tipped with artificial cold-iron, launching them in a barrage towards Zefaris, a defiant gesture meant to parody her own projectiles. In the moments it took him to do this, the three-meter jet of rigormantic energy escaping the blonde’s left eye vanished as she projected a vastly downsized, simplified version of the Great Seal of Eternal Snow onto the ground beneath her fee...

297 - Fragment of Lost Hyperborea

Another, larger seal came after it, one which would temper the resultant projectile, hardening it with selective Gelum saturation much like Ubul hardened his own stone with Terra saturation, while also imparting “Stillness” into the projectile to render it more like the stillness of death, thus more resistant to change.

The third seal was Impact Driver, serving to accelerate the projectile even further and vastly improve its penetrative capabilities, should it hold ...

296 - Embodiment of Snow Devil

A/N: I need to take a bit of extra time for polish, so no chapter tomorrow.

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The cold numbness which had washed over her now grew into the feeling of absolute cold, a thin jet of blue-white Gelum Fog escaping the Philosopher’s Eye, progressively growing larger and more intense.

She channeled Gelum directly into Tempesta’s action as she loaded its tube and placed the loading tube back in its...

295 - I am Panzermensch Pt. 2

Five flashes were seen overhead once more, now much closer, so close they were discernible as coins. Each of them was struck by one comet in turn the arcane glyph upon its surface focusing the energy of the supercritical core at the heart of the comet, and reflecting it directly into Ubul’s own core as a singular lance of five elongaged twin-tailed comets wound together into a ten-tailed spiral drill. The hardened shield of his own limb would have held up, had the blood-red tank not exploit...

294 - I am Panzermensch

What felt like a bonfire started up in his stomach, the burning pain spreading all throughout is body as the stench of sulphur filled his breath and a rising sense of blazing anger overtook him, this time his own, mixing and blending with Zero’s rage within the man known as the Steel Comet as he slipped his left arm out of the interface sleeve, reaching up and behind his seat, opening an emergency access hatch.

He grabbed one of the vital cables making up the connection between Zero�...

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...

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 wha...

291 - Firefly Thundercannon

The flash of steel was too fast to see, and beyond even Ubul’s ability to react to. In a single slash, a cut whose speed surpassed sight and sound while being elegant enough to not produce a thunderclap, Makhus severed a chunk of Ubul’s upper-left torso alongside a third of his core and half his head, only for the general to appear unfazed as he spun around and kicked the swordsman in the side with such force that his armor crumpled and he was sent careening across the ground. As if nothi...

290 - Re: Ubul

His body now even more closely mimicked his petrified form, for despite the presence of a left arm it was merely floating at the shoulder, his back was still littered with dozens of bayonets. A single crystalline core shone embedded halfway in his breast, right where his heart ought to be, plain for all to see. It seethed with such terrible power that one would’ve been hard pressed to ignore it, even if one was entirely blind to matters of the arcane. The General raised his hand, and with a...

289 - Toppled

Indeed, a gust of wind, one so terribly powerful and focused it even made Ubul step back. The wind mage detachment had followed Sigmund's example, concentrating all their capabilities into supporting the Hobbyist Wind Mage, allowing him to once more form the anthropomorphic dervish that was the Howling Wind God. It ripped across the battlefield, picking up flame-possessed and claymen alike, becoming filled by green flame as the skeletons within it endlessly spewed forth the draconic magic ani...

288 - Reignition

Lilac glow was overtaken by green flame, flooding out of the Guardian’s eyes and filling the many cracks now spreading all across the statue’s form, burning the arms which grasped it and forcing Ubul to drop the Guardian lest he lose more limbs.

Zelsys, meanwhile, embedded the Lightning Butcher into Ubul’s back, bracing her feet against it as she meticulously charged the muscles she would need to withstand the immense recoil, simultaneously enriching and refining the contents of h...

287 - The Fire of Heaven Remade Through Man

Yet again, the world came to a crawl for the historian. Despite Sigmund having learned how to focus a beamwand’s output into a single blast, only now had he truly pushed it in any real way, let alone one as significant as this feat. With this, the technique was forever branded into his being.

THE FIRE OF HEAVEN REMADE THROUGH MAN

TRANQUILITY ECHOES: HEAVEN-PIERCING COMET

At that same moment, a mighty CLANG sounded, its cla...

286 - Heaven-piercing Comet

He wouldn’t have had the time to do any of this were it not for the bravery of a particular insane norseman, the giant man having brought his hammer to bear upon Ubul’s knee and shattered it, climbing atop the general and smashing away at his stone skin, freezing it and rendering it fragile, causing the water within it to expand and pull Ubul’s armor apart from the inside. Jorfr had drawn out the full power of his connection to the earthen spirits, armored in ice from head to toe, his h...

285 - Mantle of the Incandescent

Taking the opportunity, Strake turned his tank around and leapt atop the general as well, using a solidly-stuck arm segment to stand on while he fired Zero’s pilebunkers into the shoulder of one arm after another, sending the giant stone serpents tumbling to the ground. Zefaris, even with her left eye constantly busy carving a kinetic mirror glyph on a tree somewhere out of way, saw this, and she also saw that Zero’s pilebunkers grew dull and deformed after it had severed three of Ubul’...

284 - Blue Moon Pt. 3

Even if the statue couldn’t overpower Ubul in a contest of strength, Blackstone reinforced with Azoth-auric Amalgam superseded any mundane rock no matter how rickly infused with Terra, and the edge of the Sister’s Sword bit into the haft of Ubul’s polearm, enough for the general to feel the need to kick the statue away. It sailed overhead as Zelsys strode onto the battlefield, crashing into the treeline behind her.

Ubul’s eyes scanned over the battlefield as his claymen came to ...

283 - Blue Moon Pt. 2

Crovacus simply downed a cocktail of various painkillers, high-concentration medium-suspended essentia, and alchemicals designed to ease its otherwise lethal toxicity. Despite the fact both of the noblemen possessed stormward talismans, neither planned to fight Ubul, rather deciding - independently of one another - to shore up the battle-line and manage the claymen, taking potshots at Ubul at opportune times.

Ozmir went through his silken bag. Normally, something from a beast aligned to...

282 - Blue Moon

Despite the passing of nearly a full week, none in the growing camp felt that enough time had been afforded to them. Even with the aid of mages and machines, even with tanks of bleeding-edge geopolymerase to turn dirt and clay to solid rock with, their fortifications were still barely comparable with that looming mass of rock and stone at the center of the battlefield.

Not only had Makhus had his armor repaired between the initial defensive battle and now, he had, with the Iron Brotherh...

281 - Perilous March

In the end, the statues turned out orders of magnitude more important than thought. They were not merely a hardened frontline with functionally zero logistical overhead, they were also not a mere autonomous weapons system. The Revered and Reviled among them understood commands, they merely chose to ignore them if those commands did not clearly line up with the defense of willowdale. One had to explicitly mention that the greatest immediate threat to Willowdale was several days’ march to the...

280 - Victory, Insofar as Survival Can be Considered Such

No ideas came to mind. No sudden empowerment from the belt, no sudden epiphany. Only crushing darkness and pressure. He felt the few portions of his suit that were not attached to the exoskeleton being squeezed in tight and tighter, crushingly so. Bits of clay started pushing their way in through the gaps of his right arm’s plating. He held his breath, choosing to hold out as long as he could while he tried to think of a solution. With his lungs full of Fog and what air remained inside his ...

279 - Heartbreaker Thundercannon

First, she would split the beast open, and for this, the Butcher was ideal. Its heated edge baked the clay as she cut it, rendering reconstitution difficult if not impossible. She carved away, repeatedly invoking Heartbreaker for guidance.

Once she had a deep enough gash in the clay to stick her entire arm in up to the shoulder, she did just that, grasping the gaunt-cannon’s trigger lever as she marshalled every bit of power she could, from that which she had stockpil...

278 - Panzermensch Hatsudo

A/N: Apologies for the lack of a chapter yesterday. I had decided to take a nap around 5pm, and it happened to turn into a 12hr sleep.

__________________________________________________________________________________Without a split-second’s rest or hesitation he turned around, severing the tendril which threatened to grab him before he moved on to the second slash, which would destroy the monstrosity’s remaining cores.

Plunge the sword in. Deep breath. Exhale, step forward, c...

277 - Re: Soul For the Sword

This was amazing. True chaos. Death and destruction all around, rattling his bones and threatening to blow out his eardrums even though he knew his helmet would protect him against even directed sonic attacks. An environment where, under any other circumstances, he would’ve hid and tried to find gover. It didn’t matter. Inside this steel skin, pumped to the gills with alchemicals tailored to him and him alone, wielding his very own artifact weapon, Makhus felt invincible.

What the G...

276 - Defense of Willowdale

Elsewhere, within Willowdale, deep underground, Kanbu floated in a sensory deprivation tub he had borrowed from a Fog-sailor, his body covered in complex paint and talismans which directly linked him to the great statue. He didn’t have to be present in body or soul in order to render assistance, and enabling the Watcher to reach its full potential was the best manner of assistance he could think of. It was not like its siblings, the stone giant was too big to be built around a human skeleto...

275 - Rising Thunder Pt. 4

Through aetherwave comms, loudly-shouted commands, and even words exchanged between defenders, the knowledge spread that the Clay Soldiers’ cores could be discerned from the outside, and thanks to their possession of direct aetherwave, it was the tankmen who knew first, with the artillery-men being second. And, this information, had come from several individuals with the sight to discern such things, Zefaris among them.

Indeed, Zefaris had noticed, and one after the other, she put cla...

274 - Rising Thunder Pt. 3

Artillery crews scrambled to load their mortars and field cannons, tankmen put their machines into first-gear and began spinning up their engines, training their weapons on the treeline. Mortars were fired at the marked target zones, one after the other, spreading out to cover as wide an area of the forest as possible while giving the scouts opportunity to get clear; a brief whistle on the descent, before a thunderous BOOM audible even here. Cultivators and normal people alik...

273 - Rising Thunder Pt. 2

Stormward Talismans had long been distributed, save for the few spares Zel had, and these she kept for herself, to give to whoever proved to be particularly capable in the impending battle. Despite these discordant forces, by some miracle, a cohesive battle-line managed to form. Heavy machinery, First-model tankmen, statues, and cultivators at the tip of the wedge, with defensive artillery and the more normal people among them standing as a backline meant to pick off any Clay Soldiers that go...