At this time, Zelsys made the decision to clean up her techniques list somewhat, collapsing Beast-butchering Arts and Formless Butchery into the single category of "Butchering Arts", for simplicity's sake. Geheimnis would remain as a category for more esoteric and non-combative techniques.
Despite all these changes, despite having returned to the peak of her strength and surpassed it by far, Zelsys was down here, in seclusion, frustrated.
The reason was simple: Even now, she couldn’t produce swordlight.
Swordlight, that energy which some manuals described as Armament Aura when it came to unorthodox, non-swordlike weapons, or even armor and shields. She could certainly form constructs of Fulgur and launch them just as she would do with the Flying Thundersaw technique, but this was not swordlight as any tome or scroll described it, and she had more efficient methods of attacking with lightning. In the most orthodox sense, Armament Aura was a spiritual phenomenon formed when the soul of an armament’s bearer came into resonance with the soul of the armament. Unorthodox methods, such as the Walking Way of the Formless Sword, centered around generating swordlight with anything the wielder got their hands on. The Formless Sword achieved this by creating an armament spirit which dwelt inside the wielder's own soul in a manner not unlike Thundergods or other elemental daemons. The user would then extend this spirit into anything from a floppy sleeve to a stick or his own hand. It was said to be one of the arts devised by Sagruhel Ironhand, alongside a mysterious, forbidden art that gave him total control over his own body.
Even in orthodox manuals, Storm-soul Cultivation was explicitly listed as one of the methods whose practitioners most commonly achieved swordlight…
And here she was.
Wielding a blade which had torn the Living Storm from the heavens, which had slain one of the divine generals, even before it had been reborn. A blade forged from the heart of a meteorite and the "claw" of a dragon, a blade which had been brought to new life with the token of the Skinless One as a hammer, a blade bathed in the essence of the same dragon whose body had given part of its material. A blade forged with all the power of a living god of craftsmen.
And she couldn't even make it spit out a stupid sword beam. She could feel Fulguris seething over this fact as well, the blade's individual segments shuddering and its twin arclines flaring in anger.
It really shouldn't have ticked her off as badly as it had, but she figured if she was going to take a go at seclusion training in preparation for her duel with Red, she might as well resolve this annoyance before it can grow into a mental block.
Thus, she set herself to iterating on the Flying Thundersaw to a degree which would entirely divorce the technique from a mere imitation of flying blades and swordlight waves.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
Carnifex split. Lightning arced between its segments.
One swing. Five blades flew out.
Three days of continuous refinement passed in the blink of an eye. Zelsys had only eaten once in this time, and it was not out of need, but because she had grown frustrated with lack of progress and decided to clear her head for a few hours. Her sole meal fell into this rest period.
At this moment, she finally felt ready to attempt distilling a new technique.
Fulguris appeared by Zelsys' side.
Upon her mistress grasping the handle that was the end of her tail, Fulguris became Carnifex.
A core of Metallum contained in the second stomach, side by side with a core of Fulgur. Both of them containing vast and terrible elemental power, compressed with terrible fierceness, but in a short span of time. Unstable. Then, both cores were smashed together.
Carnifex grew. And grew. And grew.
One after the next, dozens of new segments appeared between the first and endmost segment, coiling into a spiral around Zelsys.
One swing.
The many-segmented monstrosity uncoiled with terrible violence.
Dozens of gashes appeared in the glacierglass around her, from the floor, to the walls and ceiling, forming a spiral pattern.
She called back all these disparate blades, repairing them with some more Metallum and arraying them back into their places, with equal numbers of construct segments between each real segment and the next. For ease of distinction, she decided to refer to her blade's real segments as True Fangs, and construct segments as False Fangs. Having already decided to only separate the middle five Fangs from Carnifex due to their mutual similarity, Zel also decided to distinguish the first and last segments from the rest: The Root and Crown.
Further repetition.
Many gashes now scarred her environment, despite her environment's constant and quite aggressive regeneration, which was accompanied by creaking from the growing-in glacierglass. If she didn't know better, she might think it was the ice sheet itself groaning at her for making it exert effort.
A new technique was born, named for the ultra-lengthened Carnifex's unsettling resemblance to a giant centipede.
BUTCHERING ARTS: UNCOILING SCOLOPENDRA
Three more days.
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Beneath the Bjorn longhouse, there were people in subterranean chambers. Some were in seclusion, meditating or communing with the earthen spirits, or perhaps those of the glacier itself.
Several of these individuals felt an untoward tremor at that moment, however. Not merely physical, but spiritual. As if some overwhelming intent to tear them limb from limb had just surged up from beneath. In the following days, the still-recovering Bjorn clan's head would find himself dealing with questions about a terrible beast sealed away under the estate, and whether that beast might be breaking free.
Their concerns were anything but placated when they learned that the source of that inhumanly savage aura was none other than the hero who had woken the Revenant King.
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The majority of her time before the duel had passed, and Zelsys had deepened her precision control over Carnifex's segments. She hadn't expected that such precise control was even possible, but here she was, able to completely remove the five central True Fangs and rejoin the remaining two into a hooked cleaver. If need be, she could fill in the missing True Fangs with False ones to make up for the lost size, though this would obviously not be a perfect replacement. The issue of losing segments didn't concern her, as she had quickly figured out that she could simply demanifest the blade, including all its separated True Fangs, and it would be whole when she next summoned it.