Just as she had gradually and carefully purified an ignition core in her battle against Von Wickten's Entomodragon form, Zelsys did the same here. Trying to exert power through her own body was meaningless, she felt it just from how this antediluvian power crushed down upon her. However, the Conqueror's Mantle in itself was not an external exertion of power. It was a set of strengthening techniques which added up to vastly magnify Zel's ability to project power, primarily through forming a short-lived Fulguric reactor core in her second stomach. By orthodox cultivation terms, it was a complex method of creating a False Core without suffering permanent consequences.
As the light of Fulgur flooded her eyes, and the antlers grew from her head, Zelsys poured everything she could into her connection with Fulguris, bidding the spirit to make itself known.
Relief flooded her when Fulguris manifested in her full glory, seething with Fulguric power and the heat of her many blades, which also all oscillated such that the Fog-water underfoot stirred into a churning frenzy around the spirit's feet.
"Carnifex Fulguris... Do as you will. You know your task."
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On the outside, Karmesin could scarcely believe what she was seeing. It was not the fact the Walking Tribulation had somehow managed to break a formation based on trigrams formed from her fragmentary understanding of antediluvian sealing magic.
"Two minutes and thirteen seconds!" the Lady in Red exclaimed smugly, already having called back her subcores into a typical formation of four Flying Eight-trigram Reactors. They acted both as supporting thrusters for her self-propelled flight and as weapons. "I expected you to break it in a minute and a half at most."
Zelsys lashed after Karmesin while her Thundergods grew and coiled around her in preparation to pull her along, spitting a deluge of ball lightning all the while. The Lady in Red had no issue dodging or otherwise neutralizing the suppressive fire, it was Carnifex that she was concerned about. She'd come to understand that Zelsys favoured a particular number of extra segments when attacking with her strange, living weapon at range... But it was barely reliable. Using that knowledge could, at best, give her a one-third chance at dodging one of her attacks on reaction. Leveraging her own superior range was the only way she could win, as it nonetheless took time for the segmented blade to unfurl into a great enough length. Though... Something felt off. She couldn't shake the feeling that Zelsys was holding out. She hadn't even used the Mantle yet. Red had sensed it for a moment when that blade spirit of hers broke Pandora 66, but it vanished the moment the spirit turned back to a weapon.
Red zipped off deeper into the forest, and Zelsys followed close behind.
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The battle continued on as if it had never come to a halt in the first place.
Carnifex, with its edge reverberating faster than any eye could see, tore through Karmesin’s blackstone as a flaming sword would cut through wood. Its segments carved holes straight through the jungle's giant trees, leaving waterfalls of burning sap cascading down their trunks. A number of great beasts made the foolish mistake of straying into the path of the red and blue death-comets as they clashed against one another. They disturbed a mansion-sized hive of man-sized killer bees, but even these mighty armored insects soon learned better than to come after either of the two battlers. Dozens fell to northlight-hued arrows that had not even been intended for them, and dozens more were rent asunder by the incessant whip-like lashing of a terrible blade that didn’t just pass through them as if they were not even there, but shredded them to bits with its mere touch.
It wasn't until the third day of their battle that Zelsys deigned to bring out her newest tricks. It was not out of a sense of superiority or part of some elaborate plan, and it wasn't due to a desire to keep her abilities hidden, either. She had simply become so engrossed in the battle that she hadn't thought to use them.
Indeed, it was Karmesin's own deluge of devilish and delightful stratagems that forced Zelsys to employ these new techniques. An ambush formed from dozens of self-detonating blackstone insects. Hundreds rained down upon her as if out of nowhere, as Karmesin had cleverly disguised pillars behind tree branches, and upon these pillars, like fruits, her constructs had grown. When man-sized spiders that exploded into shrapnel and northlight arrows rained down, Zel realized that she had been in this particular part of the jungle. It was hard not to recognize that unique pattern of environmental damage. It had been around twelve hours ago, during a lull in the fight, when she and Karmesin had engaged in a three-hour-long shootout from a distance of over half a kilometer. It was true that Zelsys herself had laid her own plans in that time, but she hadn't expected Red to go for a tactic like this.
She bided her time picking off the first landers while the rest careened down towards the ground. At this point she already knew that dealing with this would demand the Mantle, and though it was still the crude version which Zelsys had devised as a compensatory aid, she entered that state in the span of seven breaths. From a last-ditch grab for power, the Mantle had become an invaluable tool to squeeze out extra output when she really needed it... And then turn it off until she needed it again.
When had Red figured out Servitors to begin with? Were these even Servitors, or was this part of her advancing along the path of a Pseudo-Dungeon Core? If she could just raise an army under her own strength, Red would be a nightmare to deal with in a proper armed conflict... Unless the Newman Sect's own forces could do the same. She already had a start, between Victor and Jorfr.
Twin cores of Fulgur and Metallum. Carnifex grew. Dozens of segments, passing the mark of hundreds as the serpentine blade coiled around her.
When she felt the timing was right, when she felt the approach of Red's falling army... That was when she let it rip. Indeed, she felt their impending approach; they had disturbed the field of Fulgur which extended out from her in all directions, and now, she had the capacity to react to anything within it, even to distinguish shape and texture.
BUTCHERING ART: UNCOILING SCOLOPENDRA