The redhead stabbed his staff into the ground, stepped away, and began performing an impossible hand-sign sequence; his left hand for perfectly possible ones, his right hand for strange, stiff signs befitting its size, and his third hand performing serpentine, undulating signs behind him. His dome of brambles closed in and closely enveloped all his victims. A bead of black flame formed within the ring of his staff, the core of his belt flaring and his armor’s many vents spitting small gusts of the same fire. The staff’s four jade rings spun around, and the next moment, a deluge of fire erupted from it, and his fleshy pyre erupted in flame as if it had been soaked in accelerant.
Rather than burn things, however, it seemed to petrify them… No, it was turning them to bone, and somehow, the flame exclusively affected the redhead’s own gruesome creations and the people they were entrapping.
ERADICATION SIGN
A TASTE OF THE SEVEN HELLS
MAGUS GESTALT FORMATION: BONEYARD CREMATORIUM
It was only brief, a few seconds, and when it was over, he immediately took his staff and turned to Lydia: “I will see if I can catch the one who got away. Stay here for now, if I do not return within half a minute, go back to Fort 57.”
Lydia nodded.
Then, in a blast of flame, he soared upward past the trees’ crowns. Such a feat, normally reserved only for immortals of legend, made to seem casual and inconsequential by his demeanor.
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Flying was by no means an inconsequential feat for Victor. It was significantly more energy-efficient than he’d expected, but he still didn’t default to this mode of movement. He hadn’t exactly gotten much time to get used to it since the blood feud.
Victor chased after the escapee, quickly closing the distance as he followed the disturbance left by his strong aura, but… It was his scimitar that he found, while the man himself had evaded him. The sword had been flying at a believable running speed, and fell to the ground the moment Victor landed next to it.
Frustrated, he returned to Lydia, transforming Dawnwolf back into its beast form. Riding atop the servitor the two made their way back to Fort 57, where a mass execution was taking place… If it could be called that. It was in fact Jorfr inside a circle drawn in the dirt, surrounded by a number of the surviving would-be raiders. A strange, small cultivator with a huge pipe stood off to the side, alongside a few others with tangible auras and a crowd of normal people. They seemed to have been waiting for his and Lydia’s return.
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“Now, the trial by combat may begin!” the pipe man called out.
To describe what followed as a battle was not accurate. It was a slaughter. Jorfr refrained from summoning simulacra or exerting his aura, perhaps as part of some self-limiting agreement or for his own amusement, but that made little difference. Superbia just went straight through his foes like they weren’t even there, and the explosions of just one of Iceberg Breaker’s impacts turned half of his foes into mushy gore. He was surrounded by corpses in the span of moments.
“Thus Iusticia’s judgment is carried out!” the pipe man once more shouted, spinning on his heel and walking towards the fort. “Now take their things and let’s get some drinks.”
“...I could use a drink,” Lydia agreed.
And so, as the people of Fort 57 moved in to devour those who had sought to devour them, our heroes sat down, drank, and talked. The sole reason they were granted peace was that Jorfr plainly stated that they were not to be bothered, and none dared go against him.
Questions inevitably arose as to how exactly Lydia had arrived at her current state.
“Well I already had the foundations of Sanger Family arts and a sword controlling technique. That technique was what got me chased out of the sect, little princeling or dukeling or whatever the fuck he was didn’t like a “commoner” doing something he couldn’t, even with access to all the sect’s limited-access scriptures. From there, I worked off of this,” she said, taking a Sturmblitz Kunst 0 pamphlet out of her pocket.
“My swordlight is weak, and since Vysaga already made lightning, I just went for the one method I knew of that could support it. I won’t get into how I got my hands on a Storm-soul Cultivation scripture. But, y’know, funny thing about who knows how many centuries of barely any cultivation going on… Is that I just walked my ass on up to the Stormbloom and called down a tribulation without asking… Then used pills made from two-century old herbs to heal myself afterwards. And all I had to do was help a creepy old man pick those very herbs. Sure, I got some burns from it, and my right eye is just fucked, but all in all, it was a hell of a trade.”
“Why not come to the Newman Sect? We can replace that busted eye of yours, but you’ll have to stick around for a little while so we can be sure you acclimate to it properly,” Victor offered. He had good reason to make the offer; it was the same reason he and Jorfr had split from Zelsys and Zefaris, or at least one of them. The place to which they had ventured, a concealed Three Kings Era ruin, had been one of Koschei’s old laboratories. Everything organic within the ancient dungeon had either decayed beyond use or was far inferior to on-hand alternatives, but the place had held several very interesting things. There were manuals and tomes, included among them one detailing the concept of a mask by which one might draw out dormant aspects of one’s mind. More immediately interesting, though, was a great stash of dungeontech - prosthetics making up much of it. There were also blackstone tablets and strange tools intended for creating and modifying dungeontech. Koschei’s vestige remembered that Nameless, the First King, had been the only one to create these tools.