Without another thought, she willed Fulguris to consume her Tablet as well. Then, she called Fulguris back to herself, leaving everything as it was, and closed her eyes to begin meditating. Inward, she looked, delving far down, and she found it. Fulguris’ inner realm, the spiritual representation of both the spirit itself and the weapon.

It was unlike the Dream Desert that represented the place between her Thinking and Primordial selves. Bladed mountains of steel, golden sunlight, serpentlike dragons flying through the sky alongside Thundergods, rivers of glowing, molten iron that exuded a heat no more or less intense than was pleasant. Lightning struck left and right, yet it somehow felt warm and welcoming. The realm of Fulguris was clearly segmented into seven parts, held together by chains of lightning.

There, in the First Realm, the Root Realm, it stood. A fortress of white stone with a gate of dark steel, gleaming with the unmistakable iridescence of dragonsteel. In one step, seven leagues passed and she was at the gate alongside Fulguris. Within the fortress’ many vaults, everything she had placed into Fog Storage could be found, and where one might expect a throne room, she instead found a four-armed statue-automaton in the same classical style as Willowdale’s stone sentinels, with a great tablet in its right arms and quills in its left.

Out of habit and a desire to see it in motion she checked her Traits, and left the Logic Automaton alone afterwards. It moved in just as stilted a manner as she had expected. Returning to the material world, Zelsys took a shell casing in hand and held it to her back with the intent to put it into storage… And poof, into storage it went. She tried to recall the storage bangle as well as her tablet, and for this, Fulguris herself appeared with both items in hand.

“...Can you devour other objects?”

The weapon spirit shrugged.

After some testing, it became abundantly clear that there were some sort of criteria that made this specific interaction possible, as Zel couldn’t find a single other item that Fulguris could consume in this manner. She assumed it required special arcane properties of some sort. More importantly, she found that the space in which she could pull things out of storage out of the Sigil was somewhat generous, and the transfer was nearly instant - meaning that, since Dragonsteel Shells played nice with Fog Storage, she could completely forego physically carrying her ammo until she came across an ammo type that demanded it. She had worried that Black 7 might forbid her from storing them like this, but it seemed that dragonsteel was more than sufficient to protect and stabilize the substance.

She continued with loading more shells; as meticulous as it was, it was also tedious, and so she passed the time reading scriptures, in particular her Severing Scripture Fragment and a copy of Lydia’s Storm-soul Scripture. The Storm-soul Scripture held no promises of advancement beyond where her own cultivation stood for the moment, but it did nonetheless hold some interesting insights, and Zel felt that she hadn’t yet extracted all of them. As for the Severing Scripture Fragment, she honestly didn’t know if it would, in the end, be useful; the damn thing was so dense and esoteric that she hadn’t even gotten halfway through it yet. Despite that, she had dug up some promising kernels of knowledge on the winding, hard-to-see path to externalizing one’s Armament Aura in a focused manner.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Despite this knowledge, she still found herself unable to do anything directly analogous to swordlight using her own Predator Aura. Every recommended exercise, even after adapting them for herself, produced only a frustration most easily compared to a muscle whose presence she was aware of, but which she couldn’t precisely control.

Nonetheless, after all this time, she felt close to grasping it.

So close.

Just like that itch in the back of her head.

On two fronts now, she found herself bottlenecked, yearning for a piece to complete the puzzle. Real combat against other cultivators had to be the key. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have felt a sense of progression when she fought the Artat Sect’s Ghost Sword Wall.

Soon enough, she would see if she was right.

----------------------------------------

Like their war-golem predecessors of ancient myth, steel-skinned giants ran over an Ankhezian road, flame and lightning their lifeblood. Designations: UOT-114-03 Gundream and UOT-314-01 Steelwing.

At the pack’s head, a head taller than all the others, was a bloody beast, thirsting for the ichor of fleshly things. Designation: UOT-014-02 Bloody Zero G-3 Refit.

Behind them, a column of six half-tracks drove, proudly bearing the insignia of Willowdale on the side; these machines, TR-04-02 Bullhead Combat Transports, were rebuilt and upgraded wartime transports. Within each was a driver, a gunner/aetherwave operator, and eight passengers, all clad in elite Second-model tank suits. Designation: UOT-214-05 Hellhound.

The gun turret was semi-motorized, exploiting the gunner’s own armor to operate it while making it a less appealing capture target - this also made it infinitely easier to train gunners, since the tank-suited human served as the targeting system and thus there was a minimal disconnect. In effect, the turret was a heavy-duty gunner harness for the Second-model tank suit.

Its guns were twin Type-Z2 Cannons, equipped with very simple mechanized magazines that allowed them to fire at a respectable rate - designed to deal with things the crew couldn’t, mainly monsters and old tanks whose armor could be pierced by the advanced weapon. They even carried a limited supply of rounds with Atrine-enriched powder and spitzerhead bullets, with a body of steel and a cold-iron penetrator. They were patterned directly after the Type-1a experimental rounds which had been made famous by the Newman Sect’s elder.

The column was tailed by a handful of huge, heavy-duty motorbikes, atop which rode an eclectic group of cultivators from the Newman Sect.

Meanwhile, well ahead of the pack and quickly growing even further, a sturmgandr and a giant flaming bone-beast tore across the road at over 200km/h. In mere hours, the fog-swallowed city of Eberheim was in sight.