Zefaris wholeheartedly wished she had Victor’s multitrack thinking and hypercognition. She was splitting her mind between keeping track of fire-support requests, trying to advance, keeping watch towards the center of the city, and trying to analyze the Red Fog Dome to see if it could be broken.
Then, a scream. Not one that was heard, but felt. A ripple of inconceivable suffering and wretchedness blasted out from the city center, washing over everything like a sickly tide of pure negativity. It was… Familiar. Unsettlingly so. She had felt something like this on the few occasions when she had ventured towards the center of the Exclusion Zone.
Not more than a minute later, her focus collapsed into a single point when she beheld a deluge of flesh beasts marching, hopping, skittering, and even flying from the center of the city, many of them purely organic and twisted together such that still-screaming, still-thrashing humans were included in their mass. Several Red Robes led them, alongside a woman in a dress-like scarlet-and-gold robe. She could only be described as the opposite of Red; unequivocally beautiful on the outside, while everything else about her suggested nothing but the most revolting personage imaginable. To say Zefaris determined it based on subtle tells would have been a lie; this woman absolutely radiated cruelty and malice.
Zefaris double-checked that the Nameless Phantom was ready and that he had gone unnoticed. The soldier, nestled in an attic window some hundred-fifty meters to the left, gave a thumbs-up. All her kinetic mirrors were set up, and just in case, she willed the Black Cylinder to prepare an all-Dracofulminate reload for Pentacle. Expensive, but this enemy had no clue about her true firepower, so it had no strategic value if she didn’t use it.
“Which among you worthless meatsacks dared strike out against my precious works of art?! Come forth and slit your own throats and I shall leave your corpses intact!” screeched the woman, commanding her beasts of twisted flesh forward.
Four hundred meters out and rapidly approaching. Tankmen swarmed below as they struggled to get into opportune positions, active enemy resistance waning as the survivors retreated to join up with the horrid woman. The Flesh Sculptor, if her words were to go by. Zefaris dispelled Phantom Manus and called out her Sword Phantoms, which, including two Gun Phantoms and five Formless Phantoms, left her near her limit for what she could sustain without straining. Weirdly, the Nameless Phantom didn’t levy a noticeable strain on her soul to keep around, only when it fired, and even then it was an easily-tolerated momentary spike.
Zefaris sent out a request for aid from any disciples who could reach her, and in moments, she saw both Vaceran and Mata making their way over. Vaceran used his ghostly arms for mobility, sending them out as far as ten meters from himself, whereas Mata blasted around with bursts of flame in a similar but much more limited manner to Victor. She was sort of… Skating or skiing around, it looked like. She came to a halt nearby, remaining in place and simply breathing in a measured manner, her flames flaring around her, only to go from orange to yellow, retreating into her body. A version of Sigmund’s Tranquility Echoes adapted for one with a naturally igneic physiology.
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Silent and resolute, Vaceran clapped his aura arms together and began to recite a prayer in an unknown language. His aura, just as lilac as his arms, flared around him, and dozens of shingles and bricks tore themselves free to fly towards him, forming a pair of utterly massive, rough arms floating next to his stumps. Using his aura alone he brought out several paper seals, which adhered to these stone arms, ghostly chains extending between his stumps and the limbs. With a second clap, the masses of clay and rock transmuted into statuesque limbs of near-perfect dark stone, and a third clap solidified the ghostly chains, which, despite appearing fully real, still lengthened and shortened as his stone arms floated up and down.
Understandably, the Flesh Sculptor had her beasts move ahead, throwing out a flying knife of her own that crackled with an unsettling power and darted back and forth with great agility, even while flying as quickly as the bullet from a sparklock pistol. Mata and Vaceran readily met the Flesh Beasts in battle, Mata’s rays and missiles of condensed flame scything and tearing away at them without issue. Meanwhile, Vaceran’s fists struck out with the force of cannonballs while he maintained a meticulous safe range from his foe, pounding away at the beasts one after the next without relent, turning terrible beasts into torn-up piles of meat one after the next. Any damage his arms suffered didn’t seem to be an issue for him, already repaired by the time the limb had returned to him and the next punch was chambered.
All this, from the initial preparation to the clash, spanned a few precious seconds. In this time, Zefaris annihilated four Flesh Beasts and struck down three Blue Robes, each over a kilometer away.
From where she stood, she could see Victor as he came flying back, a pack of bestial servitors leaping from one rooftop to the next, each leap accompanied by blasts of black flame and further jets of it as they flew, alowing them to move with speed and grace second only to their master. Each and every one looked like a smaller, sleeker, more draconic dawnwolf, clearly closely modeled on false drakes, with the addition of grasping tails like dawnwolf’s own. They wouldn’t get here in time. Zefaris let go of all but the Nameless and two Sword Phantoms. Before the Flesh Sculptor’s flying dagger could reach her, Manus flickered into being and grabbed it out of the air, digging his heels into the roof and even using his sword as an anchor as the weapon tried to rip itself free. It pushed and pushed, until, when Zefaris felt Manus couldn’t hold it any longer, she willed him to spin around and throw it back at the Flesh Sculptor.