Zefaris received another aetherwave message, mere moments after having struck down the Flesh Sculptor.
“Elder Zefaris, I request that you minimize physical damage to the flesh beasts if it does not impede forward progress overmuch. I wish to make use of them,” Victor’s voice rang out inside her head.
“Are you certain that your plan will work?” she asked back.
“If what I wish to do fails, I will abandon it,” came an answer right away.
It was not an unreasonable request, so she chose to trust him.
The beasts were stunned without their commander for a few seconds, and even once they resumed attacking, they had lost the precise tactics that had made them so dangerous. A few Red Robes and even Blue Robes moved in to try and retake the reins, but they all met their ends at the muzzle of her gun.
Victor thereafter returned, carrying in the ring of his staff a blazing flame tainted by the same cursed crimson light as that which the enemy harnessed. He flew unsteadily, holding the khakkhara in a death-grip, using all three of his hands. Then, he stabbed the first flesh beast he came upon, and the crimson drained out of it and into his staff, the creature falling limp… Only to reflux back down its length and return into the beast.
He left it behind and moved onto the next beast, repeating the process. Meanwhile, by the time he stuck the third, the first beast had begun transforming. Its flesh twisted undulated, bones cracking, meat squelching, skin ripping and reforming. Gradually, the substance of four humans that had been brutally merged together was transformed into a giant humanoid with two heads, a face on its chest, and another on its back. Its build was immense and deformed, with a barrel-like torso and trunk-like limbs, sagging flesh everywhere. It turned a wrathful gaze towards the nearest member of the Order.
“E-VIL!” the beast’s four voices screamed all at once as it leapt towards the cultivator, slashing with its clawed hands, spewing acid from its mouths.
One after another, the same thing repeated with each and every beast Victor struck with his staff. It looked like he was pulling the crimson energy out of them, changing it, and then returning it somehow. Each time, the flame in his staff grew, and Zefaris instinctively felt it to be different somehow from bonefire. What was he doing?
She didn’t want to disturb him in case it was particularly delicate, and so she shook off the shock and focused on covering him, belting out a command to Vaceran and Mata, who were also similarly shocked.
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“Ensure that Victor is not disturbed, protect him from the enemy!” she shouted.
The air felt strange. Winds began to pick up, coming from the city center, and it wasn’t just the air that was moving. She could see it; not clearly, but it was there. An ominous aura swirled about the cathedral, but streams escaped the mire and flowed… Somewhere. Not only that, any stream in Victor’s vicinity was sucked into the eye of his staff, not being consumed, but passing through it and growing in intensity twofold. It was a holy artifact, so she supposed it might be naturally amplifying the desperate prayers of Eberheim’s people.
Zefaris didn’t expect divine intervention to come… But she supposed the Newman Sect and its allies were close enough.
The redhead soon enough landed by her side, his helmet open, rivulets of sweat running down his face as he leaned on his staff.
Their advance deeper into the city from that point forward felt almost too smooth. Zefaris dared not presume there would be no further major resistance, but… That turned out to be the case. The vanguard of Flesh Unions did all the hard work for them, tracking down the Order’s members with greater effectiveness than any of the Newman Sect’s members, as if they just knew where they were to begin with.
In the absence of a constant, incessant demand for her full attention, Zefaris decided to look ahead… And asked Victor to lift her high into the sky. At this point, she was certain that a fall from terminal velocity would do more damage to wherever she landed than to her, and she was certain she could stop herself before that came into play.
He brought her up there, over a hundred meters above everything, and there she carved a glyph into the air to stand on.
“If I may, why this far up? Do you mean to carve a glyph of Eternal Snow around the whole city?” Victor asked, basing his assumption on what he had read of the Blue Moon War.
“No, no. The environment which allowed that to happen doesn't exist here, I just wanted a good vantage point. Look…” she pointed towards the cathedral at the center of the city. Countless bodies were strewn about its surroundings, a small lake of blood in the center of the square in front. With normal sight it looked as if huge piles of meat were placed around the perimeter, but Zefaris saw what they were; people, melded together, yet still alive. For some reason dead Order cultivators and smashed-up statues were also spread around the place in a few spots.
“The bodies?”
“No. The array patterns. The inconsistent channels gouged into the ground, the torn-out cobbles. Even the way the meat snakes over the square and climbs up the cathedral. They’re not just painting a giant array glyph, but turning the entire square into a…”
The words caught in her throat as she saw the bigger picture.
“...No. Not the square. It’s the whole inner city.”
“I… Admit that I cannot see much more than the base pattern. Like a spiral closing in on the cathedral.”
“That’s enough for you to help me.”
“With what?”
“Sabotaging the array,” she stated matter-of-factly. “We will time our entry into the inner city so that Zelsys takes the bulk of their attention, and while they are distracted, we will plant resonators at key points around the glyph. It’s designed to first expand and magnify the energy of the sacrificial rite by tapping into some well of power beneath it, probably a Leyline Well. The second step is capturing it and harnessing it in some way I cannot quite make out, as the glyph continues into the cathedral.”
Despite the certainty of her words, she wasn’t.