Rather than use a pseudo-core formed in her second stomach, this reaction was rooted within the Hammerforged Heart. With each heartbeat, she felt her insides shifting. The Primordial Self wished to do something drastic. The Thinking Self let it. Red-black sludge rushed out of her lungs with a single hacking cough, only to be consumed and digested the moment they reached her stomach. Her reserves of vitae, previously abundant and vast, dwindled to a puddle as her body tore itself apart and remade itself in the span it would take anyone else to carry out a basic technique. Zel’s lightning, a blinding deluge mere moments ago, suddenly flickered out, only for a dense, flesh-pink aura to begin wafting from her. Unable to bring herself into greater movement at this moment, she walked forward, preparing to defend herself from newly-emboldened enemies who falsely assumed this to be the sign of her exhaustion. Her engine was only halfway through upgrading itself; the spiritual side was done, the flesh had to follow. The Primordial Self had deemed it of utmost importance, beyond her own safety.
As if appearing out of nowhere, a small band of Black, Blue, and Red Robes emerged. She recognized them. Some by the subtle damage to their robes, others by their eyes or stances. They were the small few who had survived her initial incursion.
“You fools were here all along, waiting for your deaths…” she chuckled, her lungs no more than air-sacs at the moment.
One of them, for once, responded in a way that didn’t make her want to roll her eyes out of their sockets. With grim conviction, a Blue Robe flared his aura, took a pair of unfolding mechanized crossbows out of holsters on his legs, and proclaimed: “I will admit that you are still a monster, even with your lightning gone, and you shall most likely strike down the greater portion of us yet, but it is not our place to finish off a wounded beast. It is only our place to harry it and usher it into the hunters’ waiting spears!”
“I assure you, this little breather is just the eye of my storm!” Zel bellowed, even as oxygen deprivation began creeping into awareness. She would be fine for some time, but the more she exerted herself, the more she would burn the rather short wick. They fell upon her, and she struck them down with lightning wrought of the Fulgur which she constantly produced even without breathing. She shored up this lackluster fount of power with her newfound spiritual fangs, minimizing physical movement with tight, efficient motions. A pair of Fang Rippers remained operational. They proved vital tools, her passive Fulgur supply sufficient to puppet them and slow their inexorable march towards failure. Fortunately, exerting one’s aura did not demand pneuma… And Zel had a terribly, terribly large reserve to draw on. As her Thundergods flickered out of being for the moment, the surviving Red Robe alongside a pair of Blue Robes thought to take the opportunity.
Mustering every bit of strength she had, directing focus towards her spirit just as she would towards her body when lifting something at her limit, Zelsys dug in. Of the Blue Robes, one got foolishly close and was dispatched by Fang Rippers. The other met his end when she snared him using several serpentine maws formed from a pile of rubble and put a high-velocity round through him. The fact that it only went into the building behind him rather than all the way through was testament to the Blue Robe’s durability.
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Meanwhile, she directed the full brunt of her Predator Aura at the Red Robe. It was Roderick Von Burgghusen’s last surviving puppet body.
The Red Robe’s body contorted. His own clothes and skin rose up against him; the puppet body’s aura, anemic as it was, crumpled like an empty can at ten hundred leagues beneath the sea. A panicked flare of his aura didn’t save him so much as it ensured that rather than his own clothes, he was torn limb from limb by invisible maws wrought of thin air. Their gruesome shapes were briefly outlined by the splattering of his blood and the strange poisons that filled his guts, only to dissipate the moment the body died. It clattered to the ground like a sack of tools, and exploded into shrapnel as countless mechanisms inside the meatsack went off.
Still, Zelsys didn’t feel entirely herself. Breath returned to her, but trying to Fog-breathe had her faltering. It wouldn’t work without the Truth of Fangs. Zel tried again, this time flexing her spirit and her aura in concert with her body. She reached out the same way she normally did when Fog-breathing, just… Further, using all of her faculties rather than the leftovers of ancient evolution that all humans possessed. At first it felt like liquid rushing into her lungs. An ethereal, immaterial liquid. Fuel. Fuel the likes of which she had only gotten a taste of. It felt like she’d been running on fumes all this time, until this very moment.
At the apex of each slow, deliberate breath, lightning exploded within her chest, a blue glow shining out between her ribs. No more Fog. No more painstakingly dragging the essentia out of the air. With each inhalation, she drank from the Sea of Fog as a thirst-wracked lion would from an oasis. With each breath it became easier, and she gained a greater grasp of her lungs’ altered structure. They weren’t merely flooding with the Fog-sea’s ethereal liquid, but taking in a small portion and dispersing it into a vapour before breaking it down with a combination of Predator Aura and Metabolic Alkahest. The Primordial Self, in its animalistic genius, had redesigned her lungs to well and truly match the technique name “Engine Breathing”.
EVOLUTION SIGN
GEHEIMNIS: ENGINE BREATHING -LIQUID FUEL RETUNE-
It was finally all in place. The missing piece, the Truth of Fangs, had opened her eyes to the method by which she would make Conqueror’s Mantle grow into its full potential. She just had to grasp the process. To restructure the technique on the spot, in the middle of warzone, in the time it took the Order’s next assault to catch up with her. On the whole, not too bad. Zel moved ahead with her incursion into the inner city as she invoked the Despot of Self and took active full control of her insides to better work it out.
“If the Hammerforged Heart is to be the core, it may be simpler than anticipated…”
“Second stomach. Ballast chamber.”
“Will that work?”
“With reinforcement. New lungs will not endure full output for long; flesh constructs. Used Eternal Beast to force the change. Will require some time to grow in permanently after this is over.”
“How long will they last?”
“Long enough.”