Without a moment’s wait, she anchored herself in place and prepared to fire. She instantly felt an immense pressure fall upon her, Third's fiery gaze piercing her. Just as with the Hemomancer, it felt as if her blood was being pulled from her body. Zelsys flooded her blood with metallum, reinforcing her veins to the extreme, raising her blood pressure to explosive levels. Veins, like overpressurized pipes, bulged out under her skin, showing even on her right arm. With a mighty flex of muscle and aura both, Third's grip on her blood was broken. A wave of backlash came rippling through the blood-maelstrom, tearing a short canal in front of Zelsys and kicking up a fountain of blood from the rapidly-growing lake in the square's center. A number of flesh-cables were severed, but the meat quickly squirmed back together. Zel wished she had Victor here to subvert the flesh construct, but she also knew he couldn't withstand this environment for long, and Third's retaliation would at best incapacitate him.
Another ring of the bell. More screaming from the sacrifices. The maelstrom grew to envelop her. It felt, at once, like a vortex of boiling blood filled with invisible clawing things that desperately wanted to rip the life out of her. She pulled Carnifex out of the ground, and with a single swing, carved a swath into the maelstrom. Choosing to trust her other means of anchoring herself, she dedicated Carnifex to the duty of simultaneously shielding her from the maelstrom and disrupting its flow. At the point where the flow rejoined to her left, it crashed together and caused violent implosions, sending destabilizing ripples all throughout the flow.
Third once more focused his gaze on her. She felt the briefest, faintest urge to just throw down her arms and kneel, but it was snuffed out so swiftly and violently that it only served to galvanize her resolve. A far less subtle intrusion followed. The mental clash which followed lasted barely two seconds in reality.
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Third couldn't believe this. That the enemy elder could withstand his aura pressure was one thing; it only proved that she was, in fact, worthy of being called a sect elder. Everything else, however... It just didn't add up.
To start with, Third couldn't figure out how or why the Severing Fangs could cut through the ritual's aura vortex. A weapon imbued with sacrificial power could achieve a similar effect, but it would demand a specific technique, or a profound strength and purity of aura... But the aura around the blade was no more intense than that which swirled around That Woman. It was a surpassingly intense display of spiritual strength, that was true, but it didn't feel like the right answer. The blade just glided through as if it was going through water, rather than the sum life and suffering of thousands.
And that gun on her arm. Something about it felt foreboding, but he couldn't tell what it was. It felt as if the dragon-head on its muzzle was alive, but surely, that was just the weapon spirit manifesting itself.
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He formed a servitor and sent it out on an infinitesimally thin thread of aura in an attempt to mount a subtle mental attack, expecting it to at least momentarily disrupt her, to buy him time. He felt the backlash of his servitor's destruction the instant it made contact.
With engaging the Newman Elder in direct combat being out of the question, Third portioned off a section of himself to maintain the ritual's stability while he mounted a direct assault on her mind and spirit from within. He counted himself lucky that she didn't know not to directly meet his gaze, but couldn't shake the feeling of staring into the shining eyes of a predator waiting to tear his throat out. Truly, whatever unorthodox version of Storm-soul Cultivation she practiced was profoundly in-tune with the bestial side of mankind. Third decided to use this to his advantage, intending to use the Newman Elder's inner beast as a weapon against her. There was a risk to this technique, as to any, but thanks to using it countless times to break down the minds of future living puppets, Third had reached a point where even the maximal backlash wouldn't cause him any permanent damage. In the worst-case scenario, his attacking mental partition would fracture into countless pieces, minimizing the backlash and destroying all but the tiniest, subtlest cognitohazards, which would be easily stamped out when, mere seconds later, his mind reformed without so much as a mental scar to show for it. Thousands of test subjects and dozens of gruelling brain operations, carried out by his own hand, had been the cost for this: The Fluid Mind.
Such a scenario was, of course, absurd; the technique's sole flaw was that its superb characteristics demanded a majority share of his mental faculties.
With but a glance, Third infiltrated the deepest reaches of his foe's mindscape.
LIVING PUPPET SUTRA: EGO KILLER
He found himself within a desolate desert spreading out into infinity in all directions, with jagged mountains on the horizon. A gigantic blade of glass split the thoughtscape, lodged into the skull of some three-headed abomination of equally prodigious size. His own thoughtscape, too, was littered with subdued heart demons... Albeit none of this magnitude.
From far above, seven serpents of lightning descended, six of them already giant, with the seventh - or perhaps the first - dwarfing all the six nonetheless. From beneath the sand, twin monstrosities that blocked out the stars emerged:
To the east, a form of bleached-white bone and writhing flesh in the vaguest form of a bear.
To the west, an equally titanic monster in quasi-human figure, with gangly, clawed limbs and sodden hair hanging down over bloody antlers.
Third had seen this before. The Cultivation Identity Defense; a means by which some cultivators, usually unknowingly, transformed aspects of their cultivation and martial arts into mental constructs in the case of a cognitive attack. He'd seen it... But never like this. Never this refined. The mental focus required for thoughtforms of this magnitude and this number had to be inconceivable. Bit by bit, Third's respect for his sadly doomed opponent grew.