Sensory overload. That was the only appropriate description for Victor's current situation that came to his mind. There was the maelstrom, the disruptor pylons, the Dawnwolf armor, his Servitors and Flesh Unions fighting against the Order's gruesomely-revived survivors, not to mention his staff's strange state and the threads of divine energy that were becoming increasingly more visible. The flying statue knights forming a barrier that was already nearly gone, then the giant aura monster coming out around the barrier's remnants, only for a barely-recognizable, flying Zero to intercept it.
Despite having the raw mental processing power to parse it, his actual senses couldn't keep up - anything he didn't actively focus on kept blending together into noise. He missed Borea. Piloting Teutobochus against Eisengeist and later raining death on the Conspirator Clans' forces was relaxing compared to this.
"Focus. First pylon, now!" his second inner voice commanded in an effort to keep it together.
Thrusting his hands out towards the pylon, fingers locked into painful gestures by his armour, Victor awakened it. The eldritch runes flared to life, painful to glimpse even from the corner of his vision. It leapt up into the air and turned so that its sharp bottom end pointed into the vortex at an angle, against its rotation. Then, it began revolving like a drill, and a ray of lilac light erupted out of its point, while a jet of monochrome flame came out of its other end, slowly pushing it towards the vortex. On its own, the one beam had barely any effect, blasting a small, shallow cavity into the maelstrom and only slightly disrupting it. By the time the first pylon had begun firing, Victor had already awakened two more pylons. One by one, they rose up and began forming the disruption array.
One by one, turbulence built up.
When Victor hit the array's halfway point, the maelstrom's previously near-perfect spin had already destabilized into a wobbling mess. Masses of wailing spirits began tearing away from it, flying outward and smashing into the surrounding buildings. Some of them just dispersed, while others possessed statues and corpses in an effort to blindly lash out.
Zero, like a hungry beast, began to consume them. Now, however, there was a duty to it, not just hunger. They were, after all, not souls - they were resentful, tormented aura constructs born from the ritual. The true souls of the sacrificed had already passed on, and these resentful spectres would linger and plague the living if they were not purified. Indeed, Zero's enlightenment had actually caused it to be even more thorough in its consumption, driving the machine to draw into itself even the tiny scraps that it had left behind previously. Zero was, however, only one machine, and it could only consume so much, even when it was just burning it all to get rid of it. Besides Zero, Victor's staff sucked in utterly disproportionate quantities of sacrificial aura. He didn't even notice it, as it was held in his third arm while his focus was trained completely on activating the disruptor pylons.
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By the time he awoke the last one, the maelstrom didn't even look coherent. It wasn't a vortex, but a roiling mass of contradicting currents, listlessly thrashing in place while geysers and meteors of sacrificial aura tore away from it. Victor landed inelegantly near his starting point, his boots tearing a gash into the ground, with a pair of his servitors catching him while two more gathered in front to shield him from any ejected aura. He lurched forward as he tried to get his bearings, whipping his third arm forward and stabbing the Oculus into the ground as a support, grasping the staff in both hands. A strange trance had come over him.
As for the disruption array, even its already-impressive effect was like redirecting part of a river into a local creek. The vast majority of the maelstrom still remained well within the ritual circle and mostly within Third's grasp. At this rate, it wouldn't lose even one-fifth of its total mass by the time the ritual was complete.
The reason for the disruption array's lack of effect was simple: Third was fighting it the whole way. He was even starting to slowly take back control, contending against the array's disruption, even though the disruption itself continually shifted specifically to counter any attempts at mitigation. In short, Third was just that much more skilled and experienced at this.
But it wouldn't save him.
Zelsys herself struggled to comprehend the magnitude of power she had built to tear through the Third Truthseeker's defenses - it was such that her body could not contain it. Zefaris had retreated to the next building over. The air in Zel's vicinity had become lightning. She was no longer kneeling on the rooftop, but floating in mid-air, suspended effortlessly with the sheer power of fulgurmagnetism. Giant flares of lightning leapt from the bottoms of her feet and from her horns, joining together behind her into wings of lightning tens of metres tall. In order to exert a hold over all that energy, she had to stretch out her aura, and the sheer intensity of energy surrounding her had given form to Chrome Skull Viper and countless lesser auraic manifestations - as a mere side effect. A swarm of chthonic horrors wrought from screaming-blue plasma swirled around her, waiting to be given a command, themselves screeching and growling in the eardrum-rupturing frequencies of thunderbolts.
This whole time, what Third said had been stewing in the back of Zel's mind; specifically what he had called Carnifex: Inheritance. That's how the Third Truthseeker saw it: Something passed down from her betters, from some ancient cultivator who had locked it away for a worthy successor to find. Mere indignation had become true, seething anger, and it wasn't just her own. Where her right hand grasped her blade’s blackstone handle, it began to thrum with an intensity unfelt since her early months - so insulted, Fulguris was. She could’ve simply controlled it, kept her calm, but she didn’t want to. There was no reason to. No matter how furious, she wouldn’t lose control of herself. This was the comfort afforded to her by the Walking Way of the Despot of Self.
“Inheritance? There was no inheritance. Carnifex has never been wielded by another! I turned Borea upside down for the means to forge it! I awoke the Revenant King, excised the heart of a Fallen Star, harnessed a living god! YOU DARE call Carnifex Fulguris a MERE INHERITANCE?!”