Briefly, he considered the possibility that the void pulse may have burned the blessing from the High Chaplain’s body. He entertained the man’s question, even began constructing a plan to perhaps help him escape, were he willing. “Did the void pulse burn it out?” he thought.
The lilac sparks stopped dancing, and behind the visor of the chaplain’s helmet, he saw a golden glow rising again. Seeing the Blessing take over was like watching the soul being crushed down - the fire of free will, snuffed out until it was a dying ember just hot enough to fuel a meat-robot. Once more, he was reminded of the Igrons, and once more did the anger in his core begin to rise. The other High Chaplains - those of them who were even moving - were still struggling to regain their bearings, reeling from the pain of voidburn. But the sole chaplain left standing - this one single man, whose body and will were both strong enough to stand the blaze - reached his thigh, smacking the outer plate with a balled fist.
From a compartment within the armor there popped out the handle of a cleaver, one whose blade was covered in etched nonsense-words and which sung with the tell-tale tones of livingmetal. Just like the Ecclesiarch’s. No, better. It sounded clearer, and there was no garish salvaged graviton accelerator bolted to the top. He watched as the High Chaplain dropped into a low, wide stance. Armless felt the sights of many weapons on him, most of which he was certain he would barely feel. Yet, they weren’t firing. Some turned away and continued trying to breach through the Distortion Field, whilst others kept their sights trained. Were they trying to find a gap in his armor? Waiting for an order to fire? Perhaps afraid of friendly-fire? All three?
“How dare-” the chaplain growled, lunging towards him. The ground cracked under his feet, his body carried forward by a union of his own herculean strength and the explosive power of his armor’s synthfiber bundles. From a standstill, Ouroboros impelled his right arm into a weak sideways swing. One fast enough to hurt if it hit, but slow enough to dodge if his opponent was fast enough.
The High Chaplain ducked and went for an upward cut, aimed just above the ornament on his waist. A sonic crack. The clashing of metal. The chaplain’s blade-wielding arm, in his iron grip. He didn’t need to kill. These men, these pawns, they weren’t his foe. It was the golden curse within them, turning them to mere flesh-puppets, killing and dying at the behest of cowardly nobles. The void-fire in him flared. Whirr-clack. His pauldron snapped open, the now-familiar spectral dragon’s head forming around his left arm.
Whirr-clack.
The pauldron snapped shut, as did the spectral dragon’s head.
Crunch. Crack. Spectral teeth punched through armor, insulation and flesh, void energy slowly seeping in. The chaplain dropped his blade, its sing-song tones echoing as it fell. There was a pained hiss, but not much more. His left arm still good, the power-armored behemoth of a man lunged in an attempt to grab at his left leg just above the foot, perhaps to try and trip him. As fast as the chaplain moved, Ouroboros could gather and focus void energy faster. From his core, to his left arm, through his hand - the dragon’s mouth.
“Burn and be liberated.”
Lilac lightning. Screams of pain. Golden light flashing out of the chaplain’s eyes, accompanied by purple from every possible seam in his armor. Both lights died down as his form slumped to the ground, smoke rising. Ouroboros dedicated a grain of focus to his main sensor array, and he saw that the High Chaplain still had a heartbeat. Satisfied with the odds of his survival, he let go and moved onto the remaining High Chaplains. Of those that put up any sort of fight - three in total - none had the strength to resist in any meaningful way. Even so, their suits were too well-insulated for a sufficient amount of void energy to penetrate.
Whirr-clack.
He had to make a hole, or perhaps half a dozen.
Whirr-clack.
The ghost-dragon’s teeth penetrated armor, shearing through it with seemingly no resistance. A mental command was all it took to send a torrent of void energy flowing through his left arm and into the chaplain’s body. More flashing lights from every hole in the armor as he burned away the Ruler’s Blessing and the chaplain’s own blessing at the same time. He felt a mote of remorse for ripping away their cherished magic like this, but it was the only way to set them free from Clan Igron’s influence.
Another chaplain. Whirr-clack. Whirr-clack. Burn the filth away.
Another.
And another.
One by one, he went to all of the High Chaplains who still had heartbeats. One by one, he burned the Igron filth from their bodies and minds. Even as he did so, he felt the occasional burst of gunfire bouncing off his armor - most often his back. When he was done, nine remained alive. Surprisingly, all four of the chaplains who tried fighting him directly were among those nine - the three who died were dead before he even got to them, having expired instantly when his anchoring reaction struck them.
It was then that all hell broke loose, when the warriors in the firing line thought their leaders dead. Ouroboros felt his perception time slowing. There was a curtain of gunfire approaching him from the front, the back, even from the back. The only possible direction of escape was back through the distortion field. Or, perhaps… “Through.”
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Blinded by the torrent of their own gunfire, the honored warriors in the firing line didn’t see him coming. Those who saw something, saw not the shape of a man. They saw the head of a great dragon, which devoured their gunfire and crushed man after man in its colossal maw.
The illusion soon fell, when the dust cleared and the gunfire quieted. There was no dragon, it was still just that man-shaped monstrosity with a bludgeon for an arm. In its imperious slaughter, it walked through gunfire and shrugged off blades.
With the nightmarish whirr-clack of that pauldron on its left arm, it called forth that spectral dragon’s head, grabbing at warriors' arms and legs to crush them into mulch. Were it unable to reach limbs it reached for weapons, which exploded into shards in the spectral dragon’s jaws. With the colossal bulk of its right arm it cracked the ground and smashed warriors aside as if they were children, clearing a path through the firing line for itself like an unstoppable force.
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When set upon by a dozen men at once and crushed into the ground by sheer bulk, from the beast’s body erupted that lilac-coloured empyrean blaze that turned metal to slag and wiped the blessings from those it touched. From the pile of molten-together armors - the warriors still alive inside their suits - that beast didn’t leap or run. Its armored hand erupting through solid metal, it unceremoniously ripped its way out, before just walking away as if nothing had happened.
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With each warrior Ouroboros smashed aside, each blessing he burned out, his vengeful fury towards the Igrons only grew. He had no mental image of what the Igrons looked like beyond the Machinist, and so their servants were the perfect canvas to project his vengeance onto.
He didn’t feel anger, or a desire to destroy those he was fighting - he even went out of his way to inflict nonlethal wounds where he could. No, it was an overwhelming sorrow that consumed his being. When they finally piled onto him - pinning him down with sheer mass amplified by their gravithurgic blessings - he just lay there, allowing the anchoring reaction to build inside his body until its volatile energy erupted on its own.
A few seconds pass as he lay there, in the dark, surrounded on all sides by the pained hissing and growling of voidburned warriors. He briefly pondered just staying like that, leaving the rest to the others. Briefly.
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A bronze-plated hand, tearing through metal as if it were paper, a single index finger pointing defiantly to the heavens. An armored figure no larger than an adolescent Warrior-caste, its visage split down the middle. One half clad in shining bronze and covered in iconography, as if taken straight from a mural. The other a porcelain-white monstrosity, with what looked to be ribs erupting from its chest and an unsightly blade on its leg, and from its eye-socket, a horn made of void gemstone.
This figure - untouched by neither the onslaught of a dozen High Chaplains nor hundreds of Warriors - was witnessed by the soldiers of Clan Iktha, an immovable bulwark of seemingly boundless raw strength. As he utterly shattered the rest of the firing line and neared the part of the camp belonging to Clan Sordu, an earth-shattering noise there issued forth. From within one of the tents there came stomping a shining form, twice as tall as the tallest Warriors.
This image of the one called Ouroboros facing down one of Clan Sordu’s war machines would forever be emblazoned in the hearts and minds of the Iktha warriors who were part of the line that day.
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Having dismantled the remainder of the firing line, Ouroboros found himself driven towards a nearby section of the camp. Instead of many smaller tents, it had a few very large ones, and past their multi-layered fabric exteriors, his sensors detected a colossal amount of mass. It was a few clusters, each a suspiciously humanoid shape.
Then, one of the masses started to move. There was a loud noise, and a walker - no, an oversized exoskeleton - came stomping out of the tent. It had legs with inverted knees and somewhat disproportionate arms, with a very bulky torso. He could briefly see the pilot’s head poking out the top before the suit’s “helmet” unfolded and closed overtop. The pilot’s bare head was covered in burned-out markings, the scarring multi-layered like the wood of a tree as if his blessing had been burned away over a long period of time. Even so, the golden glow of the Ruler’s Blessing still shined in his eyes.
What surprised him wasn’t the frankly impressive engineering or the utterly meticulous ornamentation on the plating, or even the fact the suit had built-in plasma-throwers and nanolith cleavers on both arms. It was the fact that it had a very clear void energy signature.
The suit took another step as it raised its arms, and there thundered its pilot’s artificially deepened voice.
“Only the works of man can stand against the works of man. Face me, homunculus!”
Ouroboros smashed both arms to the ground as he lowered himself into a low stance, legs wide so that as many of his thrusters as possible faced directly backwards. In this stance, the dragon-head pauldron was pointed at his foe head-on. He willed all the available energy in his system to be divided between three systems.
“70% to the Type-VZG-2 Absolute Defense Array. 25% to propulsion systems. 5% to voicebox.”
Energy redistribution successful.
Whirr-clack.
His jaw swung open alongside the pauldron’s. Instead of just thinking the activation phrase, Ouroboros roared it as a thunderous proclamation to the earth, the skies above, and all those who would hear.
“BURN AND LIBERATE! SPIRIT OF FREEDOM!”
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Fulgent had been embroiled in a constant, unrelenting battle against her father for what felt like hours. She knew it was far less - seconds, minutes at most. The longer they fought, the more her body adapted to his combat style. She found herself blocking his strikes and landing hits without even thinking. His strikes no longer carried that colossal strength, that blinding speed. The exhaustion of combat at his physical limit and the pain of voidburn was making him slower, weaker, while Fulgent only became faster and more able to exploit his weaknesses the longer they fought.
Once more, a cross-counter. They struck one another squarely in the chest, creating a temporary gap. He had done this many times to use his gravity manipulation and accelerate himself into a strike without risking an anchoring reaction. She would be ready to dodge, or meet him with a scattershot from her third arm. Not this time. This time, the old man just stood there, heaving as he spat blood.
“Strike me down, now! The blessing...” the old man roared with a mouth full of blood and broken teeth, lowering himself into a wide stance, reaching for the hidden release levers of his armor, the golden light in his eyes shining ever brightly. With a single pull he worked the mechanism, causing the torso section of his armor to open up and drop away, exposing his scaly chest. It was almost entirely covered in elaborate, deep purple markings, arranged in a way that made them look like snakes emerging from the center of his chest.
“...it gives me no choice!”
Reaching towards the center of his chest once more, digging his clawed fingers into his skin and drawing blood, his markings began to glow - not the usual purple that showed when one with his blessing used it to alter gravity. It was the ominous blue of his own blood, a glow which only intensified as he continued to drag his claws across his chest in perfectly symmetrical, practiced patterns, drawing an arcane sigil upon himself. The glow spread from his chest all across his visible markings, and soon, the sigil upon his chest began to shine a bright white. Around him, a perfect circle was crushed into the sand. Fulgent let loose a stake, but the superheavy gravity surrounding the old man slammed it into the ground before it could detonate.
“Darkness beyond blackest pitch, deeper than the deepest night!” Iorzan roared, pulling his fingers from his chest and putting his hands in front of himself.
“Abyss as vast as the largest ocean, colder than the coldest ice!”
The air between his hands began to distort and compress, like when a gravity manipulator made a directional gravity well. Only… This one was just pulling inward. It devoured specks of dust around itself, and then finally pulled in a drop of Iorzan’s blood.
“Devour this transient flesh and let the fools before me be destroyed!”
There was a blinding blue glow. A pillar of light erupted into the heavens.
Fulgent didn’t know what it was.
Her body did.
ALERT: HAWKING RADIATION BURST DETECTED