Zel made no effort to hide her accusation, grinning at the Lady in Red.

“To level such baseless accusations at me is courting death. But then…” the horned advisor rebuked. Her tone betrayed no offense taken, only anticipation. Despite the distortion her voice was familiar, but it also lacked an expected Pateirian accent. She reached up to her mask, pulling it from her face, revealing that the mask’s horns were, in truth, her own. A moment later, the mask was gone, having vanished into a Fog Vortex that had sprung up from Red’s palm. Red lips, chitinous plates covering only the lower jaw, slight disfigurement on the cheeks, but an otherwise normal - even beautiful - face. Her robes parted down the middle, exposing a body clad only in chitinous armor and a red fundoshi. That visage exactly fit how she’d heard Red described; nevertheless, Zel couldn’t quite believe her own eyes. She could, however, see where this was going, considering the killing glow in Red’s eyes and the near-psychotic sneer on her face, and so she mentally switched gears. Breathing patterns shifted, heart began to pound, a fraction of her internal reserves was released. The stench of ozone filled the air as the air around her grew charged. Perhaps the only tool in her repertoire she left untouched was the Core of Earthly Iron, not willing to risk dropping below the Mantling Point - an arbitrarily-determined arcane rainy day fund.

“...It makes no difference. A promise I’ve made, and a promise I’ll keep - you shan’t walk away from this place, Zelsys Newman!” proclaimed the Lady in red, erupting from a standstill quickly and erratically enough that Zel had to actually focus to keep up. They clashed in the middle, exchanging blows faster than any onlookers but Zefaris could see, the mantis-mutant swiping at the homunculus, summoning up stakes of short-lived blackstone from the ground and thin air, trying to blindside her in any way conceivable. Yet, besides a few minor injuries in the initial assault, Zelsys quickly adapted; just as most opponents, Red had a tell for whenever she used her special ability, in this case that unmistakable crystalline ringing, quiet as a chime and demanding razor-sharp focus to pick out in the fray of combat. The stakes she didn’t dodge outright were robbed of momentum or conveniently slipped off her skin, Red’s own mantis blade ever found itself bogged down between the Broken Butcher’s prongs, her attention incessantly divided by the assaults of Zel’s animated braids.

Out of sight was the tremendous amount of effort Zelsys was continuously putting in to maintain such a defense, mentally acknowledging every single stake, predicting its time, point, and angle of impact, and then deciding whether to use Siphoning Pulse or Graze Pulse to rob of it momentum or make it slip off respectively. Both techniques only lasted a fraction of a second and covered a relatively small area of skin due to their prohibitive energetic cost, siphoning tissue-dissolved Pneuma from the area of their use to fuel themselves and thus weakening Zel’s offense using that limb. Each stake respectively stopped or made to miss fed into her Retributive Battery, the former charging it with kinetic energy and the latter with pure Fulgur, the former manifested as no more than an intensifying glow in her eyes while the latter caused the same thing as any other Fulguric charge in the body: Errant arcs of lightning. It was all an incredibly complex balancing act, held up by the lynchpin of the Walking Way of the Despot of Self: That vital enabler of active cooperation between the conscious mind and bodily systems down to the muscle-fiber level.

It wasn’t the stakes that she needed to be careful about, regardless; they were a distraction and little more than that. Red’s golden mantis-blade was the true danger, its edge seething with iridescent Fog each time the mutant made a swing; what was more, it didn’t seem to rely upon any sort of kinetic force to cut, as Zelsys learned when she had stopped it dead with a use of Siphoning Pulse. It was a good centimeter away from her skin, yet it still left a gash as Red pulled it back for another strike. There was no choice but to dodge or block it the hard way.

Red’s own defense was none the shoddier. Physically she wasn’t quite on Von Wickten’s level, but that shortcoming was more than made up for by the mantis-mutant’s near-prescient tactical sense, perfect union with her own blade - it being a part of her body - and, perhaps the most potent of her abilities, her ability to just summon things out of thin air. At every turn, Zel found herself blocked not by armor and blade, but by plates of blackstone that flew into the path of her blade and broke under her violence, but slowed her enough to make her attack ineffectual.

All this stress, this complexity, this sense of flow. Zel knew she could end it, she could take this to the ground or blast the mantis, but she didn’t feel like it just yet. The way this felt, it wasn’t the Red she remembered; this wasn’t a psychotic, barely-sapient drone. Even the immense malice behind every strike, the malice that burned behind those eyes; it was strange and shifting, as if even Red herself wasn’t quite sure about the reason for her own killing intent. Zel managed to catch the mantis-blade between the prongs of her own weapon yet again while immobilizing Red’s other arm with her braids, briefly bringing the battle to a standstill as the two of them struggled.

“So… Karmesin, is it?” she squinted at the mutant, having only heard her appearance described, and only now getting a good up-close look at her. She scanned Red up and down, taking note of the fact that her left foot was still prosthetic, and that while her mutations were extensive, her body wasn’t disfigured to a significant degree and there were no signs of parasite infestation. “You look… Good, all things considered.”

This only seemed to incense the Lady in Red even further, who broke free of the grapple and redoubled her assault. It wasn’t until a gunshot from behind rang out that the mantis broke the clash, somehow dodging the leaden spear as it sailed centimeters from Zel’s side, only to conjure a pillar between herself and Zelsys, leaping backwards off of it. She held out her hand towards her dragonfly-shaped vehicle, the crystalline orb in its “head” levitating towards her.

“Is that a Subcore? Where’d she get a Subcore?” Zel wondered, recognizing the orb’s general size and colour.

“No interruptions!” the Lady in Red proclaimed, her words punctuated by that terrible, all-permeating noise; the ringing. With an imperious gesture of her left hand iridescent Fog began to swirl about her form, her cloak billowing in its immaterial breeze as the Subcore smashed into the soil, burying itself. The formless being given form, an imposition being made upon the material realm. A bright flash issued from her horns, and trigonal pillars of black rock erupted from the ground at haphazard angles; from each pillar erupted smaller branches at every-which angle, forming a tangled dome of stone over the two of them. The ground cracked and crumbled to dust underfoot, being at least partly transmuted to fuel this impressive display.

IMPRISONMENT TRIGRAM

CRIMSON COMMAND: KILLZONE MANIFESTATION

“CREATE SOMETHING FROM NOTHING”

Thinking quickly, Zel leapt backwards to the still-forming dome’s outermost perimeter, reassuring Zefaris: “Just go. I’ll be done here by the time you return.”

They shared a brief kiss through a gap between pillars, then the blonde retreated. One could hear two Sturmgandrs starting up and driving around the dome. Zel readjusted her stance, approaching Red yet again as she willed her wounds shut. Her mind still dwelt on how Red had been able to predict supporting fire in advance, but a tiny flicker in the mutant’s eyes gave her the solution: She’d been keeping an eye on Zefaris this whole time, likely because the last time Zel and Red had fought, Zefaris had interfered on multiple occasions.

“You, who cursed me with doubt! I would fulfill the promise my former self made to you!” Red howled as, pillar after pillar, sight of the exterior grew more and more limited. Soon their arena was an enclosed dome lit by numerous light-shafts, not a single one originating from a hole wide enough for Pentacle’s barrel to fit through. “Your life; I shall take it to fulfill mine!”

A strange atmosphere set in when the last pillar slammed into place. The light coming in had become milky-white, and the scents of the road had vanished. Moreover, Fog-breathing suddenly became a little easier, as if there was an unnaturally high concentration of free-floating Pneuma in the air. This… Felt like the interior of a Dungeon. As she pondered whether Red could just manifest a miniature Dungeon out of nowhere, one legitimately submerged in the Sea of Fog and thus partially distanced from conventional reality, Zel weighed her options, staring down the woman that had once been a glorified meat-puppet to the Locust Queen.

This wasn’t a puppet, or a beast; from what she knew of Red’s alter-ego as Karmesin, she had been a legitimately positive influence on both Rigport and Arches, pushing back against Occupationist elements in both municipalities. This wasn’t the Red Mantis she knew, plain and simple; she felt it in her gut. Nevertheless, this new woman had made an attempt on her life, and Zelsys wasn’t one to moralize in combat… Especially not when a walking Dungeon Core had just begun raising pillars from the ground to try and crush her against the dome’s interior. Each gesture equated a pillar, each pillar rocketing upward at a speed easily comparable to a cannonball. It was frankly a little intimidating, even to her; enough that she felt the need to not just dodge, but stay well clear of those things. Breaking into a sprint around the outer perimeter of the dome, she burned the contents of her lungs to produce Fulgur, drawing on the Pneuma her sleeve had siphoned from her previous use of the arm-cannon to make up the Ignis that she couldn’t just pull from the air, recirculating it back into her sleeve, the Impelling Arm. In the midst of her mad sprint, Zel made full use of the Butcher as an anchor, stabbing it into the cracked ground and spinning around it before launching herself at her foe, spinning about mid-air to deliver kicks so forceful they could crush a Dragon Knight’s armor and go clean through multiple grown men. In her maddened tantrum, Red had not lost a speck of tactical intelligence, knowing well enough to prioritize defending herself before harming Zelsys, and so the mutant raised pillars in the way of Zel’s airborne assault and forced her to leap off of them lest she lose her balance, once again creating space between the two, if only for a moment.

Twice more she repeated this assault, feeling out Red’s defenses and collecting a slash across her back for her troubles on the second pass. She was certain that she could smash through one of Red’s pillars wholesale if she dumped her entire kinetic battery into a kick.

Another lungful burnt for Fulgur and sent into the Impelling Arm. And another. Soon enough the runes on her sleeve seethed with a terrible glow and arcs of lightning slithered about its plates, the light of dreadful recognition in Red’s eyes. Just as she got her bearings again, Zel raised her arm and invoked. “Thundercannon!”

A construct of lightning in the shape of a beastly head erupted from her arm-cannon, at its core a sphere of ball lightning with the actual lead projectile serving as its core. The technique’s flaw was that it, by necessity, had windup, and so Red had had enough time to raise a defensive barrier… But that was exactly what Zelsys had wanted. The impact left a weakness in the barrier, allowing her to leap in and deliver a divekick that would smash through both the barrier and hopefully Red as well. As she neared the apex of her jump, Zel burned yet more Fulgur and sent it to her right leg, giving purpose to the complex scaffold structure on the inside of her right boot by suffusing it with the essentia and forming a plow of manifested lightning around the boot’s wedge-shaped front. She depleted what kinetic energy was in her Retributive Battery to accelerate her own fall, and finally smashed right through the barrier… Only to find that Red wasn’t at the other side.

There was only a blackstone effigy of her, the Subcore embedded in its featureless face.