Rather, she would’ve, had the Matriarch not skillfully loosened her grip for just long enough that the handle rotated in her hand, only to grab it once more before it could leave her grasp.

Even so, the sword was stuck for long enough that Zelsys could deliver a downward cut that would’ve bisected her diagonally from the collarbone to the hip if it had not been for the stamp’s protection.

Indeed, even seething yellow-white heat were not enough to overwhelm that vaunted System, the Butcher stopping a scant centimeter and a half into the Matriarch’s flesh… But Zelsys wasn’t much better off.

Whence she had landed a strike and brought the Matriarch’s Stamp down to nearly nothing, so too had she, exploiting Zel’s exaggerated combat focus - her tunnel vision, so to speak - to strike not with her own sword, but a knife wrought of pure lightning, held in her off hand.

Zel only realized she’d been stabbed when her stamp hit her with a sudden surge of pain and she noticed the position of arnys’s hand, the blade having cut straight through her own side, between the two lowest pairs of ribs - revenge for the previous injury.

“It appears we’re both only a hair’s breadth from defeat. Shall we settle this with a climactic final showdown?” smiled the Matriarch.

Allowing a laugh to rumble through the constant rumble of her Breath engine, Zel nodded and pulled her blade free of Arnys’s shoulder, effortlessly leaping backwards to her side of the arena while Arnys Thunderwalked back to hers.

Yet another face-off.

“Something about that new look tells me you have answers to my questions about Storm-soul Cultivation. The question is, are they answers you would be willing to part with?” Zelsys called out.

A truly predatory grin spread across the Matriarch’s scale-framed features, “So be it! I suspect I already know what it will be, by the look in your eye. Show me a good time, and they’re yours.”

Arnys almost wanted to laugh. How farcical would it be, if all the breadcrumbs she’d been dropping about the true nature of Storm-soul Cultivation were to come to fruition now. Nevertheless, it was an offer she had no reason to refuse, for despite being out of public knowledge, Storm-soul Cultivation was among the methods which a sect elder could be reasonably expected to unravel on their own. Unlike certain counterparts, one of this method’s narrowest bottlenecks was the initial feat.

One second.

Three.

Five.

Both charged straight ahead, intending to strike first.

At last.

Zelsys consumed the mass of compressed, refined aether that she’d been so meticulously saving in her second stomach until now. Its purpose was single-minded, but multi-faceted.

Whereas her breath output would be divvied up, a portion of this reserve would fill in the already miniscule gaps in her breathing and ensure her muscles were always able to fire at the highest possible force no matter what. That portion, however, was small.

The lion’s share had one purpose.

To be burned in an effort to manifest Thunderclap Sting. To be fuel, not for her muscles, but for the Butcher.

Arnys, too, invoked a technique whose core she had invented in the very duel that this one was a nostalgic reminder of for her; the aptly-named Clear Sky Unseen Fang. A flexible application of Thunderwalking to only a part of one’s body for only a short burst, producing a complex blade movement at blinding speed that would be difficult at best for even the most keen-eyed of combatants to foresee.

The Matriarch herself could not foresee what her opponent intended to do, what trick she intended to pull from her metaphorical sleeve, and she didn’t wish to know. Finding out was part of the fun.

Zel’s focus honed in so keenly upon this singular moment, everything beyond it faded out of awareness.

The audience, the band, all their raucous anticipation, even the background noise of her own lightning. Her own thoughts followed suit as she grasped the Butcher in both hands, perception of time stretching in proportion to the rushing of momentary thought impulses.

No consideration of victory or consequence could be found in her mind at that very moment; only that which pertaineth to landing this singular blow; spatial calculation and foreplanning equating half a dozen moves ahead for the impending flurry of split-second micro decisions.

For all the stored-up kinetic energy in her Retributive Battery, Zelsys chose to burn it solely to accelerate her charge, to ensure a slightly more even positional playing field when, inevitably, they came within melee range of one another.

That impending moment had nearly come, and the time was now to burn her aetheric stockpile, to flood the Butcher with a deluge of aether and intent distilled from the burning memory of the very dreamt feat that informed this real counterpart. That was what she had moulded the reserve with - not to empower herself, for she already possessed the means to obtain her body’s full capabilities.

It was the memory of herself forging that god-killing blade of screaming steel and desert glass that she had imprinted upon the river of magic that she now channeled from her second gut, up through her torso, to her arm and into the Butcher, its path traced by a glow so bright it made individual silver conduits bleed together. The metal resounded with a persistent ringing so deep and resonant it shook her bones, its structure simultaneously expanding and distorting as the Lightning Butcher’s colossal mass grew and was reshaped to nearly twice and half again its original length. The vile crescent of its point, the lightning etched over its flat, and the savage fangs of its back edge all still present, its total volume, too, having grown by more than half, even if only for this moment.

Though inevitably a more lithe blade in its stretched-out form, the Lightning Butcher remained a girthier, more massive hunk of metal than many a true greatsword. Even now, its identity as a cleaver could not be impeached upon.

From the moment of the mental command to the completion of the great cleaver’s temporary metamorphosis, less than a second elapsed.