Two figures stood atop flying swords high in the air, kilometers in the distance, one in white, the other in black.

“How?! Her soul should’ve burst at the seams, burned up to cinders! She should be a fulgurite statue! There’s no conceivable way her foundation…” the Black-robed Brother exclaimed in disbelief as he glared down at the battlefield through his magnifying seal, then turned a narrow, angered gaze upon his sibling. “You. What have you done?”

For once, the White-robed Brother wasn’t having it, snapping back, “Nothing. I had theorized this might be possible, but I had no hand in the act of heresy that brought about her existence. The act which birthed this woman into being was nothing like the Creation of a Great Man ritual, it was a far more crude and primeval method that the Inheritors stumbled upon. Her soul isn’t a single, composite piece, it’s a gestalt of many sub-souls working in concert to support the spiritual core, the central pillar. The pillar takes the brunt of the strain, the supports shoulder the overflow, spreading it out and minimizing it.”

“Devouring the Living Storm must have figuratively melted the fragments making up the outer layers of her soul, breaking down the boundaries between them, permitting them to house multiple Wrathful Thundergods at once. How many… I do not hazard to know.”

“What method? What fucking method?! It’s not in our records, that’s for sure! Have you been hiding things from me again?”

“It IS in our records, you just haven’t looked hard enough,” the white-robed brother rebuked. “The old records, before our current indexing system - number three-thousand eight-hundred forty-six, the Revenant King. We don’t know how he was born, only that he embodied the folk ideals such as the Mammoth Rider and later in life the King in the Mountain, and that he exhibited the ability to inexplicably shoulder spiritual stresses beyond his realm.”

“Fine, fine. But what’s with that secondary transformation? That doesn’t look like any Wrathful Thundergod Mantle I’ve ever seen, even assuming those manifestations ARE azothic bleedoff from seven different thundergods working together. Even with Metallum-aligned monads in play, it doesn’t look right. There’s…”

“Unconscious Bestia generation at levels only exhibited by heavy animism practitioners, the essentia serving as a ritualistic fuel additive to give form both to thundergods and the Beast Self. She’s undergoing rapid-onset self-induced atavism, forcibly dredging up the genetic inheritance of ancient man. I’m certain there’s been at least one subject like this in recent centuries, but I can’t seem to recall…”

There came a blinding eruption from the battlefield, two serpents of beastly heads blossoming skyward.

“Ah, it doesn’t matter. I’ll check the archives later. It would be terribly foolish of me to get lost in my own thoughts about the spectacle unfolding before my eyes right here and now.”

For the second time, blinding-white drowned out all else, twin beast-headed serpents soaring into the heavens. One erupted from the muzzle of a gun, the other from the mouth of its wielder, both annihilating without discrimination, erasing the artificially-reinforced stone they had been set against.

In their wake was left a mangled, yet undying thing. A shell of hyperdense cold-iron, encasing a crystallized brain and spinal cord, all that was left of Ubul.

It refused to stay down, already remoulding the earth around the remnants of its body, struggling against all odds as the earthen magick within it pulsed and leaked out like the glow of an ember.

Makhus, too, had undergone a transformation of his own, donning the armor which his belt had been built for in the first place. Its design language was much like the Nameless armor’s, merely extrapolated further through more advanced production methods and more complex design, densely etched with protective sigils that openly covered its plates, three bright-red eyes shining from the helmet.

LOST ARMOR OF PROPHECY

ANCIENT HEIRLOOM MADE FIT FOR A NEW ERA

STAND ETERNALLY PROUD

IRON RIDER ACALA

The swordsman’s fears and worries shattered against the armor just as waves did upon the shore, for its holy divining magicks showed him his future - a mere few seconds ahead, true, but the Third Eye of Acala showed him the future nonetheless, and with this sight, he walked forward, watching his path change with each step he took.

He found the distinct absence of certainty and the fact his own choices determined his immediate future to be reassuring, a truth that the armor’s previous wearer had rejected.

As fast as his legs could now carry him, the metric distance between him and the clashing demigods still numbered in three digits. At least he had time to stockpile Aether in his tattoos.

Armor or not, sensory enhancement or not, drugs or not, what he saw transpiring within stone’s throw was still suicide to wade into. Exchanges of blows too fast, too forceful to properly process, only cognizable as impacts and lines of action, the earth itself rent asunder from the clashing of forces beyond human reckoning. This… This was how real cultivator duels were described in the old manuals, this was what he had been warned to steer clear of in his short time studying under the Sanger Family. Here he was, sprinting headlong into it, keeping a third eye on an estimation of his own future as insurance, and he cared not.

As the two-headed dragon-serpent bloomed overhead, as the stonebound destroyer stood back up in defiance of all odds, as Zelsys struggled to remain on her feet, it was Makhus who sprinted headlong into the jaws of hell, it was him who leapt between Ubul and her, despite knowing how ridiculous the abyss between himself and her in her current state was.

Indeed the swordsman leapt into the jaws of death, and Acala’s Third Eye saw not his death, but nothing. There was no prediction. What happened here and now was entirely up to him, and Makhus chose to stand. He chose to snap into a practiced stance, holding his blade at the ready, facing down the impending motion of Ubul’s malformed self. One huge leg, two huge arms on the right, a disproportionate torso, a glistening metal head with only pinholes for eyes, a crystallized brain on the other side.