Nine.

Eight.

Seven.

Six.

Five.

Zefaris prepared for a sharp turn as they approached the Deep Dweller backline, their force scattered and thinned out from this direction. Meanwhile, Zel stockpiled Fulgur in her Essentia Crucible, a second stomach of sorts. She compressed it until she couldn’t any more, until it was a struggle to keep it from flooding out into the rest of her body, tightly gripping the trigger lever of her arm-cannon in preparation.

Four.

Three.

The Deep Dwellers had long noticed them by now. A boulder flew overhead.

Two.

One.

Zef whipped Sturmgandr into a sharp right turn, its back end smashing right through several mole-men, its back wheel shredding them where they stood. Zel leapt off at the apex of the motion, soaring two-dozen meters over the horde of molemen. Release.

A brilliant, seething power, a sudden flood from her stomach up into her chest and down her arm; a continuous arc of lightning slithered down her left arm, the gaping maw of a monstrous serpent arising around the muzzle of her gun, formed from this immense lightning. In the wake of her skyward rise, the air was filled by chittering electric fireflies, pinhead-sized spheres of lightning that fizzled out in seconds.

Embodying the likeness of a crashing meteor, Zelsys soared down towards the convoy, her final landing spot to be only some twenty meters from the encirclement. She could feel hundreds of eyes on herself, and even heard a few cries from the defenders: “IT’S THE NEWMAN SECT!”

They weren’t as enthusiastic as she would’ve liked. A push down on the trigger lever, her left arm outstretched downward between her legs. Two clicks to pull back the striker; the third would drop it. Mere seconds before landing, she howled an invocation.

“THUNDERCANNON!”

Meters from landing. A final pull of the lever. Blinding light, deafening noise, a hailstorm of bullets, fire and lightning. Three-dozen mole-men and their steeds turned to mush in an instant, a swath cut into their encirclement. It had been a Type-2 shotshell loaded with innumerable iron bullets for conductivity. The recoil of the act would’ve felt like being struck by a runaway tractor to anyone else, but Zel was fine; she had used it to break her own fall, elegantly dropping into the circle of gore-slathered open ground she’d just created.

Still, hundreds of eyes were upon her; molemen all around, all deathly still, staring. Their teeth chattered nervously, but none seemed willing to approach the monstrous thing that now stood before them. To outside observers, Zelsys seemed less a human, and more a psychotic predator, a sharp-toothed grin spanning the width of her face and a baleful, pale-blue glow filling her eyes, blanking out the pupils and as such erasing any humanity left in her face. Silvery conduits beneath her skin shone brightly with the arcane essence coursing through them, mirroring the vascular system which bulged with the tremendous pressure within it. Even as she stood still, her muscles writhed and twitched about in unsettling ways. Before the creatures standing all around could swarm her, she sent a stream of Fulgur down one of her braids, magnetizing its entire length and crudely animating it into wrapping itself around her gun’s bolt lever. A yank upwards and back released the bolt, with the charred, Lichtenberg figure-etched shell popping out as a deluge of opaque Fog sprayed out of the cannon’s side vent, enshrouding her and obscuring her position.

It bought a few seconds of uncertainty. Only now did she take the few moments necessary to pull a fresh shell out of the belt and slot it into her gauntlet’s hungry maw.

The sound of motorbikes fell silent as her compatriots disembarked, and with its quieting, the sound of distant carnage began to grow closer. Molemen exploded into geysers of boiling gore whenever Mata channeled the fire within herself through her fists, and others turned to little more than mulch under the force of Jorfr’s hammer, or to brittle statues under the all-consuming frost of his primal magic. Gunshots accompanied the sound; the crystal-clear ring of Joseph’s rifle along the whizzing of his own magical missiles, pale shining darts precisely piercing the hearts of the horde. The raw, brutish thumping of the Hydra shotguns played percussion, a stomping march of tankmen as they ripped and tore into the enemy with a calculated brutality, jets of flame erupting from vents all over their suits whenever they pushed their machines.

The Fog had cleared. A high-strung voice from the encirclement’s inside: “Ozone! I smell ozone! The reinforcements are here!”

He was silenced by a man shouting from the top of a truck: “Yeah, we fucking noticed you mongoloid! Tell the Lieutenant that we need men on the other side, we’ve got it handled over here!”

Several Arkaley Branch men dropped into the open pit alongside Zelsys, their hardened faces filled with more caution towards her than the enemy. A particularly large Deep Dweller mounted atop a giant ant raised its spear, the tip gleaming iron rather than stone. It chattered its teeth and pointed at her, clearly a commander type. Molemen flooded in, and the slaugher resumed.

The commander-mole’s ant sprayed acid, striking one of the men to Zel’s right, steam rising from his burning skin as he growled in pain and hefted the great mass of his weapon.

“Enough waiting,” he said. “We won’t get out of here until these things lay dead.”

Zel looked off to the left, stating: “Just one more moment.”

“What-” the man began, but didn’t get to finish.

Finally came that clarion sound, from some distance away, atop the stopped-dead Sturmgandr.

The Clang.

It was Pentacle firing.

One after the next; spears of flaming metal, cutting swathes through the enemy.

Hardened cold-iron bullets. High-Ignis, Atrine-enriched gunpowder. Enough force to rip through a tank suit with the recoil to match. The heads and flesh of molemen put up only marginally more resistance than the flesh of humans; dozens were cut down before the gunfire first stopped, and even then only to be replaced, for a few seconds, by the pounding of Zef’s shotgun, Tempesta. Bullets gave way to slugs, which again gave way to bullets.

It was the scythe of a reaper for the new era, reaping the unworthy… And among them were many of the beasts surrounding Zelsys.

She glanced to her left and right, taking note of the brave few who had joined her down here. Muscular men and women with blades and auras to match, true blooded killers able and willing to stand against monsters. Zel had half a mind to try poaching the entire Arkaley Branch from the Sanger Family just for these four, but right now, it was time to kill. Numerous spearpoints, claws, and teeth threw themselves at the five of them, and Zelsys couldn’t help but allow a full-hearted laugh ring out. Their strikes numbered many, but their weapons and bodies were fragile and their technique rudimentary, easy to predict.

This was where her defensive techniques came in. She didn’t even bother using the more advanced among them, relying on those which could be powered by Pneuma alone.

“Rebound Pulse…” she invoked in her mind as a spear was about to skewer her stomach, only for a patch of silver conduits to light up in that spot, and for the spear to suddenly bounce back at the exact same speed it was moving previously, just in reverse.

Another moleman’s claws slipped under her arm and were just about to gouge her back. “Graze Pulse…” she invoked this time, causing the same phenomenon with the addition of hair-thin Fog threads emerging from the patch of skin; the moleman’s claws conspicuously slipped off, sparks of lightning crackling in their wake before the technique dissipated.

There were three other such techniques, rooted in the Core of Earthly Iron, but due to its nature as a limited reservoir, Zelsys chose not to use them. Her offense, meanwhile, was utterly unchallenged, to the beast-slayer’s disappointment. “These things are just fat midgets…” a thought crossed her mind.

The Arkaley Branch disciples carved through molemen with relative ease, using their own bodies as counterweights for their giant single-edged blades, or grasping them by handles along the blades’ spines for close-in fighting. One of them just outright spun into the enemy, laughing madly at the fact it worked… Until it didn’t, and when he got bogged down, a boulder cannonball was not far behind. Valiantly though he guarded himself, Zelsys could tell that the impact had left him in a bad way and he would soon get overwhelmed; several large scars on his back had burst open from the strain. The boulder bounced off his sword and smashed into an already-dented truck; it ruptured and piles of black, bulbous stones spilled out, glittering with veins of silvery metal. Molemen flooded right over the wounded disciple, ignoring him in favor of plunder.

Suddenly, it made sense: Why this convoy was so important. Its cargo wasn’t just any high-grade ore.

“Damasite? Explains why Estoras agreed to our terms so easily, the value of one truck alone will make up the cost…” Zel thought before she turned on a heel, bracing against the ground.

“Protect the damaged truck and get your man out of there, I’ll eliminate the Ankylodragon!” she barked, not waiting for a response before rushing headlong into the fray once again. Limbs and heads fell like overripe fruit from branches under the carnage which she unleashed, carving a path towards the surrounded disciple first of all. Once that was done, she slaughtered those trying to make off with the cargo, greatly assisted by the apparent raining-down of divine fury from on high; bullets coming down at impossible angles, a trick wherein Zefaris tossed coins into the air and bounced bullets off of them.

“This’ll be loud…” she said to him as she raised her arm-cannon yet again, swinging her cleaver in wide arcs to keep molemen away while she stockpiled Fulgur in her second stomach. He only grunted in acknowledgment, proceeding to mutter incantations under his breath; his movements became more refined and reactions sped up. A sensory enhancement technique. Exhaling gouts of Fog, he managed to just about keep up with Zelsys on the defense. The remainder of the expeditionary force had nearly carved a path to the convoy by this point, and combined with Zef’s supporting fire, Zelsys was not concerned for the safety of this perimeter. Ankylodragons were the greatest threat in her mind, plus, she simply wanted to kill one with her own hands.

It was ready. A pull of the lever. Brilliant-white heat flooding through her body, a serpent of lightning slithering down her left arm.

Click.

Click.

“THUNDERCANNON!”

A maelstrom of lightning and shot. Flesh turned to mulch, individual pellets magnetized to repel one another for maximum spread and wide-area killing power. The molemen closest to her were turned to little more than greasy stains, while those at the very edges of the technique’s effective cone were riddled with holes and, at bare minimum, severely wounded.

“Good luck,” she said to the no-longer-surrounded disciple as she worked the bolt, using the Fog discharge to obscure her escape, thereafter leaping right onto the truck behind herself. For a few moments, she ran along the encirclement, reloading her gun as she went, before she had reached the nearest point to her target and leapt down into the fray yet again, laughing and wildly swinging her blade wherever her instincts would draw it. A boulder flew right over her head just as she jumped down.

Dozens of Deep Dwellers fell before her blade as she carved a bloody swath towards the Ankylodragon, dodging boulders left and right, indirectly causing the deaths of dozens more as the errant projectiles smashed through the molemen’s ranks. Limbs and heads alike were liberated from their owners en masse, reddish-brown blood spraying all around. The molemen’s own iron claws and teeth served as shrapnel and crow’s feet, inflicting yet further harm upon their own ranks. Another amber-coloured flash from the treeline. This time she was close enough to see.

The Ankylodragon. It barely looked like the illustration; its size was nearly double the estimate, for one, being easily half again as long as one of the trucks. The monstrous, armored thing had a wide-set trunk, short, stubby legs, a club-ended tail, and an arrow-shaped head with one crystalline eye in the center of the forehead, but it didn’t match the book any further. Instead of flat, elephant-like feet it had very clear claws that gripped the stone earth. Its head was split down the middle all the way to the base of the neck, filled with huge teeth and a tongue covered in metallic spines. What caught her off guard the most, though, were the wings. They weren’t vestigial as the book displayed, but they weren’t suited to flying either. Instead, they resembled huge arms with three membranous fingers, scooping soil and rocks from the ground around the creature.

That amber flash had not been what launched the projectiles. It was the Ankylodragon solidifying the mass of compacted dirt and rocks into a solid boulder before it simply threw the mass. Zel could see it coming, and leapt up out of the morass of midget bodies to dodge, soaring above as she watched the rock plow a bloody path.

“That thing has killed more molemen than humans at this point…” she thought. A shrill shriek came from the Ankylodragon’s direction, and before she landed again, she saw the moleman that was likely commanding the creature. He carried a glistening, iron shortsword, his diminutive form was draped in animal skins and jewelry.

Ever so briefly their eyes met, and Zelsys saw the spark of thought behind those beady little staring-orbs of his. He wildly gestured upwards at her, stabbing a gaping, crusted over wound in the Ankylodragon’s side.

Rolling forward on the landing, Zel burned what kinetic energy she’d stored up from using Siphoning Pulse against dozens of attacks, throwing herself forward into a mad zigzagging dash - not to avoid the beast’s relatively clumsy aim, but in case the Deep Dweller Commander had any tricks up his sleeve. Proving her assumption right, he did: The little man pulled a golden, gem-encrusted, conspicuously gun-shaped talisman from somewhere, screaming an incantation as its “muzzle” began to glow. Red beams of arcane force erupted from the trinket, sharp snapping audible as it turned the rocky ground to slag wherever it struck.

With the little man’s eyes not being able to track her movements, Zelsys closed the distance, sliding between the Ankylodragon’s legs, her momentum sending her into a spin. As she emerged she heard the beast slam down in an effort to crush her, but she had already grabbed the beast-master’s leg, and was currently halfway through the motion of smashing him against a tree as one would a sackful of rats.

There came a satisfying crunch, and the forest-edge undergrowth was painted by moleman blood. A significant detachment of molemen had followed in her wake in some vain hope of cornering her, or perhaps out of concern for their superior, but this act of ultraviolence had whipped both them and the Ankylodragon into a frenzy. While the molemen sprinted after her, the dragon swung its tail, its wings still moulding a new boulder.

Truly the Impelling Arm was a marvel of arcane smithing, but its greatest feature was its ability to disperse received kinetic energy across the wearer’s entire body. It also converted one-third of a fired shell’s recoil into usable Pneuma for her to use, storing it in the pauldron.

She met the swing of the Ankylodragon’s tail with a left-handed punch, invoking Siphoning Pulse without too much worry for timing. It struck her, yet merely threw her to the side; she’d stolen one-third of its kinetic energy and the remainder was evenly distributed across her body and thus insufficient to cause injury. It felt no worse than Jorfr tackling her, which admittedly was comparable to being hit by a tractor, but nothing serious. The molemen had closed the distance by now, but she didn’t feel the need to use Thundercannon for this small cluster.

Click. Click. Boom.

A maelstrom of fire and shot erupted outward, painting a cone of gore where over a dozen molemen had once stood and pushing Zelsys back several meters. With a yank on the lever, the bolt popped open and a geyser of silver Fog erupted from the vent on the gun’s side, obscuring her position; arcane exhaust from the recoil mitigation mechanism’s operation.

She had no time to appreciate the sound, however, as the Ankylodragon brought its full wroth against her, swinging its tail at her while it tossed aside a half-formed boulder, its singular eye flashing and walls of false stone rising up around it in defense. Zel jumped over the tail in a rising backflip, forming a dozer-blade of lighting around her right leg as she did so, having expected the beast to use its wings against her.

When she landed atop the Ankylodragon’s back its right wing was short a digit, the finger dangling by a strip of membrane. The screeching, chittering construct around her leg fizzled out; it was prohibitively expensive to form and maintain, a niche tool compared to the straightforward brutality of a good cleaver… Though, the one in her hand was already covered in cracks and clearly on the edge of breaking. The Ankylodragon’s wings and tail alike came down on her, but she just rolled forward on the creature’s back, towards its head. It clearly knew what she intended to do, as its brought its wings forward as far as they could go, trying to grab at her. Its reward for this effort were stumps where fingers had once been. Five seconds and several brutal moments of vibrosaw action later, even these stumps had been cut down to the point of ineffectuality.

The beast swayed in place and tried to buck her as she knelt down over its head, snapping its jaws and closing its eye in panic, but none of that could save it. Zelsys buried her cleaver in one of the gaps between the beast’s armor plates, wrenching it downwards saw-side first as to crudely cut through its spinal column and into its chest cavity. Its head fell limp while the rest of its body stiffened.

Zel coated the Impelling Arm’s clawed fingertips with lightning, digging her fingers through the calloused, thick eyelid, ripping away at it until she got a hold of the creature’s crystal eye, and at last wrenched it free of its socket. The nerve dangled from one side of it, but it wasn’t truly attached, slipping off the crystalline orb with little resistance. It filled her hand the way a large apple might, and she immediately stowed it away into her Tablet. Satisfied, Zel glanced towards the convoy. The molemen’s ranks had broken; it was a wholesale slaughter, now.

“I see that you’ve a good eye for valuable beast parts. Third-Order Terramantic catalysts aren’t easy to come by, after all,” came a light-hearted, almost smug voice from the treeline to her right. She whipped around to catch a glimpse of the person who had slipped beneath her notice, and was met by a man in Arkaley Branch garb. A practically-sized sword was in his hand and the corpses of several molemen surrounded him. A second, much tenser-looking man with a mustache stood by his side, hefting a blade much more like the Sangers, being one of the single-edged, huge greatswords.

“And here I thought myself wise for taking the long route around in an effort to flank the beast, not knowing that our reinforcements would include the Newman Sect Elder herself,” the old man continued.

She kept digging, smashing open the creature’s skull and plunging her gauntleted hand into its alien, purplish brain, digging in search of an Azoth Stone.

“I’m afraid you won’t find an Azoth Stone, if that’s what you are searching for. Dragon Descendants do not develop them,” came that voice again. He was right, there was nothing.

Letting out a sigh, Zel shook the brain matter off of her hand and stood up, yanking her cleaver out of the beast. There were still molemen to kill, but… The moment she ripped the cleaver free, chunks of it began falling away. In moments, the mass of cold-iron was reduced to a jagged, two-pronged dagger. If anything, Zelsys was impressed that it had held out this long. She tossed it aside.

She jumped down from the corpse, pulling out her Tablet with the intent of retrieving a mundane blade for now, but the younger man annoyed her again.

“Why discard it?” the younger of the two men questioned. “It’s broken, but it should grow back in a few weeks even if you do not want to spend the money to have it repaired.”

Zelsys shook her head, pulling a long, curved butcher’s cleaver out of storage, its huge bulk belying a razor’s edge. It was decent steel, but not any better than that; good enough for government work by any other descriptor. This mundane metal would melt in her hand if she poured Fulgur into it, but it would last at least a little while.

“Pick it up, see if it sings,” she gestured with the new cleaver, walking to the corpse of the commander moleman as she did. “It’s dead metal now, just like this thing in my hand.”

The antsy-looking man did so, giving it a light swing in an effort to tease out the telltale resonance of cold-iron. His brow furrowed at the sound’s absence.

“Well I’ll be… I have never heard of a cultivation method that kills living weapons, but I suppose it’s no surprise with you lot,” the younger man said with a vague tone of disdain.

“It’s not my method, brain champion,” she snapped back, having picked up the moleman’s talisman. Up-close, it looked like a garish, gold-plated gun, just missing a physical operation mechanism. “This issue is inherent to the way Storm-soul Cultivation functions, it can’t be side-stepped without fundamentally altering the method and thus creating a new one, with its own issues. Ever wonder why Kargarian sword-saints are so obsessed with one sword? This is why.”

“Brain wha-” he began.

“I’m calling you a moron,” she interrupted, fiddling with the weird magical firearm-equivalent. It finally fired, a beam of flame erupting from the muzzle with a snap. A useful trinket, but it would need further study before she could decide whether to keep it or relegate it to storage.

“Moron? You dare, junior?” came a faux-indignant question from the elder, utterly steeped in facetiousness. Zelsys chuckled at that, punting the head off of a lone charging moleman as she walked. A glance at the man’s clothes again, then up at his face. Old, but lively. He answered before she could ask the question: “As you’ve likely guessed, I am the Arkaley Branch elder. My name is Gideon Strickers, and this is one of my lieutenants, Ernest Maulers. I was warned about you and yours, Zelsys Newman. Dangerous lot, barely better than mercenaries, the main branch called you. They said you practiced heretical cultivation methods, the likes of which are seen only in primitive far off lands. Do you?”

There, in the middle of a bloodsoaked battlefield, the two sect elders stood face to face as equals, and Zelsys answered as she would answer an equal: “If by “heretical methods“ the main branch meant methods which we actually understand and which bring results without turning the practitioner into a tumor-ridden sociopath, then yes. Storm-soul Cultivation, Victory Demon Cultivation, The Windswept Road to Xi’ba’qha, the Walking Way of the Despot of Self. We even have members who practice a more practical derivative of the Sanger Family’s own Sword-Soul Cultivation, along some of the methods of our Black Horse predecessors.”

“And… To what end is that, might I ask?” he questioned.

“Ikesia’s cultivation has been overly steeped in mysticism, myth, and purposeful disinformation, at least the better-known forms of it. The noble cultivator-families are mostly inbred degenerates snorting noon dust and injecting mutagens, or at best fools drunk on the initial power gains of False Paths like Azoth Stone Cultivaton. Major sects like you Sangers or the Black Horses aren’t much better, even if your Paths are at least true," she answered.

“Do you seek to create a unified, supreme theory of cultivation, then? To understand the underlying principles of it all, even knowing that you only stand to gain the hatred of those who benefit from the status quo? It is a path many have tried to walk, the Three Kings among them, and it brought them all to ruin,” mused the old man, his mask slipping; it couldn’t be clearer that he was quite a bit older than his mortal countenance suggested.

Zel chuckled, giving a brief nod.

“It makes no difference,” she said. “I’ve already made an enemy of the Emperor; if the remnants of Ikesia’s old sects wish to break themselves upon me and mine, I will not stop them. Now, if you don’t mind, there are still quite a few molemen that need exterminating before my work is done here.”

“That, I cannot disagree with,” Gideon agreed. His eyes shifted around two meters to the left and down. He took a breath, and in a heartbeat’s span, swung his blade upwards, quickly enough that Zel just barely saw it happen. There was a flash of light, and when she turned around to look, she saw two halves of a moleman slide apart and topple to the ground.

At the same moment, Jorfr could be seen careening out from within the encirclement, spinning through the air before he smashed down hammer-first into one of the larger remaining moleman swarms. Great stakes of ice erupted from the earth, skewering many of them and eliciting a light smile from Gideon, as well as an indignant look from Ernest.

“In the end, this incident may yet serve to humble those foolish disciples of mine; to remind them that if we stagnate we will be left in the dust, in this age of upheaval,” Gideon said as he walked past Zelsys. She didn’t stay behind, rejoining the fight alongside him.

The slaughter went on for the next hour and a half. By the end of it, all but Zefaris were out of ammunition. Both material and human losses had been minimized, with only four Tankmen suffering serious injuries, while every sect disciple except Zefaris and Joseph suffered minor, incidental wounds that could be taken care of with basic restorative elixirs. The Arkaley Branch wasn’t quite as well-off, but their human losses could be counted on one hand, and all of them were lesser disciples by Gideon’s reckoning, as callous as it sounded. Next would come the arduous task of gathering any scattered Damasite, patching up damaged trucks, and getting the convoy back to Willowdale. While this wasn’t the Newman Sect’s job they were initially willing to help, but the Arkaley Branch members didn’t seem at all as happy to work with them as they rightly should have been; as such, Zelsys made the decision to depart right then and there, and they got to hear Gideon slave-driving his disciples as they rode off.