Red continued, to Zel’s great amusement, by copying her: “However… It seems that we are at an impasse. You cannot truly harm me, and exhausted as I am, I cannot strike you down either.”

Stomping footsteps could be heard approaching, and obviously making it up on the spot, Red gestured to the snow-pale figure which stomped through the entryway: ”Fortunate it is then, that I am not your executioner!”

On the lower floor of the former temple, in the chambers beyond the sight of those who had come here as buyers, Jorfr and Zefaris were themselves facing off against a grave foe: A desperate beast-tamer who had released all nine of the False Drakes that were being housed here, a good five of them in good-enough condition to spit lethal flame.

Upon receipt of Zel’s message, Zefaris remarked: “I suppose that means Von Wickten pulled some desperate ploy, if he became a sufficient threat to warrant that.”

She glanced sideways to Jorfr, unloading her shotgun down the hallway as she did so, skewering and freezing the head of a charging drake with glacierglass stakes before shattering it with slugs.

“Go, I have it handled here. If you move quickly you might get there in time to watch her disembowel him,” she said to the norseman with a tinge of humor. He nodded, hoisting his massive hammer onto one shoulder and storming off.

Zefaris locked her mask to her face and took a deep breath, reloading Tempesta before she pulled out a handful of coins. She breathed on them, throwing them all into the air, the chamber’s vaulted ceilings permitting their long ascent. Time compressed. The world stopped for a moment - a breath’s span - then resumed.

“Praise gun, our savior…”

Pentacle came into her now-free right hand as a stake from Tempesta pinned a second drake to the ground. The first half of Death’s Lieutenant took form. Another deep breath through the mask.

“...Hail death, the master!”

Jorfr sprinted back through the auction room, now littered with corpses; the Dragon Knights on the upper floor had reacted when Zefaris began executing the buyers, giving each of them a chance to explain their reasons to be here before killing them. He could hear the battle raging clear as day, the unmistakable boom of Zel’s arm-cannon going off contrasted by monstrous roaring in a version of the knight captain’s unmistakable voice. Then, there was the scream. The high-pitched screech of some empyrean force ripping through the air. Through already-opened doorways, he could glimpse an iridescent beam clashing with the horrifically mutated Dragon Knight’s own beam of flame, seemingly being pushed back before it suddenly flickered out. The voice of that woman - the Red Mantis - then resounded, but Jorfr had already slipped into a battle-trance and extraneous sensory input faded out of focus, his attention utterly fixed on his target: The Entomodragon.

As he ran, the norseman reached for his chest, and forming an iceborn claw around his thumb, he cut a vertical line downwards, the wound freezing shut moments after it began bleeding. After the first line came another, and another, until he’d carved a ritualistic glyph into his own skin: two crosses overlaid to form an eight-spoked star, with three lines across the midpoint of each spoke and a U-shape at the tip of each spoke to form a trident. Despite its complexity, the glyph was completed before he passed the last open door. It was a magnified representation of the self-same glyph which shone upon his forehead, inlaid into the bone in meteoric iron: The Helm of Awe, a glyph of his clan which magnified the user’s presence and inured them from harm. Never before had it failed him, as unlike many, Jorfr had the knowledge, strength of will, and rapport with the earthen spirits to manifest the glyph’s power in full. It was the very reason for his foregoing a shirt, in fact: The magic required that his skin be laid bare.

“Let the glaciers be my weapon, the permafrost my skin, the scouring winds my breath…”

Water froze upon him, forming layers of frost that shaped themselves huge plates of armor, while his exhalations blasted forth hot steam alongside Fog, and a jagged beard of frost grew upon his jaw, his own wiry hair the scaffolding. The immense bulk of solid, rough cold-iron which Jorfr chose to be his weapon - his hammer - froze in his hands, becoming enveloped by jagged spikes of translucent glacierglass.

Sprinting right past the red woman and fully anticipating the same exact flame-beam to be set upon him, he already began zigzagging left and right, using his hammer as an anchor to make hairpin turns and even running along walls with the assistance of the runes which were carved on the soles of his feet. Though their purpose was to anchor him to the ground for wrestling, they could be turned to more mobile purposes in short bursts, as long as what he was trying to run on was stone or soil. Bolts of flame came flying all around him and a tremendous bladed tail came at him like a gigantic whip, not to mention the bug-dragon’s claws, but Jorfr had fought beasts that moved like this. He managed to dodge enough of the beast’s strikes to get above it and come crashing down like a man-shaped meteor, spinning downward and smashing his hammer upon the dragon’s back with such force the beast’s feet cracked the stone beneath and two of its scales shattered, yellow blood spurting out of its mouth. He found himself grabbed like a ragdoll and thrown across the room the next moment, smashing back-first into a wall. His vision briefly flickered out, and when it returned, he caught sight of Zelsys - hiding behind a pillar, twitching in place, visibly struggling with five of her six braids already alighted with a manifested Thundergod.

“Two steps left. A minute at most. I can do that.”

He freed himself just in time for a blast of flame to strike the wall where he had been moments earlier, once more meeting the abomination in a melee. Not knowing of the anchoring-runes on Jorfr’s feet, the dragon thought to meet Jorfr’s hammer-swings with strikes of his own, and though the force of Von Wickten’s tail was by far greater than that which Jorfr could generate from a standstill, the norseman remained unmoved even after the tail smashed his hammer aside. Desperate, the monster grabbed for him once more, but Jorfr had slipped between his legs and was just about to smash one of his knees from the side, only for that damnable tail to get him again. His reactions were just quick enough to will his anchoring-runes to release, and he was thrown across the chamber once again, but this time he righted himself in mid-air.

“Come, show me how a pretender-dragon’s flame splatters upon a glacier!” he exclaimed as he stood up after landing. “You shan’t move me.”

He saw the bug-dragon’s chest expanding and an ominous glow between the scales as he reared up and flame sputtered from his mouth. It was a tell so obvious he didn’t need any more than that to dig his heels in and smash his hammer down, invoking the spirits of his ancestors. The stone cracked beneath its force and a great mass of ice erupted forth, forming into the visage of an immense norseman holding a shield in one hand and a sword in the other, a backswept wall of frost in his wake. Upon that snarling, iceborne visage the terrible beam of flame splattered.

ANCESTOR SIGN

REPRISING THE FEATS OF ONE’S FOREBEARS

HULSON CLAN ARTS: WIDE-WUTH OF THE UNBROKEN SHIELD

The face of that statue meant nothing to anyone but Jorfr, for only he knew who it was: His own grandfather, whose spirit Jorfr had invoked in the casting of this defensive technique. He cared not for the methodology, for the how and why of it, all he cared about was that the ritualistic invocation of his ancestors’ spirits amplified his magic as long as he did so with full conviction. He knew exactly how the feat had been achieved; the tale of it had been drilled into him since childhood and the shield defense form his grandfather had used was as familiar to him as his own hammer. So it was that, despite not practicing the usage of cultivation assist devices like Tablets, Jorfr had attained the very thing those devices bestowed on anyone to use them: Spiritual muscle memory by way of ancestor-worship.

What he had just done had also ripped a chunk out of his already-waning reserves, of which he had spent a portion helping to fuel Zef’s Eternal Snow technique and in the convoy battle. Jorfr cared not if he depleted his own reserves, only that he bought Zelsys enough time to take over for him and finish the job… And so he charged ahead, dragging his hammer across the stone floor. Smashing down his hammer once more, Jorfr used it as a lever to throw himself upwards, spending everything he had on a last-ditch effort, a technique which reprised not the feat of an ancestor, but one of his own feats in the Blue Moon War.

The ice-mass encasing his hammer grew to the size of boulder, ominous runes alighting upon its surface as it threatened to smash Von Wickten’s head through sheer mass, being a sufficient threat for the entomodragon to raise both his arms and his tail in a guard. It shattered like sugar-glass on impact, its spray of fragments turning to a rapidly-expanding mass of solid ice that utterly encased the accursed beast of a man.

ABSOLUTE ZERO SIGN

BY WHICH A MOVING MOUNTAIN CAN BE HALTED

HULSON CLAN ARTS: GLIMMER OF LOST HYPERBOREA

The sixth of her braids had come alive, and Zelsys could scarcely contain both the building power and the excitement swirling within her breast. She stepped out of cover when she saw Jorfr get that look on his face before he sprinted off again, having anticipated that he would do exactly what he did.

She could do naught but laugh when Jorfr stumbled out from behind the frozen bug-dragon, struggling to catch his breath as he dragged his hammer in one hand and leaned on the mass of glacierglass with the other.

“That…” he sighed, knocking on the mass. “Is so much harder to do without the preparatory ritual. You have twenty seconds before it gives.”

With that, he retreated to the side of the Lady in Red, squatting down next to her. He briefly glanced over to the still-unconscious body of Victor, still shielded by Red’s unmistakable black pillars, then looked up at the mantis with a questioning gaze. She refused to answer why these constructs conveniently didn’t crumble, as if they were being actively maintained.

“Now, little man, let me show you the difference between your borrowed power and something real…” Zelsys uttered, looking up into Von Wickten’s eyes. Despite being frozen, he twitched in his temporary tomb, visibly struggling against it as his eyes shuddered in place even as they remained steadily affixed on Zelsys.

Breath in, breath out, she fed the final - or rather, first - and largest of her Thundergods, fighting with all her might to keep the bead of cosmic lightning in her second stomach from just flooding into the rest of her body prematurely.

With the seventh step, the very air around her seemed to become lightning, a flash of blinding blue consuming her surroundings as arcs of lightning lashed the ground and gouged channels of molten rock beneath her feet. As the upsurge subsided, lightning and exhaled Fog both swirled together into a looming figure right behind Zelsys, mirroring her stance; it could only be described as her true persona given form, a musclebound embodiment of violence half again as tall as she was, a mane of white hair framing a face shrouded by a bear skull mask, the figure’s nudity concealed only by huge red braids, each as thick as a grown man’s arm.

A tangible manifestation of the Primordial Self.

“Slave to your inner animal that you are, you could never conceive of the control I possess. I tread the Walking Way of the Despot of Self! My very being is my empire, and not a single soldier shall go unaccounted for!”