Ubul wasn’t a fool. He was extremely and rightly so confident in the capability of his new form, but he wasn’t a fool. He knew when to go on the defensive, and that time was now. His fortune was the fact that spraying blood from one’s mouth somewhat prevents one from invoking the name of a complex Fulgurkinetic technique, thus affording him the time to form the necessary sigils with his hidden hand even as the skeletons crawled all over him, preferring their slowly-scouring flame to whatever heretical blood magick this mad woman was about to unleash. He suffused the earth around himself with Terra, willingly sapping away his own strength in order to prepare an earthen shell, one which he willed to manifest when it was too late for the woman to back out of her technique.

Despite his foresight, the first wave slammed into him like a wave of superheated air into a wax statue, the unstable lightning shredding away the outermost layer of his body with the metal penetrating a good few centimeters deep, while a swarm of blood-red lightning-spheres floated overhead menacingly. He saw them descend upon him with zigzagging motions as his shell closed up around him, slamming into and eating away at it bit at a time, but even such a small amount swiftly added up when there were hundreds of the godforsaken red fireflies.

It sealed the decision in his mind. She had to die.

The greatest threat on the battlefield wasn’t the norseman, the living suit of machine-armor, that skull-masked gunwoman, or even the bald beardo that had somehow grasped the lost arts of the islanders through the means of heretical Ikesian alchemy.

It was her.

The madness in her eyes, the constant changing of ways, the way she seemed to just pull new moves techniques out of nowhere or combine existing ones on the fly, the mere fact she survived and so quickly recovered from his Breath-destroying Strike with seemingly no serious aftereffects, it was proof that she was a true monster, regardless of how seemingly mediocre her physicals were. The possibility of her being a high-tier body cultivator early on in the journey to physical perfection sparked in his mind, but was snuffed out by the reality that such a thing was impossible, especially after the half-millennium spent working so hard to snuff out the arts outside of Pateiria.

No, she was a monster, a homunculus, an abomination against nature, plain and simple, and Ubul would reinstate the natural order by ending the life of this monstrosity.

He felt the Terra of his defensive shell waning, and he felt as it ceased waning too, telling him that the onslaught had stopped. Ubul mentally calculated her current position by taking into account her velocity and position the moment before he enclosed himself, plus the physical recoil of her technique which he had derived from the previous time she had used it. Even if this shell had a different, weaker, or stronger recoil pattern, it didn’t matter much.

The general dropped his focus on the shield, allowing it to dissolve into dirt as he pushed his head out, already digging his heels into the soil, suffusing it with Terra, before he commanded a pillar of earth to rise up as he pushed down and took off skyward like a three-meter tall stone cannonball. Zelsys was already in his sights, still mid-air, and well within acceptable margin or error of is mental math - the fact the direction of recoil was directly away from him and that it was distributed evenly across her body made it far easier to predict, and such, he barely had to make any adjustments to catch her…

…Or so he thought.

Just before he could get that damnable homunculus in his hands, she just moved to the side as if an unseen force propelled her, working the bolt of her strange arm-cannon and releasing a great cloud of unstable Fog that blinded Ubul’s arcane sight.

Despite his vastly superior speed, she pulled out some way to evade him again and again, peppering him with lightning-bolts that wore away at his skin just a bit faster than he could repair himself, throwing in his path screeching, flying, electrified bands of chattering cold-iron teeth. She met him in an open clash once, and only once, for the mistake of accepting it led to his punch being met with a kineticist trick that robbed it of all momentum, instantly followed by lightning-wreathed kick to his side, the violent spin of her body propelled beyond his ability to counter by the stolen velocity of his own strike. It split him down the middle at the waist, shaving off a good few centimeters off his height and forcing him to once again resort to dismantling nearby Ikesian war scrap to hold himself together while he performed lengthier, more thorough repairs.

Ubul’s anger only rose throughout the exchange, but he had to begrudgingly admit that she wasn’t just a living weapon relying on monstrous physiology and an apparent immunity to pain. Fighting her felt more like fighting a smug, old, wandering martial artist, or one of those “peaceful” monks that made a religion of their own capability for violence, combined with the choice not to use it unless provoked. It was clear that there was some semblance of martial morality within this woman, and so a small part of the great general mourned her as he sprung his trap.

Through the stone-cat-and-mouse-with-a-gun chase, Ubul had drawn a complex seal within the soil underfoot, manipulating the dirt into forming the sign just a few dozen centimeters beneath the surface. Now, with a stomp and a burst of Terra, he was able to make the ground drop out under the woman’s feet, only for a stone pillar to shoot up a moment later, throwing her into the air. As she began her ascent, Ubul was already prepared, propelling himself using the self-same seal, altering his arms into two pairs of many-jointed tendrils as he flew, and snatching her out of mid-air. With his limbs securely wound around her right arm, right leg, and neck, crushing her windpipe and snuffing out the possibility of resistance, Ubul didn’t take the mistake of monologuing or taking his time in torturing his foe.

Even with his strength, it took considerable effort to make the woman’s flesh come apart, to make the joints of her thigh and shoulder pop out of their sockets, to garotte and sever the spinal cord right at the bottom of the neck. Letting go with one of his arm-tendrils, he formed an edge at its tip and disemboweled her, piercing her lungs and her heart as well as severing the spinal cord in two more spots just to make sure. The amount of force he had to exert just to cut through her muscle and tendons, combined with the fact her blood seemed to still clot nearly instantly spoke volumes of how thoroughly refined the body was, a terrible waste of good cultivation in sacrifice for the enemy.

He left the body in the mud, tossing the head, arm, and leg a few meters away as blood geysered from the wounds, the cultivator body rejecting death and struggling for survival even in this doomed state, a fruitless struggle the sight of which Ubul was so gravely familiar with. The body kept trying to breathe, the heart kept trying to beat in a controlled manner as if trying to minimize exsanguination, even as the severed head’s eyes still moved. It was said that a lesser body cultivator’s severed head could remain conscious for minutes without any intervention, and even cultivators of a standard well beyond this barbaric prodigy could not reverse lethal wounds under their own power. It was simply how Ubul understood cultivation, his viewpoint entirely rooted in western practice.

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Zefaris saw the entire exchange transpire in perfect detail, even from nigh-on half a kilometer away, having kept her eye on it as she continuously laid into the general with hardened slugs to distract and maybe inflict marginal damage.

The realization of what had just happened didn’t really sink in for a good few seconds, in which she stared blankly into the middle-distance. There was no feeling to come alongside it. There never had been. She’d long taught herself to feel only a numb, calming cold wash over her whenever she saw a comrade shot or cut down, thrown into the mud.

Just as all those times, so too did that comfortable, cold numbness wash over her, and it consumed everything else there was. Thoughts, emotions, even her anchor to reality, all gone, swept away by total dissociation. A blood-red death machine roaring back to life halfway across the battlefield, its frame expanding and distorting as it dropped onto all fours and sprinted faster than any human could hope to in Ubul’s direction. Her mind, not unlike an automaton, decided the most tactically sound course of action and decided to strike when the two clashed.

A cylinder full of Mogralt and Atrine. A handful of coins, held between the fingers. A deep breath, and another still, all shunted to the Philosopher’s Eye. An Impact Driver seal carved into both sides of each coin. Another breath in, an exhalation out through the mask’s vent, enchanting all at once, as though tiny silver serpents slithering into the metal.

No emotion, no rage and rancor, just calm cold, spreading all throughout, freezing the very soul.

Zefaris threw the coins and fired a series of low-intensity Concussion Impact missiles at them, propelling them yet further skyward as Ubul smashed aside tankman after tankman in pursuit of Jorfr, planning to strike down upon him at the exact moment when Zero finally clashed with the general.

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Ubul would finish off the norseman, take that washed-up nobleman-hunter Rushing Dandy hostage, and put Willowdale to the torch. Then, he would return here, and give that Newman woman a proper cultivator’s burial, by utterly destroying what was left of her so that her remains might not be repurposed by cravens.

These were the thoughts that went through the general’s head before he locked eyes with Jorfr and chased after him.

Even as he did so, one after the other, men in machine-armor came after him. One after the other, wielding weapons meant for their betters, swords as tall as themselves, great clubs whose sheer mass could conceivably crack apart Ubul’s skin with enough force, even just hoisting field cannons off their frames to try and fire on him at point blank.

Magic knights, they were, even if magic knights of a new era. This had been done before, this desperate effort to replace cultivation with industrial and technological prowess. Again and again, Ubul had seen it, fought it, broken it. The same absence of time and spiritual resources for cultivation that necessitated such focus on equipment also made the users lacking, unable to become truly one with their own armor and weapons as a cultivator, or even mundane, experienced swordsman could.

One after the other he smashed them to the side, picked them up and threw them, or just punted them across the field. The larger among them, the so-called “First-models”, were a little more impressive, clearly in sync with their vehicles by necessity, but even still, most of them moved like… Well, machines. Reliable, uncompromising, but predictable.

“MACHINES? IS THAT THE BEST YOU HAVE?! SUCH SOULLESS THINGS CANNOT EVOLVE! YOUR WORSHIP OF MACHINERY IS DOOMED TO FAILURE! NO MACHINE, NO MATTER HOW ADVANCED, CAN EVER MAKE A MORTAL EQUAL TO A CULTIVATOR.”

Strake had been procedurally going through every conceivable method and contingency to try and get Zero’s engine running at a workable output level, but there was no getting around reality. It was severely damaged, and it was a miracle that it still ran, let alone that its output was sufficient to let the machine walk, albeit slowly. He felt Zero shuddering around him, the metal creaking and ringing as the machine’s spirit exerted every bit of power it had in an effort to move, its righteous anger seething and filling the cockpit with an aura of bloodlust.

After witnessing what had just transpired, and to a degree, hearing that filthy fucking zipperhead mock superior Ikesian engineering, Strake got over his aversion towards a certain last-resort option. He reached for the Victory Wash, downing one, two, three full doses, before slotting a fresh Fulguric cell into the Thundercharger module.