The pieces connected in her mind: “He hasn’t repaired his body. That thing before - it was a golem, shod with the Terra-soaked implements of his death to amplify its connection to his true self in support of the main core, as well as to divert from the fact he had hidden his real body deep underground. All this time, he’d been puppeting his own golem body as though no more than a clay soldier.”

She could barely finish her thought.

The way that glow spread out from his eyes almost made it look like he was crying…

…And the way he moved was enough to make even Zefaris skirt the edge of panic. She burned the stockpile of Gelum in her left eye, borrowing a few precious moments, distorting her own place in time. With help from these borrowed moments, she used the single kinetic mirror still in range and a thrown coin to slow Ubul’s impossibly speedy, zigzagging advance, calculating where exactly his knee would be at a given moment in time when he was least likely to change its position, while Makhus took a stand in front of her, like the fool he was.

Two shots, each from a different direction - 10 and 2 o’clock from Ubul’s perspective.

One connected, skewering his knee, the unstable projectile penetrating stone and instantly destabilizing, the ice forcing it open with its expansion, weakening it.

Makhus, made ignorant of the pain wracking him while a dose of Fivefold Philter coursed through his veins, faced down the charging mountain with all the confidence of his foolish, younger self. He could not merely see, but feel the general’s approach, the fire in his arm from just now injecting another dose of TB 9, the edge of his sword rendered unto an all-severing blade by the belt’s resonance.

THE SWORD THAT CLEAVES EVIL

IRON PHILOSOPHY: OPUS ONE

Lunging forward with all the speed his armor could impart and then some, Makhus severed Ubul’s leg at the knee as he ducked down, turning his blade into a reverse-grip and pulling his arm back, simultaneously dragging himself underneath Ubul and cutting into the general’s other leg, tripping the general. Despite his armor, his sword, his skill, and the drugs in his system, Ubul’s current form still superseded the swordsman by a long shot - Makhus had caught him off-guard half by virtue of underestimation, and half Ubul’s own focus on Zefaris as a priority target. In that time which Makhus had bought, Zefaris had been able to fire an empowered gunshot from Pentacle, invoking Concussion Impact. The force wasn’t enough to carry Ubul’s immense mass away, but it was enough to turn a near-trip into an outright backwards fall. Makhus exploited this by spinning around, invoking Opus One yet again in a desperate - and successful - bid to sever the general’s upper and lower halves entirely.

Ubul had already prepared to right himself by the time he realized what had happened. As he fell, he stretched out his arm and, in touching the ground, sent a surge of Terra into it, causing a pillar of stone to slam into Makhus’s chest with such force as to cave in his chestplate, sending him flying. He then reattached his own lower half, yet again forced by that accursed blade to use scavenged battlefield scrap as structural support.

Even this brief amount of bought time had been enough for Zefaris to slip away, once more diving into one of the many trenches that snaked all across the Ikesian side of the old battlefield, exploiting her instinctual understanding of their structure and her newfound ability to cheat time itself to evade the general and create distance, even if only for a short while longer.

Makhus landed several dozen meters away, his armor gone altogether. The Iron Rider belt had automatically placed his armor in Fog Storage as he fell, the process inherently having been designed to protect the Iron Rider from interruptions to their transformation. Thus, it protected him from crumpling like a crouton on impact with the ground.

The Swordsman-Alchemist’s first thought after he landed wasn’t getting to safety, but picking his sword back up, finding anyone still able to fight, and striking Ubul down, in that exact order. These thoughts were what awakened the square tablet inside one of the tablet storage slots along the belt’s length - the one the belt had originally come with. It thrummed in its slot, emitting a dull glow alongside wisps of Fog. Calling, demanding to be slotted in.

Acala.

He took the cartridge in hand and slotted it into his belt, only to hear the sound of music carry across the wall as Zero crowned its top, immediately followed by a guttural bellow in a familiar female voice. Ubul seemed to panic, shooting across the battlefield like a blur, and then… There was blinding light, deafening noise, and a wave of scorching heat.

Elsewhere on the battlefield, a very short time earlier…

A body laid amidst mud and blood, strewn into four pieces, its severed right arm still grasping a cold-iron cleaver, its torso still breathing through a headless stump, all but the trachea sealed shut by a giant black clot. Even the stump where the right leg and arm had once attached were now sealed. Without a brain, driven by fragmentary partitions of the Primordial Self, the body crawled through the mud towards its severed head.

The moment the head came within sight of the body, it, too, began to move, its pallid countenance stirred into motion by whipping tendrils of blood that extended from its neck and pulled it along. The severed leg and arm, too, had been pulled themselves along the ground in this manner, all the disparate, lungless pieces having substituted for air by burning precious Aether that their tissues had been saturated with. The severed head, meanwhile, was truly an unconscious object, for the Primordial Self was wise enough to know that even brief loss of oxygenation could spell permanent damage. Thus, in the moments before the owner of this dismembered body had been rendered unto this lessened form, the Primordial Self had communicated the situation and asked to shut down all higher mental function, effectively reducing the brain’s need for air - and thus Aether - to a fraction of its proportionally massive requirement.