In favor of moving quickly, the dismembered body parts moved cautiously, arriving into the immediate vicinity of one another with minimal risk of being noticed amidst the chaos.

When, and only when, each and every disparate part of the body was within a few meters of the next, having reformed a basic connection by means of blood-tendril, did the Primordial Self enact its true intentions.

Laying in cold, dark mud.

No feeling, no thought, for but a moment.

A flash of oblivion.

Then, a sound. Pop. Pop.

Joints popping back into place.

Arteries, sinew, ligaments, muscle reconnected, forcefully welded together, clotted blood metallized into what may as well have been azoth-ferric amalgam.

Pain.

Zelsys felt herself getting up, but she wasn’t the one willing herself to move.

She howled and thrust her blade to the heavens, screaming bloody defiance as she, out of raw instinct, challenged the Living Storm to strike her. The Primordial Self was already moving her body while her Thinking Self was still waking from the torpor of false death.

A tacit proclamation:

“GIVE ME ALL YOU HAVE.”

“THE WRETCH YOU WERE WROUGHT TO STRIKE DOWN STANDS HERE.”

“TRUST ME TO DELIVER YOUR WRATH UPON HIM.”

“I HEREBY CALL DOWN, DEMAND, USURP ALL THAT IS THE LIVING STORM, FALL UPON ME AND BECOME AS ONE WITH THIS FLESH!”

Truly, never had Ubul had the displeasure of fighting a less forthright warrior than that skull-masked woman… But he respected her nonetheless, for he was fully aware of just how far-reaching the implications of her wielding the Supreme Law of Entropy were. It was a cultivation path just as elusive and lethal as its practitioners, after all.

To evade him even in his true body, that was a feat all on its own. Although his senses were once more contained to a single body, they were more than sharp enough to detect even the stealthiest of rogues, but she wasn’t stealthy. She was a ghost, a cheat, a trickster that lied to the very laws of causality so convincingly they would second-guess themselves for a moment.

That voice.

Ubul knew that voice.

For how few times he had heard it, he could not mistake it anywhere in the world. Had he heard a mere illusion of it, the general would not paid it any mind.

But he felt it.

When that guttural scream rang out the presence of its originator asserted itself, and the Living Storm responded. He had gotten his eye on that damnable norseman, having decided to eliminate him before rooting out the masked gunwoman, insufferably slippery as she was.

“HOW-”

A bright flash surged through the clouds overhead, causing Ubul to instinctively manifest a defensive arm. No lightning strike came. Another flash in the clouds, brighter this time. This was disconcerting - he would’ve preferred a lightning strike. To add yet more onto the pile, that thrice-damned song began to carry over the wall again, those obnoxious brass horns and war drums blasted from that blood-red machine’s speakers. He couldn’t have ignored it even had he tried, so brightly did the tank’s paint contrast against the sky as it crested the top of his wall.

With a false breath he didn’t need to take, the general cleared his mind, plunging his hand into the ground and ripping out a mass of arcanely hardened stone, shaped into the form of a giant hammer. He began bounding across the battlefield, with one intent: Pulverize Zelsys Newman thoroughly enough that she wouldn’t get back up again, regardless of what obscure feat of outsider cultivation had permitted her to reassemble herself as she had seemingly done. It reminded him of those abominations born of the Ikes’ Rot Bombs, those beasts that fed on decay and refused to die. In fact, the stench, the black streak of such a beast was very much present within Newman’s aura, even if subdued. Faded. Purified. Had she truly devoured the core of such a beast without succumbing to the rot? If so, it either proved that she was indeed a monster despite Ubul’s having given her the benefit of the doubt, or that she possessed knowledge of cultivation outside the Empire’s grasp.

Hundreds of meters, he traversed in seconds, driven by something he had not felt in a long time. Real, true fear, fear at the sight of that woman holding up that crude cleaver to the heavens, the heavens churning. The spots where he had split her apart were mended with silver-coloured matter so densely steeped in Metallum it could be nothing but some manifestation of the magic of these earthen spirits. To think she possessed such a magic and hadn’t used it in their exchanges before now… A ghastly thought crossed Ubul’s mind: “...Did she allow me to dismember her on purpose?”

Whatever she was doing had to be stopped before it could complete. Ubul leapt at her with all the force his legs could muster, hardening the ground under his feet to create a good jumping-off point, only to shatter the plate of hardened rock into four parts with the force of his leap. So fast was it that many on the battlefield couldn’t even see him as more than a momentary blur.

Lightning, however, was faster, and the Living Storm struck Ubul in his moment of careless risk. It wasn’t lethal, or even a notable injury, but it was enough to knock him off course to a degree he couldn’t correct in time, much as he tried, turning his hammer into a long stone staff to contact the ground with so he could launch himself at Newman…

…Only to suddenly swerve out the way, having noticed the clouds change.

It wasn’t a flash inside the clouds, but an absolute consumption with blinding light, as if the controlling intelligence of the abominable storm marshalled everything the storm was into a single discharge in response to the barbaric woman’s beastly scream.

His dodge was just barely in time, for a split-second later, scorching heat washed over him and everything turned to white.