Chapter 86: 86 – Butcher the Lightning

A torrential downpour of raging white-hot lightning came crashing down on the dome. The dome held, and surprisingly, so did the plug - for about half a second. That half a second was more than enough time, however.

All at once she emptied her lungs and swung her Cleaver skyward, right into the gap in the barrier, right as the plug finally shattered. A thought flashed through her mind as she did so, no more than a name for the feat which, in her bottomless sense of self-assurance, Zelsys knew would echo throughout her life from this point forward. Through this feat, she would butcher the lightning and take its constituent parts to use as she pleased - she would assert her blazing will to live over one of the most violent forces of nature.

“Beast-butchering Arts: Lightning-splitter!!!”

The Cleaver’s edge met the lightning bolt, wrathful tongues of raging plasma leaping across the outside of the barrier and even squeezing in through the gap to sear channels in the cabin’s wooden roof. 

Zel’s blade thrummed in her grip, it shuddered and shook, its metal screamed like ten thousand braking locomotives and its shape was twisted by violent electromagnetism, but it held. 

Furious sparks danced across its surface and torrents of superheated plasma split at its edge, but it held. 

The blackened flat of its blade became blackened no more, etched by the lightning into a branching Lichtenberg figure more elaborate and detailed than any human hand could conjure.

Milliseconds turned to deciseconds which turned to seconds, and all throughout, the lightning coursed not only through her blade, but through Zelsys as well. 

The tendrils of lightning that were not devoured by the living weapon arced across its surface and tried to strike the wielder, but once they reached Zelsys they didn’t so much as touch her skin. Instead, these violent arcs were inexorably pulled towards the lines of silver that covered her skin, even to the scarce gleaming strands that were mixed in with the rest of her silver hair. Through Osmotic Essentia Absorption her body took in the very essence of lightning, and through Metabolic Alkahest it ripped the primordial force of nature into its constituent essentia and digested them as no more than nutrition for the soul.

In spite of this, a great deal of current still surged through her body, muscles twitching out of control. As Zelsys struggled to maintain steady breathing and fought the shocks something clicked in her head, and sheer force of will took control where the body’s self-regulatory functions failed. By the time it was all over, Zelsys had exerted willful control over not just her own musculature, but over her heart and lungs as well, unknowingly controlling the beating of the former and the individual movements of the latter to maintain Fog-breathing. When the left lung exhaled Fog the right one was already inhaling fresh air, the two gaseous substances remaining separate, not unlike oil and water.

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Then, the lightning was gone, and in its place Zelsys stood. Her body ached more than she had thought it could, her hair stood on-end, but she was outwardly unscathed, and the blade that sat in her hand was the Captain’s Cleaver no more. 

It was the Lightning Butcher, its cutting edge glowing red with electro-induction and its sawteeth vibrating with oscillating magnetic fields. Both these violent effects faded just before she put it down and holstered it. With the lightning bolt’s current gone, the moment Zel ceased exerting control over her own bodily functions the regulatory mechanisms took over. She managed to deftly leap to the ground, even to step towards the door, before she felt herself lapse into unconsciousness. 

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The rays of the morning sun dragged her from the cold abyss of a dreamless healing sleep. Zelsys woke to a muscle ache that permeated every fibre of her being, soothed by the comforting grasp of familiar hands wrapped around her from behind. She stirred ever so slightly, attempting to slip out of Zef’s grasp without waking the markswoman, but her counterpart woke the moment Zelsys moved.

As she sat up and began to carefully stretch her aching muscles to alleviate some of the stiffness, she tried to remember what had happened. The memory floated to the surface and her mouth curled into a grin, one immediately dispelled by the sound of Zef’s voice and the renewed feeling of her embrace. It wasn’t speech as much as it was an admonishing groan, an expression of disapproval and a grudging admission of awe at an exceedingly foolish feat, no matter how impressive it was.

She responded with a turn of her head and a kiss planted on the markswoman’s waiting lips. They remained in this idle state between sleep and waking for a good couple minutes, wherein Zelsys took her sweet time in slowly shaking off the cobwebs of sleep, grabbing her Tablet, and retrieving a bottle of Liquid Vigor. Sipping away at it throughout the early parts of her morning, Zelsys relished the slow fading of her muscle pain and the gradual return of her strength.

Then, came Strolvath’s rock-gravel roar, just as he stomped up to the door and hauled wood into the cabin. “Finally awake, y’idiot savant?” he prodded, ambling over to the stove and tossing a couple pieces of wood into the embers. The same pot they had used for soup yesterday was already bubbling with a new batch of the very same food, the only difference being the ratio of ingredients if the smell was to go by.

Less fish, more vegetables. 

Strolvath stirred the soup, grabbed one of the chairs, spun it around on a leg, and stopped it perfectly facing the bed Zel and Zef were sitting on. He sat wide-legged in the chair, and with a genuinely apologetic sigh gave an admission, “I’m at fault for yesterday. When I explained the storm, I omitted a crucial component - the Stormtrance.”

He looked to Zelsys in particular, and continued, ”The very thing that made you do what you did. The Storm entrances its chosen victims, taunts them into leaving their shelters with a siren’s call that only the most iron-willed can ignore, like Ubul. I didn’t think your soul was bright enough to draw the storm’s ire, and yet… Here we are. Regardless of the outcome, I still should have warned you. Forgive me.”

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