Chapter 129: 127 – Formless Butchery

If it didn’t work, if this effort ended with her merely wasting the contents of her Essentia Gut on a fruitless endeavor… Then she would figure out something else. Exhaustion was still far out of reach.

The Horse-man had vanished from sight once more, only to appear behind her. There was a delay there, subtle but noticeable. It wasn’t instant movement - it was Fog-walking. Knowing that it was not going to simply reappear in the same place it had previously occupied, Zelsys leapt into that space to give herself some breathing room, enough to get a steady stance, adjust her grip, and brace for the havoc that a gutful of lightning would try to wreak as it surged through her into the Butcher.

Indeed, her prediction had been correct. The Horse-man had appeared in a space that would’ve laid well out of her field of vision, and now that she was out of its reach, the only reproach it had were those eye-beams.

It cut a swath in the earth with them, one that would’ve struck Zelsys, had she not hopped a short distance backwards. The earth erupted with dust and debris, obscuring the golem - but she knew it would charge at her. That was what she would’ve done in its position, and that was, indeed, what it did.

Among the few true flaws of golems, she had observed, was their consistency. Even when they attempted to be intentionally chaotic, golems simply could not deny their own nature intentionally, and even the flailing of a golem exhibited an ordered pattern. A negligible fact when struggling to survive such an onslaught, but an important detail when one had already faced a head-on charge from such a thing multiple times.

In short, she didn’t need to see it to know how to position herself, how to swing to get a good hit in. It would place its left shoulder forward, shielding itself with its left arm while the right remained reared back for a punch. That was where she would strike - she would sever that left arm below the shoulder, and perhaps even rip a gash into its torso before riding the saw’s pull underneath its body with a judicious use of Graze Pulse to avoid the bone-powderizing punch.

The searing power of lightning flowed out of the Essentia Gut, burning on its way out of the arcane organ like a terrible case of acid reflux before it became the familiar and downright bearable shooting, searing, burning-white flow. It slithered up her throat like a swarm of furious serpents, surging forth from the tip of her tongue, lashing the ground for a moment before she managed to steer it towards her cleaver’s sawteeth. Moments later, the torrent stopped, and blinding-white tendrils arced between every single sawtooth, the incredible energy causing them to grow and shrink in size as they screeched and oscillated.

Though a veritable maelstrom of white-burning tendrils seethed about the blade, obscuring sight of it, Zelsys somehow knew that it was not merely enshrouded by raw essentia, but had somehow captured the manifested lightning-arc. Something clicked in her mind - the difference between Fulgur and actual lightning was the missing lynchpin. 

A reassuring thrum crawled its way up her right arm from the cleaver’s handle, as if the weapon itself saying: “Finally, you get it. You would do well to remember why you named me as you did.”

Zel was almost certain that such ideations were merely her own mind running rampant in this moment of absolute focus, in these rare seconds preceding a feat that she was confident would echo for all coming days. Just as her butchering of the lightning-bolt, her utter defiance of the Black Swordsman’s steel wall of a sword, her annihilation of the immortal Locust Queen.

The golem moved all too quickly for her to see. It mattered not.

She willed every ounce of Fulgur within the blade to fuel a single sawing impulse, a single all-severing, ear-piercing scream to butcher even that which could not be butchered.

Everything drowned in the screaming of the saw, for but a moment, and in that moment, she took her swing. An upward swing, which she thought would, at most, cut into the statue’s chest.

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The Lightning Butcher ripped through stone, throwing sand and gravel all around as it carved a gash not merely through the Horse-man’s arm, but all the way through its chest, arcing upwards as it trailed a crescent of white-shining fury. A great stone arm slammed into the dirt. 

In the next moment, Zel instinctually channeled Siphoning Pulse through her elbow only moments before a stone fist struck it, then instantaneously threw herself forward into a slide betwixt the edifice’s legs, intending to make full use of what preternatural cutting power still lingered in the butcher’s teeth. 

Such an opportunity did not present itself, for the Horse-man vanished in a flash of purple just before she could carve into its thigh, reappearing nearly all the way across the courtyard. Had she just made a statue panic?

It stared at her, deliberating. Judging. She could damn-near feel the air pressure increasing, as if it were actively deciding to use more of its strength in the next bout.

And even then, her mind dwelt on the feat, for the Butcher’s teeth were still a screaming blur of snicker-snacking steel and lightning, and by the Dead Gods, did they scream.

These were not Beast-butchering Arts. No mere beast deserved an expression of precise, focused destruction like this.

The world came to a standstill, two names burning themselves into the forefront of her mind.

“Formless Butchery: All-Severing Scream.”

In these few seconds of downtime, Zelsys dedicated every breath to refilling her Essentia Gut. As she was, she had two things - a substantial kinetic charge, and a small Fulguric one… And, as it seemed, she also had the golem’s own disbelief. For a good five seconds it just stood there, and that was all the time she needed. Enough to regain her bearings.

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