Chapter 194: 192 – Power Struggle

She had already arrived at the conclusion that she would need to exploit every advantage afforded by her sapience, for she had felt the dream-realm’s bizarrity already. Where she would’ve expected her instincts was now a foggy approximation, the feelings of drive, of fight or flight, everything animalistic; it was numbed. Not absent, but… Compartmentalized. Distinctly separate, still perceptible, but unable to affect her directly. 

They were also not quite right, invasive feelings pushing against her every time she chose to move towards self-rulership, like a half-trained dog thrashing against a leash.  

With but the picturing of her imagination, she conjured a facsimile of her cleaver, imprecise and warped, stuck in the sand at her feet. A bit more focus still, and it grew more concrete, singing at her touch and shifting its weight just like it did in material reality.

That was when the Primordial Self panicked, rearing up on its back feet and emitting a howl which resounded with an unsettling mixture of her own voice and the necrobeast’s gurgling rumble.

It exploded forward at impossible speed, barreling her over with unstoppable force, pinning her under itself with superior size. In a split-second, Zelsys was overwhelmed, forced to stare into her own feral eyes as both halves of her skidded across coarse sand.

Despite this, despite the fact that she was hopelessly pinned with her blade having been knocked out of her hand, it didn’t matter.

The Primordial Self couldn’t conceive anything beyond its own physicality, beyond the immediate moment.

First she imagined the Primordial Self simply being swatted out of the way by an inexplicable surge of wind, but it was too unbelievable, too implausible, too much of a convenient coincidence, and so could not take hold even here, manifesting as a weak gust that did little more than blow some sand into both their faces. 

Zelsys set alight the crucible of her mind, and with it forced her dream-body to draw in a galeforce breath, forcing it all into the essentia gut she knew she had and compressing it, imagining the manner in which it would erupt from her mouth as a blast of kinetic force.

It didn’t matter that she, in reality, couldn’t do this. All that mattered was that she understood it to be theoretically possible, and could conceive of how it would happen, this thin veneer of plausibility anchoring the concept securely enough that the gap could be made up for in sheer willpower.

And indeed, from her mouth erupted an uncontrollable whirlwind of Fog, carrying away both the Primordial Self’s beastly form and a great deal of sand, which Zelsys both saw and tangentially felt ripping at the thoughtform’s manifestation. Even as it was carried away hundreds of meters, the shadowy thread connecting it to her remained.

There was no doubt in her mind that it would get back to her in moments regardless of distance, and in those moments, Zelsys mustered a cognitive power bank of every single thing she could think of possibly doing. She extrapolated everything she knew she was capable of to its nearest logical conclusion, giving life to those aspects most expedient.

Engine Breathing with lungs that wouldn’t rupture, muscles that wouldn’t tire, Fog Conduits unlimited by how much arcane power they could convey, muscles that wouldn’t tear under the strain.

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From normal breathing to an approximation of an actual engine, breathing at a cyclic rate comparable to an actual engine, extracting Aether at such efficiency she expelled only tiny wisps of visible Fog with each breath, and yet still this was enough to envelop her in silver.

Next, Storm Engine, blended with fog-coating techniques.

Tongues of lightning became tendrils, slithering all across her and enveloping her, becoming a writhing bodysuit of searing white, taking hold of all but her face, turning even her hair into whipping serpents of lightning.

The Primordial Self leapt over the edge of a dune, scream-roaring as it flew, trailing a tailwind of blood and air distorted from sheer velocity. She had maybe two, three seconds before gravity brought it to her, for despite its impossible strength, the Primordial Self had no conception of mid-air propulsion.

Zelsys summoned her cleaver, and with a lightning-infused tongue-whip she imbued its saw-side with the white-hot screaming life of a Thundersaw, conceiving in it the chattering jaws of an incomprehensibly violent beast born from steel and lightning…

...And in the realm of her mind, that concept took life from her will, and in moments her cleaver had grown to monstrous proportions as it twisted into a roaring, vaguely quadrupedal form of lightning and cold-iron. A skeletal beast enveloped in congealed lightning instead of flesh, from which grew uncountable bladed feathers, its maw filled by screaming sawteeth, from its back trailing a blackened tail that ended in Zel’s hands.

With this manifestation she whipped at her Primordial Self, intending it to merely subdue the monstrous manifestation of Id… And that exactly the lightning-beast did, lashing out as its tail grew without cease and it zipped through the air on a trajectory perfectly matching the erratic flight pattern of a real Thundersaw. 

Her Thundersaw Beast effortlessly enveloped the Primordial Self, biting into its nigh-impenetrable hide and its muscles akin to corded steel, painstakingly sawing into them with the orange-glowing vibroblades that were its teeth and dragging it down into the sand in a tremendous impact that sprayed molten greenish glass every-which way as the primal forces involved battled for supremacy.

The Thundersaw Beast prevailed, until Zelsys willingly demanifested it after she herself caught up in moments, zipping across the desert and leaving a path of glass footprints. 

Everything was a constant mental effort, everything short of the most fundamental things like moving. The suit of lightning, the faux-cleaver, the beast it had transformed into, it all demanded attention, demanded focus, and focus Zelsys had in spades without her instincts nagging at her, even as everything outside her focus faded out of it just like the outside world tended to in do whenever she got serious in a fight in the waking realm.

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