Chapter 252: 250 – Incandescing Demon

With mental focus and a deep breath, he brought the rising blaze under control, the flames receding and growing pale until both his beard and right arm smoldered a pale blue rather than outright burning. The beamwand’s wood-like structure sucked up the self-same glow, its point shining bright blue.

He pointed it, directing his body’s smoldering heat through it at the already chewed-up nearby target block. A cone of writhing, flickering flames erupted from its point, deep orange at first, slowly converging inward as they were overtaken by blue - so pale as to be near white at the edges, yet royal blue at the center. Suddenly, with a terrible noise akin to quenching white-hot metal in water, a bright beam ripped through the air, part melting and part carving a pit into the cold-iron block. It held for nearly two whole seconds before it died down.

Zefaris had seen this before, but what she hadn’t seen was what the historian did immediately afterwards. Once again he directed his energy, remarking, “Now apparently, the thing is that there’s barely anything going on inside these things. The way they fire is supposed to be entirely reliant on how you feed them Ignis, so the same wand will have different characteristics in the hands of different users. Therefore, I should be able to…”

Again, the same unfocused cone of rising flame-tongue, growing and growing until it was no longer a vaguely conical shape formed by discordant flame tongues, but a contiguous, but still unfocused torch. Then, a single immense pulse, a loud high-pitched bark as a blindingly bright mass of white-blue fire pulsed towards its target far faster than Zefaris could see even with the Philosopher’s Eye, on impact ripping a considerable hole into the metal mass - a little bigger in volume than the gash left by the beam, the impact amplified by fact it was a singular release rather than stretched out over two seconds.

The raw power didn’t faze her - she had figured Sig was capable of something like this, beamwand or not. It was the sound. 

“That… Kinda sounds like a Type-103 94mm Essentia Cannon…” she murmured, memory of that rare and ever vaunted prototype field weapon rising to the surface. Their ammunition was canister cells of powdered aether crystal with alchemical reagents and who knew what else - Zefaris had not cared to remember the technical details, but she remembered someone describing it as “creating a short-lived elemental reactor and then directing the meltdown at the enemy”. 

Sig agreed, smiling at her, “Yeah, it does. I - that is to say, Makhus and I - have a theory on how the whole Victory Demon thing might work. All that bodily energy that gets burned makes Ignis, while the Rubedo acts as a reaction reagent with my own Azoth as a medium, same as the black rock in the Philosopher’s Heart, or something like that. Regardless,  the big pulse there  - it’s the same amount of power, or near enough, I just build it up and release it all at once with greater focus. Making a melee weapon with this is where it gets counterintuitive.”

A deep breath, and Sig once more caused the wand to fire a beam, one about as thick as a finger just slowly chipping away as he kept it active.

“See they’re weird, they don’t really make swords, it’s just that I can… Compact the discharge…” he explained, visibly flexing the muscles of his arm and furrowing his brow as some strain entered his voice. 

The beam vanished, becoming a ring of flame surrounding the tip of the wand, receding before a noticeably thicker “beam” erupted, a good two meters long and tapering down towards a point in a shape that very nearly looked like a sword.It was a mass of shimmering flame in the general shape of a blade, with a central core of royal blue that gradually paled into pure white at the very edges in a pattern resembling the colour changes within a person’s iris. 

It settled into its shape, Sigmund finishing, “...I can get a better output for the same energy, and I can just hold this until I gotta “cut” something, even stockpile energy in the wand and construct, only firing it up to get it cutting properly. Y’know the Islanders have a whole martial art around these things, just a shame the zipperheads were smart enough to go after masters and practitioners before anyone else.”

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“So what, you’re gonna be half swordsman, half gunman, half… Martial arts reconstructionist?” the blonde raised an eyebrow in amusement, prompting a light laugh from the historian as he allowed his literal flaming sword to fizzle away. “Maybe. Maybe not. Whatever helps me make the best of my condition, properly get it under control.” 

“Helping rebuild what’s left of a near-extinct martial art sure sounds like something a sect’s historian would do.”

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Despite having eaten a not insignificant breakfast already, Zel quickly became hungry again as she ran her errands, craving yet more fat and protein among other things. Thus, she found one of the nearby food vendors that were still hanging around, and purchased some rather rich, heavily spiced, grilled sausages. Moreover, she had noticed strange, if only slight aches in suspicious places, such as lymph nodes and somewhere in her chest where she wasn’t sure even had any organs that could have been damaged. 

Reaching out to the Primordial Self over such a thing brought with it a simple answer:

“Future-proofing. Building reserves. Plenty of space.” 

The actual words flashing in her mind’s eye were accompanied by thoughts of the reckless thing she had done in her fight with Arnys - she had wished to be capable of exerting herself as such without the consequences of that first time, and her body was taking action towards that goal. 

All in all, personally finding those promising candidates proved to be more of a pain than she’d expected - especially without the Sturmgandr, which she had left behind simply because she didn’t necessarily want to ride it everywhere. 

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