Molting the Mortal Coil

On the plus side, Sage wasn’t the only victim of the oncoming calamity. His many enemies in the area scattered like frightened rodents in the face of the giant monster’s destructive rampage. The sky turned black and soot rained down upon them. Cracks of unknown depth opened up beneath them, and worst of all the land around them turned to fire. Like a little taste of hell on earth.

Despite the fact that this wasn’t Earth, Sage still maintained his opinion of the imminent catastrophe. He slithered back and forth, using the double layered armor of the Blacksilver King to protect himself from the worst of heat and molten stone raining from the sky like burning hail. The sheer magnitude of destruction left little room for him to escape, the swath of destruction stretched a dozen miles in every direction, the Living Disaster attacked indiscriminately, transforming a huge area into a zone of destruction.

He wanted to break away from this violent area, but the tortoise’s destructive power seemed concentrated around him. Even if it seemed like it was just blasting a massive area, that was mainly the blowback from the power leveled around Sage. He’d proven quite adept at avoiding and resisting attacks, so it seemed the tortoise didn’t target him directly. Enraged, the tortoise focused on creating a ‘prison’ of absolute devastation around him. It prevented him from escaping and was wearing him down rapidly.

He felt like a frog being boiled. If you drop a frog into boiling water it will leap out instantly, but if you place it in cool water and slowly raise the temperature, the frog will sit calmly until its boiled alive, happily acclimating to the gently changing conditions. Or at least that’s how the story goes. Actual frogs are not so oblivious to an increasing temperature. Nor was Sage stupid enough to stick around and get himself slowly cooked to death by the tortoise’s exceedingly wasteful expenditure of energy. It wasn’t fast enough to catch him, but it had enough power to burn that it could trap and slowly kill him by proximity.

Surrounded by flames, he thought about going underground, but the land was still quivering from the stomping that the tortoise had been doing. He was far more likely to be crushed by the shifting earth than he was to escape. There was also the sky, but the flames around him could be easily moved in that direction. The tortoise only left his view to the air open to observe him, and he knew the tortoise would happily turn the ring of flame into a dome of flame. That would only accelerate the rate he was being cooked, so he held back from making that attempt.

Sage called upon his most powerful weapons, releasing different types of poison upon the giant tortoise. He enhanced their power with his grasp of laws, but the monster was just too large. His poison could barely span the great distance between them, and the poison that struck the monster was not even as effective as a single bee sting for a human. The monster was just too large, and the heavy layer of stone armor it had reduced the effect of his poisons to nearly nothing.

Facing the inevitable, the giant cobra’s actions started to become desperate. It released a few huge gusts of wind to blast away the flames, but by the time it slithered into the clear path the radius of fire had shifted. The spikes over its body were shimmering, like their outer shell was slowly melting even as the black oily layer beneath had begun to boil and bubble away. The snake was just as trapped as before, traversing a narrow path through the flames only to find no escape in sight. A few Formation Plates were thrown out, but they shattered apart after just a few seconds under the terrifying heat and damage. The snake’s eyes flickered and a little field of stars appeared in both of its pupils, but that lasted for only a few moments.

To seal it, I have to touch it.

Attempting Soul Resonance had shown him much of the monster’s life, and that gave him ample impetus to refine a crux. With just a few moments he’d already learned the rest of what he needed to apply one. The problem was that he had to touch the tortoise to apply the seal, and despite its massive size, the mountainous creature wasn’t letting him move, let alone get close.

The giant cobra slithered in a circle, moving round and round, coiling itself into a large pile. A forest of spikes, like cloudy ice with a metallic blue sheen, sprung upwards, like a ziggurat shaped porcupine. After coiling itself up for a few moments, its head lifted out from the center of the coil and released a torrent of power right back at the tortoise. A rumbling boom of power shot forth, the power of Stormbreath to power the Divine Breath power. A high pressure cannon, releasing blasts that could carve through a mountain towards the Living Disaster.

The ground rumbled once again, the force of the attacks smashing against its shell caused the tortoise to lose its balance. A pair of high pressure air bullets forced it to take a step back. Again and again, the giant cobra called upon its most powerful weapon. An offensively oriented Heavenly Material that he had a matching technique to use with. The combination was much greater than the Samsara Flame and First Light. Although Heavenly Flames were more destructive than most other Heavenly Materials, the fact remained that their capabilities were skewed towards certain areas and Sage was far from experienced with Fire techniques, let alone one that could match the power of a Heavenly Flame. The Divine Breath was directly derived from the power of Stormbreath, perfectly suited to harness the winds of the stormy skies, channeling it into a vortex cannon of the highest level.

The rumbling of the earth and sky was like a battle between titans. The booming blasts of air breaking the sound barrier contended against the sounds of a moving mountain. The riotous cacophony of sound continued for only a few minutes before everything suddenly went silent. The air boomed no longer and the quaking ground finally came to rest when the giant tortoise stopped moving.

If only that lack of motion was permanent.

Sage had gone all out, trying to topple the beast with power, or at the very least scare it away. Unfortunately, the compressed air contained by the Divine Breath technique had a limit. That terrifying power could not be drawn upon at will. It took many hours to draw in air and compress it into such a state, and the quantity of air he could contain was not boundless. He still had a little left, which he used to bluff that he hadn’t run out. He glared up at the giant tortoise. The Living Disaster had been slowly driven back by his flurry of air bolts, but it had only a few layers of the stone that armored its body. Each shot had peeled off a few feet of stone, rattling loose enough rock to build a palace. Even so, the mountain sized turtle was large enough to build a thousand palaces, so the dozen hits were mere scratches to it.

With that assault a failure, the giant cobra ducked its head down between its coils once more and then popped back up, releasing another blast of pressurized air. The tortoise was not tricked by the feint, staying on guard and catching the blast against its shell. Another blast followed the first, and it mechanically ducked its head aside from that one as well. It only realized something was different at that moment, high pressure air was not the only thing that struck it. Tiny shards of metal stuck against its shell. They still did nothing to its thick shell, but it was enraged by the snake trying to trick it and the tortoise rushed forward, bringing a building sized leg down upon the snake and smashing it beneath its foot.