He bent down, picked up the hamr, and took a mont to acclimate to the sensation of wielding a Cursed Item. Perhaps because its transformation hadn't been entirely successful, he felt that while the [Wrath of the Thunder God] was imnsely powerful, the ntal corruption and sense of defilent it exuded were weaker than any Cursed Item he had ever encountered.
Clutching the hamr tightly, he lifted his head and gazed toward the other end of the smoke-filled street. A man in a black coat, holding a black umbrella, was slowly approaching.
The people nearby had likely all fled, leaving the street eerily quiet for an ordinary sumr morning. Every footstep of the black-clad stranger landed with a heavy thud. As he drew closer, the tal fragnts scattered by the explosion began to tremble, as if pulled by a powerful magnetic force.
“A level six Enchanter.”
He thought to himself. Though the man's entrance was impressive, his actual level was even lower than Jenkins's. Still, Jenkins didn't let his guard down. After a mont's hesitation, he raised the hamr, and as his spirit resonated with the weapon, a sudden clap of black thunder echoed across the sky.
The points of light representing [Titan's Power] and [Stormcall] flared simultaneously. They weren't fully activated, yet they still amplified the power of the [Wrath of the Thunder God]. Deep within the roiling black storm clouds, a nearly imperceptible glint of gold flashed, and then a thunderbolt descended from the heavens, striking the raised hamr.
The imnse power of nature converged on the hamr, which now crackled with golden arcs of electricity. Jenkins felt as if he were lifting a heavy shot put. Amid the flashing sparks, he strained to point the hamr forward. A mont later, the lightning erupted in a shockwave, blasting out in a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree arc and montarily scattering even the dense fog.
As the lightning flared, Jenkins felt a sudden tremor beneath his feet. He had no ti to ponder it, however, as a silver tal shield materialized out of thin air in front of the man in black.
He had no idea what the tal was made of, but it was utterly non-conductive. It stood firm in the sea of arcing electricity, splitting the lightning shockwave in two. The material's strength, however, couldn't withstand such imnse energy. Before the light that threatened to engulf the area had even faded, the shield disintegrated into dust.
“Probably an ability like [Aegis of Tos].”
Jenkins mused, watching as the black-clad man shot upward as if taking flight, leaping almost to the height of a two-story building. He likely had few tal items on his person, which was why the ground-sweeping shockwave had barely touched him.
But Jenkins wasn't about to give him a chance to land. The instant the man leaped, Jenkins raised the hamr again and flung the descending black thunderbolt. The bolt of black lightning struck the enemy mid-air, leaving him no room to evade. He cried out in agony and was flung backward, unconscious before he even hit the ground.
“Dead? It can't be that easy, can it?”
Jenkins wondered in surprise, glancing down at the hamr. "And another thing," he mused, "this so-called [Wrath of the Thunder God]... which thunder god does it belong to? An unknown pseudo-god?"
As he mused, he scanned his surroundings. The level six Enchanter he'd sent flying wasn't dead; the proof was that his spiritual aura hadn't faded. Jenkins reached up to stroke the ginger cat, Maple, on his shoulder, stopping her from tentatively poking a small paw at the electricity still crackling around the hamr.
He strode forward, intending to finish his enemy off. Afterward, he could leave, revert to his identity as Jenkins, and the whole affair would be neatly concluded.
But he had taken no more than two steps when, to his surprise, a blurry figure rose from within the gray fog.
The figure's posture was bizarre, like that of a puppet on strings. Jenkins instinctively paused, curious to see its next move, while slightly raising his hamr, ready to strike again.
But the figure in the fog didn't charge him. Instead, it scrambled on all fours like an animal toward the ruins of a nearby clinic. Jenkins imdiately followed, only to find that the figure hadn't gone far. It had plunged straight into the rubble and was now sprawled over a glossy black chanical piano, which was half-crushed under a wooden beam.
Jenkins had no idea why a clinic would have a piano.
“What?”
He'd never witnessed it himself, but he recognized the scene from Mr. Hood's descriptions. Startled, he acted instantly. The cackling shadow clone behind him shot toward the piano, but when the smoke from the explosion cleared, the machine wasn't in pieces. Instead, a monster stood there, roughly humanoid but with tal parts piercing its body from all angles.
The fusion was far cruder than Luther's with the steam engine. Luther had almost perfectly integrated the engine's components into his body, while this creature had simply broken the piano apart and forcibly stuffed the pieces into its torso. It was more like the fusion of flesh and loom Jenkins had first witnessed. Yet it was still terrifying. As a bizarre black aura flared to life, the points of light indicating its Enchanter abilities remained lit.
It had transford from a human into so other form of life, yet Jenkins hadn't seen it consu any [Gear Germs]. This contradicted his earlier deduction that the fusion of corpses and machinery was caused by them. Jenkins began to suspect the cultists of the Gear Artisans' Association were up to sothing else entirely.
However, recalling that the first fusion he'd seen—between a human and a loom—and the second—between a human and a steam engine—had both taken different forms, Jenkins realized he couldn't jump to any conclusions just yet.
Gripping his hamr, he watched the puppet-like monster crouch on the ground. A series of piano notes echoed, rising from the low keys to the high, and the dense fog began to swirl around the creature.
The sound carried on the wind grew increasingly bizarre as the incessant notes wove into a strange lody. A subtle agitation welled up inside Jenkins. At the sa ti, the exposed tal on the monster's body began to glow red-hot, as if heated by so imnse internal furnace.
Whatever power this thing possessed, Jenkins had no intention of waiting for its 'performance' to conclude. He shifted the hamr to his left hand and drew his sword with his right. As his spirit resonated with the blade, tendrils of green and gray—the colors of life and death—wreathed the steel.
“Aura of Death!”
A massive halo expanded outward from his feet, its decaying light causing the lush sumr weeds to visibly turn yellow and wither.
“Life Source!”
Flecks of green light spilled from his body. The erald radiance was the very essence of life, and its potent energy caused the roots dormant in the soil beneath his feet to stir.
Gray and green light entwined upon his blade. With a forward thrust from Jenkins, an arc of light from the sword engulfed everything in its path. Two separate ventures into Mysterious Realms had given Jenkins a far deeper understanding of life and death. The result wasn't more abilities, but a much finer control over the balance between the two forces.
The explosive arc of light from his sword flattened the entire street, the shockwave even scarring the face of a low cliff in the distance. The monster, taking the full brunt of the attack, was sliced in two at the waist. With that, the eerie piano music stopped, and everything seed to fall silent.
“Is it over?”
Jenkins, breathing lightly, did not relax his guard. Instead, his eyes were fixed on the two halves of the corpse as they writhed on the ground. He wanted to move in for the finishing blow, but his intuition scread a warning of extre danger.
His body reacted on instinct, leaping to the left. In the exact instant he moved, an indescribable, trendous chanical grinding echoed from deep underground, and an iron-gray pillar erupted from the spot where he had just been standing.
Jenkins didn't stop once he landed. The earth began to vibrate once more—he'd lost count of the tremors that day. The violent shaking made it almost impossible to stand, and all the while, iron-gray pillars kept erupting from the ground, tracking his steps, attempting to impale him.
The ceaseless chanical noise welled up from the depths, sounding like a symphony from the abyss. A terrible premonition made Jenkins instinctively glance down at the ground beneath his feet.
His eyes couldn't penetrate the thick layers of earth and rock, but a strange intuition gave him a vision: a colossal structure, covered in interlocking gears, its corner just barely visible in the subterranean darkness, pointing up from the abyss toward the sky.
The object was both bizarre and orderly. An overwhelming chanical presence seed to bind the gears on its surface, compelling them to turn in unison. To even try and comprehend the force that drove its motion was to risk becoming lost in contemplation of its chanical perfection.
His very mind trembled at the sight, but fortunately, his self-control was strong enough to pull him back from the vision. With the iron-gray pillars continuously erupting and leaving him no safe place to stand, he had no choice but to summon the waiting unicorn. He mounted the small beast and soared into the sky, from where he watched the ground below heave and ripple like the surface of a stormy sea.
As the pillars rose, tal chains constructed from interlocking gears erged from the depths as well. Countless chains swayed between the pillars, their rhythmic, synchronized movents making Jenkins feel dizzy just watching them.
The roaring from the depths grew louder. Simultaneously, dark clouds drifted in from an unknown source to blot out the sun. The fog thickened, sealing the space like a maze-lock. In the very center of the pillars, the two halves of the corpse were each pierced by a chain of gears.
The chains lifted the two halves of the corpse, slowly bringing them together. New, more slender chains of gears erged, manipulating tiny cogs to stitch the severed torso back together with the precision of a surgeon.
At the sa ti, the tops of the tal pillars, which seed to form a vague pattern, began to shine with a rust-colored light. The light connected the chains, ultimately converging on the heart of the corpse at the center of it all.
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