"oh so you'd want a nice sword that doesn't cleave without mercy? im sure you'd also be interested in a heatless fire then. idiot" - @yuriartillery.bsky.social 22 November 2025
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I push the bus I was holding into the mouth on my left palm and bite down and it comes apart with a satisfying krtngkrtngk trsss! that sprinkles shards of crispy glass down my throat/arm mixed with a spray of bitter and sour liquid that scorches its way down and it’s just too much, too much. 

I’m back at the wheel now, wincing, staring into the screen as the Duke’s red horned mech dives down towards me with claws outstretched. My heart is pounding away BABUM BABUM BABUM and there’s a weird aftertaste in my mouth that’s making me a bit nauseous, and something large feels like it’s crawling up, squeezing through my blood vessels towards my chest, and the voice in my head tells me that I’m only backing away horizontally in the air like an idiot who thinks she’s moonwalking when I could be going up down left right in this thing and we both suddenly remember about ‘the forehead thing’.

And all of that happens at once in a few seconds to culminate in me/Typh-Ea raising our arms up to our chest and crossing it into a triangle shape before that same ruinous yellow light blazes forth from the crystal on our/her forehead, forcing Jim to instinctively juke away and let me dash up to more than match his altitude while only letting him graze me with his weird foot lasers which buys me the time to-

I violently retch inside the cockpit (outside to everyone who can hear) as my left arm reaches up to one of the two mouths on my/our chest as it opens up and ejects a long and study metal staff right into my readied hand still warm and slightly slick when my palm bites down on the length to keep it steady. I feel my/our power coursing through it as we close the gap and I instinctively swing my staff to meet his approaching claws and I get a brief second to marvel at how his violent pink beams of coherent light fail to tear my staff to shreds like I expected they would as instead I hear and feel a satisfying THRNK as his imago’s arm is bent back wrong and he’s forced to send the whole thing flying away to keep it from breaking completely. He punches me/us away in my shock with his other arm as he yells out, “Disgusting!” to goad me as if I’d have the presence of mind to both come up with a response and batter away his claws when he closes the gap again and again and again.

It doesn’t take long before he’s backing me into a corner, driving me further into the mountain range as the searing heat of his claws makes itself known, marking my right shoulder, my upper chest, barely skimming past my neck with a lucky twist. All the while my arms are jerking madly, struggling to keep up with the duke’s breakneck pace to at least hold off the worst of it off with my staff and the firmer parts of my upper arm. I try my best to swing back at him but that moment of surprise I had earlier is gone and he’s just…

God, he’s better than anyone I’ve fought before. He’s moving like a madman, kicking against the rapidly forming cliffside and my own body to lunge at me at queer angles while yelling out insults to my form and status and silence and god knows what else when he devolves into his native tongue. He’s giving me no time to breathe, no space to work with, and every time he’s swinging he’s swinging up at my head, stone cold trying to crush my cockpit to get to me and end it all.

There’s still that satisfying crunch whenever we do get him back, and he’s popping his arms free slower and slower everytime we do, I know if I keep battering away eventually one of them will break completely and take his momentum with it, I just don’t think they’ll break before I do. I’m out of breath, nauseous, a little dazed in general, and my arms are sore as all hell, I need to end this quickly but h-that other voice in my head surges forth again, screaming, burning at me abou-oh that would work wouldn’t it?

I grit my teeth (I grit my teeth) to muscle through the pain and exhaustion and as his claws arc down to tear into my/our forehead my staff surges up to meet him again, and just before it all comes apart I feel power surging throughout my whole body (left arm shifting finger firmly pressing down on the left trigger) and an electromagnetic pulse emanating from my the tip of my staff sucks in the shards of loose metal, tears parts free from the larger drones, and pulls anything smaller and crushes them all into a crude macehead.

And before he could do much more than scream out in genuine, blood pumping pain for the first time in too damn long I swing my new mace back at his torso and I feel the slightest hint of resistance as I feel his will surge against mine but I am the king who has no equal in all of the lands! The rightful ruler of the west! The dragon who mounts the world! 

I crush his chest like I have thousands upon thousands upon thousands before and with a mere thought (finger sliding off and tapping the right trigger) my mace head detonates in a cleansing wave of kinetic energy and shrapnel. I feel something inside of the vaunted Omnivaga break just before its head and still functional legs both pop free and tear away from me, the quarry, these mountains we drove each other to and from, and everything else. The broken and impaled torso spins and break itself apart further on the ground as it bounces again and again, leaving a trail of shorn metal, discarded drones and rubble in its wake as it finally comes to a stop in a puddle of its own juices right before the shrapnel ridden parking lot.

And yet, despite it all I could hear his voice in the distance, still brash and confident and imperious in defeat. “Well fought nameless one, but this isn’t the last you will see of me!”

For the first time I shout back, “Nobody fucking asked!” 

I slump back in my chair just breathing in and out in and out (my/our body slowly descends down to the ground, holding the remains of our staff above us in victory) and I have a pleasant and simple thought; thank God, it’s finally over.

Only for the voice to snarl in the back of my mind as she/Typh-Ea retorts back, ‘Is that all you’ve got? A mere moment in battle and you’re left whining, whinging in the corner like a maimed dog hiding from the crush of blades? The Duke is not dead, there is no glory to be found here anymore, quickly, before he can rally his own forces, you mus-’

My/our body slams intothe hard ground with a loud THUD, and my body makes me put in the rest of its hours.
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I lay there dreaming, forming barely coherent thoughts and visions. Playing simple line swiping videogames in bed with a girlfriend whose face is familiar but hard to pin down, floating aimlessly through the air and bottling up dragons and spirits inside of little glass jars to put on display near the window, or being chased by noble hunters on horseback and their pack of braying hounds in a twilit forest. I can feel something else in my mind, a stream of thought that shifts in and out unbidden, filling in the space between every disconnected scene and struggling to make itself known and remembered even as everything else starts to slip out of my grasp the moment I can think about opening my eyes and feel the weight of my own body.

There was an alabaster man, with jade countenance and burning coals for eyes who bore an iron spear. I knew he was important because he was the one who…. did something or other with the dragon/void/hunger/chaos in order to shape/define/create the uh, I think they fought each other? I can vaguely recall the bard in the background singing about uh, the heft of the spear as it pierced through my.. God how did that song go again? There was nothing right? There was something creating nothing out of the stars and the center (who I know is called Xin) noticed it was encroaching on them right? So the alabaster man he consulted with his top sages Guthrun and Guthird and Guth-something, and he gets to the void-maker right? And they fight and it’s a man straddling and slaying/subduing a dragon but it’s also more important than that? It’s-fuck, I can’t remember.

I blink my eyes open, still groggy from trying to chase after the remains of that dream, only to be immediately struck dumb when I realize the trash covered sand in front of me is actually a hastily built encampment I’m looking at from straight above, high enough that I didn’t recognize that the little dots moving about on it were people… fuck, my arms are still sore actually, am I still… oh yep, I can still see the remains of the Omnivaga not too far ahead of me. It’s… a lot less menacing when it’s burnt out and separated like this, but as I turn my head around to get a better look at it I start to hear the sound of distant people all screaming something along the lines of ‘it’s moving again! GET TO THE YACHT!’ and all of a sudden there’s way too many people moving about on the ground beneath me for comfort.

God, what happened to the quarry anyway? I raise my head up to take a look at it in the distance and it’s clear of smoke at least, however long I’ve been out (a day back on earth) is enough t-Oh right, I’m…

The rushing wind on my/our head, the heat of the three suns broiling me/us, and the soreness in my/our arm and the coarse sand settling against my/our feet all fades away as i find myself back in the seat again, staring out at the camp and all of the people rushing about through the monitor.

‘Good, it seems the peasants already know their place’ I think, an odd sense of warming pride swelling up in my own heart before I strain myself to let go of the square wheel and turn my own head around to look at…

Nothing, save for the shadow of someone’s presence within mine that refuses to give it(her)self form as (I presume to) ask it(her), “What the fuck are you and what have you done to me?”