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It became a giant, born of rock and clay and dirt and grass, carrying whole trees and sidewalks up its body. Its head and shoulders alone were enough to dwarf the crumbling castle by its side.

The Rainlords wasted no time attacking. In unison, explosions and materials and gunfire and beams of nearly invisible light all bombarded the earthy titan with a furious maelstrom, carving out chunks of its body and causing it to shower chipped rocks across the battlefield.

But it wasn’t enough. The giant’s body repaired itself as quickly as they could damage it. Even a pair of rapid singularities from Octavia did little more than make the golem shiver before refilling the gaping caverns in its stone flesh.

The ground all but vanished beneath the beast’s clawed feet, sunken in so greatly that it flattened the hill that they had all been standing on. Rhein’s Keep shifted as its foundation did, losing many of its broken pieces to a sudden landslide but otherwise remaining intact.

The beast grew to its full height, a living skyscraper for Rheinhal, complete with the same devil’s face as Sanko’s mask, this time bearing a devil’s body to go along with it. It had the hunched posture of a gorilla with its short legs and long, powerful arms; and from its huge back jutted two enormous wings, crooked and grotesque and almost certainly incapable of flight, if that mattered. It probably didn’t, Zeff felt.

From his position of momentary safety atop an icy platform, Zeff reached for everything he could muster from his mind. Pan-forma burned inside him, granting three important increases: soul defenses, physical regeneration, and connectivity of his creations. The latter bonus was often overlooked somewhat, but it meant that Zeff could create complex structures more easily, treat multiple creations as one in his mind, and even have his materialized mass regenerate on its own, if he wanted it to.

And he called on each of those material enhancements now as he created something that had been in his mind for years but that he had never quite been able to manage without forma to help him.

The body of it was a long tube of soul-strengthened ice, thick enough to withstand cannon fire--because that was exactly what this was going to be: an enormous cannon. Only without the fire.