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Even without his brain, however, the Lord Elroy remained conscious, still able to sense the relative positions of other souls. Pan-forma allowed his mind to reside with Axiolis’, and reapers, of course, did not require a physical brain for their own consciousness. So instead of regenerating from his splattered brain matter, Zeff’s body regenerated from his legs as they tumbled to the ground. Pan-forma would always regrow the body from the largest surviving section of their merged souls, regardless of whether it was the head or the little toe or only the soul without any flesh whatsoever.

In mere seconds, Zeff had a skull again, and after that, his gray eyes returned as well, allowing him to witness the result of Sanko’s attack. Spears of jagged rock littered the uneven earth, having created a sloped field of stone spires, almost like a maze. Aftershocks were still making the ground quiver.

And the blood. Pools of it were everywhere, growing with each moment as dozens of Rainlords lay dead or nearly so, smashed beneath piles of stone.

Octavia and Rayen were still attacking Sanko, Zeff saw. Evangelina, Socorro, and Santos looked like they would be on their feet momentarily, but he also spotted Parson and Lawrence descending from the broken cliff that the Keep now stood upon.

Zeff didn’t even think. His body just started moving on its own as he felt the old well boil to the utmost brink, ready to explode now that he finally had those two men in sight. No doubt, they were hoping to finish Zeff’s brethren off while they were down.

He was absolutely not going to let that happen.

The old well loosed an explosion of burning water. Not steam. That wasn’t the kind of water that could hold his hatred. Only lakefire could fulfill that purpose. Flaming water, eternally burning and boiling, never extinguishing or evaporating.

This was the old well’s purpose. To preserve the ingredient he needed for when the moment presented itself, the moment that demanded explosive refusal. And it worked. Almost too easily. It had been many years, but Zeff felt the response. Emergence found him once again.

A mountain of ice blinked into existence, already hurtling toward Parson and Lawrence. The two men noticed it rather immediately and diverted courses--Parson zooming up and away, while Lawrence launched himself down toward the three Rainlords via a radium projectile.

Unfortunately for Lawrence, however, there was a second mountain of ice, and it clobbered him into the cliffside.

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It required an explosion, which was the difficulty of the trick. If the explosion were too weak, the cannon would be useless. If it were too strong, the cannon itself would burst apart. He and Axiolis had to strike the correct balance between power and structural integrity.

Zeff plugged up the cannon and filled it with warm, swirling water. The time was ticking now, because the surrounding ice would freeze the water if he took too long, but Zeff knew the timing. From there, two things needed to happen in near succession. First, he had to create a vein of superheated steam inside the sloshing water. The heat would cause the water to boil in a violent flash, resulting in the explosion he needed. Second, he needed to materialize the soul-strengthened cannonball with his maximized velocity. This way, the explosive velocity of the steam would increase the already moving cannonball, granting it much greater punch than Zeff could give it otherwise. And it all had to be done in an instant, with immense precision.

With full concentration, Zeff wrenched one open palm upward and created the vein of superheated steam, and with the other hand, this one a closed fist, he threw a backhanded punch, creating the cannonball of solid ice while simultaneously unplugging the cannon.

The cannon jumped from the force of the explosion, and the cannonball rocketed into the sky and barreled into the Gargoyle’s stomach, shattering on impact.

And Sanko hardly even seemed to notice.

Zeff scowled inside his own mind and just kept firing. He’d hardly expected it to end the fight, but still, this was more than a little frustrating. His ice became all but lost in the huge flurry of other attacks that the Rainlords were launching. Multiple paths of destruction, little more than splinters against the Gargoyle’s skin. Octavia’s singularities managed to poke bigger holes into her, but they didn’t seem to be doing very much.

Then the Gargoyle finally launched an attack of her own.

Earthen spires shot out of the giant’s body in every direction--thousands of car-sized arrows looking for Rainlord blood. And finding it, too, because Sanko also chose that moment to send an earthquake tearing through the ground, throwing everyone off balance.

Zeff tried to avoid them by leaping off his platform, but one spire took his head clean off, along with his arms and chest.

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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.