Zelsys caught a glimpse of the Tablet’s surface, just about able to make out what it said before the Swordsman pressed OVERWRITE, seizing up and collapsing onto the bed moments later, gripping the Tablet so hard one of his fingernails cracked. A staccato of silver flashes erupted from his suddenly dilated pupils, the Tablet’s projection flickering in synchronicity.

In the short seconds that followed, she rolled out of the bunk onto her feet. The foreign thought process bled into hers - the brief thought of “He’s taking it quite well,” which was soon washed away by the sound of her own voice stating “I think he needs help.” loud enough for both of the others to hear as she pointed behind herself. Instantly, Spliteye whipped around and got off her log, letting her nearly-empty canteen clatter to the ground. Wire lurched up and forward as if to do the same thing, but he gave up and continued eating when he saw that his compatriot was already walking towards the transport.

Zelsys stepped back into the transport when Spliteye got up, squatting down next to the Swordsman’s seizing body. Even now, he was in the exact same position, laid back against the wall with silver light flashing from his eyes and the Tablet in a death-grip.

“What did you do?” Spliteye’s half-fearful, half-confused accusation rang out when she passed through the door, her eye jumping between the Tablet, the Swordsman’s vacant face, and Zelsys. A small drool stain was beginning to form beneath him, his mouth having slowly begun to hang open.

“Nothing,” Zelsys said in a completely flat tone, further befuddling Spliteye. Even in the short time since they’d met, Zelsys had made it clear she didn’t take many things seriously. The immediate remark that followed cemented her attitude, even in the face of something like this - a grin briefly flashed over her face when she remarked that “Maybe he’s looking at all the lewd art I’ve got stored in there,” gesturing at the Tablet.

It certainly worked, eliciting a brief chuckle from the cyclopean blonde before her usual demeanor took over. “By your sense of humor, I’d have mistaken you for a soldier any day,” she admitted. “Alright, what actually happened?”

“I let him take a look at the Tablet, and it showed a “Record Format Not Recognized” message with the options to register the new format or overwrite the record.”

Spliteye’s gaze turned towards the Tablet again as she muttered “Homunculus Eye…”

Her pupils dilated and a single strand of Fog escaped the tear duct as she stared unblinking to try and make out what the rapidly-flashing messages said. “...And that’s what it’s doing,” she said in a hushed voice. “It’s already halfway done. Do we just wait for it to finish?”

“It’s a better idea than trying to interrupt the process,” Zelsys responded with faux authority. Spliteye let out a sigh of uneasy relief, blinking a couple times as her pupils contracted. Before she could suggest a further course of action or really say anything at all, the tan woman shot upwards with a vigorous proclamation of “Well, no point in just sitting here. You said there was soup?”

“Y-yes,” the blonde stuttered in response, briefly staring straight ahead before she looked up to meet Zelsys’ gaze. “I think there was uh… A spare mess kit somewhere around here,” she continued, stepping past Zelsys to get at one of the wall lockers, eliciting an ear-splitting screech from its hinges. She looked its contents up and down and reached in to pull out a mess tin, utensils rattling within as she handed it over.

Zelsys took the kit with a smile and a nod, making her way out the door and to the firepit. She heard the locker screech and slam shut behind her, followed by a mutter of “Just hope it isn’t as unpleasant as it looks…”

As she walked towards the firepit she was met with the sight of Sigmund using a stick to stoke the embers, his bald head glistening in the warm heat of the fire. It was getting progressively darker, yet the overall visibility had barely changed since they arrived - the moss that covered the trees and parts of the ground had begun to glow in pale shades of chartreuse, bestowing the camp with a truly serene atmosphere. Sigmund met her approach with a smile as warm as the campfire, rising from his seat as he set down his stick and reached for the ladle.

“It’s getting a bit thick, but it’s still good,” he rasped through his beard, stirring the pot while Zelsys approached, fishing the three utensils out of the mess tin as she went. He already had a ladle-full raised above the pot when she reached him, and so she just reached out to let him fill the tin. The soup was a dark brown, with its recognizable ingredients including lentils, carrots, and a mixture of salted pork and deer meat. It smelled good, if rather salty.

“Where’d you get the carrots?” she asked as she sat down on one of the stumps, setting the knife and fork in her lap before she scooped up a spoonful of the soup. Sigmund answered with a point towards the transport, sitting back down and reaching for his stick. “We grow ‘em behind there,” he explained, stoking the embers again. “Same as the lentils. The soil’s unnaturally fertile here, makes it easy.”

The soup was thick, the flavor of spices, umami and salt drowning out all others as she chewed on the gamey deer meat. Each spoonful brought a sensation strikingly similar to that of absorbing pure Viriditas, so rich a meal it was. For a brief few minutes she sat there, eating food offered up by damned soldiers and taking in the beauty of a place at the very edge of desolation, acutely aware of how transitory this situation was.

It was a peace like no other.

“Sorry ‘bout the aggression back there. Red sickness ain’t nice,” Sigmund said, turning his wizened eyes toward her again. The dancing flames painted his face in shadows deeper than any night, drawing out a harrowed visage that remained hidden in the daylight.

Just that single look was enough to give her an impression of how much he had gone through.

Despite the towering woman’s remark about the pointlessness of remaining by his side while the Tablet did its work, Spliteye couldn’t help but do so anyway. She sat by his side, watching the projection flickering in staccato and simply waiting, listening to the rustling of the leaves and the distant crackling of the fire.

The sound of stomping feet from behind the transport echoed through the wall. She thought it was just Sigmund pulling some carrots, but… His voice could clearly be heard from the direction of the firepit. The stench of rot and death hit her nostrils like a hammer, and the impact of something very heavy on the transport’s exterior cemented a suspicion in her mind.

The locker. She yanked it open and grabbed her gun alongside a handful of paper cartridges, pulling out the ramrod as she ran out of the transport, yelling at the other two. By their faces, she knew that they knew something was amiss.

“It’s the beast! It must’ve followed us through the crossing point!” she exclaimed, sprinting to the other side of the clearing and taking up position behind a tree. With one swift motion she dropped a cartridge into the muzzle of her rifle, rammed it down and took aim at the front of the transport, from behind which she expected the creature to emerge.

By the time Spliteye ran out of the transport Zelsys’ instincts had already kicked into high gear, the beast’s ponderous movement easily loud enough to hear from where she sat. She looked to Sigmund and he looked to her, his breathing growing erratic as his posture stiffened. “I’ll b’fine,” he slurred as the seizure took hold.

“Shit, he’s out,” she thought, dropping the mess tin and reaching for the bandages that covered her gun. They wouldn’t budge, she had wrapped them too tightly. As she tried to pull the wrapping loose, there issued a thunderous noise and a bright yellow flash emanated from Spliteye’s position, soon followed by a thud and a horrific, gurgling roar. It sounded like…

“It’s a fuckin’ mutated bear!” Spliteye yelled, scrambling to reload her gun.

A sharp breath in. A breath of Fog out. A swift yank to rip the wrapping off, bringing the gun to bear on the creature’s head - or rather, what was left of it. A skinless skull with bloodshot eyes in its sockets, curtains of half-rotten skin hanging around its neck and long ropes of Black Fog trailing from its mouth. Spliteye’s bullet was embedded into its forehead, but it seemed unaffected, ponderously making its way towards the source of its newest pain. Zelsys could see most of its front half now, its wretched heart visibly beating beneath exposed ribs.

She grabbed the lever and pushed down.

Click.

Click.

The gun erupted with a blinding flash and a deafening boom, the recoil so forceful it threw Zelsys into a brief backwards roll. A fleshy thunk resounded, followed by an angry gurgle-roar from the beast just as Zelsys landed on her feet. She couldn’t clearly see where she hit through the smoke, but she saw clearly enough to see the beast was still moving. The thought of reloading crossed her mind, but was immediately quelled by the realization that the rest of the ammo was stored within the Tablet. She scanned her surroundings for any other weapons, thinking that perhaps Wire had his gun by his side, but no such luck. Then, out of the corner of her eye, she saw it - the silvery gleam.

“Keep it busy! I’ll get it from behind!” she yelled at Spliteye, sharply inhaling and taking off towards the transport, a trail of silver Fog marking her superhumanly fast dash. In the face of imminent death, Zelsys felt not fear, but exhilaration - she was alive, ready and willing to try killing the beast with her bare hands if her current plan failed - if the cleaver was too heavy.

She grabbed it with her right hand as she leapt over the makeshift butchering table, its weight so massive she had to rebalance herself to remain upright. Then, as she ran through the small vegetable field and trampled the lentils underfoot, she felt a buzzing warmth spreading up her arm and the apparent mass of the blade becoming lesser and lesser with each step. The sound of a gunshot echoed, followed by a roar from the beast as it reared up on its back legs, tall enough that its head was visible over the transport.

When she finally got to the bear-beat’s rotting backside, the cleaver had shifted into a double-edged instrument of slaughter - one side an inward-curved blade and the other a push-saw with massive feather-shaped teeth. The bear-creature noticed her presence and dropped onto all fours, but it was too late. She had already noticed a weak point where its hide had rotted away, the ridges of its lower spine showing through.

The huge weapon noticeably trembled in her grip as she gripped it with both hands and raised it, but the bear was already moving, it would be able to dodge faster than she could follow through with a chop. Midway through raising the blade, Zelsys twisted her core to the left and rammed its push-saw side sideways into the beast’s back.

The sickening crunch of bone and the pained roar of the beast as its back legs gave out were both as though sweet music to her ears. It began thrashing, twisting about on the ground as it failed to understand why its back legs wouldn’t move. Zelsys ripped the cleaver from its back, raising it in preparation to butcher the thing as it thrashed helpless on the ground.

The moment her blade left the beast’s back, its flesh pulled itself back together and even its spine reattached, putrid black blood congealing instantaneously within the hole to compensate for lost mass. Almost instantly it was back on its feet, the only things that stopped it from instantly lashing out at Zelsys being its own size and a well-timed third gunshot to its cranium from Spliteye’s rifle. The shock was enough to slow it down, but it wasn’t enough to drag its attention away from the one who had severed its spine.

It turned around, lashing out at her with its maw gaping like the gates of hell themselves. Zelsys eagerly rammed her open left hand down its throat, grabbing its tongue at the root with confidence that its fangs were too far apart to even nick her flesh. Its jaws slammed shut much like those of a bear trap, met by the hard steel of her gun’s barrel at the top and the trigger lever on the bottom.

She took a deep breath of the fetid air, a manic grin stretching across her face in proportion to the exhilaration coursing through her body. With a long exhalation of Fog she swung the cleaver upward one-handed. Flesh split like mud and bones like twigs underneath its razor-sharp edge and tremendous momentum, and the bear-thing’s left foreleg was gone, black blood gushing from the stump. Wherever its blood landed, the plants withered.

It thrashed, pushing and pulling, nearly ripping Zelsys off her feet, but she just laughed and guided the blade towards its neck on downswing, still holding onto the thing’s tongue like it was a giant fish. A disgusting squelch. She let go of the handle and switched her grip to the hilt, using it as a push bar in an attempt to engage the saw-action and sever the beast’s head. It wouldn’t budge.

Zelsys took a breath, and pushed again as she exhaled a rope of Fog. Crunch. The bear’s thrashing grew weaker, its ability to pull itself back together entirely countered by the cleaver’s presence as a physical barrier. Yet, despite the fact its cervical spine had been severed, it continued to move.

With heavy, Fog-filled breaths she sawed violently at the beast’s neck, confident that the next push would leave its head dangling in her grasp. Sensing its impending death the beast threw itself at the transport as she pulled, dislodging the cleaver and slamming her into the hull. Pain shot through her body from the impact, and she felt her consciousness slip as she fell into a bed of lentil plants.

It was only a few seconds before she woke and leapt to her feet, the sudden waking breath fueling a rising handspring. The bear’s head had reattached itself, the wound sealed shut by a huge plug of congealed blood. It was lumbering towards her in some lopsided approximation of a charge, fangs bared and black foam bubbling from the corners of its mouth. The absence of its left foreleg made the creature’s gait skewed to the right as it tried to compensate, exposing its neck.

Zelsys inhaled sharply through a toothy grin, her face as much a snarl as the beast’s, her eyes shining in silver just as the beast’s did in yellow. She tossed its tongue aside and gripped the cleaver with both hands, resolute in her decision to end the beast with a single decisive strike.

“Come on! Come at me!” she mocked, walking towards the creature, staring it down. “So I may put you out of your misery.”

It lurched forward with the last remnants of its strength, teeth flashing and tongueless maw snapping. A step forward, and upward cleave, flesh and bone and congealed blood yielding to the cleaver’s barbarous power. Its dying roar, the brass. The blade’s resonant ring, the strings. Her own heart, the percussion. The ironclad kick that sent the bear’s head flying into a tree, the final note.

A song of battle, concluded.

Zelsys couldn’t help but sigh in relief as the beast’s body slumped to the ground, its fetid blood poisoning the ground. “Rest in pieces,” she said as she lowered the cleaver, more to herself than the bear. The unearthly glow faded from her eyes and small strings of silver Fog trailed from the corners of her mouth as she stepped around the corpse, slowly walking towards the firepit. Spliteye slipped out from behind her tree, questioning “Is it dead?” with her gun still up and pointed at the motionless beast’s rear end.

“Its brain is splattered against that tree over there, of course it’s dead,” Zelsys replied, making no attempt to hide the self-satisfaction in her tone, a beaming smile on her face.

The riflewoman let out a relieved sigh, tension visibly leaving her body. As she walked towards the firepit, she stowed the remaining cartridges into her pants pocket and stuck the ramrod back into its slot below the rifle’s barrel.

“How much longer do you think he’ll be out?” the towering bear-slayer mused, stabbing her newfound tool of slaughter into the ash-covered soil around the firepit before she sat down on the log next to her cyclopean compatriot.

“Long enough to get you the proper holster for that thing,” answered the blonde with a nod towards the cleaver. “Knowing him, he won’t try tangling with someone objectively stronger than him.”

“Objectively- Oh, because I can use the cleaver and he can’t.”

“Yeah. His Aether’s barely good enough to make it shift, and he isn’t even strong enough to swing it with both hands, even though he’s the strongest among us by a hair.”

“I assume the second strongest is-”

“Sigmund, yeah,” said Spliteye, turning her eyes to the man. Motionless as he was, his eyes shifted to meet hers. “When he’s not seized up, at least. You good there buddy?”

He remained motionless, but he blinked thrice in a row.

“Three blinks?” asked Zelsys.

“That means yes. Two mean no.”

A loud rumble echoed from Zelsys’ stomach, and she instinctively looked around for her unfinished mess tin of soup. “Still warm. Good enough,” she said, scooping up a spoonful.

While she ate, Spliteye left the firepit and disappeared into the transport. The screaming of rusty hinges echoed through the night for a good couple minutes, undercut by the distant sound of the blonde rummaging around inside their living space. A couple times, Zelsys even caught remarks along the lines of “So that’s where that was.” and “I knew we still had one of those somewhere.”

A few minutes and another helping of soup later, Sigmund had begun to move rather cautiously and Spliteye finally came out of the transport bearing a large, reinforced sheet of leather with a number of straps and buckles attached. Before Zelsys could question its design, her raised eyebrow was answered with “I know how it looks, it’ll wrap around the cleaver and loosen when you want to use it. We just have to get it on you first.”

The holster had to be attached to an extra belt that went across her chest as well as the belt loops of her trousers, but when it was finally time to test it, the holster worked flawlessly. With nary a single visible strand of Fog, the hardened leather wrapped itself around the cleaver and then loosened itself just enough when Zelsys pulled on the handle with the intent to unsheath the weapon.

“You think he’ll notice it when he wakes up?”

“He’ll notice the cleaver missing for sure.”

“Let’s hope he doesn’t get too torn up about it.”

“Say, what’s up with that gun on your arm?”

“Oh, this? I don’t know myself. Found it in the Exclusion Zone.”

“Figures. Most explorers come here looking for tech from the War of Fog. While he’s still out, I think there was a way to officially transfer ownership of something within a squad as per the operational guidelines…”

Two words flashed in his mind’s eye, dredging him up from the void of unconsciousness.

DELETION SUCCESSFUL

He awoke to the after-echoes of a familiar, buzzing pain shooting up his right arm, punctuated by the sting of a cracked fingernail. For a brief moment, he thought he was back in the barracks, before he got his bearings. The moment he realized where he was, he immediately looked to the Tablet, and there it was - the very projection he had hoped to see.

RECORD OVERWRITE PLEASE ENTER NAME

The consideration of using his legal name was brief, and quickly swatted away by a name he felt far greater connection to. The name of a man he had looked up to in his youth, and also one of the more common names out there.

“Makhus.”

NAME

MAKHUS

SEX MALE SPECIES HUMAN (IKESIAN) FORCE D+ PRECISION C- HARDNESS C- AETHER C TRAITS>

Makhus was pleasantly surprised by his Aether - he had expected a D+, or perhaps a C-, but not a full C - anything above or below D was considered beyond the usual deviations from human baseline. A full C would’ve been good enough to qualify for further specialist training back during the war. “Were I more talented, I would’ve been there when they stormed central command,” he thought, justifying his low military position as the reason for his survival of the war. He wasn’t lying to himself, even though he was using the truth to justify his own lack of ambition.

“She’ll probably end me if I go rootin’ around in her stuff, but she won’t mind if I check my traits, will she?” he thought, sluggishly swiping through the projection. It flickered and changed to a projection with the title he had expected, but not one that contained what he had expected.

TRAITS Swordsmanship Lesser Gunmanship Lesser Aethermancy Fog Tolerance Greater Rubedo Tolerance Type-2-X Essentia Storage Glyph (Unique) Greater Purgation Arts (Anti-Rubedo Spec. - Unique) S.S.S.S. Arts (Unique)

The corners of his mouth and his eyebrows rose in unison. “Greater tolerance?” he mentally questioned, fully aware of the effects Rubedo had on him, lazily swiping the projection again to get back to the main attribute readout. “Eh, guess it’s right. Gettin’ horny sure is less debilitatin’ than sudden-onset shellshock paralysis.”

His train of thought was smashed clean off its rails by the sound of Spliteye’s voice from outside, ringing out clear as a bell, devoid of the hushed tone she had adopted after their first encounter with one of the Exclusion Zone’s beasts. “We should probably go check on him,” she said. “The overwrite should be done soon.”

There was no verbal response, only the sound of a mess tin being placed on the ground followed by footsteps - ones all too heavy and energetic to be Spliteye. And indeed, it wasn’t - it was the tan amazon that called herself Zelsys, though he doubted the veracity of that name. Then again, he was doing the exact same thing he suspected her of doing.

She poked her head into the doorway, her eyes briefly resting on the Tablet before jumping to his face as a smug smirk formed on her face. “Had a nice nap?” she mocked, not even waiting for him to give a proper response before she added “You sleep like a dead bear. Get up, soup’s getting cold and a certain cyclops wants to overwrite her record next.”

“Y’looked at my-”

“Don’t worry, it didn’t show anything while it was doing its work. Now get up.”

She could see his face flushing - ever so briefly - at the implication of such a benign invasion of privacy as looking at someone’s attributes. Perhaps it was her own lack of social awareness, but something like that came across as no more sensitive than asking someone how much they could lift. The redness came as quickly as it went, and he was none the wiser it had even happened, slowly rising from the bunk and visibly doing all he could to ignore the pain that the Tablet had caused. Zelsys made sure to take note of the name that the Tablet showed just before its projection flickered and faded out.

Makhus did his best to ignore Zelsys as he walked out onto the clearing, making a beeline for the still. The entire time she watched, casually leaning on the transport. “How’s the sickness? No aftershock seizures?” he offhandedly asked Sigmund as he tinkered with the glass and copper monstrosity, adjusting the barrier-stone fragment in its mount with one hand and the tube its condensation fed into with the other.

“I had a rather bad one, but I got over it,” the bearded man responded in an equally offhand manner, chuckling into his beard as he gave Zelsys an utterly unsubtle wink.

“Really? Any obvious trigger?”

“Oh, just that the rot-bear we were out hunting showed up. Our new friend dealt with it quite handily, I must say.”

Makhus froze where he stood, looking straight ahead before he turned to look at Sigmund, then at Zelsys, then at Sigmund again, visibly unsure whether he should chide the bearded soldier for joking around or ask where the corpse was. A smile on her face, Zelsys exclaimed “The body’s in your little field, sans a couple parts.”

“Ho-” he began with a questioning tone, turning the word to a faux cough almost quickly enough that she didn’t notice his partly surprised, partly impressed tone. “Well, there go all our crops,” he sighed instead, turning his attention to the butchering table.

“Where’s the-” he wondered looking around for the cleaver, but Spliteye interrupted him. “Don’t even think about it, we’re leaving in the morning,” she rebuffed, rising from her seat and dusting herself off before she began walking towards the transport. With a nod of her head towards the silver-haired woman, Spliteye added that “Besides, it’s hers by rights.”

“The fuck y’mean-”

“Seems I’m strong enough to use it properly, unlike you,” Zelsys mocked in a joking tone, lowering her hand to the cleaver’s handle. She couldn’t help but grin from ear to ear when his eyes went wide, fists clenched in sudden anger. “That’s not yours!” he shouted.

“It is according to the Squad Dynamics Guidelines contained within the Ikesian Military Doctrine guidebook. The decision was put to a vote within the unit, and a majority of the unit’s members voted in favor.”

With every word she said, the anger faded from Makhus’ face and turned to disbelief, then to plain confusion. He turned to Sigmund, questioning “Really? You did that?”

The simple answer of a few nods from the bearded man as he ate more soup seemed to hit him like a gut punch, considering the weight with which Makhus dropped onto the stump.

“You gave the Captain’s Cleaver to a foreigner?”

Sigmund swallowed the current mouthful and, slowly stirring the soup in his tin, looked up at the younger man with a hardened gaze. “She could’ve split as soon the beast showed up, but she chose mauling and Nigredo exposure instead. I think that’s a good enough reason alone, not to mention the fact it’s just a burden to us. A shiny and expensive burden, but a burden nonetheless.”

A heavy sigh escaped Makhus’ lungs as he grabbed the nearest mess tin in reach - the one Zelsys had used - and stood up to get himself a portion of soup.

There it was. The Tablet. Her ticket to a new identity. Just sitting there on the bunk, next to a puddle of that asshat’s drool. She’d given up on trying to help him directly long ago, with how eager he seemed to close himself off and play the good soldier.

It made her entire forearm buzz with pins and needles when she picked it up, just like the attribute scanners back in the barracks. A word appeared in the middle.

SCANNING

She never did find the sensation painful, regardless of how much the others complained about the monthly attribute checkups during training. The device took some time before the first stage of its work was finished, after which another projection manifested above its surface. One sentence in white, two in blue.

RECORD FORMAT NOT RECOGNIZED REGISTER NEW FORMAT OVERWRITE RECORD

As the brief argument outside unfolded she climbed into the lower right bunk. It wasn’t hers, but she didn’t want to risk falling out of hers as a result of whatever reaction she might have to the Tablet’s overwrite process.

The pain wasn’t a concern. Her pain threshold was higher than most men’s, and even then she knew how to deal with what little pain truly affected her. It was the unconsciousness, in particular the possibility of her other eye opening for that bizarre projector-like side effect.

While she sat there staring at the Tablet and trying to mentally talk herself into just doing it, the nearly-empty bottle of “Liquid Vigor” next to Makhus’s bunk caught her eye. “Addict,” she thought as she leaned down to grab it, downing the rest of the liquid in one gulp. Much to her surprise it smelled and tasted different from what she was used to, though that wasn’t the surprising part - the evershifting, undefinable olfactory qualities of Viriditas were almost as well-known as the theory that no matter what, it would always be to a person’s liking.

Through the aggressively minty notes of this batch, there pierced an undertone that smelled both different and familiar. Something new, but something she had smelled before, rather recently. It smelled like… “The foreigner?”

Her mind raced with a dozen different thoughts as she furrowed her brow, looking the bottle over in a futile attempt to discern whether the tan giantess had drunk from it. The smell hit her nostrils again, and she realized that it wasn’t the Viriditas - it was just the foreigner’s smell lingering in the bunk from when she had used it to change clothes. Somewhat eased by this realization, Spliteye took a deep breath and laid down in the bunk, then pressed “Overwrite” on the Tablet, doing her best to keep her left eyelid closed.

The buzzing sensation grew and eventually became painful, the brief urge to open her other eye fading a moment before her consciousness slipped.