He drew in a ragged death rattle of a breath, but before he could speak another word, a lance of sparks and flaming lead splattered the remnants of his head. Now truly lifeless, his body slumped to the ground, and Zefaris let out a shaken breath, murmuring, “Fu-fuckin’ locust-men, y’don’t belong here...”

Zef’s eye snapped in the direction of where the dead pistoleer had turned his head, landing upon Zelsys to the sound of a relieved sigh as she cautiously lowered her revolver’s hammer and holstered the weapon. It was at this moment that she stopped exhaling Fog. Surprisingly, the markswoman didn’t at all seem surprised by either the mutations, or the apparently post-mortem speech of the soldier - she had, after all, stood above him with gun in hand, ready to double-tap him the moment he reanimated.

This was too far to not question.

“Was… Was this a normal occurrence in the war?” she asked, holstering her cleaver. “With the… The bug shit and the reanimation?”

With a heavy sigh and a reluctant nod, Zefaris confirmed that, “Yeah, pretty much. Once the head starts changin’, the person inside is probably gone. Even the Grekurians shot those things on sight. What the fuck are they doing here, though? It sounded like they’re...”

“...Extorting farmers with forced tolls,” Zelsys finished. “Explains why the Governor wants them gone, beyond the terrorism.”

“He wants you to play the exterminator, that’s why he wanted to speak with you? Not to chide you for beating the shit outta his son?” Zef questioned, stepping over the corpse and squatting down as she began rifling through its pants pockets. Among the spoils were a couple foreign coins, a single silver Gelt and two coppers, plus a small pouch of powder, some lead balls, cotton wads, and a makeshift ramrod. Money and reloading supplies. Upon closer inspection, his pistols were in too poor a condition even for resale.

She stood up, stowing away the spoils in a pocket as she approached Zelsys to join her in briskly walking back towards the main road and then back to town. Still processing the implication that this was not an uncommon sight during the war, she answered, “...Exactly in those words, yes. How’d you know?”

“Playing exterminator is code-speak for wiping out a hive of out-of-control locust-men. They’re half-insane soldiers at best, and feral animals at worst. A couple times we got through enemy territory under the pretense of playing exterminator, that’s how bad these fuckers get for either side, especially once some poor soul mutates into a hive queen and starts laying eggs.”

They quickly reached the main road, and almost as quickly got back to the town gates, and all along Zelsys questioned her counterpart, all her disgust and worry completely replaced by utter confusion and bewilderment at the nonchalance with which Zefaris regarded these monstrous creatures. It was clear she had completely dehumanized even the least-mutated of these people in her mind, and frankly, Zelsys couldn’t blame her.

“That’s… Bizarre. Pateirian soldiers just kept drinking these elixirs even if they knew that each dose risked mutations? Why?”

“Apparently, they believed that those favored by their Divine Emperor would eventually turn into a sacred orchid mantis, while the unworthy would become plague locusts. The locust-men would turn to banditry or just outright go feral to survive,” Zef explained in a spiteful tone, making no effort to hide her personal hatred for Pateirians.

For a short while, they walked in silence whilst Zelsys digested the information, recontextualizing her view of the situation from an isolated cell, to a ticking time-bomb waiting just out of sight. Perhaps all of the side roads were infested, perhaps the one she used to reach the man-eater beast was only safe because of the beast’s presence.

“Rot-bears, man-eaters, locust-men… Just how infested is Ikesia?” she wondered out loud. Zefaris let out a heavy sigh, looking directly at her.

“Assuming our trip out of the E.Z. was your first experience with Ikesia, I can guess that it’s worse than you think. A lot of dirty tactics were used by all sides, and that filth has only festered since the end of the war. Between that, the natural beasts of the land, and the lack of beast-slayers, it’d be an insurmountable task to keep even one town safe.”

“I wager we could get it done, if I teach all three of you Fog-breathing.”

Zefaris chuckled disbelievingly at that, but suddenly went quiet and stopped on a boot-heel, blinking a couple times in realization. She breathed in sharply through her teeth, then slowly exhaled. Nothing happened.

“T-the thing you did back there, with the Fog,” she looked to Zel. “Do it again.”

“Lover’s Breath…” Zelsys whispered without missing a beat, inhaling as she went. She leaned in, driven by the lust imparted by the technique to kiss a breath of Fog into Zef’s mouth. The markswoman’s face flushed bright pink, Fog spilling from her mouth and nose as she began to breathe heavily. After a few breaths the Fog disappeared, and she was left looking mildly flustered and disappointed.

A shake of her head and another sigh, “Almost got it. Almost. Was that really necessary? Not that I mind, but…”

“Figured you’d have an easier time learning Lover’s Breath, considering how I learned it,” Zelsys grinned, draping her arm around the cyclops and beginning to walk again. “Though on second thought, you’d probably make better use of the Fog-breathing method I’ve been using up until now.”

The markswoman’s face remained thoroughly flushed for a little while, until she stammered out, “H-how you learned it? Did last night…”

“Seems to be the case. I used it fighting the man-eater, it’s like you can just keep going for ages with a single breath,” she continued to really drive the point home, glad to have swerved the tone of their conversation away from horrific mutations and the aftershocks of the war.

It didn’t take them much longer to get back to the town gates, and though the guards gave them strange looks, they dared not accost them. The walk back to Riverside Remedies was almost uncannily uneventful, and they got back to their room without any further incident.

Zefaris sat down at the writing desk and took to cleaning Pentacle with the maintenance kit that it came with, while Zelsys shed her combat gear and laid back on the bed, swiping through the Tablet’s readouts in an attempt to discern what exactly it was that the DETAILS function did.

The first choice - a trait.

SURVIVOR’S INSTINCT Type: Sensory Enhancement Trigger: Situational Effects: Situational Awareness C+, Sense Motive C-, Danger Sense B- Advancement: Survive Dangerous Events A gut feeling. A little voice in the back of your head. The feeling of being looked at. Your instincts will never lead you astray.

She didn’t know what she had expected. A numerical readout? Some sort of concrete quantifier for how much more accurate her instincts were compared to the average human? Of course this trait wouldn’t be good to show the details function, it was too esoteric.

Another one.

LESSER GREAT-CLEAVER EXPERTISE Type: Weapon Skill Trigger: Wield a Weapon (Great-cleaver) Effects: Great-cleaver Maneuvering C+, Great-cleaver Wound Severity B- Advancement: Improve with a Weapon (Great-cleaver) The great-cleaver is a beastly tool of butchery and prodigal strength, yet belies a deceptive dexterity which requires an equally deceptive amount of skill to draw out. The difference between a novice of the great-cleaver and a Mountain-cutter is as wide as that between a novice swordsman and a Sword-saint.

This was far closer to what she had expected. Just for good measure, she checked one more trait.

FOG-BREATHING Type: Self-Empowerment, Cultivation Trigger: Breathe and Focus Effects: Dependent on Method Advancement: Develop a Unique Method “To breathe is to live. To breathe the essence of Aer is to be most alive of all…”

Back to wishy-washy musings it was, then. “I already have a method that comes naturally, why’s it not showing up in the techniques list?” she wondered, frustrated by the Tablet’s apparent refusal to acknowledge the way in which she used Fog-breathing well before having developed a named method for doing so. She swiped to the techniques screen, and sure enough, it still only showed Lover’s Breath.

Perhaps it needed an attached memory and a specific method for the device to consider it legitimate? It couldn’t hurt to try.

The memory was easy - the moment when she readied herself to slay the Colossal Failure, back in the bunker.

The method, equally so - even though she had never written it down, she knew exactly how it went, she had done it many times even in just a couple days.

A deep, continuous breath to fill the lungs as far as they’ll go, then controlled, sharp exhalations, using up the lung capacity as if it were fuel in a tank.

Zelsys focused on her intention to codify this method of hers, fully confident that if something like Lover’s Breath could come about through coincidence, surely she could intentionally create a technique.

She was right.

Just below Lover’s Breath, there flickered into being another listing.

TECHNIQUES Lover’s Breath Unnamed Breathing Technique - Name Technique

Under the assumption that naming it would make calling out the technique’s name empower it or make it easier to trigger, Zelsys decided on something innocuous. Something she could weave into conversation, exactly unlike she had back at the roadside ambush when she used Lover’s Breath.

“A deep breath,” she thought, and so it was. Not bothering to check the details, she figured this would be enough to make the breathing method more likely to take.

“You want to try the other way I do Fog-breathing?” she asked Zef, sitting up on the bed and crossing her legs.

Her answer was just a simple, “Sure, why not.”

It started simply - they sat on the bed opposite one another, and Zelsys followed the train of logic that came naturally in trying to teach Zefaris the breathing method. A deep breath in, filling the lungs to their absolute capacity, and sharp breaths out whenever one needed to perform a physical endeavor, like rationing fuel within an engine.

The markswoman quickly grasped the mechanics of the breathing method, but even with the assistance of Zel’s puffing Fog into her face, she couldn’t seem to breathe more than a miniscule quantity of Fog with every breath.

Enraptured by his discovery, Makhus made a foolish decision. He decided he would try to distill an Azoth elixir from the blood sample, just to see if Zel’s blood really contained microscopic Azoth stones. The glassware setup was already present in the lab, all he had to do was dissolve all the blood into an Alkahest solution and run it through the setup.

Were everything to go to plan and were his hypothesis correct, he would be able to extract some fragmentary essence of what Zelsys was, thus proving his hypothesis. He took no notice of the distant sound of the doorbell, correctly assuming it was just Zel and Zef returning. Alchemist that he was, Makhus maintained his ironclad focus on getting everything set up just right, watching and waiting with unyielding attentiveness that could only be cultivated by days of standing guard in an active warzone.

Ten minutes. Twenty minutes. Half an hour turned to an hour, then to an hour and a half.

The doorbell rang again, a pair of heavy boots stomped up the stairs, and it was gone. Sigmund was back.

And still Makhus continued to watch the blood sample dissolve, ever so slowly.

Attempt after attempt, they spent hours on this fruitless effort, dragged along by Zef’s continual incremental improvements. But they were too incremental. She might develop a sort of Fog-breathing eventually using this brute method of teaching, but there was clearly a greater issue at the root of how she viewed the method.

Perhaps she needed a practical application to spark the initial breakthrough.

With the sun beginning to near the western horizon, Zelsys decided that, “This isn’t working. You need an obstacle.”

So it was that they went to the store’s back yard in an effort to find something to serve as an obstacle, and indeed, they found something. The yard was walled-in by the surrounding buildings, mostly taken up by a small greenhouse containing a herb garden, but from its roof there led a channel which was suspended alongside the surrounding walls. It led to the perfect obstacle for Zel’s purpose - a two-story tower of scaffolding, atop which there sat a funnel for rainwater.

The tower was far too tall to scale with a single normal leap, but its top was a shorter distance from the ground than the branch she had leapt towards back in the E.Z.

Before she so much as spoke a word, Zefaris had already inferred her intentions from the way she looked at that tangle of screwed-together steel.

“Y’think scaling that will help me learn Fog-breathing?” she questioned, disbelieving.

Zel shook her head, and gave the markswoman a grinning look, “You’ll jump to the top from a standstill.”

“...And that was how you learned Fog-breathing?” Zef questioned, raising an eyebrow. “An extreme high jump?”

“It was the second time I ever used it, to get out of a dead end in the Maze of Dead Trees,” Zel confirmed. “First time was a life-death showdown with a mass of cancerous flesh, so I figured the high jump would be more realistic.”

Zefaris sighed in resignation, taking off her holster and handing it to Zelsys. She rolled up her sleeves, rubbed her hands off on her trousers, and took a stand at the base of the tower.

This wasn’t nearly as outlandish as some of the Fog-breather teaching methods she’d heard about from users of the art she’d met in the army, and it was downright tame compared to some of the things detailed in books. No, this was downright reasonable, and it somehow made her even more annoyed about the idea.

A clear goal, a clear logic, a clear method. No mysticism.

Deep breath in, filling her lungs as far as they would go as she lowered herself.

Sharp exhalation alongside the jump.

It was higher than she had expected, but nowhere near the top. An attempt to land on her feet, sabotaged by the slippery grass beneath. Without a word, she got back to her feet and tried again.

Breathe in. Jump, breathing out. Fall. Get up. Repeat.

Over.

And over.

And over again.

Annoyance and outright anger building.

Zelsys finally broke through the haze of winded breathing and grunting as she got back up after who knew how many attempts, offering with an uncharacteristically kind tone, “It might be a better idea to try this tomorrow.”

A major part of Zefaris wanted to give up - she was already tired enough from the preceding events of the day, and now, she had exhausted herself both physically and mentally by beating away at this fruitless task. But this failure infuriated her. Zefaris knew she could do this, the breath of Fog was there for her to grasp, yet it always slipped between her fingers every time.

She shook her head and nearly growled, “One more try.”

On a purely mental level, she knew this last attempt was no more likely to succeed than the previous ones. The primate brain, of course, didn’t care. “Try again, get it right this time, last chance,” the anger-driven Id goaded.

And so, she lowered herself into a leaping stance again, took a deep breath, and then… Everything came to a halt, for a split-second. The hyper-awareness of Fog coursed through Zefaris as her lungs filled with clean air, yet it was not just oxygen that her body extracted from this breath. With a yelling exhalation she leapt upward, her boots caving small pits in the soft soil as she rocketed towards the top of the scaffolding tower, her ascent marked by a trail of silver Fog.

Her brief moment of reveling in this accomplishment was disturbed when she heard Zelsys exclaim in amazement, “Holy shit it worked!”

Surprised by this she let out a brief laugh, and her grip on the mossy steel slipped. She plummeted to the ground, eyes unwillingly turned skyward, only to find herself landing in a pair of muscular arms, staring into a pair of silver eyes.

Sigmund had spent more than he was willing to admit on three one-liter bottles of decent whiskey. He didn’t believe it would take him that much to get blackout drunk, but he’d never gotten that drunk - he had no way to know, and so wanted to be certain. He entered the store, walked up the stairs to the upper floor, passed by the door of the women’s room, and shut the door behind himself when he entered his and Makhus’ room.

Taking a seat at the writing desk, the historian cracked open the first bottle, took a swig, and felt the fire rise in his chest the moment it went down. The fingers of his left hand began seizing already, and that was when he knew this would be a long, long evening. Swig after swig, Sigmund put away the first bottle, fighting off the encroaching seizures with sheer grit and willpower. He dealt with worse on a daily basis without anyone noticing, this was no different.

Just standing or sitting around, a seized up arm or leg was barely noticeable, and they rarely if ever lasted long enough to become noticeable. By the time he got a quarter of the way into the second bottle, he was feeling the alcohol finally take effect, his sense of balance swaying and his train of thought becoming less secure upon its rails. Another swig.

The phantom sound of distant guns drowned out the noise of the street outside the window. The yelling of men, the foreboding crackle of a campfire and rustling of a bush. All these noises were familiar, to all these noises he fell asleep. In their absence his mind occasionally conjured phantoms, much like it was doing at this very moment.

Another swig.

Another.

And another.

His mouth was numb, as was much of his left side after having seized up. He didn’t have the mental wherewithal to fight it, and at this point, he was too drunk to try.

Before he knew it Sigmund had drained the second bottle and fallen asleep at the writing desk. In a brief moment of lucidity he jolted upright, noticing that even the third one was two-thirds gone. The sun had long set by now, and everything was quiet.

Sigmund took another swig, and allowed himself to drift off into the dreamless void of a drunkard’s sleep, unable to so much as move a muscle beyond his right arm and his head. He felt himself slipping, awareness, fading, and then…

Zel and Zef spent the remainder of their afternoon in the backyard, after they had discovered a nook nestled between the greenhouse and the walls of two other buildings. It contained half of a large barrel repurposed for use as a table, surrounded by three wooden chairs.

It was shielded from both rain and sun by an old copper awning, turned its characteristic bright green by corrosion. For a while they did nothing, merely sitting there, basking in each other's presence. By the time the sky began to turn the colours of dusk, Zelsys had briefly taken another look at the details of her traits. Fog-breathing had changed, ever so subtly - its advancement condition was different.

Advancement: Advance a Unique Method

Zelsys wasn’t sure how she could improve her usual breathing method in a significant enough way for the device to consider it as having advanced, and at this very moment, she was all too exhausted to give it any further thought. She put the Tablet down and turned her attention to Zefaris.

That night no strange noises came out of their room, though they still spent the night in one another’s embrace.

The sleepiness was gone, just as he downed the contents of a bottle. It tasted like blood, and fire, and whiskey. It tasted like victory.

He was surrounded by a dozen Grekurians with scatterguns, sleep gas grenades sprayed their contents all around him, yet at this very moment, he knew he was in the position of power. It was all like a bizarre dream - Sigmund knew what he was recalling was long in the past, he knew he was just a passenger in his own head, but he couldn’t feel more in control than right now.

The concoction which he had just drunk was his entire squad’s supply of highly experimental Victory Wash elixir, and it felt like he had just set himself ablaze from the inside out. His nostrils filled with the stench of his own blood and burning hair, his facial hair somehow spontaneously turning to embers without burning away.

“We have you surrounded, just surrender!” one of the soldiers yelled in barely-legible Ikesian. “If you lay down your arms, we can promise you and your squad fair treatment as prisoners of war!”

Immediately after, another soldier rebuked in Grekurian, “Just blast the filthy Ike and bag the rest! We don’t have the time to take prisoners!”

Sigmund had learned the Grekurian language before his conscription into the military. Despite the blazing fury rising from his gut, Sigmund maintained self-control. “I am afraid I can’t risk that,” he responded, reaching for his war-knife. A scattergun rang out, but it only blasted apart the campfire and sprayed embers into the air. Sigmund was long gone.

“Where the hell did he ghrk-”

His hand on the soldier’s shoulder, his war-knife squarely through his spine. The fabric burned away beneath his fingers, but before any of the others could whip around at their comrade’s deathrattle, he was gone once again.

The Grekurian soldiers were spread out in their four-man squads. Sigmund didn’t have much time to take them all out, with every passing second and with every inhumanly-fast movement, he felt his body cooking itself from the inside out, yet he felt no pain nor fear for his life. He was the fire, Victory Wash was merely accelerant to kickstart his blazing will to live.

Though his perception of time remained unaltered, even a fraction of a second felt like enough time to ruminate on a plan of approach and plot out a course of action. A single step was enough to rip gashes in the ground underfoot, a moment enough time to move from one victim’s slumping form to the next and plunge his war-knife into their chest.

Sigmund wiped out five of them before he encountered any resistance. The vast bulk of his strength was already spent and he was beginning to slow down, but now than ever, his fiery transformation was most apparent. The top half of his uniform hung off him as no more than burning tatters, his snow-white skin was a canvas painted with the blackness of charred soot and the orange of blazing embers, tracing elaborate patterns along his veins.

This sixth soldier, the first he crossed blades and locked stares with before he ended them, knew he was a dead man standing. He was the furthest from the rest, caught reloading his scattergun, only able to catch Sig’s war-knife with his weapon’s bayonet through sheer luck. The moment Sigmund’s bloodshot, blazing stare met that soldier’s trained gaze, the Grekurian knew his impending fate. Even still, he bequeathed, “You’re no Fog-breather. How do you plan to kill twelve of us?”

“You’re already dead,” Sigmund told the soldier, fully leaning into his confidence that he came out of this alive and victorious. “You just don’t know it yet.”

Before the soldier could respond, Sigmund had already kicked the soldier away and severed his head with a wide, sweeping slash. Two more soldiers fell without ever knowing he was there until his steel had already severed their lives and they could feel his searing body heat burning through their clothes.

The last four were the issue.

By now, they had caught on and regrouped back to back near the remnants of the campfire.

He could charge in and kill one, perhaps two by leveraging his sheer physicality, but that wouldn’t be enough.

A war-knife’s center of gravity was a little strange for throwing, but with some effort and his momentarily superhuman strength, Sigmund was confident that he could throw it hard enough to skewer two people. He threw his war-knife and did, indeed, skewer two of the soldiers where they stood, hearing one’s breathless gurgling and the other’s pained screams echo into the night as he used the momentary distraction to unceremoniously rip the bayonets off two of the Grekurians’ scatterguns to use for himself.

Armed as such, Sigmund stepped out of the bushes, revealing the ravaged state of his form to the last two of his remaining opponents. His beard smoldering like steel wool, skin clinging to musculature, his skin charred black and veins shining orange like the last sparks of a dying ember, Sigmund took what could have very well been his final stand.

There was not a protracted exchange of blows, or a pitched duel of one against two.

The Beast of Embers slaughtered those last two soldiers like they were cattle, using their own comrades’ bayonets. That night he fell to the ground amongst his freshly-slain foes believing he would die, only to wake up in a colossal amount of pain and with no memory of the events of the night prior.

Sigmund woke up in a colossal amount of pain, wracked by terrible hunger… In a bed.

On the nightstand, there was a glass of light-green Liquid Vigor and a bowl heaping with steaming-hot porridge.