“Alright, how much?” Zel sighed, dropping another shell into the vortex as she looked to the old woman. Collier rose from her seat, quietly cackling to herself whilst she strode into the back room and nearly immediately returned toting a loose, leather belt with eight loops, perfectly sized for the shells. She put it on the counter, and with a self-satisfied grin held out her ancient hand for payment, “Fifteen gelt.”

Zelsys had gotten played, and frankly, she wasn’t mad in the slightest. She gladly counted out three more silvers, and after slipping the remaining six shells into its loops, strapped the belt around her waist, allowing it to hang just below the cleaver’s holster and perfectly within reach. Its bulky, brass buckle wouldn’t come loose and it was more than long enough that she had to tie its loose length around itself, but otherwise, it was perfect.

The leather was stiff. It was new.

“Did you make this under the assumption that I would take you up on that offer?” Zelsys asked, knowing the answer before it came. A simple nod, accompanied by a knowing smile.

“Y’get good at readin’ people at my age, and boy are ya an interestin’ book,” Collier said. The doorbell rang - another customer. An older Ikesian man, clearly well-off financially, sporting a short, stylish haircut and a perfectly trimmed mustache. Before he could so much as say a word, Collier’s pleasant demeanor vanished and she barked at him, “Get the fuck outta my store you dandy fuck, I ain’t sellin’ you shit! Like it or not, yer gods-forsaken dead brother didn’t want yer filthy hands on that gun, and dead gods be my witnesses I ain’t breakin’ a promise!”

She turned to Zel, and for the moment returned to her grandmotherly demeanor, beckoning her to, “Go handler yer business dear, this’ll be an ordeal y’dont wanna see.”

Without uttering another word or even listening to the raucous verbal exchange that ensued, Zelsys took her leave and made for the town hall. Pencil-pushing bureaucrats still milled into its front doors, but there were fewer of them, few enough to weave through without too much difficulty.

Zelsys, of course, didn’t bother with such niceties. Swaggering into the town hall at full stride, she fully leveraged her ability to project raw charisma to make the weak-willed office drones eagerly move out of her way without even considering a challenge of her right to pass - it was polite exclamations of “Sorry!” and “Excuse me!” from those she walked past all the way to the top. Then, at the top of the stairs, there was… Silence.

The second floor was utterly deserted, and through this deafening silence, she trod the hallway of paintings towards the governor’s office. Two knocks on the door.

“Come in!” the governor’s voice rumbled, tension and stress audible even through the door. She pushed the door open, met by no guards when she passed through, and so closed it herself.

The sight that met her was Provisional Governor of Willowdale Crovacus Estoras, his desk in utter disarray, his form leaned against it with a cigar in his hand and a veritable pile of ash threatening to pour out of the ashtray. His deathly-pale visage was only broken up by a five o’ clock shadow and swollen black bags that underlined his bloodshot eyes. He looked to her, silently beckoning with his cigar before he leaned back in his chair and took a long drag. There was an extra seat in front of his desk, but she paid it no mind.

“Your son came by early-” she began as she took a seat, but he interrupted.

“I am… So sorry for dragging you into this,” he rasped. “I thought the locusts were just a small cell of holdouts. It’s so much worse than I thought. They’ve infested this whole gods-forsaken valley, now it’s just a matter of time before they devour us all and move on.”

The gut feeling. He wasn’t exaggerating in the slightest. Zel maintained eye contact, but from her peripheral vision, she could make out the papers that covered Crovacus’s desk.

Photos. Documents. Letters. Some printed, others handwritten. One was written in panicked, shaky handwriting, stained with blood.

“Could you please explain, sir?” Zelsys asked.

Crovacus chuckled darkly, “You killed three of ‘em yesterday, my men found the corpses. One had passed for a normal person for weeks, walking our streets and eating our food. Let me tell you this - consider yourself lucky that they were just toll takers.”

“That... Still does not put things into context.”

He took another drag, his face slowly twisting into a grin of denial. Zelsys could almost see his mental state cracking before her very eyes. A deep breath, and the grin was gone, the governor briefly retook the reins of his mind. Derangement was replaced by unassailable mental exhaustion that would have doubtlessly broken a lesser man.

“Very well,” he sighed. “I’ll start from the beginning. When I first hired you, I intended to send you and perhaps one or two partners on a simple mission to wipe out a small cell, what was thought to be fourteen locust-men at most.”

She nodded in understanding, silently gesturing for him to continue. He reached into the pile of papers that was his desk and pulled out three tattered photographs, tossing them over to her side.

Left to right, they showed:

A far shot of a cave entrance, which was surrounded by a huge swathe of land utterly picked of any greenery.

A much darker shot, displaying a point where the cave’s natural wall suddenly transitioned to a solid wall of dark stone, a great glyph-etched door gaping open into a chamber at whose other side was something… Familiar. An outline identical to that of the actual door, surrounding an elaborate glyph etched into marble. It was a Fog Gate. This photo also showed a great deal of detritus covering the floor and walls of the cave and chamber in equal measure, with blood, feces, and other bodily fluids smeared over the ancient door’s surface and the chamber’s walls.

The third photo showed a swarm of nude locust-creatures emerging from the now-activated Fog Gate.

Zel looked up to meet the governor’s tired eyes, and he gave a slow nod, assuming that they were on the same page.

“Yeah,” he affirmed. “We thought they were just hiding in a cave, but they’ve made a nest of a Dungeon.”

Another long, long drag, and an equally long exhalation. Smoke pouring from his mouth with each word, he continued, “Good news is it’s still dormant, and will be for a good five years more. I can scarcely imagine what horrors an awakened Dungeon will produce, but soon we might not have to imagine.”

Another drag. The cigar was just a stub, so he tossed it into the tray and retrieved another from one of the drawers. He bit off the end and spat it into the trash can by his desk, and with a snap of his fingers produced a small flame above his thumb that he used to ignite the cigar. Her attention drawn by this small act of magic, Zelsys noticed that Crovacus’s fingers were tattooed on the inside with arcane glyphs, the one on his thumb glowing bright orange whilst he lit his cigar.

“The fully insectoid beasts you’ve encountered are not even human, but the result of a human woman’s reproductive tract mutating due to the consumption of Pateirian combat elixirs,” he continued, and the realization dawned on her.

“Oh. Oh that’s bad,” she thought, trying not to imagine what the mutated monstrosity might look like.

“I fear this one might be feeding off the dormant Dungeon Core. If it goes unchecked, the Queen might absorb the device and take over the whole damn Dungeon, and if that comes to pass… We’re all doomed. A very literal plague of locust-men, a catastrophe of such proportions even the pre-war beast-slayer guilds would have struggled to contain it.”

“I… I don’t see how I could stop that, sir,” Zelsys admitted.

“You can’t,” he agreed. “Not on your own. You’ve been to the E.Z., yes? Dealt with a rot-bear or two? Maybe even a Necrobeast?”

“I’ve killed both a rot-bear and the resulting Necrobeast, yes,” she admitted again. “Why is it relevant?”

“Splendid,” he smiled. “The Locust Queen won’t be much stronger than a Necrobeast, and neither as resilient nor as mobile. All you need is a means of dealing with the locusts.”

There came three slow, rhythmic knocks on the door. Crovacus looked from her to the door and exclaimed, “Come in!”

Zel turned her head just enough to see who it was, and… It was him.

The Singer.

“I believe it’s me you’re speaking of,” he said with a grin.

“How long’ve you been listening?” Crovacus asked, matching the grin with one of his own, speaking to the Singer as if he were an old friend. Perhaps he was.

“A couple minutes. One last job, eh? Bet you’re glad I owe you a favor, you Grek sack of shit,” the singer laughed in his sonorous boom of a voice, walking right up and taking a seat.

“That’s just fuckin’ rich coming from you,” Crovacus rebutted jokingly, shaking hands with the Singer. Clearly, they knew one another. The governor turned his eyes to her and explained, “Locust-men are vulnerable to sonic attacks. Noise that’ll make your ears ring will turn one of those bugs to mush inside its shell, if it’s the right frequency. Strolvath here used to pull exterminator duty in the later stages of the war.”

“An active hive of those fuckers was a cause for instant truce until it was dealt with,” Strolvath added.

Glossing over the two men’s friendly banter, Zelsys pushed for more information, “I take it you have more pertinent information than tattered pictures and stories from the war.”

Crovacus gave a nod, reached into the pile of papers on his desk, and without so much as a second look retrieved a folder from the mess. The briefing was, on the whole, short and to the point. A simple explanation of the path they would take to reach the mouth of the cave, with stopping points on the way to permit for rest and recovery.

“It will be a few days’ trek there and back,” Crovacus explained as Zel and Strol both intently looked at a map that had been laid out overtop the mess on the desk. “I could get you access to motorized transport, but that’d be like painting targets on your backs.”

“March there, exterminate the bugs, march back,” the singer nodded. “The more things change the more they stay the same, huh?”

“Uh-huh. Just make sure to reach Rally Point Gamma on time, you’re to rendezvous with the third member of your party there,” the governor continued, pointing a free finger at the third stopping point on the plotted course, being the first stopping point of the trek’s second day. Ideally, the trek would only be two days with four stops, but the alternate path for bad weather accounted for up to four days with eight secure stopping points. Crovacus even gave Zelsys a military pocket watch, its tarnished shell stamped with a simple floral design.

He reluctantly added that, “You’ll need four people in total to open the Fog door. I can have my son accompany you, if necessary.”

Zelsys chuckled and graciously refused the offer, citing that, “I already have someone to watch my back, but the offer is appreciated. Perhaps have the boy train some more so I don’t completely trample him when he inevitably challenges me again.”

Soon enough, the briefing was done and she made her way out of the town hall alongside the Singer, both of them having been given a map with their intended path. He was bizarrely normal in person, his violent charisma reined in so tightly that he would’ve seemed like a normal person were it not for his extreme appearance.

Makhus found himself flitting from task to task, yet he had no issue keeping up after a good night’s sleep. The first was taking care of Sigmund, who was practically bedridden with a truly severe hangover and covered in mild burns, having somehow lost several kilos of weight and developed an insatiable appetite for protein, fat, and sugar.

Instead of purging the Rubedo that came from his seizures, it was cooking enough of his personal favorite lentil stew to feed everyone - enough for six, but Sigmund as he was now would eat for three.

The second task was the elaborate, and thankfully slow process of brewing the Necrobeast’s Azoth and Zel’s blood into a cohesive elixir. He’d already worked out the new glyphic inscriptions he had to make, the arrangement of glassware, the process itself, even the math of it, all in his sleepless Liquid Vigor-fuelled bender.

All he had to figure out was which of the beast’s positive traits he could safely distill, or rather, if he could manage to extract both its self-reconstruction and its ability to project a destructive breath of Essentia. Fortunately for Makhus, he had more than enough time to do this, as it would still be long hours before the new sample of Zel’s blood would fully dissolve into solution.

The third of his pursuits was his own obsession, his own desire to more thoroughly plumb the dead alchemist’s notes. Between adjusting both of his active alkahestry setups, making sure the soup didn’t burn, and checking in on Sigmund every hour or so, he couldn’t find time to do more than take a peek every once in a while. Much to his relief, Zefaris woke up at a rather reasonable time, sleepily stumbling into the kitchen just as the soup was nearing completion.

“Mind keeping an eye on it for me?” he asked, and with a yawning nod, she took over the ever so important duty of making sure the soup didn’t turn to burnt mush. Now that he didn’t have to ping-pong back and forth every couple minutes to make sure it wasn’t burnt, he could direct most of his focus towards making sure neither of his ongoing alchemy processes got out of hand and reading more of the alchemist’s notes.

Makhus resorted to just taking the coded notebook and slowly decoding it piece by piece whilst also standing watch over the two active glassware sets. Whilst the one being used to dissolve Zel’s blood into solution didn’t really need any adjustment, the flask being used to melt the Necrobeast’s Azoth required constant adjustment to ensure the solution remained stable. He had ground the outer shell into dust until only a very thin layer remained around the liquid, mercurial essence in the stone’s core, simply dissolving the shell into a solution of alkahest before he added the core itself and placed the flask into a traditional extraction setup.

It took some trial and error with the giant tangle of tubes and flasks that the setup was, but he had managed to replace a solid third of its components with ones he had found that he thought had more appropriate glyphs - glyphs to dispel any Nigredo that formed, glyphs to ward against decay and death, glyphs to purge the bestial aspects of the Azoth to leave only the pure core of its constituent traits. Distilling an Azoth stone was a meticulous balancing game of filtering out the undesirables while extracting the desirable components.

Many traditionalists would have found it offensive, they would have said that one shouldn’t be able to just pick and choose, that one should absorb an Azoth for all it was and put in the work to deal with all of the consequences. Many claimed it was disrespectful to the creature, to rip its essence to pieces with alchemy and discard those that don’t fit.

Most of these people had died in the war, unlike Makhus.

“Natural order this, natural order that, they’d justify genocide by citing the natural order if it came to that,” he annoyedly murmured to himself as he adjusted a valve. “The natural order can go fuck itself.”

The process seemed to be going stable, and so Makhus finally turned his attention to the journal. He read, decoded, and found nothing but disappointment. The vast majority of the journal’s contents after its owner departed for the location given to him by the Sage of Fog was… What one would expect from a journal. Documentation of travel, of the weather, of the owner’s mood. Much of the contents were rather apt descriptions and sketches of the Exclusion Zone’s many oddities, certainly fascinating to anyone who hadn’t lived there for months on end like Makhus had. The dead alchemist had apparently even encountered a rot-bear, going by the accurate full-page sketch.

It wouldn’t have been much of an issue at all, were this a normal journal - he could’ve just flipped through until he reached a part actually interesting to him. But, being encoded, Makhus couldn’t help but decode it linearly to ensure he didn’t miss out on anything. Hours passed, and the alchemist continued decoding the journal bit by bit, watching over his glassware and checking in on Sigmund every once in a while. Zelsys returned from her errand run at some point, apparently having decided to spend the rest of the morning training in the backyard.

Once the soup was ready and he brought a portion to Sigmund, the historian struggled onto his feet and made his way to join the three of them in the kitchen just so he wouldn’t have to be alone for a little while.

“It’s fine, I can bear the pain,” he rebuffed concerned questions, sipping down his fourth glass of Liquid Vigor. A quite substantial portion of his skin was covered in charred patterns that resembled the glowing veins of a dying ember, though his face was untouched. It was largely his extremities that were most affected, his hands having completely blackened halfway up the elbows, from which point further black lines spread up his arms and even onto his chest.

His legs were less affected, with the blackening having stopped a quarter of the way up his thighs. His chest was also partly covered in charring, though it was just a circular, radiating mark over his stomach. Beyond these rather visible signs, Sigmund also had many small first-degree burns, relegated entirely to the portions of his skin which remained uncharred.

Bizarrely, it didn’t seem like the visible changes to skin colour had any functional effect beyond greatly increased heat resistance - Sigmund had held his hand over one of the stove’s burners for a solid twenty seconds before he noticed any actual temperature increase.

Most importantly of all - he hadn’t had a single seizure since the strange ritual. “It’s still there, but I don’t feel any tension anymore,” he remarked. “I’m certain my ah… Metabolic Rubedo, was it? I’m sure my condition will manifest in a different way, but I’m not eager to seek out danger just to see what happens.”

“You’d just snap in half at a light breeze,” Zel chuckled, pointing out his gaunt figure. Even his own clothes hung off him in a comical way, as he was now- like all his body fat had been burned off, leaving a freakishly thin frame of muscle shrink-wrapped in dehydrated two-tone skin.

Makhus had expected Zelsys to question him as to when the Azoth extract would be ready, but… She didn’t. She didn’t even bring it up. She did, however, bring up that, “Me and Zef will be leaving for a couple days tomorrow.”

“Beast-slaying contract?” Makhus asked, already expecting the answer. He didn’t expect the details of the answer, though.

“Uh-huh,” she offhandedly affirmed. “Some locust-men have holed up in an inactive Dungeon so we’re to play exterminator.”

“An inactive dungeon?” he asked, only slightly concerned. An active Dungeon Core hadn’t breached containment since long before he was born, and he’d been on an exploratory mission to a dormant one that had been forced open. There were still beasts there, beasts that could kill a normal person easily, but… Neither Zel nor Zef were normal people. Even Makhus wasn’t a normal person.

He wasn’t concerned by locust-men either - without a queen, they were no more dangerous than regular bandits, and with a queen, they would’ve overrun the valley by now. The risk of death or severe injury was very present, that much was true, but the war had taught him to live with the assumption of survival, he had seen all too many soldiers die paralyzed by fear for their lives.

The remainder of the day was… Impressively uneventful. Sigmund continued stocking the front end of the store as part of his effort towards recovery, Zel and Zef wiled the day away in a combination of training, lounging about, and shameless displays of mutual affection, whilst Makhus continued his work down in the lab.

At one point when he came upstairs to check on Sig and make sure everything was alright, he saw the two women out in the backyard practicing Fog-breathing. He even asked Zelsys to teach him Fog-breathing and she agreed, but upon realizing it would be a full day’s effort, he decided he would actively commit to the effort once he didn’t have an unstable Azoth extraction to watch over.

Until then, just practicing the breathing method that Zel described would have to be enough.

The four of them ate breakfast together the next day, Zel and Zef said a brief and largely jovial goodbye, and they departed for Willowdale’s northern gate. They heard Strolvath’s thunderous voice and deft instrumental echoing through the streets long before they saw the gate. He was waiting for them. He was playing an aggressive, dance-like rhythm, one known in certain lands as flamenco guitar.

He wasn’t singing any particular lyrics as much as he was using his own voice as part of the instrumental, hollering out a melody to perfectly underline his strumming. Even without lyrics, though, his voice conveyed a great deal of emotion, a great deal of passion for whatever his wordless song was about. When they finally rounded the corner that brought him into direct line of sight, they saw that he was leant against the wall of a building, surrounded by a small group of people actively listening to him. When he saw the two women approaching, he quickly transitioned to a climactic crescendo to end the performance and quietly gave the audience his thanks.

By the time they actually reached him, the audience had largely dispersed, and the few stragglers went their separate ways when the trio quickly made their way through the northern gate. The guards not only didn’t try to stop them, they entirely refused to acknowledge their passage, only letting them pass and shutting the door behind them the moment they passed. The road to the north was paved with ancient stones, tracks carved into it by the perpetual coming and going of carriages and motorized vehicles alike. Something about the stones felt timeless, like they had been here for far longer than they had any right to be, had endured things that would’ve destroyed any natural stone. When she walked upon them her steps were lighter, her stride quicker, and this effect clearly extended to both Zefaris and Strolvath. Enchanted paving stones?

For a solid fifteen minutes, the trio walked in silence, surprisingly with Strolvath in the lead as he hurried along as quickly as his feet would carry him. He eventually turned around, squinted at Willowdale, and resumed walking at a much more reasonable pace.

“Why-” Zel began to question, but the scarred soldier shushed her.

“Quiet,” he hissed. “The locusts aren’t usually active this close north of town, but we can’t risk it. Stay as quiet as you possibly can until we reach the first stopping point, understood?”

Zel and Zef exchanged looks and gave a sharp nod.

“Good,” Strolvath smiled. “C’mon, this is the hard part. Paradoxically, it’ll be easiest to evade the bugs in the middle two-thirds of the trek. They’re mostly active near the farmsteads and their nest, but not near the main supply road.”

He explained whilst walking, whispering in a near-inaudible volume. Somehow he threw his voice exactly at them, just close enough to be heard, and his mouth didn’t move in a visible way. For a good while they walked the main road, with Zelsys having mentally checked out for substantial stretches of the trek. Zefaris pressed up to her when the clouds draped over the sky and the smell of impending rain came to dominate all other scents. The electric tension in the air and the nearly pitch-black clouds suggested more than just rain, but rather an impending storm.

The fields that surrounded Willowdale had turned to forest and the sun had crossed its apex by now, but to both the women’s relief it was entirely unlike the green death-trap of the Exclusion Zone, but rather a normal forest like that past the border. According to Zel’s brief study of the map they were meant to take a sharp turn directly into the forest somewhere near here, and sure enough, Strolvath beckoned them into the treeline and through a thicket, eventually reaching a narrow but recognizable footpath. He quickly went out of sight, but Zelsys just followed her gut feeling where the footpath became unrecognizable.

After a good half-hour of semi-blind trawling through a narrow forest path, they caught up with Strolvath at the edge of a small clearing, though he stopped them and angrily pointed towards the opposite edge of it. There was a small lean-to shelter shielding from the weather three sacks of what were doubtlessly supplies, but there were also unwelcome guests.

Four locust-men. Zel raised her left hand to take aim at one and Zef swiftly unholstered Pentacle to take aim at another, but the singer once more stopped them, hissing, “We’re still in the danger zone, gunshots will attract more locusts. We have to deal with them quietly.”

He looked to Zel’s cleaver then met her gaze, offering, “I can shut ‘em down with infrasound, but only for about four seconds. Is that enough time for you?”

She grinned, “More than enough.”

Strolvath gave a sharp nod, and Zelsys prepared herself. She couldn’t fire her arm-cannon, and given the locust-men’s spacing she wasn’t confident in her ability to take them all down with a single swing, but she had an idea. With a deep breath she readied herself, unholstering her blade.

A trail of silver Fog marked her path out of the bush as she rocketed across the clearing, ripping a cloud of leaves and small branches from the bush they had hid in. Just as she departed, she heard a strange croaking noise come out of the scarred singer, quickly deepening in pitch until it became inaudible. Halfway across the clearing one of the locust-men noticed her, rearing back in preparation to let out a screech. A small squeak left its chattering mandibles, then died with a pained gurgle as its joints locked up, its exoskeleton rippling and warping from powerful sonic vibrations, much in the same way as the other locusts.

Another exhalation, an upswing through the three locust-men who were closest together. By the time her blade bisected the first one at the waist, she invoked “Heartbreaker!”

The cleaver’s edge turned upward and it sped up to a noticeable degree, crunching through the second locust’s chitin and severing its heart. It wouldn’t kill the third on the upswing at this rate, but Zelsys was more than alright with that. She had grown used to using her blade’s prodigal mass as a tool.

With the last of her breath, she simultaneously swung her cleaver down on the head of the third locust. Finally she was in reach of the left-hand side locust, and alongside her downward swing she unleashed a truly explosive punch to its gnashing jaws, utilizing her arm-cannon’s great weight as a force amplifier.

At that moment, Zelsys obliterated the heads of two locusts, outright punching through one and bisecting another down the middle.

With the time it took her to run across the clearing taken into account, the slaughter was over in no more than five seconds. The locust-men’s rancid blood and insides had spilled all over the shelter, but it was of no concern - it merely slipped off the supply bags, for they were made of Fog-infused fabric.

“That’s a hell of a breathing method. And is that a Captain’s Cleaver you got there?” Strolvath wondered as he and Zef approached the shelter, each of the trio picking up one of the bags. They each contained some food, medical supplies, and three half-liter seal-bottles full of Liquid Vigor, each bearing three seals unlike those of Makhus’ design - they were far more elaborate in design, entirely covered in angular blood-red sigils.

“Sure is,” Zel nodded, strapping on the backpack.

“Where’d you get it, if you don’t mind me askin’?”

Zel just smiled and said, “Ikesians find a way to pay even without money.”

“So we do,” the singer smiled back, seemingly content with that answer. “Right, let’s not dawdle too long. The pheromones in their blood will spread and attract more of their kind.”

“The stench isn’t particularly attractive either,” Zefaris added wryly, popping the cork of one bottle and taking a swig. “Oofh, that’s strong.”

Strolvath also took a long swig of the liquid, letting out a satisfied sigh as he corked the bottle back up, “It’s their version of Liquid Vigor, I think they call it Vitamax or somethin’. The Greks know how to keep their soldiers going, I’ll give ‘em that.”

For a few minutes they rested in the clearing, sitting across from the shelter to avoid the stench of locust-man hemolymph. Zelsys spent the bulk of this short while picking pieces of chitin out of her gun, working the mechanism, removing and replacing the shell a few times to make sure nothing that would jam it was present. When it finally grew annoying, Zelsys rose to her feet, rolled her shoulders, and stretched a few times in preparation to continue walking.

Zef and Strol both seemed to agree, going by the fact they each stood up in turn. It took the singer a little longer, and he audibly grunted a refusal of help when Zefaris offered a hand. Soon enough, they were back on the path, once more treading a narrow footpath through the forest, though now Zelsys felt no need to keep quiet.

In part it was because of what Strolvath had said, but in part also because she didn’t feel the same tension as before - her instincts didn’t lie, and this part of the forest felt about as deserted as the border forest just outside the E.Z.

However, she did feel something nagging at the back of her mind, about all of this. As far as she could tell this was a completely normal forest, so then why was it not only avoided by the locusts, but even by other animals, just like the decimated wasteland past the border?

“You mind a question about the assignment?” she asked, looking to Strolvath. He gave an affirmative grunt and a nod, and so she took the shot.

“Why do the locust-men avoid this part of the forest?”

Strolvath took a swig, exhaled a small puff of green Fog, and simply said, “You’ll see why, soon.”

She looked to Zef with a furrowed brow, but the markswoman didn’t answer either - not for lack of knowledge. Even without a word spoken, Zelsys could tell that both of her companions knew the reason, but weren’t willing to say right now. So… She just accepted it, trusting that Strolvath wasn’t lying.

Whilst they walked, she did take out her map and tried to deliberate where they were going by the location of the first stopping point. Almost right away, she noticed a point of interest that they hadn’t come upon yet, one that wasn’t mentioned in the briefing, one that was printed onto the base map itself rather than drawn-on after the fact - an oval shape marked by criss-crossing red lines that their journey was plotted through the middle of.

It stood out because the small portion of the Exclusion Zone that the map included was marked in the same way.

Zelsys folded up her map, slipping it into her pack rather than into her cleaver’s holster where she had kept it. While she was at it, she also took the shells that the holster was holding onto for dear life, stowing them in the pack as well. They hadn’t moved a single millimeter from where she stuck them into the holster, but she still didn’t like how precarious their position looked. After that, she simply took Zef’s hand and allowed herself to mentally check out for the rest of the trek until something remarkable came into view.

The sight of a human skeleton grown into a tree yanked her into awareness soon after. It was crucified on the branches, with huge railway nails still visible between the bones of its forearms and through its feet. The great oak’s bark had swallowed up a good portion of the dead soldier’s body, but his blown-open Pateirian-style helmet still crowned his head, its jagged metal like the spikes of a pariah king’s crown.

Both of the soldiers uttered an inaudible prayer at the strange effigy’s feet, then without so much of a word stood and continued walking. Zelsys had no choice but to follow, her instincts telling her that her answer was imminent.

The first signs suggesting what she would see next were yet more small shrines to the dead with rifles and war-knives as their centerpieces, some barely recognizable and others in good condition considering the onslaught of the elements. The treeline thinned out, eventually turning to saplings and small bushes moving in to reclaim land that had been stripped of vegetation.

It was a great field of dead, ripped-open earth, craters and trenches stretching to the horizon. Within immediate line of sight, Zelsys could see at least two dozen dead bodies and who knew how many rusted artillery pieces, piles and piles of fired shells sunken in the mud.

What drew her gaze most, however, were all the shrines. Shrines of dead soldiers from both sides, identical in how they honored the dead, but most importantly derogatory shrines of defaced, heraldic armor and weaponry. None of the extravagant, knightly equipment looked like anything the Ikesians would use - they were the arms of Pateirian heroes, annihilated by the unbound violence of an industrialized army. Riddled with holes from bullets and bayonets in some cases, entirely ripped open by cannon or artillery shells in others.

“The locust-men are creatures of scent and instinct,” Strolvath began with a grim sort of pride, taking a stand by Zel’s side as he gazed out across the battlefield. “The stink of their recently-dead attracts them, but large concentrations of corpses deter them, whether those dead are mutants or just soldiers who partook of those elixirs.”

He paused, uncorked his half-finished bottle of Vitamax, poured some of the green liquid onto the muddy ground, then took a swig.

“This place - this desolate, polluted swathe of dead land - was the first time Ikesia spat in the face of the old world. This place is why the Pateirians despise us so.”

Giving him no response, Zelsys began walking, taking in her surroundings. Amidst the mud and trenches, the razorwire and makeshift graves, there were paths - narrow, only made visible by wide gaps in the barricades and plank bridges over the trenches. This place was dead, deader than any carcass or graveyard. Even with the sky draped over by storm clouds, the sun found a way to break through their unassailable gloom to shine small rays of light onto the battlefield, uncaring for whose grave it was illuminating - an Ikesian infantryman, or a Pateirian noble.

They were all equal at the end, dead and buried in the mud, despite the worldly markers of who they were in life that stood tall above their corpses.

They were all equal.

All but one.