Mid-flight she somehow dug her fingers into the creature’s flesh, flipping it over and slamming it back-first onto the ground. She wrestled with it and tried to stab it using what at a glance looked like a tonfa with a two-pronged, jagged blade on the front, terrible snapping noise and flashes of light issuing from the gap between the prongs.

The way she moved was almost unnatural, flashes of light under her skin not unlike the flashes of lightning within a storm cloud preceding snappy movements too fast for his eyes to see, her muscles writhing under her skin like a bag of serpents in the brief moments of stillness. Both sides of her chest expanded and contracted independently faster than even his heart was pounding at this very moment, and her heartbeat was so rapid it was more like the pounding of an engine’s pistons that a human heart - in fact, it outright looked like she had an engine in her chest in the stead of flesh and blood. Even the silvery wisps indicative of a breathing technique that issued from her nostrils did so in the sputtering, rhythmic manner of an engine’s exhaust.

The urge to save himself finally took hold, driving the young man to run as quickly as his feet would carry him, his eyes turned to the ground so that he wouldn’t trip again… But he couldn't help it. In his panic, he had run out of breath after only a short distance, hyperventilating as he doubled-over, his gaze yet again drawn to the source of that terrible noise, the roaring and growling, the repeated thunderclap noise of gunshots.

The False Drake had somehow gotten itself upright, its legs braced against a tree as it tried to envelop the woman’s head in its maw, her armored left hand somehow keeping it open as fire washed over the metal, her right hand empty - the weapon had been knocked out of her grasp. She reached out, exhaling a stream of Fog, and by some magic, one of her braids came alive. As though a serpent it shot out, wrapping itself around the tonfa and whipping it straight into her hand. That terrible electric arcing started up again for just a moment before she sunk the shiv into the drake’s throat, the muscles of its neck and forelegs undulating under its skin uncontrollably from the current. Simple electrocution was something that just… Didn’t work on arcane beasts, by Victor’s reckoning - it was like trying to cook someone alive by forcing a flood of Ignis into their body, or forcefully turning someone into stone, a feat that only worked if one’s own magic could overwhelm or otherwise unravel that which suffused another.

Either she could just create enough Fulgur within her own body to supersede a False Drake’s breath of fire by an order of magnitude, or her control over the element was so refined she could use it as to disrupt the complex bio-arcane organ that generated a False Drake’s fire breath. To entirely subvert the meticulous work of genius mutagenicist, or to overpower it - regardless of what combination of these things she possessed, Victor couldn’t quite believe it was real. People like this were so far removed from his reality that even his memory of the events felt unreal, almost dreamlike in nature.

Three copper coins arced into the air in the distance, a woman in a black dress following in their stead, holding up a giant revolver, firing off three shots in impossibly quick succession, their report like the smashing of a sledgehammer upon an anvil.

CLANG

CLANG

CLANG

Each flaming spear of lead and smoke bounced off a thrown coin, careening down into and through the False Drake’s back, the three projectiles landing safely between the tan woman’s legs. The beast’s hind legs went limp as its blood spurted out onto the ground. He’d caught his breath and then some, but… He couldn’t help himself. It was like watching a trainwreck.

The taller woman left her weapon stuck inside the drake’s neck, grasping both its jaws with her bare hands, the hand of her right arm taking on a metallic sheen as she pried its jaws open wide and wider. Despite her monstrous strength, the beast’s skull wouldn’t budge, until… With a deep, sharp inhalation, arcs of lightning flashed over her arms, and with a mighty roar she ripped the drake’s head clean off the neck in two pieces.

It was this feat that had shocked Victor out of his fascinated stupor, reminding him that these people could very well just decide to kill the other hunters as well, and him with them, so it was safer to just get the hell out of there. The drake was dealt with, job done, paycheck on the table.

Indeed, paycheck on the table: A measly sixty gelt sat in a half-empty pouch on his table, cut down from the agreed-upon three hundred because someone couldn’t keep their mouth shut about “those two cultivators that slaughtered the drake like it was straight out of Sturmblitz Kunst”. It was accompanied by groceries he hadn’t bothered to put in the icebox and two stacks of pulps - one a messy pile of nigh on three-dozen books he’d already read, and a considerably smaller, neat tower of five pulps yet to be read.

As he walked out of the bathroom and back into reality, his legs stiff from having sat down on the toilet and staying there stone-still while he mentally replayed the events of yesterday, Victor picked up two of the books off the “new” pile to reveal the third from the top. It was nearly twice as thick as the others, the mark of the Hanging Feudalist Printing Company on its cover - enough to get him a talking-to about “Ikesio-chauvinist extremism” if the wrong people saw him with it. The fact it offended such occupationists was a mark of quality in his eyes, and so the young man picked this book to be his sole amusement for the day’s doubtlessly lengthy stretches of mindless training. For all the amusement he derived from his instructor’s lectures, it was balanced by the nothingness of beating - often literally - his own body into improvement.

He started reading the pulp on his way to the gymnasium, finding a suspicious similarity in the physical description of the protagonist. Two-meters tall, bronze skin, split-tone hair with a long ginger portion and a short, silvery-white top, pointed ears like an Ankhezian, pupil-less silver eyes like a dragon-descendant monk noble… Surely, just a coincidence. The violent foreigner bearing the traits of many ethnicities at once and possessing implausible ability was a common enough trope, an archetypical figure representing the people’s united hatred of tyranny.

Still… Not only two cultivators, but ones that exactly lived up to literary depictions of their kind, here? In the actual middle of bumblefuck nowhere, a dukedom so insignificant that its entirety had managed to go mostly unscathed by the war by the virtue of sheer obscurity?

Victor just couldn’t quite convince himself it was real.

Not yet.

On his way to the training grounds, Victor stopped by an apothecary to replenish one of the several creams he used for his face. He found himself delayed further by a Kargarian peddler’s stand - one of many traveling merchants who had broken off from the Great Caravan to independently travel Ikesia. Victor had learned to ignore these peddlers, but this one, he just couldn’t ignore, because he sold something the young man hadn’t been able to get his hands on since he’d arrived to this dump: Makeup.

Rather, not any old makeup, but makeup of good quality, makeup that wouldn’t make him look like some wannabe crossdresser, makeup of the sort used by men and women of all walks in the Kargarian steppe. Subtle colours that would hold once in place even through a scouring sandstorm, quality ingredients, usable application tools to go with it all. For all his anger toward that idiot who’d gotten everyone’s payout cut, Victor gladly parted with over half of all the money he had left for what he knew to be good quality, and the peddler clearly knew it too, considering the fact they didn’t make the slightest attempt to… Well, peddle. They saw him approach and knew that they had a good customer, and that was that.

From an outside perspective, Victor’s time at the training grounds passed uneventfully. The Instructor - a tall, blonde Ikesian man with a moustache - went on and on about theory, the history of martial arts, and various semi-related tangents while occasionally asking questions and ordering the students to perform various exercises for wrong answers, or simply not raising their hand even if the answer was correct. He wasn’t malicious; rather, this was a way of placating both the occupationists and the duke’s watchmen that wrongly thought they blended in by sitting outside the cafe across the street every day, exactly at the same hours, wearing the same vaguely civilian outfits.

A great deal of this time, Victor spent with his nose buried in Sturmblitz Kunst, burning through page after page; from the short summary of the main character’s numerous journeys through many foreign lands, to her unfortunate arrival in the Exclusion Zone and initial encounter with the Three Soldiers, their protracted struggle in escaping and later hunting a terrifying, deathless creature called a Necrobeast. When called on for a question he intentionally didn’t think about his answer, the Instructor faking an exasperated sigh, putting his hands on his hips, before gesturing towards one of the log dummies.

“Alright, you know how it goes,” said the older man. As he alongside the rest of the class watched Victor get up and walk to the dummy without bothering to pry himself away from his book, the Instructor added: “One of these days that aloofness of yours will get you run over in the street.”

That remark clearly wasn’t part of the charade, even if Victor didn’t feel he was particularly aloof. He began delivering one kick after the other to the dummy, feeling the shock reverberate up his leg and stifling the nagging pain in his shin. It was tolerable, now - a few months ago he thought he’d broken his leg after just one full-strength kick into this damn thing, but now, his shins and the tops of his feet were covered in bone plates thick enough to actually make his kicks do real damage. The same could be said for his fists, elbows, and to a much lesser degree, forearms, but as far as manifestations of his genetic inheritance went, the plates were thickest on his chest, and certainly not because of some natural predisposition.

No, the fact he had a layer of armor that couldn’t be stripped from him was his work and his alone.

“Whole lotta good it did me when I’ve got jack shit on my back…” he thought to himself when, after a mere few dozen kicks, he felt blood oozing out of his wound, soaking through the back of his shirt. Despite the pain, Victor was able to distance himself from it through engrossing himself in the world of his book, in reading about Zelsys the Lightning Butcher fulfilling her namesake against hordes of locust-men, in so brazenly calling out the Imperials and spitting in the face of their Emperor - it was so far removed from his reality that, in diving into the book’s world, he was able to remove himself from the reality of his aching body, if only partially. Victor just continued kicking, but he knew the Instructor would force him to stop, and indeed, his prediction came true only three kicks later.

When the man half mindedly looked over to check Victor’s form, he double-took, raising his hand and snapping his fingers as he called out: “Ey, Khestun, that’s enough! Go clean yourself up, you should’ve told me you had a fresh wound, can’t have you causing yourself permanent damage ‘cause you think yourself a hardcore martial artist.”

“It’s just a ripped scab, I’m sure of it,” lied the young man, finally lowering the pulp from his face, but keeping his finger between its pages so as to not lose his spot. The Instructor clearly didn’t buy it, pointing at the modest building that the martial arts school called a home, reiterating his point: “Tell it to Old Man Duma.”

“Old Man, right…” a thought shot through Victor’s head as a chuckle escaped him. Resved Duma wouldn’t let anyone call him any variant of “Master” or “Elder” in an effort to soften the open secret of his past - a ruthless killer, a man born and made what he was now by the savage “World of Martial Arts”. Some thought it to be a literal place, an obscure region far away, while others considered it an reference to the lawless underworld that coexisted with law-abiding society, with public-facing martial arts schools and sects being bridges between the two. Victor leaned towards the latter, and though he thought himself above buying into mysticism, he couldn’t help staring at all the scrolls and weird-looking seals in Duma’s sanctum, not to mention what secrets doubtlessly hid behind those big brass doors.

The Old Man’s personal quarters, perhaps, but even then, what did he have in there?