He had chosen to wear no underlayer, as he had enough understanding of Fog-infused clothing to know that there was no real point. Certain baseline enchantments were universal even on mass-produced Fog-infused clothing, such as those which were supplied to Ikesian soldiers whose superhuman attribute ratings and high-level training qualified them for the rank of Captain. Among these were the garment’s ability to clean and mend itself by feeding off of both ambient and the wearer’s own Pneuma, as well as to actively repel what the user would consider filthy and wick away sweat and other such bodily filth to then expel it as it would external filth. Victor had read about how Grekurian Inquisitors would wear their armor for days on end, only ever doffing even a single piece to relieve themselves, and even then, they could supposedly urinate through the armor without it becoming soiled, if circumstances arose that demanded them to remain in full armor for that long.

Victor swept the disgusting consideration from his mind, refocusing on what mattered in the moment: The finishing touches. His vanity drove the young man to open up the expensive makeup kit he’d bought from that Kargarian peddler, and after a few attempts to shake the rust off, he got the eye highlights right, using a bright shade of red that he thought would best fit in with everything else. His hair was still wet, so he couldn’t quite finish the job, but an invigorating confidence already washed over him. As self-absorbed as he knew it to be, he couldn’t stop himself from grinning at himself in the mirror.

“Damn I look good.”

He decided to go for a run on the same path as the previous days, dressed as he was, considering that just running dressed like this would be the least of his concerns. Thus, he wished to make absolutely sure everything was fitted properly before he got into an actually dangerous situation in this getup. However, before he left, something crossed his mind: he no longer felt entirely safe going out without some sort of weapon on his person, within hand’s reach. As such he opened up his Tablet’s Fog Storage and retrieved a hand-axe that he’d bought as a sidearm after the third time he’d found himself disarmed of his assigned Boarkiller on a hunting assignment, not only as a backup, but out of a desire for a weapon that was his own… And because he couldn’t afford a sword at the time. The axe and its accompanying leather holster were well-made, but plain - so plain that the weapon’s presence blended into the rest of his outfit as little more than an accessory.

As far as Victor was concerned, the rest of his day went uneventfully. His hair had dried in the course of his outing, and after he returned home, he took some time to braid some of it on the right side in shameless imitation of Zelsys. In the evening, as he warmed up yesterday’s leftovers, his mind turned towards Ossomancy again… And just as yesterday, he stayed awake into the night attempting to recreate what he’d already done once. Having achieved the feat before and having recorded the glyphs allowed him to re-enact it after not too many failed attempts, confirming that it had not been a sleep deprivation induced delusion. Knowing that he didn’t actually need to crunch down bones like some fucking animal was certainly nice, but it only spawned further questions, it scratched one itch only to spawn another, even worse one. This bit of knowledge alone, combined with what he already knew, opened up a whole new realm of possibility.

He willed two fundamental glyphs to appear in the palm of his right hand, and with a breath, he funneled a mixture of Pneuma and Ossum into it, flicking his thumb out from within a closed fist. A pure white spark issued from the tip of his thumbnail, and it burst into monochromatic flame, the bottom being black and the tip white.

It was the most basic of Ignis magicks, so minor that the inefficiency and thus increased effort of substituting Ignis with Pneuma was barely noticeable. Ossum, however, tainted the flame, changing how it burned. Victor brought his thumb to a scrap of meat. It sizzled for a few moments, and then turned pale, stiffening as it burned. Black and white; this was how all his fire magicks looked, more or less; inherently tinged by the Ossum constantly coursing throughout his body and soul. But actively adding more Ossum into the flame produced something different. Something that could hurt even a False Drake, turn its mighty hide brittle and make it vulnerable; something that could eat away at even the toughest of armors the same way Zelsys’ ball lightning did.

Bonefire, as his younger self had so uncreatively named it when he had inadvertently produced the phenomenon, calcified whatever it burned. In his experience, it could eat away at near enough everything, the only problem was the fact he needed to actively input Ossum into the reaction to make it have a noticeable effect, and the amount wasn’t at all trivial, thus significantly limiting Victor’s ability to use it… Until now.

Another breath. A bit more Ossum. A snap of his fingers. A scrap of cartilage went up in flames and became a plaster-white husk of itself. Victor crushed it into dust in his hand and reabsorbed its constituent Ossum. He wasn’t a living essentia meter, but what he’d just gotten out of that felt like more than he had put in.

“If it feels like cheating, but it works, it’s not cheating…” he muttered to himself, smiling. He knew it wouldn’t be nearly this easy with living, resisting foes, but that made no difference. As long as he was careful, he could replenish his Ossum reserves from the bones and calcified flesh of his enemies once they had breathed their last. He put the flame out, and took a look at his Tablet.

He hadn’t bothered to check his own Traits list in months, as it never changed, but a piece of advice in Sturmblitz Kunst 0 had spurred him on to do it now:

“If you have access to a personal assistant tablet or a similar device with attribute/trait reading features, be sure to check them regularly to monitor attribute/trait changes you may have otherwise not noticed. This is especially important after any personally significant events, even those seemingly unrelated to cultivation. While bothersome, it is a good habit to have.”

“It is equally as important, however, to keep in mind that any such assistant device is limited by its logic automaton. No matter how complex, a logic automaton is no more than an arcane machine attempting to interpret the complexities of a human being and codify them into text form; such devices often fail to account for subtleties and may even outright ignore non-combat traits. As such, it would be foolish to rely on such a device to guide your path.”

SKILL TRAITS Spear Wielding Martial Artist Arcane Mathematics Lesser Glyphic Magic Fog-breathing SPECIAL TRAITS Legacy of Bone: Ossomancy Affinity Legacy of Bone: Metabolic Ossum Legacy of Bone: Superior Body Hardening Superior Body Hardening: Osseous Callusing Superior Body Hardening: Osseous Exoskeleton Legacy of Bone: Instinctive Skeletal Understanding Octagram Conductive Glyph Tattoos (Palms) Second King’s Arts (Unique)

Second King’s Arts. What a self-absorbed name. It’d been foisted upon him in his studies; anything to do with the Khestun family’s offshoot of arcane study was incessantly associated with the Second King in reference to the fact they were his direct descendants. It meant little. The Second King, less commonly known as Koschei, the King of That Which Lives, was known to have sired so many children that if a random mage claimed to be his descendant, there was a good chance that claim was true. The Khestun family had the dubious honor of possessing records that proved their relation to him, nothing more.

Victor didn’t particularly care for such a legacy, considering that as far as he knew, his family’s bone magic came from a much more recent ancestor’s foolish escapades. He willed his Tablet to change the listing. But what to change it to?

Considering he was unmistakably Ikesian and the fact his bone plates were as white as plaster, he predicted that he’d get called a Snow Devil quite a bit… It clicked into place.

The projection flickered and shifted in front of him.

Devilbone Arts (Unique)

Devilbone… It would double as a good way to differentiate his temporary constructs from real bones. Vic spent the rest of is evening fiddling with Ossomancy, going over what he already knew, creating small, oval constructs that he imbued with bonefire. Launching them would incur an additional cost of Aer, and it would be altogether energetically quite expensive, but… An idea took root in his brain. He could make projectiles out of Devilbone, so why not barrels? Containing an Igneic charge and replicating the function of a firearm would allow him to achieve tremendous speed, but it would be wasteful to create disposable barrels. That wouldn’t do.

He spent a short while reading Sturmblitz Kunst to clear his mind, and came upon a mention of a different sort of firearm: Volcanics. Cutting-edge repeating guns that solved the problem of ammunition storage without the need for cartridges, instead using bullets with hollow bases that contained the propellant.

It was a perfect concept for making the most of Victor’s limited raw power, combined with his versatility as a caster.

He formed a tapered, finger-length dart that was hollow on the inside, condensing a small amount of Aer and Ignis inside the hollow as it took shape. It was plugged at the back by a separate piece of devilbone with an ignition glyph on the inside. Since the projectile was a construct of his own making, a quirky interaction of the arcane and the mundane permitted him a degree of telekinetic control over it even without use of kineticism, but launching it at that velocity under raw arcane power would’ve been at least twice as energy-intensive as this clever method.

The efficiency difference left no room for doubt; even in an environment with no easily-accessible Ignis, drawing from subterranean leylines or substituting Ignis-coded Pneuma in the propellant would be more efficient than brute-forcing it with his unrefined grasp of kineticism. It was a future-proof design, by his reckoning. Once he became skilled and/or strong enough to just launch arcane projectiles at high velocities under his own strength, he would have the advantage of his projectiles also self-propelling after being let go. Vic’s mind wandered into the realms of remote fantasy, imagining arm-sized bone stakes smashing into an enemy’s flying swords, or flying skeletal hands snatching them out of the air, their flight controlled by secondary output nozzles and complex, yet elegant internal burn control glyph networks.

What snapped him out of it was the realization that the construct was still floating in his hand, and it would probably begin degrading of its own volition quite soon. He pointed his finger at a nearby wall, the bone-dart aligning itself with the tip of it, floating a few centimeters in front of it. A spark of will, and it burst forward, monochromatic sparks spewing out the back and washing over his arm as it rocketed into the exposed brickwork. The small charge meant that it slammed into the brick with a hollow sound and bounced right back at Victor, slowly enough for him to catch. Letting out a relieved sigh, he willed the construct to crumble and reabsorbed it.

It was too late and he was too exhausted to be doing this.

The next day’s training went quite well.

Victor made his covert delivery to Duma without incident, and between rounds of sparring with Reiner, he devised a method of applying his idea from yesterday to enhance unarmed strikes.

He was ecstatic when it worked exactly as he’d hoped: He’d formed a bulked-up hollow construct around the spur of his right elbow, filling its cavity with a decent amount of the same Aer-Ignis mixture. It took him a bit of time, but Reiner’s slow-and-steady fighting style made it possible… And Vic was pretty sure the mountain of flesh intentionally let him do it to begin with, perhaps just to see what he was trying to do in the first place.

Punching his opponent with an arcane rocket strapped to the back of his elbow and sending him flying out of the ring was probably as painful for Victor as it was for Reiner, but more than his victory, Vic derived enjoyment out of Reiner’s widened eyes and breathless utterance of: “What in the nine hells…”

Victor also enjoyed the attention from the rest of the class nearly as much… But not enough to agree to pull that stunt again. He wasn’t tough enough to do something like that without hurting himself more than once. After the training day was done, he found himself invited to the town bathhouse, and though the attention-seeking part of his brain wanted to go, he forced himself to decline. Still, he couldn’t help himself saying it as such: “...Can’t go, sorry. Not safe.”

Looking back on it as he bathed at home, that cringe worthy attempt at being mysterious made him want to kill himself. He wouldn’t do that ever again.