“Of course.”

It clicked in his head. Even if drawing Viriditas directly from plants was a high-level technique, it was still one of the most easily accessible essentia in its distilled form. They would try something with the most common manifestation of Viridimancy: Brambly vines to incapacitate and bind. Was that other one also a caster, or just meat? Mulling over what to do, Vic sat there with his legs crossed. They had already proven that they could keep up with him, and even if he did get away, they would run back to their superiors. If he got unlucky he’d be hunted through the streets, and the Dragon Knights would conveniently miss the commotion.

“It can’t be helped. I’ll just have to incapacitate them,” he thought, sighing inwardly. He began to draw Ignis from the gem, while simultaneously building up devilbone around his right arm, murmuring about how he didn’t pay his tuition just to be told there was no training in an attempt to deceive his stalkers into thinking he had come out here to practice. A form approximating that of an armored gauntlet took shape, a concave hollow at the elbow that he filled with Aer-Igneic propellant.

The reason Victor and most other casters avoided drawing from essentia gems if at all possible was the terrible, terrible instability. Even those who practiced the ancient method did so with precautions and special tools. What he was doing all but assured the gem’s destabilization and detonation… Which, as he’d hoped, began to happen. He stopped drawing from the stone just as he felt it begin to heat up in his hand, instead forming stabilizing glyphs in his palm into which he poured Aqua-coded Pneuma to slow the cookoff.

The two men stepped into plain sight behind him a moment before Vic finished armoring his right arm.

“My, what a coincidence!” the one to his right exclaimed with badly-feigned surprise. He sounded… Normal. No accent. A sympathizer, then. A filthy occupationist. He walked clear-as-day into Vic’s sightline, pulling down his hood, revealing his pockmarked features and an ever-closed left eye. There was something wrong about his right eye. His iris was segmented. Both his legs were artificial, and a steel plate was bolted to the man’s left temple, stamped with a Pateirian symbol; Vic knew a bit of that revolting tongue, enough to read the pictogram as “Captive” or “Prisoner of War”.

It couldn’t have been clearer that he was trying to occupy Vic’s attention while the other man snuck up from behind.

With grease dripping from every word, he continued the charade: “And here I was, thinking my secret spot was known only to me, myself, and I…”

He squatted down, looking off towards the stream and letting out a contented sigh, before he turned his head to look at Victor again.

“Victor Khestun, right?” he asked. “Seen you around Duma’s place, terrible shame what happened there last night. Say, what is such a strapping young lad doing out this far into the forest? Training, I take it?”

“More or less. You’re a war vet, right?” Vic prodded, continuing to covertly build up his gauntlet. Wishing to know if the vet was just an opportunistic, man-shaped beast, or a locust in human skin who directly served the Pateirians, Victor decided to prod. Pateirian loyalists, those who had adopted Pateirian ideology and with it the concept of “face”, would be unable to let an insult towards their faction go unanswered, even with a subtle show of anger.

“Didn’t know the bugmen ever repatriated any of their POWs. Can’t expect much better from bugmen; barely any difference between the average cat-eater and a full blown locust mutant if you ask me.”

Though he’d let his mouth carry him a bit further than intended, the results spoke for themselves. The vet spat off to the site, speaking with barely-concealed anger: “Don’t be a fool, kid. Speaking like that about your rightful rulers is just courting death.”

A chuckle escaped his mouth.

He grasped inside himself for something, anything to say. The jagged fragments of what he’d read in the pulps took shape, forming something new. Somehow, the fact these weren’t his own words made them easier to say.

“You know, I would’ve been a non-factor if you just left me be; I would’ve left this shithole before the end of the month,” he lied, standing up and drawing in a partial breath. He burned it to fuel a long jump away from his pursuers, the edge of a bramble-whip licking his boot as he went. He spun around upon landing and tossed the unstable gem at the war vet’s feet, pulling out his hand-axe with his free hand.

“But you just couldn’t leave well enough alone; now I’m obligated to kill the two of you, your slaver friends, and that subhuman Von Wickten!”

The vet sprung up to his feet with uncanny dexterity, the veins on his neck bulging as the humanity drained from his face, his expression growing distorted. It… It was an expression of pain. A moment later, the gemstone erupted into a pillar of flame just as the vet tried to dodge, enveloping him in fire as he stood frozen in place, seemingly struggling to stop himself from stepping out of the fire. He twitched in place, and a moment later his left eye shot open, from the hole erupting a writhing… Centipede? It was a long, parasitic insect, but it didn’t have enough legs to be a centipede, and its tip had a thick stinger. A chitinous spike shot out of the bug, whizzing past Vic’s head as the bug undulated and pushed out another spike.

“Not a stinger. A quill launcher.”

The vet’s right eye popped out of its socket, revealing itself to be the parasite’s other end. He lurched forward, sprinting after Victor while still wheezing: “Khiiiill… Mgheeee…!”

“Khill mheee-” he wheezed. Meanwhile, the Viridimancer - an almost brown-skinned Pateirian - tried to circle around, lashing at Victor’s feet and obviously trying to trip him while he fumbled with his free hand for another of the Viriditas bottles on his belt, his camouflage cloak getting in the way. It was too big for the man, probably tailored down from something made for Ikesians or Grekurians. Vic’s flight instinct was drowned out by an overpowering impulse, something primordial roiling in his gut. It wasn’t a personal, conscious desire to kill, but an animalistic impulse. Half of it was survival, and the other half was ego. These fools had the absolute fucking gall to try snatching him to be made into some perverse living sex toy. Killing them quickly would be a mercy.

Vic decided to create a bit more distance; the gauntlet wasn’t ready yet, and it would only work once. He spun around and began sprinting, zigzagging around between trees in an effort to avoid getting hit with that insect’s doubtlessly poisoned darts. Hearing the both of them trying to chase after him and the thumping of darts into nearby trees, Vic veered off the path towards a nearby stream. He formed a Devil’s Tooth as he ran, firing it off towards the veteran. It ripped into his leg, drilling inward as blood gushed out around it, causing him to fall to his knees. Meanwhile, the Viridimancer’s whip, as if coming out of nowhere, wrapped itself around Vic’s axe-arm. With his lungs half-full he grabbed onto the whip and dug his heels in, burning what Pneuma he had alongside some of the Ossum he’d drawn out to finish his gauntlet to set the arboreal construct ablaze. A ravenous wave of Bonefire rushed down the bamble-whip’s length, turning it into a brittle, pale-white shell as it went. Even if he wasn’t particularly strong, he was able to rid himself of the whip’s calcified remnants without issue.

Panickedly letting go of his whip so as to not be burned, the Viridimancer briefly fell back, grabbing for a third bottle… Just in time for the charred, walking corpse that was the veteran to finally begin catching up. Somehow the Devil’s Tooth hadn’t hit any important parts, a steady trickle of blood running down the vet’s leg.

Aqua and Terra were both easy; the soil near the stream was full of groundwater, after all, and the air around it was humid. He thought to draw from the environment, but the fact his pursuers could keep up with him made the young man reconsider. If he dedicated effort to drawing essentia from the environment, he would have to stop pulling Pneuma, which would leave him at the mercy of his muscles’ natural exhaustion point. He would gas himself out. So, inefficiency be damned, he just kept using the Shifting Winds breathing method, forming a great glob of slick, greasy mud between his hands that he more or less just lobbed into the veteran’s path. It spilled out underfoot, his prosthetic feet completely losing traction and causing him to briefly run in place before he toppled over, clearly throwing himself sideways so as to not risk harming the insect.

With the Viridimancer a short distance away and just about finished with chugging down another of his Viriditas bottles, Vic took the opportunity to just sprint headlong towards the veteran, kicking his feet out from under him as he tried to stand up. A downward swing with the axe split his skull, a sideways prying motion to wrench it free cracked him open like an overripe watermelon. A tsunami of yellow-tinged brain matter spilled forth, small insects writhing within it. The centipede writhed and wriggled, but it was threaded through the man’s entire brain it seemed, taking up much of where his frontal lobe had once been. Vic blasted the thing with Bonefire, setting ablaze the corpse, too, which without life now had no resistance to the calcifying flame. It was just meat.

He yanked the Devil’s Tooth out of the vet’s rapidly-calcifying flesh, the flames harmlessly licking his fingers. After reabsorbing its constituent Ossum, he used it to finish the devilbone gauntlet… Only for the Viridiancer to catch him off-guard, lashing at him with a newly-formed bramble whip, yanking the axe straight from his hand. Screaming rancor and fury, Victor charged at the would-be kidnapper and set off what he had prepared. Black flame erupted from the back of his elbow and his fist rocketed forward with inhuman force, pulling him with it as it crashed straight into its target’s face and caved it in. What fuel remained kept on burning, pushing the man down and Victor on top of him.

Vic felt the man’s face crumple inward under his fist as he thrashed about in utter panic, his whip flailing about and cutting bark off of trees with Victor’s axe. Teeth and pieces of facial bones erupted through ruptured muscle and eyes burst from their sockets, from which blood and pulverized brain matter then gushed. There were ribbons of yellow amongst the red. Once the flame sputtered out he pulled his fist back and the devilbone gauntlet fell to pieces altogether, crumbling from the front. His elbow and wrist both screamed in pain.

Looking over what he’d just done, the realization sunk in and Victor felt… Relief. Where he expected some sort of dread change to come over him, or at least the sudden upsurge of vomit that was so prevalent in pulp novels when a character killed someone for the first time, there only came relief and a sense of satisfaction.

“I’ve never killed anyone before. Kinda fucked up that I don’t feel bad in the slightest. This should make me want to vomit, right? Why doesn’t it?” he thought. He sighed, and retrieved his axe, washing both it and himself in the nearby stream. It was a small mercy that none of the blood had gotten in his hair. It clicked in his head.

Killing other people was something to be considered, something that demanded a reason. However, regardless of the fact one of them could have very well been a meat-golem being piloted by some sort of Gu parasite, the moment they chose to kidnap him into slavery they had forfeited their lives. They had chosen to become beasts, as far as he was concerned.