Zelsys had decided to subvert the laid-out path in order to ambush Vic’s captors, instead going through the forest itself. As the trio rode through the woods, it quickly became apparent that the forest’s entirety was somehow bewitched. Zel’s instincts constantly gnawed at her, insisting that something was wrong here, her sense of direction occasionally going haywire, while Zefaris had no such issues. Where Zel’s resistance to illusions was derived from instincts, Zef saw through them wholesale by the nature of her eyes, and thus, the two switched places atop the Sturmgandr.

Delving deeper into the forest, they were soon set upon by a pack of huge, terrible Beetle-boars, creatures born from the attempts of Pateirian mutagenicists to commandeer native wildlife as bioweapons. Free of their handlers, these beasts became super predators wherever they were found. Their hides were too thick and their stomachs too acidic for parasites to take root in their bodies on their own; instead, their tusks had mutated into articulated, snapping pincers that could go through a tree, and their hides were wrapped in Armor Centipedes. Their matron was the size of a farm tractor, while the smaller ones were easily as large as a brown bear each.

A plan came together in Zel’s head, a part of which she voiced to her companions, yelling over the sound of engines, thumping of hooves, and general furious boar noises: “Let’s stop somewhere around here! I’ll disable the big one and hitch it to the back of my bike, you keep the smaller ones occupied, but don’t kill them! Freeze them if you can!”

Just as she had laid out, the plan was put into motion; Zel stood up on the motorbike while it was still in motion and leapt onto the matron’s back, and soon the Sturmgandrs were brought to a halt. Awakening the Broken Butcher’s sawteeth with an influx of Fulgur, she began sawing into the matron’s back to sever its spine and cripple it without killing the beast, while Zefaris and Jorfr disembarked and pooled their icebound magicks to immobilize the rest of the pack.

Jorfr, using his connection to the earthen spirits of ice, chanted an inefficient, but quick invocation: “Hoarfrost, halt my prey!”

With a stomp of the norseman’s foot, a wave of frost surged forward and momentarily froze the smaller beetle-boars’ feet in place, giving Zefaris the time she needed. Having jumped up into a tree she charged her left eye with a full breath’s Pneuma, and from it issued a flashing beam of white. In a few brief flashes it carved a complex glyph into the ground which the boars stood on, a glyph invoking the stillness of a long-abandoned graveyard or crypt, the serenity of an overgrown skeleton leaned up against a tree deep in the forest.

The glyph took on a combined glow in bone-white and pale blue, and a moment later snow erupted upward within its perimeter, freezing mid-air before it could begin to fall… Alongside the boars.

THE STILLNESS OF DEATH UNTO ALL THINGS

HEADPIERCER ARTS: ETERNAL SNOW

It only lasted a few seconds, but it gave Zelsys the time needed to hitch the matron to the back of her Sturmgandr and for the trio to ride off, the smaller boars now in pursuit as their pack-leader squealed impotently and snapped its pincers while being dragged.

“Really? You stopped time for some boars, but not a False Drake?!” Zel laughed, much to her lover’s chagrin.

“It would have been a waste, I would have only delayed the inevitable!” the blonde snapped back. “Mutant animals are much easier to stop than a magic beast, besides!”

Sooner, rather than later, Zefaris spotted a small convoy through the small gaps in the trees, and through making full use of her supreme visual faculties, she spotted a familiar redhead among them. An exchange of glances was all it took for the three to agree on a course of action, for they had done things like this several times before in the course of their northward journey.

The Tablet had sent out two more broadcast pulses by now. Victor had resorted to burning some of his Pneuma to fuel it, rather than suffer the migraine.

His eyes landed on a particular locust, a particularly large and individualistic one, wearing the lower half of a Grekurian-style suit of plate, a sleeve of bronze, segmented armor in a vaguely southern style, and a chestguard that covered his heart with a thick steel plate, and nothing more. And why would he need to wear any more, when every exposed part of his body was thickly layered in bright-red chitin? Where the split lower jaws of other locust-men chattered, his clacked and smacked together, so thick they were. It wasn’t the armor that caught Vic’s eye, though; it was the weapon in his right hand. The bugman grasped a shaft of blood-red wood with silver veins spidering throughout it, and at its top was fixed none other than the tip of Duma’s Spear. He knew what it was: Bloodwood, one of the most magically conductive materials that could be bought with money. All too expensive to arm some locust with it, thus making it clear that either this locust was very important, or that he was carrying the weapon for someone else. It became obvious someone very wealthy was behind the theft… Von Wickten? No, his view of polearms as footsoldier weapons was well known as the reason for the Dragon Knights' exclusive use of swords and axes. The locust? The Locust Queen? Vic had no way to know, and at this moment, something else tugged at his attention.

At first, it was the feeling of being glared at from behind, from far, far behind, by a focused, calm eye. Next came the howl of a motorized vehicle. He’d never heard it before, but he made the connection by how it had been described in the pulps: A Sturmgandr. Another noise accompanied it, something terribly heavy being dragged along and smashing into trees. The sound passed the convoy and pulled ahead, as if someone were driving at breakneck speed through the dense forest around them, with only the setting sun to light the way.

Everything came to a halt when the motor noise ceased, and a mutilated boar the size of a tractor flew out of the treeline and into the middle of the dirt road.

A few moments passed. Victor’s heart raced ahead of its own accord, anticipating a slaughter, knowing of only a handful of people who owned Sturmgandrs, and knowing that Von Wickten was not among them.

Two women rode out into the open in the dead boar’s stead atop a two-wheeled monster belching flame and lightning from its exhaust; one was a musclebound bronze titan, the other a blonde Ikesian in a militaristic red-black dress and an officer’s cap. The former grasped the boar’s leg, and hammer-threw it right across the road into the other side of the treeline. A third figure emerged behind the convoy riding a slightly smaller, albeit still monstrous motorbike; he was a snow-skinned, topless Borean who quietly hailed one of the rear guards, uttering something about a red sun and bloody peaks that somehow made them just let him join without quarrel. Meanwhile, at the front, the spear-wielding locust-man barked with a thick Pateirian accent: “THE RED SUN!?”

Without missing a beat, Zelsys shouted back: “RISES OVER BLOODSTAINED PEAKS!”

The sense of readiness for combat evaporated from the convoy, hands leaving the pommels of swords and grips of guns, and a few lungfuls of Fog were exhaled unused. Zel and Zef approached the convoy as if to join without further incident, though as they did, they made it crystal-clear that they had noticed Victor, before stopping some twenty meters short, with Zefaris standing up atop the motorbike, sweeping her gaze from one side of the road to the other. They intended to do something, he could feel it.

The leading locust saw that they’d stopped, turning to look at her as he barked again: “WHAT IS IT?!”

“BOARS! I SHALL SHOOT DOWN AS MANY AS I CAN, BUT THERE ARE MORE OF THEM THAN I HAVE BULLETS!” she yelled back, opening her pitch-black left eye, and as if to corroborate her claim, beetle-boars did indeed emerge from the treeline, setting upon the convoy. A bright beam in pale-blue and bone-white erupted from her eye, freezing one of the boars in its tracks, soon followed by her raising a giant revolver and firing a shot in the same direction. The terrible power of her gun, whose shots were more akin to flaming lances of lead and smoke than mere bullets, shattered the beast into chunks of frozen meat.

“Great, they probably… Damn things right to us... What happens when you let a cultivator’s wealth speak louder than your good judgment…” Vic heard one of the nearby Locust-men grumbling to the normal Ikesian next to him, only catching pieces of his complaints through the thick accent. Wearing a beaten-up chestplate and possessing a lanky, stiff, mechanical prosthetic for a left arm, the Ikesian looked to be a veteran just like one of the two men who’d tried to kidnap him. He nodded in agreement, leaning on the boarkiller spear in his hand, the veteran nodded agreement: “One would think that obtaining and controlling a Philosopher’s Eye would be hard enough to filter out fools such as these, but who knows anymore.”

Kinship among Ikesians and Pateirians, both former soldiers at that; who would’ve thought. It would’ve been nice to see, were they not both slaver scum, no more than dead meat walking. And like the dead meat that they were, they sprung into action alongside the other locusts and humans that made up most of the convoy, setting their spears, blades, and guns to the grim task of dispatching these huge, murderous beasts that made normal boars seem non-threatening by comparison. A man was split in two at the waist in the first clash. Vic couldn’t help noticing the number of rolling-block pistols among these slavers; they must’ve stolen a shipment of these new guns or somesuch. The spear-wielding locust glared straight through the two women, nervously clacking his mandibles as he spun Duma’s Spear in his hands as he joined his men. Meanwhile, the Dragon Knights deigned not to involve themselves, reluctantly drawing their blades but remaining behind the line of bodies.

Great gusts of Fog erupted from Zef’s mouth as she breathed, firing pairs of short beams and bullets as she went, continuously switching between her revolver, Pentacle, and her strange, slide-action folding shotgun, whose name Victor knew to be Tempesta. Vic knew the cycle like the back of his hand; the blackstone cylinder was a dungeon artifact that reloaded her revolver in a flash, and did the same with speedloading tubes for her shotgun.

Only the most attentive in the convoy were quick enough to notice that she had not shot a single boar since her initial demonstration, and that both her beams and gunshots actually aimed at trees all around the sides of the road. Alas, they were not quick enough to alert the remainder of their comrades; but Victor knew what she’d just done and what was to come, and he stayed where he was, trusting in the gunwoman’s precision… But something felt wrong.

Why was he this calm? In the midst of a battle, surrounded by death, anticipating the slaughter of his captors; it was wrong to be so phlegmatic in a circumstance like this. He knew it to be so in his heart. It angered him that he’d slid back into total apathy to cope with his circumstances, and with this spark, Victor felt the serenity of detachment wash away again, nearly doing something stupid before he realized that he was, indeed, still manacled.

Calming himself, he turned his attention forward once again and noticed Zelsys glancing backward at Zefaris, the two exchanging nods. Both women disembarked their motorbike, approaching the convoy side by side.