Zel pulled the Broken Butcher from its sheath, her countenance shifting from relaxed, to wild-eyed and wreathed in lightning in the span of only three breaths. Her braids came alive with the lightning-wrought beastly heads at their tips, blades as their tongues.

Zef, meanwhile, continued firing into the treeline as if nothing had changed, alternating between eye-beams and gunshots, but her left eye began emitting a long, whipping trail of pale blue and bone-white, her movements flickering. It was as if, every other second, she skipped forward in time by a moment.

The Dragon Knights had already raised the alarm and formed a defensive, front-facing line, some manifesting mutations that transformed their heads to those of dragons while others suddenly sprouted tails with poisoned barbs or spiked maces, but it was all too late.

Zelsys had already leapt high into the air with a crater where she had stood, while Zefaris put on a disdainful sneer, uttering something that Victor could not hear as she raised four coins between her fingers, exhaling a great plume of Fog over them. There was something there, right next to her, revealed by the Fog for a moment before it vanished. A humanoid figure.

She tossed these enchanted coins into the air, suddenly stuttering forward and firing three gunshots near-simultaneously. All three came down like lightning from the heavens, smashing through the helmets of three Dragon Knights. To Vic’s surprise, only one of them fell.

It was then, when Zel finally landed atop one of the cages and smashed it in, that the chaos truly began; not because of the thrashing False Drake whose spine she severed with a single incredibly violent dragging-cut of her blade, but because of the gunfire that would soon erupt from all around.

Vic felt a pair of huge hands grasp his manacles, the presence behind him somewhat familiar. It had to be Jorfr, and it was.

Zel and Zef had agreed; it would only be right to go all-out here, regardless of whether it was too much. Wastage of resources, exhaustion, it didn’t really matter. This was about making a point, about putting down these slavers hard and fast and igniting the flames of aspiration in the rescued slaves who had such potential. So it was that Zefaris had affixed her mask to her face, its skull-faced visage belying the mechanisms of a Fog Infuser; a device that, contrary to its appearance, saturated the air which one breathed through it with whatever essentia was contained in its canister. The only problem was that the device was quite fragile on the inside, with tight tolerances, making it impractical in a melee. Its canisters weren’t much more resilient; the particular canister loaded in it right now was filled with ground-up, high-purity Pneuma crystals, effectively amplifying the output of her breathing technique by an order of magnitude for as long as it held out.

It was this device that allowed Zefaris to bridge the gap and draw out the full potential of her arsenal while still having a comfortable surplus to use otherwise or charge into her left eye.

To call her shotgun, Tempesta, “just a gun” was a grave insult.

To call her revolver, Pentacle, “just a gun” was, in the words of those she most often leveled its barrel at, courting death.

Pentacle had claimed over a thousand lives; it had been elevated beyond mortal craftsmanship by a Dungeon Core’s reality-warping might; the spears of lead and fire which it spewed had smashed apart the body of Ubul, the Beast Reborn in Stone, a being that had once been a Divine General whose death had consequences that reverberated hundreds of kilometers away from the site. With the sparklock rifle that had been rebuilt into Tempesta, Zefaris had killed hundreds, had waged war for years before she had even thought of becoming a cultivator; she had put down cultivators and monsters for her country.

It had only been a matter of time until either gun developed a spirit of its own, but neither was universal, neither embodied how she fought in full, and so in the months following the Blue Moon War, she had not settled for learning how to draw out just one of these weapons’ spirits.

“Now, Pentacle, Tempesta… Let us share our friendship with them, shall we?”

The smoke plume which erupted from her gun’s muzzle took on the form of a cackling, human skull; simultaneously, the great plume of bone-white Fog which she had exhaled gave plainly visible form to two phantoms, figures without form. The left-hand one saluted in a stiff, professional manner, while the one on the right lackadaisically flipped a phantom coin between its fingers.

“Praise gun, our savior…” Zefaris uttered under her breath, the left-hand figure mouthing in perfect sync with her as it stepped into the space behind her. She finished the invocation, the right-hand figure mouthing the second half: “...Hail death, the master!”

They were words from a song she’d often heard in the trenches, sung by soldiers who thought their deaths were nigh.

Out from the space behind her stepped a defined, clear figure, a ghostly humanoid wrought of bone-white Fog. It held the image of a skeletal Ikesian soldier in full lieutenant’s uniform, any distinguishing marks replaced by the sign of a five-petaled flower, the ends of its petals split - that flower was the Giltine Belladonna, a legendarily poisonous blossom cultivated by the Black Horse family long ago, the self-same flower which was inlaid into the stock of her shotgun. A baleful, icy blue glow issued from the phantom’s mouth and eye sockets.

PRAISE GUN, OUR SAVIOR

HAIL DEATH, THE MASTER

GUNSOUL UNION: DEATH’S LIEUTENANT

Zefaris fired again. Emitting a voiceless cackle, Death’s Lieutenant mirrored the motion with a slight delay, a ghostly missile erupting from the sparklock in its hand. Both bullets struck true; both ran a Dragon Knight through, one leaving scorched flesh, the other a trail of frozen meat. Death’s Lieutenant was as simple a weapon spirit as it was terrifying: it did nothing more than play Zef’s double, mirroring anything she did if she willed it so.

Focused on keeping up ranged support, Zefaris dedicated the vast majority of her breathing to a technique she’d first grasped in the battle against Ubul, when she had witnessed what she fully believed to be Zel’s death, and thus fully grasped a deeper understanding of what it meant to walk side by side with the reaper without ever meeting him. By burning significant amounts of Pneuma and Gelum, Zefaris was able to tap into the stillness of death and “compress” her own flow of time, thus gaining the appearance of flickering ahead by a moment.

So she went on, gladly providing fire support from outside the crucible of battle while she waited for all the pieces to move into position. Zel had entered into an unarmed brawl with three Dragon Knights simultaneously, cackling through a grin of razor teeth as she fought a knight using nothing but her own animated braids, one strangling him while another had burrowed up his sword-hand’s forearm and the third had gotten inside his chestplate. With each passing second, he was being turned to mush from the inside, made to twitch in place like a grotesque marionette while he died. Meanwhile, Zelsys played with the other two more than she fought them in earnest, as she too was waiting; due to continuously using her Core of Earthly Iron to dredge up Metallum with which she empowered her defensive techniques to render the knights’ attacks completely impotent, she had already manifested a pair of metal antlers, one iron and one brass. The ghostly top half of a beast’s skull sat atop her head between these antlers, and it too was slowly taking physical shape.

Zef felt her Tablet buzz, and saw that Jorfr had finally managed to shatter Vic’s manacles. She smiled under her mask and set loose what she had prepared. A spark of will was all it took.

For a moment, those making up the convoy felt utter panic; they thought they had been tricked into an ambush, that an entire enemy force had somehow been led through the bewitched forest and had surrounded them with the boars acting as a distraction. What else could explain dozens of bullets and shotgun slugs erupting from the woods to either side of the convoy all in rapid succession? Dozens of ghostly soldiers appeared in the treeline, each born from the arcane waste-product of its corresponding glyph, their forms blowing away in the wind moments later.

Such panic was then put to rest, for nine-tenths of the convoy now laid dead, for each bullet had been unerringly aimed at its target. In eras past, great archers had made use of such stratagems using arrows and sling bullets, many of their arts lost in the dark age of cultivation and martial arts that the Divine Emperor’s genocide five centuries prior had brought about.

Yet, these ancient stratagems had come to be for a reason, and now they were reborn in a form befitting this new era.

BELLADONNA SIGN

ILLUSORY TRIBUTE TO IKESIA’S FALLEN

HEADPIERCER ARTS: GHOST BATTALION

This technique nearly lived up to its name by creating the illusion of many soldiers firing on the victims from all directions at once, albeit not to the degree of an actual battalion. Zefaris achieved this by carving over a dozen kinetic mirror glyphs around the area layered over with what she had come to call kinetic snare glyphs, which captured her projectiles and stopped them mid-air until she chose to release them, or the glyphs ran out. This, combined with Flickering and Death’s Lieutenant, allowed her to achieve a truly staggering volume of fire… A volume of fire sufficient to, in a single volley, mow down dozens of Red Locusts and a good number of Dragon Knights, while remaining precise enough to not strike any of her allies.

This was what she had, at the suggestion of an old man in white, named the Walking Way of the Eternal Soldier.

Burgghusen had just been shot, a slug having been aimed at his heart and sent off-course by his armor into his liver. Were he not who he was, it would’ve at least disabled him, but this was a minor injury. Already, his draconic heart was pushing the bullet out and sealing the wound shut.

Though he was sociopath, he wasn’t an idiot or a coward; so, after giving Victor a warning glare, he too drew his blade and went to meet his fate. Unlike Von Wickten’s flashy, yet pointless blade, Burgghusen’s sword had a plainer design, with a power cell the size of a fist for a pommel, and a cable that snaked from it to the base of its damascened blade. It came alive when he swung it at Zelsys, the blade’s edge alighting to a bright-yellow glow that trailed wavy, heated air.

It was this moment when she gave up all pretense of equality and caught his sword between the Broken Butcher’s prongs. She willed her body to remove every restriction that was still in place, the intoxicating high of an artificial fight-or-flight reaction flooding her system as she twisted her weapon just enough to lock up her opponent without tearing the sword out of his grasp.

“Shame,” she uttered. “I’d given you the courtesy of holding back in the pit, but you just had to go and confirm all of my suspicions, slaver. Tell me, before I turn you into a pretzel: How many among your subordinates are “just following orders” like you? Will I have to set fire to all of Arches to rid it of your filth, will I have to call upon the Charred Judge to carry out her grisly work upon your duke?”

For a few seconds he stared up into her eyes, weighing the consequences of his death against revealing his own past and possibly surviving. There were few things that could elicit something approaching a real, human emotion inside him, but among those was this woman’s arrogance combined with his recently-obtained knowledge of who she was. Burgghusen hadn’t known the Newman Sect by name, but he had known that the Willowdale Branch of the Black Horse Family had been succeeded by a new sect that disregarded tradition in favor of what its pragmatic founder considered “practical cultivation”. Only recently had he learned that the woman who stood before him was that disrespectful cur.