She grumbled as she jumped and grabbed it by the exposed portion, and it slipped out of the bandage with little resistance. With a relieved sigh, she turned her gaze in the direction she had heard human voices from, which had now become quieter and were accompanied by three pairs of approaching footsteps. Assuming they had heard her, she walked towards them.

Past one of the many bends of the path she saw them, and they saw her. Two men and a woman. Zelsys immediately assigned them nicknames to better remember them by, based on the first of their features she noticed when she scanned them.

Leading the trio, the man in front grasped a single-edged longblade in one hand and a large glass bottle in the other. It was partially covered in paper talismans and had a piece of cord tying it to his wrist, light-green liquid swirling in the bottom half. She could tell that under all the filth and stubble his skin was white as snow, his hair short and black as coal, his face angular and rough. The way he held himself and his sword made it look like it was just an extension of his arm. The Swordsman.

The two by his side clutched long guns with rust-speckled barrels - the second man’s gun even had a long crack spidering down its stock from the front to the trigger-guard, meticulously-wrapped copper wire holding it together. He kept it trained at Zelsys’ center of mass, one eye twitching and lip trembling so strongly it was visible even through the wiry, dark brown bush of his beard, which was so imposing Zelsys couldn’t help but wonder if he was compensating for the utter lack of any hair on the top of his head. The Wire.

In contrast the woman’s demeanor was far more relaxed, as she didn’t even bother to shoulder her gun, instead just holding it at the ready. Platinum blonde hair, skin just as pale as the other two, and a green eye with two pupils as the centerpiece of her face, the left eye closed shut. From this angle, Zelsys could tell that her gun had no visible loading mechanism. “A muzzle-loader?” she wondered. A strange mask hung around the woman's neck, a tube running from it to some sort of canister on her belt. Spliteye.

The three of them wore identical, filthy uniforms, a lush green hidden under uncountable layers of dirt, and their feet bore armor-plated, knee-high boots, the soles worn down to almost nothing. Thick chest-plates shielded their torsos, the frontmost man’s one covered in dimples and trios of gashes while the other two’s were just dirty and battered in general.

“Id-id-identif-if-ifuh cherself!” Wire barked through his beard, stuttering and slurring his words as if he was in a rush to finish speaking. His eyes jumped all over, from her face, to her left arm, to the Tablet in her hand, and still, he kept his gun aimed dead-straight at her center of mass.