There weren’t any guards on this side, and so she just approached the small door and tried to pull it open. It wouldn’t budge. A couple good bangs made the eye slot slide open, a pair of pale blue eyes squinting from the other side.

“Haven’t seen you before, mind explainin’ yerself?” the man on the other side questioned, but his counterpart quickly shut him up with nothing more than a hushed whisper.

“She’s the one that beat the daylights outta the governor’s son!” the other one muttered, half excited and half fearful. They shut the slot and opened the door, nervously waving her on through. If she remembered the briefing correctly, she’d have to walk a few dozen meters down the road, and then step onto one of the dirt roads that connected the fields…

Uncertain, Zel took out her Tablet and used the record function to refresh her memory. She had, indeed, remembered correctly. Whilst she walked, she took the time to check the other category of techniques. This one held more than the Fog-breathing category - three in total. These too were unnamed, and their names too flickered in.

Staggering Shot Beheading Saw Heartbreaker

She didn’t even bother trying to check the techniques’ details, as the names alone were enough to infer their moments of creation, though she did wonder how exactly destroying the Necrobeast’s heart would translate to creatures whose hearts weren’t inside tempered alchemic flasks.

In fact, she was just curious how using techniques would work in general, how it would be any different from doing whatever action created them. Zel’s mind continued to wander in this direction for a short while as she herself wandered down the road, only broken out of this trekking trance by the realization that she had nearly passed the dirt path she was supposed to take.

Through the fields she walked, her path flanked on either side by dried-up canals - now full of poppy flowers and the scraps of war, from discarded shot-through helmets to war knives too damaged to have been salvaged. The thought of bringing a few poppies back for Zef crossed her mind, to see the cyclops’ reaction. She wasn’t even sure if such a thing would get a rise out of her, after last night. Then again, even if it didn’t, she would be able to use the poppies as a jumping-off point for something.

Daydreaming about all the ways she could tease the markswoman turned out to be a rather easy pastime to get lost in. Zel shook her head to banish this train of thought, as she was nearing the field where the beast was supposedly seen most often. At first glance, the field looked completely normal - a solid perimeter of maize, stretching so tall as to tower even above her head.

Stepping into the field, though, revealed a far different image. She found herself in a small, near-perfectly circular clearing of stomped down stalks, reddish-brown splotches of dried blood staining the dessicated yellow.