She sat on the cot with her eyes closed, leaning against the wall, resting her head on Zef’s shoulder while she sipped the golden nectar. A breath of Fog in, a breath of Fog out, and the pain faded a little more. The silvery threads snaked their way through the air, drifting towards the ground as they slowly faded out. But a few of them reached the Lightning Butcher, and its metal teeth drank the Fog like the maw of a parched beast, ringing with soft metallic notes.

The Inquisitor’s piercing glare affixed to the blade, then snapped Zel’s face to grab her attention. The beast-slayer felt it, but she didn’t have the mind to reciprocate. Not yet. Another gulp of sweet, herbal elixir.

“This is better than Liquid Vigor,” she thought to herself. Still, the Inquisitor persevered in her burning stare, and so Zel deigned to lazily open her eyes and return a lazily haughty glare of equal intensity.

Even through the gas mask’s small eye-holes, the Inquisitor’s incredulous eye-twitch was clear to see, much to Zel’s amusement. She let a small smirk show through as she took another sip of nectar, just to drive the nail a little deeper. Even still, what the Inquisitor signed next blindsided her.

Her gestures carried resentment, but the question they conveyed implied the benefit of the doubt.

“That thing,” she pointed to the cleaver. “Why do you have it?”

Zel didn’t feel like speaking, and for once preferred the silence, so she put the bottle down and with some difficulty, signed an answer.

“Why do you think I will answer?”

“It’s a symbol of rank. Either you took it from a dead officer, or you were not as uninvolved in the war as you claim. Which is it?”

Before Zelsys could be bothered to answer Zefaris broke the silence and spat a vitriol-laden reply of her own, “It never reached the intended owner. Our Captain died to protect us from the likes of you, Inquisitor.”

“Calm yourself,” the Inquisitor signed, turning a cold gaze towards Zefaris. “I risked my hide to challenge false war-crime accusations, cyclops.”

“Then why does this feel like an attempted interrogation, huh?” Zel smugged at the masked woman. Whether it was, she knew how such interrogations worked - she knew the most powerful leverage an interrogator had was fear. The Inquisitor had no power over her, she was all too self-assured to ever be coerced into submission.

The Inquisitor stared at her, then sighed forcefully enough to hear the air rushing through her mask’s exhaust valve.

“Old habits die hard,” she signed with visible resignation, only to reiterate her question. “So, how did you obtain it? They’re not exactly a common sight, since most were reclaimed for raw cold-iron.”

“It was payment for a beast-slaying job, more or less,” Zel signed a half-truth.

“If it ever comes to it, know that they are symbols of station,” the Inquisitor surprised with genuine advice. “Even today, a Captain’s Cleaver’s obedience gives you a measure of authority as far as Ikesian military laws are concerned.”

That was where their brief conversation ended. The Inquisitor made no further attempts to interact, which bothered neither Zel nor Zef.

Zefaris needed the tablet for one simple thing - to double-check whether she had indeed developed a new technique. She got as far as finding its listening and even opening the details readout, before she caught sight of the Inquisitor signing interrogative questions at Zel and felt the need to respond.

Only once the exchange was clearly over did she feel comfortable turning her focus back towards the Tablet. The new technique was unnamed as far as the device knew, though naming was no difficulty.

CONCUSSION IMPACT Type: Utility, Crowd Control Trigger: At-Will Effects: Kinetic Amplification C, Kinetic Proliferation B- Advancement: Use this technique to directly or indirectly cause lethal head trauma to a creature significantly larger or stronger than you.

She couldn’t help but find the Tablet’s suggestions somewhat entertaining. From what she’d seen, the device seemed to suffer from a quirk known to widely affect older devices of its type - a bizarre logic born from an arcane machine’s attempts at approximating parameters it hadn’t been designed to deal with. Some called it “Fog Logic”, others fear-mongered about artificial souls whenever a Tablet happened to be right about something. She set the Tablet down, as the bright glow of its projections hurt her eye in the setting sun’s dim light.

The man Strol had been all those years ago would’ve considered his current views of Pateiria extreme at best and outright insane at worst, but the war had changed him. After seeing both the best and the worst from all sides involved, he had come to a simple conclusion.

Out of all the countries that Ikesia had warred against, all had their heroes and good people, all were venerable and wise in their own ways, such that Ikesia could recover and eventually actively cooperate with them; be they Grekurian or Kargareth, or even the far-off kingship of Toten. But Pateiria… In its sprawling, mind boggling size, Pateiria festered with a seething, empire-wide resentment for anything and anyone that threatened or defied them even in the slightest manner. He’d encountered cases as extreme as calls for honor killings over the simple mention of a colony that had managed to wrench itself free from Pateirian control thanks to its status as a volcanic island - only the natives could survive there, their skin black as pitch and their bodies blazing with Ignis more brightly than a campfire from birth.

As things were at this very moment, there was no point to turning fear and wrath outward. The Black Wall was impermeable as far as any remotely realistic scenario could be concerned, thus the most reasonable course of action was to exterminate any holdouts and make sure they couldn’t damage the country more than they already had.

Strol couldn’t help chuckling at the fact he had arrived at the foregone conclusion that what he was doing was the right thing to do. Then, he passed out.

Zel and Zef drifted off to sleep soon after, while the Inquisitor remained awake well into the evening. She cautiously watched from the shack’s windows, making absolutely sure there were enough dead locusts to deter more of their kind, rather than attract them.

There was exactly one overly curious locust drone that wandered onto the clearing, and it turned on its heel the moment it saw the field of its slaughtered brethren.