Zelsys drew in a deep breath and kicked up some sand, burning the better part of her lung capacity to generate Fulgur that she immediately dumped into her outstretched right arm, causing the minor muscles to twitch uncontrollably under her skin as snaking, blue-white arcs branched off of the limb to strike at airborne sand particles. Each grain became the core of a miniscule lightning-sphere, none powerful enough to cause serious damage, yet together counting over a hundred.

She whipped her arm in front of herself in a wide, sweeping motion, firing off the swarm of fireflies in a haphazard shotgun with huge, intentional gaps in its coverage. Even having given him space to dodge, the projectiles naturally zipped around in a chaotic manner, speckling the man’s bare upper body in nigh-on two dozen shallow, cauterized craters, each about a centimeter deep and twice as wide.

FORMLESS BUTCHERY: SCATTERING FIREFLIES

“A DAZZLING DISPLAY TO OVERWHELM THE SENSES”

It was a diversion and nothing more, meant to take up Masonson’s attention while she ducked into his blind spot and clocked him in the underside of his jaw with a right hook. With a single strike, her knuckles pinched a pressure-point behind his jaw and sharply twisted his head on his neck, causing him to crumple to the ground like a sack of meat. Those pressure-points - that glaring weakness - had been among the few things she had intentionally changed about her own body in the last few months, although she couldn’t eliminate it entirely without disfiguring herself. The issues of the spinal cord getting twisted or the brain bouncing around inside the skull were ones she had yet to devise solutions for.

Zelsys got down on the ground and put him in a modified sitout pin, hoisting his legs up onto her shoulders so that his legs and lower body were elevated while his upper back remained on the ground, simultaneously pulling at his arms so that, when he came-to, he didn’t even think to try breaking out. As a sporadic shower of coppers and a few silvers rained into the pit, Zelsys showboated to the crowd for a few seconds, taking a moment to pick her opponent up and ensure that he was conscious. Only once two of the attendants came down to help him out of the pit did she let go of him, turning her full attention to the spectators.

Zel collected the money as was her prerogative to do, being the winner, quickly channeling lightning through her hand to generate a strong magnetic field and gathering the cash in a lump before she just handed it off to Masonson, picking the few non-magnetic silver coins out of the sand by hand. It wasn’t a great sum and she would’ve given her opponent a share of the money to begin with, and refusing the payout that rightfully belonged to her could further agitate Von Wickten if he was watching. Her gut told her that he was, and she could count the number of times her gut had been wrong on one hand.

With most of the crowd’s attention still very much on her thanks to the show she’d put on, she jumped onto an empty table.

“What you just saw was me trying my best to go easy! I could’ve tied both my arms and one leg behind my back and still won!” she exclaimed to the crowd, embellishing somewhat. She was quite certain she could’ve won without use of her arms, at least.

“The only man alive in this town who I can really fight without killing him is Adalbert Von Wickten!”

Perfectly on-cue, the heretofore closed door at the far north-eastern end of the amphitheater opened up, the knight-captain striding out onto the elevated stage which took up that section of the ground.

“FO-HOO-HOOLISH HUBRIS!” he laugh-screamed, the appearance of supreme self-confidence tinged by obvious anger at being upstaged. “Your hubris will be your death, stranger, doubly so if I choose to be so magnanimous as to choose you as my opponent! Should you qualify by being among the three winners of the next round, that is.”

“Hubris implies confidence in excess! However…” Zelsys smugged back at him, drawing in a breath before she stared him straight in the eyes and shunted a lungful’s worth of Fulgur through her hair, briefly causing her braids to animate not unlike serpents, discharges of blue plasma gathering at each braid’s tip and forming the beastly heads of the Thundergods that fuelled her magic.

“Mine does not extend a hair’s breadth beyond what I am able and willing to do,” she finished, and with the last word, she ceased the magickal display, her braids falling limply at her back, the blades at their tips jangling against one another. She took a moment to get a look at him, and he looked exactly how she had expected him to. Von Wickten was clad in a suit of beautiful full-plate that had been ruined with an inhumanly kitschy level of filigree and inlay, designed to resemble the bright-red scales of a stereotypical dragon. He wore no helmet, perhaps due to the three pairs of horns sprouting from his head that obviously wanted to grow unevenly, but had been carved into a false symmetry, exposing his long, flowing blonde hair for all to see. His face was covered in reddish-rusty scales where one would expect facial hair and bone ridges in the stead of eyebrows, a few of his scales stained by the makeup that was thickly caked onto the skin of his face. His eyes were akin to those of a serpent, yellow and slit-pupiled, while his jawline was so cartoonishly pronounced that it leapt over the uncanny line that the bookie’s modified face had only toed.

“WE SHALL SEE!” screamed the knight-captain, the spotlight bouncing off of his blindingly-white teeth and armor alike before he spun around on his heel and angrily stomped off-stage.

Before reuniting with her compatriots, she stole off to a corner near the stage, making it look as if she was inspecting the larger fighting pit while, in truth, the majority of her attention was directed to listening in, trying to see if she could make out anything through the closed door… And she could. Its vast bulk only allowed Von Wickten’s screaming to pass through, accompanied by a boyish, pleading voice and the smashing of glass, noise which she wagered only a small handful of those present could make out, or even cared about in the first place.

“THIS SHALL NOT STAND; END THIS SUB-HU-MAN; RIGHT HERE AND NOW!” her Primordial Self screamed and thrashed deep inside her, demanding that she drop the pretense, that she drag that pederast out by his testicles if he even had any, that she string him up from a street lamp, but Zelsys reassured the raging cavewoman part of herself that the knight-captain would get his due once he’d outlived his usefulness. Thereafter, this part of her began to hope that he would turn out to know nothing, so that the promise of his lynching could be fulfilled sooner.

When she returned to her companions she found the young man to be conspicuously absent, Zelsys didn’t think to ask where he was at first. She shared what she had learned, and having noticed that Zefaris had opened her left eye when the knight-captain was on the stage, she asked what the blonde had seen.

“It checks out with what you heard - his soul is downright filthy; if a normal person has a candle-flame, then he has an industrial waste burner. I noticed the presence of a damaged geas, likely one to secure loyalty to the duke that Von Wickten had attempted to break, as well as a nature concealment enchantment that was so deteriorated I had to actively search for one to notice it. His filthy nature is too much for even the best mage a knight-captain’s money can hire to hide it, it seems… Or he simply no longer fears anyone noticing what he is.”

Her mind swirling with malice, Zel’s first thought at the description of Von Wickten’s soul was to pull out her White Marble Tablet and retrieve a slim box made of polished blackstone, opening it up to reveal three rows of seven off-white, oval shaped pills each, with several missing. She removed one and dropped it into the tablet’s Fog Storage vortex alongside the box itself, causing the device to list the pill as an independent item.

BOX OF IMPURITY EXPULSION PILLS IMPURITY EXPULSION PILL x1

“Those things? My, what a cruel fate you have in stock for our valuable asset,” Zefaris grimaced, her own memory of what it was like to eat one of those pills still very fresh. Even for someone whose soul had been relatively pure for a professional killer, the breakthrough had been an experience that the blonde didn’t wish to repeat, even with the knowledge that similar breakthroughs would only get harder from here on.

“These are for after I rearrange his skeleton. He’ll cry and beg and plead repentance, so I’ll just give him one of these and let its effects run their course,” Zelsys explained, making no effort to hide the malice dripping from every word. “If he truly does repent he might live, which I doubt.”

“Considering how much of his soul looks like congealed impurity, I’d wager that at best he’ll be reduced to a bumbling amnesiac with no clue of who he was or where he is,” the markswoman chuckled, her own tone becoming tinged with the same malice.

With barely a second between this exchange and the next, Zelsys turned to Jorfr, asking: “Right, where’d the kid go? You didn't lose your nephew, did you?”

“He said something about how he knew someone who would want to see you fight Von Wickten, likely someone from his class,” the Borean said, clearly not worried for the young man in the least. “Say, how long is it until the next round? It will likely be a long enough wait for you two to register for the auction in the meanwhile.”

“Us?” Zefaris raised an eyebrow, to which Jorfr nodded.

“Yeah. I have chained myself by bringing Reiner, it is my responsibility as his elder to look after him. It would not be right to risk having him return only to find himself alone in an unfamiliar place, even if he is nearly a man,” the norseman said with utter seriousness. “...And I would rather not risk his grandmother’s wroth.”

Zelsys decided to ask the bookie how long it was until the next series of matches, finding to her dismay that it would be roughly another hour. She visited the bar, buying a tankard of ale for Jorfr, one of apple cider for Zefaris, and simple grape juice for herself - not because she disliked alcohol, but because she wasn’t in the mood to drink the ten men’s worth that it took for her to feel anything.

A few minutes later, Zelsys and Zefaris departed the amphitheater, leaving Jorfr to stick out like a giant, extremely muscular snow sculpture.

After getting some distance from the amphitheater the two broke off from the main part of Scarlet Silk Road, following the guidelines given to them by their Bureau contact. After a few minutes of walking through tangled, unmarked streets, they arrived at an inconspicuous door to an equally inconspicuous building near the amphitheater, hidden in plain sight by a trick of architectural illusionism - the street could clearly be seen from where they stood, but normal people on the outside couldn’t notice the place unless one knew what to look for, or had some means of seeing past low-level illusions.

A particular knock pattern made an eye slit in the door slide open, and a gruff, stilted voice asked: “Na-mes?”

“Zelsys and Zefaris Newman. We’re on the list,” Zel answered, gesturing first to herself and then to her partner. The door swung open, and they entered an appropriately inconspicuous cellar, a black, metal door covered in hammer marks and chained shut staring back at them across the room.