The young man couldn’t quite make out the terse, rapid-fire exchange between her and the two other in-the-flesh pulp characters, though going off the fact Reiner’s face took on the self-same disgust as the amazon’s, it seemed that his classmate was able to handle drink a great deal better than him. Despite the general sense of awe which now suffused Victor’s perception of everything, the confirmation that Zelsys would go toe to toe in the pit with knight captain Adalbert was… Not entirely positive. Much like Reiner, he had a generally positive outlook on the knight captain, blaming the duke for the misuse of the Dragon Knights.

Somehow, the murderous aura of three cultivators combined just washed over him, whereas it made even Reiner try to make himself look small. However, the docile torpor of his drunken state wasn’t spared, for the presence of these three and their seething fury only stoked Victor’s curiosity as to what exactly was contained in that mnemonic record. Perhaps the honorable knight captain had shared some secret record obtained during his open secret of an investigation into the local slave trade? Victor thought to simply ask a question, but as he stood up, his first thought was to pick up the Tablet, and his total lack of balance combined with this unrestrained train of thought resulted in him thoughtlessly doubling-over onto the table and grabbing the Tablet. The device’s logic automaton didn’t distinguish drunken curiosity from a legitimate mental command, as it had never needed to do so and Zelsys had not seen fit to ensure it could make such a distinction.

Despite his intoxicated state, the mnemonic record came through as clear as if he’d really been there. In fact, the degradation of his mental barriers had only rendered it more vivid; it felt as if he was truly there.

The stench, the atmosphere, the… The slaves? Why was that voice from beyond the door vaguely familiar? And… Why was one of his classmates here, in that revolting, perverse getup, branded with the Pateirian numeral for 4? Last Victor had seen him, he’d helped him slip away from a couple of particularly nosy Dragon Knights, weeks ago…

What in the seven hells was that on the back of his neck?!

The scents, the sights, the emotions of disgust at what Zelsys had witnessed and her murderous disdain towards the knight captain, it was all clear and vivid to a degree beyond most of Victor’s own memories. The senses of a cultivator created mnemonic records that no normal person had a frame of reference for, causing them to come across as a hyper-real exaggeration. Even though it all flashed through his head in moments, and even though he knew it to all be a recording by virtue of how mnemonic records worked, the recording spurred a disgust and anger inside Victor that he had never felt before, because he had never so vividly stood witness to such vileness, let alone vileness perpetrated upon someone he had considered a friend.

Before he knew it, his knees gave out and he collapsed off to the side, falling onto all fours before he emptied the contents of his stomach onto the ground, much to the amusement of the people at the tables within eyeshot.

The calm voice of Zefaris came from above while Victor’s mouth was still playing the role of a revolting fountain spout: “...You alright?”

A moment passed. Her voice again.

“I told you he was a lightweight, what now…” she continued, but Victor had more or less recovered by then, coughing and hacking as he dragged himself back up to the table. The first thought he had after puking his guts out wasn’t cleaning himself up, or the burn of stomach acid in his throat, but wrath, such wrath as he had never felt; it was a caustic, violent impulse that he had not been able to even conceive of feeling up until this very moment.

The melancholy prince of a bonewrought castle sat upon his throne atop the tallest spire, wilfully ignoring the reality of his demesne’s decay. He had built this place as a prison for the beast atop whom it stood, and as an impregnable fortress of isolation for himself.

And yet, as the beast below was stirred into catastrophic fury, the prince felt no need to calm it, no need to repair the walls of its prison or the chains which bound it. The beast’s righteous anger was shattering his castle around him, yet the prince could only think of how long it had been since they’d been one; of how sorely he’d missed his own other half, not caring for the danger its freedom would bring to the kingdom of flesh they were both rightful rulers of.

As his head rose above the table, his gaze swept over the gunwoman, the norseman, and finally the beast-slayer herself.

There was an expectant curiosity in her eyes.

“Y’know, I didn’t… HEUGHCK-” he began, only to be interrupted by a sudden retch, but there was nothing left to puke up. “I think I finally get the… The whole beast-slayer spiel that you repeated in the books, about butchering beasts regardless of… HGUCK-”

“...Of how many legs they walk on, or what honeyed words they sph- spew.”

A grin entirely unlike himself forced its way onto Victor’s face.

It was an expression of malice, of giddy expectation for ultraviolence.

“You’ll kill it… Right? That wretched beast on two legs. That thing and all the sycophants that protect it, like you said you would, in the pulps.”

They all felt it, that newly-ignited murderous aura. Zelsys saw something there, behind his eyes - the blazing will that she had thought to be present inside the young man, but buried, deep inside. She’d thought it would take weeks, maybe months to tease it out of him, but just a glance at his face made her drop that line of thought altogether for a brief moment of inner monologue: “My my, there it is. Just how long have you been repressing yourself, young man?”

Zel couldn’t help laughing to herself.

The vomiting was an entirely expected reaction given the mnemonic record’s contents, but this… This was a pleasant surprise.

“Of course I will. I wouldn’t be much of a beast-slayer if I didn’t do my job, would I?” she said to him, fishing up a couple coppers that she tossed over to him. “Here, get something to wash the taste of vomit out of your mouth.”

Once he had made his way down the stands, Zel finally took her eyes off of him. “I think we can chalk this one up as a happy accident,” she said to the others, much to Reiner’s confusion.

“...This may be a foolish question, but what do you mean? What did you do to him?” the young man asked plainly.

“Nothing, the recording was normal,” Zefaris shrugged. “Being faced with something truly detestable was just what it took to fully break down the mental barriers he’d put up to escape reality as a coping mechanism. Hard to keep up those barriers when you pour a figurative casket’s worth of gunpowder onto the smoldering embers of who knows how many years of repressed anger.”

Reiner sighed, sipping from his drink.

“I don’t think I will ever understand this cultivation mysticism,” he sighed. “I just lift weights and punch hard. Works well enough, the money’s sure good.”

Considering the fact that he wasn’t even twenty, Zelsys thought that Jorfr’s remote nephew was doing quite well. The only cultivator of any note younger than him that she knew of was Halxian Estoras, and besides being the scion of a family wealthy in material possessions as well as genetics, he was also an insufferable fuckhead, even after he’d been force fed a few dozen portions of humble pie by the Blue Moon War.

In preparation for the fight, Zelsys took a few moments to retrieve several items from storage: A silver, lightly tarnished mug, a small metal box, and two bottles. One was wrapped in red-bordered seals with smooth symbols written in green ink, while the other had similar seals, but instead bore green-bordered seals with angular symbols in red ink; the first bottle contained a lightly glowing, emerald-green liquid, while the other held what looked like uncongealed blood; Viriditas and Rubedo, the two “living” essentia found most commonly in nature, distilled from rich sources and stabilized with glyphic seals. The mug had two lines on the inside, clearly visible, as well as a glyph at the bottom.

Zel uncorked the Viriditas bottle, emerald-green Fog rising from the syrupy liquid as she poured it up to the first line. The scent of Viriditas was known to be different person to person, evoking things that deeply appeal to a person. For Zelsys, it smelled like mint and Zef’s body.

The contents of the other bottle, on the other hand, smelled like blood and a vaguely musky smell, and Zelsys only left the bottle open for as long as she had to in order to pour up to the second line, taking care not to inhale the ruby-coloured Fog. It wasn’t a pure essentia, but rather a Rubedo-rich, boiled-down form of chicken’s blood, as this worked better than the pure form of Rubedo for this specific purpose.

“Can’t you just transmute it in your second stomach?” came a question from Victor, who’d just returned to the sight of Zel doing something he vividly remembered the description of from the books, in his hand a tankard filled with small beer of the sort that one could drink liters of without becoming drunk. It was a somewhat primitive, but highly potent restorative, allowing one to fight harder and for longer, to resist fatigue in battle and recover after the fact faster.

“...I could, but Deep Blood is disgusting,” she stated plainly, performing strange hand signs over the silver mug for a few seconds, exhaling silver Fog the whole time. There was a slight iridescent shimmer across the liquid’s surface, and it shifted colour from a bloody-green swirl to a uniform, pale pinkish red. She kicked it back, licking the mug clean with her freakishly-long tongue that moved more like a serpent than anything else. Victor’s dumbfounded expression made it obvious that he wondered how in the nine hells it fit in her mouth. Unfortunately for his curiosity, even she didn’t know.

The next object of interest was, of course, the metal box, containing a number of round, metal pills, each stamped with a glyph for “Iron”. Newly emboldened, Victor questioned: “What’re those? They weren’t in the books.”

“Alchemically activated iron,” she answered, holding up a pill between two fingers, before sticking out her tongue and, with its uncanny dexterity, snatching the pill. “They don’t do much, but they help.”

The sudden sound of the stage door opening grabbed her attention, and before Von Wickten even spoke she had already risen to her feet, staring down at the knight captain as he walked out in a heavily-adorned, but distinctly more practical suit of plate than his “dragon-scale” suit. An opulent sword sat at his hip, its crossguard in the shape of two dragon heads with rubies in their mouths.

“A CHALLENGER FROM THE FAR SOUTH NOW SEEKS TO USURP MY CHAMPIONSHIP!” the knight captain belted, a microphone grasped in one hand and the other outstretched to point at Zelsys. She drew in a deep breath, burning it to propel herself through the air and to the edge of the fighting pit, landing in a violent crash that cracked the ground immediately around her and sent up a cloud of dust.

“...BUT I AM MAGNANIMOUS, AND I SHALL ACCEPT THIS CHALLENGER! TONIGHT, I SHALL DEFEND MY CHAMPIONSHIP ON THE CHALLENGER’S TERMS! BRING IN THE REFEREE.”

Von Wickten seemed a little too eager to get into the fight. He thought he had an ace up his sleeve. Nevertheless, Zelsys gladly got in the pit, with Von Wickten doing the same just as a pudgy-looking Grekurian in a stained apron was led out onto the edge of the stage by one of the pit attendants.