The invitation was, in reality, just a hand-drawn map with some directions written down, including guidelines to getting through four consecutive illusory corridors in the forest and a passphrase so they would let her in. Zel burned all of these, including the map itself, into memory, and made a mnemonic recording for good measure. The invitation was now just a piece of paper.

Still… Her mind dwelt on how they would be able to make their way north.

The only other route known to her, that which the merchant had suggested - that is to say, by sea - could take months. Even then, the final stretch was littered with so many frozen ships to have become known as the Sailor’s Tomb.

“Do we just take our chances with the northward road regardless of the dangers? There has to be some way to mitigate the risk…” she mused aloud. Her concern was, in reality, not for whether she or Jorfr could survive the harrowing trip, but whether Zefaris or Victor would have to stay behind if that was the path she chose.

Jorfr let out a sigh.

“There is… Another way,” he sighed, moving his finger across the map of the Ikes mountains to the region labeled as “Titan’s Bane”.

“Through Agartha. We traverse the Deterrence Fields of Titan’s Bane, enter the Mouth of Prasticaris, traverse the Graveyard of the Gods…” he dragged his finger off the north edge of the map. “And come out the other side in Borea, right in the middle of the Eternal Oasis.”

“...Are you certain that this path is real and safer than taking the risk on the surface?” Zefaris chimed in with a raised eyebrow.

“My grandfather took the trip a few times,” the borean nodded, stowing the map. “It is dangerous compared to the surface road, but more or less the only reliable option for when one needs to pass while the surface is engulfed.”

“Can’t be much worse than traversing a locust-infested dungeon,” Zel chuckled, leaning forward before she took a breath. Pale serpents surged down her arms and into the Sturmgandr’s steering handles, surging through the cold-iron cables and into its Thundercharger. The engine howled back to life, jumping instantly from idling to fourth gear. Jorfr, knowing what this meant, engaged his own motorbike’s Thundercharger, though lacking a means of generating Fulgur, he relied upon the device’s Fulguric fuel cell.

Both Sturmgandrs howled across the landscape and towards Arches, barely slowing down as they approached the northern gate, the sun lazily sinking beneath the horizon. They came to a skidding halt just before they would’ve smashed right on through, waiting only long enough for the two Dragon Knights guarding the gate to open it up. As they rode into the city, Zelsys felt one of the Dragon Knights looking at her. Zel still had some business to handle before she could pick up Victor and head off to exterminate the Red Locust Bandits.

“Something is wrong. I can feel it,” she uttered as she looked around. The townspeople went about their daily lives more or less as normal, but an atmosphere of unease filled the air. It soon became clear why, when they rode by the Duma School and saw that it had been burned down. The building still stood, a charred, defiant husk. It was deserted.

Then, out of nowhere, Zel felt her Tablet thrumming in her hand.

An aetherwave message alert. But from whom? The Bureau? Governor Estoras? Maybe one of the Newman Sect’s officers?

Zefaris pulled out her own Tablet, for it too had begun thrumming with an alert. Even Jorfr noticed his own, Brass Tablet rattling about in its holster on his Faux-Sturmgrandr’s side, where it had been for the majority of their journey.

All three had picked up the same, short text message, having been blasted across every aetherwave comms frequency that only assistant tablets could broadcast and receive on. In other words, this was a message intended solely for these rare devices, and thus not meant to be received by more common, static receivers.

“Kidnapped by Burgghusen. Being taken to Meat Market. Not much time. Send help.”

Zel had no way to know who exactly was making this distress call, but her gut told her that it was Victor. He was the only person she knew of that possessed a Tablet in this podunk, middle-of-nowhere town.

“Jorfr, do you mind checking if Victor is home? If he isn’t, ask around. Failing that, send me a distance ping and meet up with us outside town.”

The norseman nodded. He wasn’t great with essentech, but he at least knew how to impel his assistant tablet to perform one of the new functions that Willowdale’s clever engineers had added: A ping message that calculated how far the two devices were from one another based on travel time, with an error margin of five-hundredths of the distance barring serious disturbances in the Sea of Fog.

And so it was that they set off once again. Zelsys almost felt bad sending Jorfr off on what she, in her gut, knew to be a fool’s errand, but it was best to be sure, and Zel wasn’t concerned with getting there in time. A Sturmgandr could be outpaced by nothing that the Red Locust Bandits or Dragon Knights could reasonably have access to, short of a Fog Gate, and with all this security, there was no way they were careless enough to leave such a gaping hole in their security.

Zel and Zef, meanwhile, rode off through the city to the very outskirts, picking up a dead-drop from a Bureau agent. The drop contained an extraction location in the woods near town, and a device that clamped around the palm of the hand with frames for the fingers that ended in brass finger-caps, the whole apparatus fitted to Zelsys and Zelsys alone. It soon served its purpose after the two stealthily made their way to the Von Wickten family manor, Zef retrieving her camera from Fog Storage and taking several high-fidelity photographs of Von Wickten’s familial estate while Zelsys rode the motorbike to the front of the mansion. She distracted the surprisingly light guard contingent by causing a huge ruckus, albeit a more or less non-violent one; she demanded to see Von Wickten to speak with him, pretending that she was drunk and that she genuinely held a friendly sentiment towards the man while simultaneously “playing” with the guards by very obviously pulling her punches, but still hitting hard enough to put the grown men out of commission after a short while, expressing disappointment every time and encouraging them to train harder so they wouldn’t crumple like that the next time she came around.

She repeatedly dry-fired her arm-cannon in the guards’ general direction, using it as a medium for a low-powered form of her Thundercannon technique. In truth, she was aiming it at the mansion itself; with these miniature lightning bolts she smashed its windows, stripped the facade, and vandalized much of the front-facing part of the property.

Meanwhile, the professional that she was, Zefaris even scaled the walls with aid from her Terra-imbued bayonet which sunk into stone as if it was butter and amplified the strength of the wielding limb by several rating grades. After that point, infiltrating the mostly-empty mansion was a matter of muscle memory for the former career soldier, a trivial task compared to the feats which had earned her the reputation of a wrathful spirit haunting the trenches during the war.

Zef exfiltrated the mansion only a few minutes later with two teenaged slave boys in tow, pinging Zelsys that the operation had been a success, prompting the beastly amazon to pretend that a massive dose of alchemical alcohol suddenly wore off before absconding from the scene. Zel couldn’t help herself spoiling the deception before she left, however, remarking: “You know, I would consider looking for a new employer if I were you. Someone might just do something about Lord Von Wickten’s proclivity for slave-boys some time soon.”

“...What?” came a confused question from one of the less-beaten guards, but he got no answer, as Zelsys had already ridden off. He turned to one of his comrades, coughing up blood onto the mosaic paving-stones, asking: “Y’think she intends to kill the knight-captain?”

“I dgh… I don’t know, and I don’t care. That old bastard is barely paying us enough to keep quiet, let alone lay down our lives for him,” spat the other guard.

None of the guards dared to pursue her, as most of them were thankful to get out of the mess with their lives, despite dreading what their employer would do when he saw the damage.

Both of the slaves bore terrible scars and signs of extensive abuse, and the less said of the nature of the aforementioned abuse the better. Likewise, both of them had purple, bulging Compliance Gu attached to the backs of their necks, which rendered them so universally compliant that they may as well have been flesh puppets, and the removal of these was the purpose of the palm device.

Donning the device, Zelsys began funneling tiny increments of Fulgur into it, so minor was its power draw that her own natural metabolic Fulguric charge more than sufficed. When it was charged, there came a quiet click as three needlepoint prongs extended from the center piece, with which she punctured the back of a Compliance Gu while making sure each finger-cap was in direct contact with the creature. A spark of will was all it took to set the device off, and the horrible little bug emitted a quiet screech as it let go of its host.

Zelsys pulled the first one off, drew in a breath, and ran Fulgur through the accursed thing until it was a piece of charcoal, crushing it for its tiny Azoth Stone. So she went, removing the Gu from the other slave and carefully storing its Azoth Stone so that it would be clear which stone was associated with which boy. This was so that Bureau alchemists could attempt to retrieve at least some of their lost memories.

They removed the revolting non-clothing and jewelry from both boys, before draping them both in large, heavy cloaks and taking them to the Bureau extraction point in the woods, where a Bureau agent took over custody, with the two women handing over the Azoth Stones and the broken remnants of what the slaves had been made to wear. The agent, surprisingly, turned out to be a Pateirian, barely older than the slaves; it was in fact a young defector that Zelsys had spared during an incident in Willowdale, months prior. Looking back on his descriptions of the abuses he had suffered in the Pateirian military, it only made sense that he would sign up for assignments like this.

With this aspect of the operation handled, the two rode northward, soon receiving a ping from Jorfr.

Vic felt himself drift into consciousness again.

He was near a fire this time, still not tied up. The first thought through Vic’s head was that Burgghusen probably intended to wake him to feed him again, not knowing that the paralytic venom actually wore off a little faster than intended. Bone plates were already forming around and over the spot where the Dragon Knight had jabbed his claw into Victor’s neck, but said claw had just broken through them without even trying.

This time it was just grilled meat from a small boar that Burgghusen had hunted and hung up from a nearby tree branch. Burgghusen had broken up the beast’s rib cage, roasting it in four pieces over the roaring flame while the disemboweled carcass hung there, blood pooling beneath it. Where had its organs gone?

“Why are you doing this?” Vic asked in a flat, resigned tone. That familiar feeling had returned; detached apathy. The Lunar Principle washed over him and quenched his fight-or-flight reaction, allowing him to stay calm even in this dire of a situation.