“Wonder why they didn’t just start with smaller cartridges and scale them up, sounds like it would’ve been easier to make scale prototypes…” Victor pondered, picking up the pistol and fiddling with its mechanism.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” she shrugged, folding her shotgun back in its holster. “Maybe it was easier to get cannons to production because artillery didn’t fall under the purview of gunsmithing guilds. Maybe it was that the existing machine-tools were better suited to making big ol’ shells. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Sage had just considered upgrading our artillery more important than infantry weapons, considering how effective our use of it was during the war - it was artillery, after all, that forced Ubul to self-petrify. Still, those are just guesses. Could be any of a thousand reasons.”

Silence fell over them as they observed the ritual. It proceeded without incident, and after a while, the broken obelisk came alive. Both its base and the broken-off section alighted with rows and rows of glyphs, the latter section soundlessly levitating into the air and seating itself back into place. The obelisk’s glow suddenly dissipated, bursting out of the edifice as pale-blue, glowing Fog, which was abruptly sucked into the ritual circle. The circle itself took on this glow, which seemed to flow into the new seals, granting that same glow to the sealing glyphs upon them. Still in a trance, Zelsys picked up the Broken Butcher and unwrapped its temporary sealing wrap, beginning the process of affixing the new, proper seals to it.

Once every last seal was in place, Zel and Jorfr snapped out of their trance, both stretching as they stood up. She spun the blade in her hand, briefly causing it to levitate before stowing it away, satisfied.

“Alright, that’s done,” she uttered, stretching again. Her eyes turned to Victor. “Anything left to do here, or are we good to go?”

Victor had anticipated this question. He’d already said his goodbyes to the few people he thought might truly care that he’s gone, and so there was nothing anchoring him to Arches.

“Ready,” he said.

And so they left, selling off the bulkiest of their loot at the first trading post that wouldn’t ask questions - one that happened to be just outside the duchy’s borders. Between the Dragon Knights’ armor and weapons, a good profit was made.

Twin steel beasts screamed northward along an ancient and unmarred road.

It was a road that had cut through this land since millennia past, anchored deep and suffused with ancient magic so that it might repair itself and never crumble. Upon these twin beasts, four people rode, making their way towards a subterranean passage to the remote nation of Borea. A conqueror of storms, a woman who walked as one with the grave, a norseman able to summon the might of his forebears. Last among them was the vain, red-headed child of a minor noble house, perhaps best described as a wizard of sorts; not a proper, robe and pointed hat wizard, but still a competent spellcaster by current standards, standards which had been driven six feet into the ground by the very war which had caused this whole mess.

Through the wartorn landscape of Ikesia they rode, stopping or slowing down only if their path became treacherous, covering hundreds of kilometers every single day. The country, being little more than a recently-unified amalgam of many smaller duchies and fiefdoms, sprawled across the continent, its vast territories standing unrepentant in the face of foreign occupation. It had been this sheer scale combined with lightning-fast industrialization that had caused the outbreak of war in the first place, initially intended to be little more than the older powers taking some territory and with it factories, so they might reverse-engineer Ikesian technology for themselves. The Grekurian Statehood to the east, the Divine Empire of Pateiria to the west, and what had once been a swath of buffer-states inbetween, left desolate by the ascendance of the Divine Emperor himself.

They rode within eyeshot of both surreal and horrific remnants of the war; tremendous scars in the landscape, sections of road barricaded by burned-out tanks, with only a path wide enough for carriages opened up. Swathes of forests had been burned down, fields and rivers left barren by hateful magic. Cliffs and hills were riddled by thousands of craters, arrows, and discarded weapons.

In the first day of travel, they passed not one, not two, but three battlefields. One was far too new for the battle to have taken place during the war, but it was the oldest one that left the biggest impression. A lake of blood took up its center, with smaller ponds filling craters, and a great number of truly terrible-looking beasts lingered around the blood-lake’s edge. As they drew near, the true nature of this place became obvious, for all four of them had heard, read, or otherwise learned of places like these. A battle so savage and intense had taken place here that all of the blood which the combatants had shed was transmuted into a liquid rich in Rubedo, too dense to be washed away by the rain. Rubedo was the very essence of the cycle of survival, of pure, raw instinct, a vital component in the metabolism of any true animal and even some plants. Just a whiff of its fumes could induce a bevy of primeval effects, varied both by dosage and subject.

Scarlet fumes hung over the battlefield, the beasts which drunk from its lakes stuck in a rabid cycle of violence and copulation, replenishing the lake. They were twice, thrice the natural size one might expect from them, covered in shallow wounds and misshapen in all sorts of ways, from disproportionately enlarged musculature and genitals to horns and antlers growing from bare skin. Some of them were obviously just animals, wolves, bears, deer and wildcats, but… A good number among the beasts looked a bit too flat-faced, their quadrupedal gaits didn’t quite look right, and they had no tails. Perhaps most unsettling was the presence of an elevated walkway over the mess, leading a ways into the water, roped buckets at its furthest edge. Someone had been collecting the Rubedo. A bucket floated in the lake, and a snapped rope hung from the pier’s edge.

They had gas masks, but Zelsys wasn’t willing to take this risk. Who knew what might be dwelling in the lake of blood.

“We have to go around,” Zelsys said. She knew better than to distrust a gut feeling.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

And so, they drove on further.

However, sooner rather than later, Zelsys felt her focus slipping. As the Nth burned-out outpost and wrecked tank passed them by, she finally decided to address it. That incessant feeling that wasn’t quite pain, or an itch, or a tickle. It was inside her jaw, like the roots of her teeth were abuzz somehow.

During one of the necessary stops to check the map she’d surrendered controls of the motorbike to Zefaris, excusing that she needed a moment to think so that she could go into a meditative trance and commune directly with her Primordial Self. The purpose was singular: To make that feeling go away. Her teeth had changed once before, after escaping from the Dungeon. The Dungeon had purified the Azoth Stone of a Maneater of Retribution for her - an accursed, cannibalistic being born from a vengeance curse. Alongside her Dualism and Retributive Battery traits, even the purified elixir the Dungeon Core had made from the Azoth Stone inflicted mutations as it was fully processed, causing her tongue to become a long, prehensive muscle, suited for licking marrow out of broken bones, while her third and fourth teeth from the center had sharpened and grown longer. But that change was long over, three-quarters of a year in the past, so what whence did this sensation originate?

Unable to pin it down as she was, she had decided to retreat into the Dream-Desert, the mental landscape where she had ritualistically fought a manifested memory of all her previous foes to establish a direct line of communication between her own Thinking and Primordial selves, the Ego and the Id. Since the connection had been established here, this imagined place was where she returned when she needed to speak with the Primordial Self directly.

They sat atop a dune - the Thinking Self and the Primordial Self. Words needn’t be exchanged for the latter to know why the former had called this meeting.

“It cannot be done,” the bestial mirror image of herself answered. A vague frustration was audible in its voice, too. “That feeling. It is not pain… Let me cla-ri-fy.”

The Primordial Self held up its hand. A bolt of lightning descended from the clouded sky, striking the sand, kicking up a geyser of molten glass that hardened into a rod perfectly within the Primodial Self’s hand. Where the Thinking Self had enjoyed perfect awareness of and control over bodily functions previously reserved to the Primordial Self’s domain, so too had the Primordial Self learned of things such as imagination and foreplanning, and it put these to use. It still struggled to pronounce certain words or form long sentences, however. With the staff of fulgurite, the Primordial Self commanded sand up from the dune to form a perfect diagram of Zel’s body. It shifted, thinning out until it showed the nervous system wound around her skeleton. Not only had nerves moved, but all her bones had thickened slightly, with the design of the right wrist having changed to involve fewer separate parts so it could better withstand the strain of repeatedly using the Thunderclap Sting technique.

The sand-effigy further changed, closing in on the upper third of the body, the brain’s intestine-like tangle now dominating the image. Its layout differed slightly from a normal brain, the most noticeable part being the much deeper, numerous creases in its surface. If the Thinking Self squinted, it could picture the creases which were hidden from view. The whole thing was further enveloped in an elastic membrane that was absent inside a normal skull, one which anchored it and protected from impacts that would cause serious brain damage to anyone else.

The Primordial Self gestured to a spot in the brain. Sparks from the fulgurite lit up a few grains of sand to highlight it.

“Pain.”

Then, it gestured to a slightly different spot.

“Not pain. Different signals. A new mutation is needed - to shut the feeling out.”

It wasn’t the most succinct explanation, but the Thinking Self understood. Since the sensation driving her crazy wasn’t transmitted or processed the same way as pain, it would require an entirely new mutation for her to regulate it the way she could do with pain.

“What is its source, then?”

A wave of the fulgurite again. Most of the sand fell away, leaving only enough to mock up a diagram of her grinning mouth. The four front teeth shifted, with all of the teeth becoming pointier until they meshed perfectly with the canines in an interlocking bear trap. Even the molars took on slightly more jagged silhouettes, even though they remained mostly flat.

“New front teeth. Current layout… Soon to be crooked. Drifting out of place. Need to adjust for mutation. Maneater teeth not… Not built for the long-term.”

Two memories came to the surface. The first was an image of the aforementioned Maneater of Retribution; its twisted, semi-human visage, a curtain of mottled brown hair hanging down over his face and parted by twisted antlers erupting from his skull. He had torn his own cheeks in half from opening his mouth so wide, and his teeth were as crooked as they were pointy. By contrast, Zel’s own teeth were straight and symmetrical, making her four mutated, Maneater-like teeth an ill fit. The second memory was nothing more than a thought: “We did agree to that, though I’d hoped it wouldn’t take long enough for me to forget about it…”

The connection now beginning to fade as the sounds of the real world flooded in, the Primordial Self talked back to her for once, even going so far as to form longer sentences: “Replacing childhood teeth takes years. Two seasons to reshape existing teeth is fast.”

The Primordial Self’s imposing figure blew away as no more than sand, and the next time Zelsys blinked, she found herself back atop the Sturmgandr, leaning up against Zef’s back, her arms wrapped securely around the blonde’s waist.

She thought to question why this hadn’t been a problem the last time her teeth had changed, when the Maneater’s Azoth had first taken physiological effect and sharpened her canines alongside lengthening her tongue… But it was answered by the spark of another memory: That mutation had taken place while she was unconscious.