Truly, Lydia had distanced herself from anything to do with cultivation, even fleeing to the mountain-kingdoms to escape the worst of the war. And yet, she couldn’t help herself; when that woman took off she ran after her, seeing her take off. Knowing that the livestead wasn’t in that direction at all, she waited outside Fort 57. She’d heard of this woman in recent months. It was impossible to mistake an appearance as distinct as this. Tales spread quickly, especially tales of a person who supposedly resurrected a sect and struck down one of the Divine Generals.

When she rode by on that monstrous, howling machine, Lydia let out a sigh and began running. It was only a few kilometers, at the absolute worst she would arrive in time to see the beast die, knowing how impossibly tenacious an Alkasnail was. Lydia arrived to the livestead just in time to behold a sight that didn’t fit into her conception of what a cultivator was, what they could do. In her few years in the world of cultivation, she’d seen all sorts of methods. Simple body hardening, mutagens, elixirs, drugs. Weapons from the normal to the outlandish, from spears and maces to flying swords and meteor hammers. Magicks of all kinds, too; glyphs, fireballs, incantations and rituals, curses, talismans, even an elemental transformation and the blinding speed of a Kargarian Storm-soul Cultivator.

Nothing like this. Nothing remotely like this.

It was an image straight out of an ancient myth, something one would see etched on the wall of a long-abandoned temple. Without thinking, she drew closer.

That woman with her huge braids, a sword grasped in each hand as if it were a spear, and at least two-dozen more swords stabbed into the ground all around her. Each braid was tipped by the ghostly head of a monster made of pure lightning, and each grasped in its jaws yet another sword. Each sword was shrouded in arcs of lightning, the snapping and buzzing drowning out all other sound, as did the stench of ozone drown out all other smells. She just stood there seemingly unconcerned even as a burst of alkahest sprayed right by her head, stepping aside to the left before just jumping out of the way of the creature’s eyestalk-flail, the serpents which sprouted from her head grabbing more blades from the ground. A laugh full of amusement emanated from the woman, ringing with a bell-like purity. She made this dance of ultraviolence seem whimsical and gracious, in no small part because of the impossible coordination with which she moved, with nary one wasted twitch of a single muscle.

Another sword thrown. It smashed into the creature with the force of a true lightning bolt, a slurry of pulverized flesh gushing out of the wound alongside the shattered remains of the weapon.

There was no cultivator, nobleman or otherwise, that Lydia had known to be capable of such a thing. She had, of course, only ever met the lower and lower-middle echelons of a single sect, but that didn’t change how earth-shaking this image was for her. It seared itself into her mind with a brilliant clarity, one which she would go on to render out upon canvas.

With each sword she threw, Zelsys felt herself gaining a better grasp of the process, growing closer to a comprehensive understanding. As it had been many times before, applying techniques in real combat was what it took for her to solidify a new technique. It was also a plainly entertaining change of pace, fundamentally different from her usual close-in tactics.

The snail’s left eyestalk came crashing down, and taking a Dragon Knight sword from one of her braids, she met it with an upward cut. It was another imitation Aquila Calibur, its rudimentary pyromantic circuits overwhelmed by the deluge of Fulgur she poured into it, causing it to burn with tongues of lightning and the fuel gem in its pommel to turn blue. The fuel gem’s Ignis was simply subsumed by the flood of Fulgur, as the latter was a composite of Ignis and Aer and its quantity by far surpassed the gem’s remaining charge. Snail and parasite flesh alike gave in easily under the blade, wreathed in flames and lightning as it was, the shredded bulb falling limply behind her. It was easily the size of her torso. Out of interest in examining it later, she handed the blade back to one of her braids and took another Dragon Knight sword in hand.

Already the right-hand eyestalk was pulling back for a much faster whip strike, so she changed her grip and put her entire body into this one throw. Being made of good cold-iron and to a higher standard, the swords of Dragon Knights didn’t so much as crack under the charge she placed into them.

This one ripped straight through the air and struck the very root of the Alkasnail’s right eyestalk. There came a sudden discharge, and the eyestalk suddenly burst, splitting down the middle from the base to the tip much like a lightning-struck tree, only backwards. The multi-colored, gigantic specimen of Black Rope lurched out onto the ground, only for Zelsys to pin it with a thrown blade. The discharge was grounded and thus didn’t cause meaningful harm to the gigantic worm, but that made little difference when it was washed away by a blind outpouring of Alkahest from its former host.

It only took a few more throws before the Alkasnail ceased moving in any meaningful way, and it was then that she felt the technique finally settling into something concrete, the world stopping for but a moment. It lay there, blind and immobile, dying as tens of meters of Black Rope erupted out through its mouth and wounds, many of the parasites clearly split at points. They writhed about on the ground, tangling into a huge ball and rolling away in an apparent attempt to escape. A couple more thrown blades put a stop to that attempt, shredding the mass apart before it could make it onto the right-hand field. Next was only the matter of harvesting the snail’s beak, and for this purpose she took up the Fulgur-burned faux-Aquila Calibur again. Even with the snail seemingly disabled, she took care to stay clear of the opening and didn’t risk letting her guard down.

This choice turned out to be correct when a particularly thick specimen of Black Rope lunged out of the beast’s maw halfway through Zelsys cutting the beak out. A thick, keratinous ovipositor erupted from the creature’s lamprey-like mouth as it emerged, attempting to stab her and doubtlessly inject its young, but she caught the thing mere centimeters before it would’ve had a chance to pierce her skin, sharply turning it away from her just as hair-thin black worms sprayed out of the horrendous thing. She fried it alive, dumping Fulgur into the giant worm until it dried out and stiffened in her grip.

Throwing aside the blade in her hand, she pulled out the Butcher and used it to excise the beak in full. While doing this she felt a presence, approaching from the rear. Not a threat, or at least not malicious. Jumping off of the slimy corpse, her observer didn’t precisely turn out to be what she had expected by the feel of the presence: An old woman, looking to be in her early fifties. Her face bore crow's feet and her eyes spoke her age freely, but the quality of her skin, hair, and personal presence spoke not a word of aging; youth had left her, but she had escaped the grasp of old age for now. She was dressed in the mismatched armor of a mercenary, and carried herself with a semblance of a mercenary’s combat-capable demeanor. Indeed, only a semblance, because the woman was damn near kowtowing in front of Zelsys, a fact that pleased and confused her in equal measure. She recognized her.

“Who- What are you?! That power, it is the likeness of a Fierce Deity, unlike any magic I have seen!” the woman exclaimed, stumbling over her own words as she tried to coherently express her bewilderment. A part of Zelsys wanted to lean into that and to simply claim that she had, in fact, usurped part of a dead storm deity. It wouldn’t have been entirely untrue, as the nature-spirits which fuelled her magic were often deified, but the idea of such a deception left a bad taste in her mouth.

She relaxed and stopped Fog-breathing, her braids falling limp all at once, the blades in their grips sticking into the ground in a semicircle.

“Just a beast-slayer. I go where I will, and slay beasts that need slaying, regardless of how many legs they walk on-” she began.

“-or what honeyed words they speak, yes, I’ve heard of your feats, Lady Newman…” the old woman interrupted, having gotten her bearings enough to speak coherently, though the awe was still thoroughly present. “But… Never have I seen something like that, nor have I heard or read of such things being possible through cultivation.”

“Let me guess, Black Horses?” Zel smugly raised an eyebrow, pulling out her Tablet to store the beak for now. Already having determined that she liked the aura of this benign stalker, she also retrieved a copy of Sturmblitz Kunst 0.

Hesitating a bit, the woman answered, “Sanger Family…”

“Uh-huh. Sure doesn’t feel like you’re a cultivator. Y’quit or get kicked out?” the beast-slayer questioned.

“A nobleman forced me out.” Lydia answered.

“Alright, one more question. You followed me from Fort 57. Why?”

“I don’t… I don’t know. Curiosity, I suppose.”

“Well take a sword and don’t get in my way, ‘cause I’m not done here yet. Need to retrieve the ones that didn’t break and make sure all the Black Rope is gone. Oh, and take this, too,” Zel said, tossing the pamphlet over to Lydia before turning around, beginning to pick unbroken swords from the ground. The mercenary caught it on reflex, taking only moments to examine it before she figured out what it was.

“Any of these swords?” came a question from behind soon enough. Zel grinned to herself, knowing the meaning.

“Sure, just take one,” she gestured vaguely in the direction of the Fulgur-burned Dragon Knight blade. There came a voltaic sound, and a cry of surprised pain, as the sword released its proportionately tiny lingering charge into Lydia. When she turned to look, Zel saw, to her satisfaction in her own ability to judge others, that the woman was still holding the blade without issue. She asked: “Sure about that? It’ll eat Ignis gems by the handful to work.”

“Why would that matter-”

“It’s yours now, what did you think I meant when I told you to take a sword?” Zel asked smugly. “Just don’t use it to become a beast for me to clean up later on… And come to Willowdale if you ever want to try your hand at cultivation again. The Newman Family could use as many competent disciples as we can get.”

“But this must be the price of a small-” Lydia began to object, but bit her tongue halfway through and just accepted a cultivator’s generosity, not wishing to seem ungrateful, as she still had little reason to believe Zelsys to be any saner than a typical Azoth Stone Cultivator. It wasn’t as if the beast-slayer was listening, as she had finished recovering the remaining blades and was now halfway towards the barn entrance. Inside, she expected to find something akin to a locust-man hive, egg sacs and hive material all over the place, but no such thing came to be. The barn’s interior, save for a number of smaller parasites and a great deal of general filth, was clean, or so she thought.

There was a hole in the back wall, just barely big enough for a human to fit through, a trail of dried blood running from it up to the ladder onto the loft. She found a body up there, splayed out right next to the edge.

“There’s our suspect…” she sighed through the stench of a rotting corpse, which had been hidden by the smell of the grandparents’ bodies. It was an Ikesian, wearing superficially Ikesian clothes, but she knew better. There were subtle details that betrayed this dress as the disguise of a Pateirian collaborator. However, the corpse’s other possessions were better evidence still. The first was an undeniably Pateirian-styled dagger, crusted with dried venom, which she recognized immediately: It was akin to the dagger which a failed assassin had used to kill himself rather than be interrogated. The venom, too, had an unmistakable scent - Heartstopper Venom, the venom of choice for the aforementioned assassin.

The second object explained the infestation: A seal-jar in the Pateirian style, its cork having been removed, and dead Black Rope worms still floating at the bottom.