It stretched on for minutes and hours, and Zel took the opportunity to for once play the part of spectator, quietly making her way about the yard and deriving great amusement from the would-be recruits’ reactions to her mere presence. Some shrunk from her, flinching merely at her gaze, while others grew noticeably tense as they - understandably - tried to put on a good show for the sect elder. Those who had stood out to her previously maintained their focus, least of all the Mercenary in his methodical assault on his towering opponent.

A most curious candidate showed up near the very end, a dour-faced Kargarian with a large coat and a strong presence. The curious part came when he was asked to take hold of the attribute reader’s handle, and refused on the grounds that: “I don’t have arms.”

He wasn’t turned away in spite of this, with the Kargarians putting a bulky belt on him and connecting it to the machine, which facilitated the same functionality. In actual testing, his lack of arms made no difference - he left dents in his target block and kept up with his sparring partners all the same, employing a style heavy in kicks and headbutts.

At the end of the process, after several hundred applicants, the courtyard was an utter mess, a mess which, thankfully, the Kargarians cleaned up without needing to be asked. The rather pretty-looking nobleman who had helped deal with the mercantile plot lottery brought over the resulting dossiers, which they spent a good portion of the day going over. It was only then that the matter of the leyline well and the ritual which took place there came up, and Zel readily explained what exactly had transpired. In the time going over the dossiers took, Zel also went over her technique list, mainly because a good number of the dossiers were boring in their acceptability - that is to say, the people they detailed were capable, promising even, but what they had displayed in the first round of vetting didn’t stand out in any significant way.

THUNDERCLAP STING Type: High Velocity Strike Trigger: Full-body Gesture (Requires high localized muscular saturation via Thundercharger) Effects: Kinetic Amplification B-, Kinetic Manipulation A, Precision Enhancement C Advancement: Unknown

She couldn’t have articulated the satisfaction that washed over her when she saw that even if she had tried to do so. In fact, it was such that she entirely forgot to check the detailed readouts for All-severing Scream and Flying Thundersaw.

The next day…

Yesterday’s spectacle had been more than sufficient to light a metaphorical fire under Makhus, the swordsman deciding that the sooner he got his weapon fixed, and the sooner he could get back to polishing Iron Philosophy, the better. Thus, he sought out the G-Kaisers.

The repair and reinforcement job on his blade turned out to be far cheaper and faster than he’d expected, with the smiths taking a look at it and just telling him: “Come back tomorrow, we’ll have him right as rain.”

When he asked the price, the quote he received was low enough that he felt comfortable just paying for it out of pocket, in no small part thanks to the success of Riverside Remedies; a decent chunk of change for sure, but one that would be easily covered by the profit-loss compensation they’d received from the caravan.

In the process of this errand, he also learned an interesting detail of arcane smithing.

“Speakin’ in generalized terms, there’s a couple stages of an object’s life when it is most receptive to magickal smithing. The first is the earliest, ideally right at inception, so to speak. The second is after it’s lived for a while, after it’s been used by people for a while, ideally one person if it’s somethin’ as personal as a blade. Even better if it’s already developed a soul of its own, which seems to be the case with your iron, though it’s quite young.”

“We’ll just do our usual cold-iron treatment, let our reactor do what it will, and we’ll see what happens. Long as you don’t decide to suddenly change how you fight I’d wager you’ll like what you get back from us.”

Gen approached Sarz once their customer left the smithy, sighing, “...The price you quoted that guy covers repair and reinforcement, but not a cold-iron treatment.”

“I know. I’ll do it on my own time. Ain’t like it’ll cost us anything extra, reactor’s already runnin’ all day at full tilt to begin with and we’ve got plenty of sacred quenching oil leftover that’s too impure fer greater arcane smithin’ but just fine for a couple rounds of cold-iron treatment.”

Projects of fancy were nothing new from Sarz, and this one wasn’t the first of this middling sort he’d accepted in their time here.

“They’re good blades, Gen, and it ain’t like an undedicated wielder could light a soul in a new-model warknife besides. They’ve barely been in production for what, half a decade. Would be a rotten thing to just leave a good soldier languishing as mundane, chipped steel,” he would say.

“Alright, let’s get these catalogued…'' a white-robed ankhezian muttered to himself in the comfort of his mountaintop manor, calmly scribing a seamless blend of High Ankhezian hieroglyphs and mnemoglyphs onto a solid blackstone tablet. He had just returned from a quite eventful country trip, and what he had seen left him in high spirits. Considering the depths of depravity and despair he had witnessed in the wake of previous, far smaller-scale conflicts, the outlook on recovery from the War of Fog was downright optimistic. Perhaps a few decades to a century, if things go well - though that was a truly cyclopean IF.

Year of His Glory, the Architect, 4713

Cultivation Branch VD62 Report No. 6

Monikers: Victory Demon, Victory Echoes, Hellfire Mantle

Cultivation Tier: Class 6

Observation Report:

My heretofore limited observation of the semi-novel “Victory Demon” cultivation branch has confirmed some aspects of my initial hypothesis, though its clear connection to the user’s mental state shows it to be more than a mere alchemically-induced mutation.