Zelsys was very much content to continue leaning against the transport’s pleasantly cool metal, but she wasn’t one to eavesdrop. When she heard Spliteye mumbling something about a foreigner in her unconscious state, she decided to join Makhus and Sigmund around the firepit. She was curious, but she wasn’t disrespectful of one’s privacy. Even so, she still caught muttered descriptors like “tall” and “brown” as she walked away from the transport.

Neither of the men said anything at her approach, though she almost tangibly felt Makhus’s gaze. It wasn’t tracing her skin or traveling to undue places, but rather jumping between her gun and the cleaver. The three of them sat there in silence as the two men slowly ate while Zelsys periodically switched between watching the fire and what little of the night sky could be seen through the tree canopy.

“Alright, fine. The cleaver’s yours,” Makhus suddenly piped up with annoyed resignation.

Zelsys gave him a look, one eyebrow raised. She knew he had more to say. “So it is. You want to take a look?” she offered, reaching for the handle, for she knew what his answer would be. A deliberate, controlled nod. The veneer of a self-controlled soldier broke almost immediately when Zelsys put the cleaver in her lap. Staring at the push-saw side with a furrowed brow, the swordsman muttered “The fuck’s this shit, that looks utterly impractical….”

“It sure saws through bears pretty good,” she laughed.

The sudden flash of two words in her head dragged her into the realm of the waking.

DELETION SUCCESSFUL

She woke with a stream of drool running down her cheek and her right arm numb up to the bicep, and after a few blinks to clear her eye, she immediately lifted the Tablet to take a look. Much to her relief, it seemed the process had worked, if the projection she was seeing was the one Makhus had seen. “Should’ve asked him what it showed when he woke up before I did it,” she chastised herself.

RECORD OVERWRITE PLEASE ENTER NAME

Much like Makhus, she chose a name other than her given one. Unlike him, hers was an entirely arbitrary choice. It wasn’t the name of anyone she had looked up to, or anyone who had played a significant role in her earlier life - it was just the name of a girl who she had met perhaps once or twice, a name which she liked and which stuck with her, unlike anything else about the girl.

“Zefaris.”

NAME ZEFARIS SEX FEMALE SPECIES HUMAN (IKESIAN) FORCE D PRECISION C+ HARDNESS C AETHER D+ TRAITS>

Not a flicker of surprise crossed her mind at the change in her attributes. “Helping him with that alchemic moonshine setup did improve my aether,” she thought, satisfied by the accuracy of her self-knowledge. The increase of her Hardness was only to be expected considering her circumstances, and she was all too confident in her own marksmanship to be surprised by the Tablet’s judgment of her Precision. Thinking nothing of it, she swiped through the projection to check her traits.

TRAITS Gunmanship (Rifle Spec.) Lesser Swordsmanship Lesser Rubedo Tolerance Rudimentary Aethermancy Headpiercer Arts Type-T Homunculus Eye (Unique)

“Nothing new huh,” she thought at first glance, focused more on the stiffness of her back as she sat up than what the traits list read. Another swipe to reset the Tablet, and out the transport’s door she went, the device in hand.

“That was fast,” remarked Sigmund as he stood up. “I presume it’s my turn next.”

With a nod she handed him the Tablet, taking a seat on his spot. Without enthusiasm, she directed her focus towards hand exercises in a futile attempt to make the numbness subside faster. More importantly, it was to give herself something to do besides trying not to look at the bronze, silver filigree adorned statue that sat next to her. Zefaris directed her eye at the border between the firepit’s ash and the forest’s tapestries of luminescent moss, imagining it to be a natural representation of the Exclusion Zone’s slow spread. “Ridiculous. I understand jewelry or even chainmail, but tattooing holy metal into your skin?” she thought, staring dead ahead but unable to help paying attention to the glimmering form in her peripheral vision.

The fight for self-control was won by Makhus’s voice when he asked “What name’d you pick?”

She raised her gaze to meet his, blinking a few times when she realized her eye was as dry as the Exclusion Zone. “Zefaris. You?”

“Makhus.”

A grin parted her lips. “That’s almost suspiciously generic,” she said.

“And Zefaris is suspiciously memorable,” he rebutted. The smell of Viriditas suddenly became stronger, accompanied by ribbons of green Fog rising from the ground next to the still.

“Uh, the still-” she began, but Makhus had already turned around, turning one of the still’s many valves to shut off output. He stood and strode toward the transport, emerging after a couple seconds of glassy clattering with an armful of bottles. With little regard, he allowed them to spill out of his grasp onto the mossy forest soil next to the still, smacking one of the large ones below the still’s outlet and opening the valve. A continuous flow of emerald-green Viriditas poured forth, much to his audible delight.

“Fuck me, that beast’s heart is packed with more Nigredo than a whole rotten deer!” he exclaimed, laughing as he watched the bottle filling. An eyebrow raised, Zefaris gave the amazon a questioning look.

Even Zelsys was impressed by the sheer amount of Viriditas that resulted from inserting the bear’s heart into the still. The device immediately began working at its highest capacity, the barrier-stone fragment shattered less than half a minute later, much to Makhus’s dismay and lightning-fast replacement with a pristine piece.

When Zefaris gave her that questioning look, her first response was a smile and a truthful excuse. “I didn’t butcher it,” she said. “Just took the heart out to make sure it wouldn’t pull itself back together.”

The blonde chuckled, turning her eye toward the beast’s carcass. “Yeah, that’s fair. Seen weirder shit in the zone,” she remarked. Zelsys had noticed her looking, but she didn’t particularly care. She’d let the riflewoman make her own choices, and in the meantime, she was just fine with sitting there and looking pretty.

Sigmund found the violent buzzing sensation that holding the Tablet caused unpleasant, even painful, but he had gotten used to pain. It was a fact of life, as far as he was concerned. The arcane device showed one word at his touch.

SCANNING

He waited for the device to finish scanning him without any thoughts on his mind beyond a hope that his attributes hadn’t decreased since he was scanned at the training camp. While this part of the process took place he sat down on Makhus’s bunk, taking care to position himself in a way that wouldn’t cause him to slip into the drool-stain when he fell unconscious.

RECORD FORMAT NOT RECOGNIZED REGISTER NEW FORMAT OVERWRITE RECORD

“Overwrite record,” he mentally repeated as he cautiously raised his hand to the projection to press it. He never was too confident around Fog devices. When his action caused pain to shoot up his arm, he expected to just pass out the way the other two had. Instead, he felt a familiar sensation creeping in, one not unlike a Rubedo Sickness seizure. The edges of his field of view were fading into silver rather than red, and instead of stiffness he felt himself becoming sluggish and overwhelmingly sleepy but it was worryingly familiar. “Boy, did the sickness mess up my soul too?” he worried, his concerns only worsened by what little he knew of the scan process.

Relief washed over him like a warm summer breeze when he felt his consciousness fading. “Guess I’m just a bit tougher of a nut to crack,” he smiled into his beard as he fell unconscious, sliding down into a lying position as his bald head squeaked against the metal wall.

Just as it had for Makhus and Zefaris, the Tablet woke him up with two words that flashed in his mind’s eye.

DELETION SUCCESSFUL

He woke immediately, sitting up so quickly he slammed his head against the bottom of the top bunk. A pained “Ow!” thundered from his mouth - more an exclamation of annoyance than one of pain, it nevertheless prompted a laugh from outside. The one who laughed was Makhus, to no surprise.

When Sigmund turned his eyes to the Tablet, it had changed to the very same thing it had for the others.

RECORD OVERWRITE PLEASE ENTER NAME

Not questioning it, he thought of his own name.

“Sigmund.”

He didn’t much worry about being recognized - he was there when his death certificate was penned, the last report from their squad to central command, which listed both him and the Captain as casualties. To be a casualty didn’t mean one was killed in action, but that didn’t matter, especially since in his record photo he had a mustache and a head full of hair. As far as the post-war government was concerned he was a dead man, and that gave him a sense of security in using his birth name.

The projection flickered and changed to an attribute readout, one which furrowed the brow and befuddled the mind. Partly for the supposedly superhuman Hardness which the device assigned him, and partly for the second attribute ratings in parentheses.

NAME SIGMUND SEX MALE SPECIES HUMAN (IKESIAN) FORCE D+ PRECISION C- (C+) HARDNESS B AETHER E+ (C-) TRAITS>

Taking care not to hit his head again he stood up, walking out onto the clearing as he shook off the last cobwebs of unconsciousness. A conversation echoed faintly from outside, and he could tell it was between Zelsys and Zefaris by their voices. He passed by Makhus on the way out, taking no particular note of what he was doing until he heard the swordsman enthusiastically muttering something. “Purgation Arts: Hundredfold Viriditas Containment Seal Creation!” he recited, soon followed by a weak breeze from the rapid movement of his arms and the sound of calligraphy brushes on parchment. He turned to look, and saw something he hadn’t seen in a long time - since they first started brewing Viriditas, really.

The butchering table had been cleaned to a cleaner state than usual. To Makhus’s left, there were four empty sheets of parchment, the seal-covered bottle that seemed to store an endless quantity of Rubedo, an inkwell, three calligraphy brushes, and a bowl with a liquid so dark-red it was nearly black. To his right, he had stacked four sheets of parchment covered in a repeating pattern of that dark ink - containment seals, painted with Rubedo-infused ink.

Sigmund knew his friend wouldn’t so much as acknowledge any external stimuli until he finished this sheet of seals, and thus he just waited, leaning in to get a look at the process. First came an outline along the parchment’s edge with one brush, then a grid to outline the seals with a different, special brush, a narrow blade flashing amidst the bristles. “He could’ve made a living off that back in the day,” he thought, and then a realization hit him. He waited - Tablet in hand - for the swordsman to finish the seal-painting sequence, for that small exhalation at the end when he put the brush down.

“What’d you need all those seals for?” he asked as Makhus put the finished sheet on the stack. “We don’t even have that many bottles.”

“I know. It’s to cover all our bottles completely. Partly to make sure none o’ the stuff goes poof, partly to-”

“You think they’ll let us past the border with all of that?” he jokingly interrupted.

“Let me finish. I figure they’ll confiscate some of it no matter what, so we just gotta make sure what they confiscate is Liquid Vigor instead of pure essentia. Thus, I gotta cover up all the bottles, so it’s not suspicious.”

“Won’t making all those seals tire you out?”

Makhus laughed at that. “It normally fuckin’ would, the ink’s one third Rubedo by volume. Lucky fer me…” he shook the Rubedo bottle. Sigmund was just about to play into the conversation further by asking how he’ll distinguish the Rubedo bottle from the others if all of them are completely covered in seals, but Makhus interrupted him with an offhanded gesture at the Tablet. “Does the sickness show up as a trait?” he asked.

“Ah, I… Have not checked those,” he confessed, raising the Tablet and skimming his attributes again. “I should do that.”

The fingers of his left hand hovered above the projection as he tried to discern how to get to his traits. He couldn’t remember how - he knew how to, but the memory just wouldn’t come to the forefront no matter how much he muttered into his beard and furrowed his brow. Makhus watched and waited, and with an almost palpable effort to not sound condescending, advised to “Swipe to the right, like on the old model back at recruitment.”

Sigmund couldn’t help but laugh at himself as he did as Makhus suggested. “Must still be a bit foggy up in the ol’ noggin,” chuckled the bald soldier through his beard as he waited for the Tablet’s projection to flicker to the next readout.

TRAITS Lesser Swordsmanship Lesser Gunmanship Lesser Fog Intolerance Greater Rubedo Tolerance Greater Ignis Tolerance Metabolic Rubedo (Stress-triggered - Unique) Victory Echoes (Unique)

For a while, he stood there reading the list over and over. “Hrm… It makes sense, up ‘till the last two,” he thought aloud, turning the Tablet so that Makhus could see. The swordsman briefly averted his gaze, but looked once he realized it was intentional rather than just a slip-up. He skimmed the list, furrowed his brow, rubbed the stubble of his chin, then remarked “Fucked up how chuggin’ the essence of fire can turn ya flame-retardant. I’m pretty sure the second to last one is yer sickness.”

A few minutes after the last of the three soldiers left to use the Tablet, Zelsys remembered something. She reached for the bolt handle of her gun, giving it a solid turn and a backward yank. The empty shell jumped out of the chamber and she caught it, expecting it to be cold - strangely, even this long after being fired, the brass was still almost painfully hot. The rather loud mechanical noise caught Zefaris’s attention, and her eye twinkled like a binary star at the sight of the shell.

Zelsys didn’t know what the symbol on the back of the shell said, but that didn’t mean the blonde had to know that. “C’mon, you’re good with a gun. What does the symbol on the base of this shell mean?” she asked, tossing the shell over. The rune was a little deformed from the impact of the striker, but she thought it should be perfectly legible. The markswoman eagerly caught it, turning it over in her fingers and examining it inside and out.

“Low-yield,” remarked Zefaris, chuckling at the fact. “If this is low-yield, wouldn’t high-yield just rip your arm off from the recoil?”

“Of course not. I’d just be able to propel myself a couple dozen meters,” Zelsys responded, only half-jokingly. She hadn’t checked the runes on the other shells, and thus didn’t actually know whether she had any shells other than “low-yield”. The conversation was somewhat interrupted by the feeling of cold marble on her shoulder and the sight of Sigmund’s bushy face when she turned to look.

“All done?” she asked, taking the Tablet from him. The only answer she got was an affirmative grunt while he walked over to the nearest free log to take a seat on. When she lowered her gaze toward the Tablet she caught Zefaris’s eye affixed squarely on her stomach, only for the twin-pupiled eye to jump to the fire a half-second later.

SCANNING UPDATING RECORD UPDATE SUCCESSFUL

A warm thrum shot up her arm when the so-called record update took place. The readout changed to show her traits rather than attributes, as Sigmund hadn’t switched it back to that readout after checking his own traits.

TRAITS Survivor’s Instinct Fog-breathing Lesser Great-cleaver Expertise Lesser Gunmanship (Arm-cannon Spec.) Osmotic Essentia Absorption Metabolic Alkahest Beast Butchering Arts (Unique)

Paying the readout no particular mind, she swiped to the left twice to get to the Fog Storage. “Hey, look at this,” she waved at Zefaris, placing the Tablet on her lap and activating the PUT INTO STORAGE function. Even she was entertained by the small Fog vortex forming, as mundane a thing as it was.

The blonde sluggishly raised her eye from the fire-pit. She had been becoming progressively more noticeably sleepy, and now that Zelsys thought about it, she was somewhat sleepy as well. Nevertheless, there were still a few things to be done before she was willing to sleep. She dropped the casing into the vortex, waiting for it to dissipate before she pressed BROWSE STORAGE. The tablet distinguished between the loaded shells, but it did so by labeling them as “Type-1 Loaded shell” or “Type-2 Loaded Shell”.

She recovered a Type-1 Loaded shell, and sure enough, it had the rune for “low-yield” on its base. A turn of the bolt handle, a backwards yank, and the bolt popped open, to which Zefaris’s sluggish demeanor perked up somewhat as she visibly began to pay more attention when Zelsys did absolutely anything involving the “Arm-cannon”, as the Tablet referred to it.

Clack. Clack. The bolt shut, Zelsys rose to her feet and stretched, letting out an involuntary moan of “Mnnngh…” as she did. “Think I’ll call it a night,” she said, rolling her shoulders to shake off the last remnants of stiffness from sitting motionless.

“Same here, probably,” muttered Sigmund, his eyes half-closed. Zefaris only gave an indistinct affirmative groan as she leaned forward, slowly standing up and dusting herself off.

Just about ready to sleep, Zelsys walked to the transport and slipped into the lower right bunk. She took off her boots, the cleaver’s holster, and the arm-cannon alongside its arm harness, placing all three against the wall. Short as the bunk was for her height, it was plenty wide, unlike the passage between it and the other bunk.

She stretched out on the hard mattress, her feet hanging out of the bunk, head resting on her hands. All it took was a couple deep breaths, and she slipped into the realm of sleep.

A mixture of smells and sounds assaulted the senses. Zelsys instinctively grabbed to the right, grabbing the cleaver before she even opened her eyes. The pale morning sun shone through the doorway. The smell that filled her nostrils was a pungent mixture of Viriditas and Nigredo, the former countering the latter and creating a smell that could only be described as aggressively fungal, a smell that one would follow if they wanted to find mushrooms after rain. The other smells were sweat, and menthol, and vanilla, noticeably wafting in from nearby.

“Morning already?” she thought, looking around. The bunk across was empty, but there she was - Zefaris stood over the sink, brushing her teeth. She placed a cup underneath the faucet and turned the valve, the crystal on the wall glowing a faint blue as crystal-clear water poured into the waiting cup. She poured the water down the drain, then opened the faucet again and washed her hands, then her face.

Shaking her head, Zelsys sluggishly rolled out of the bunk into a sitting position, stretching and rolling her shoulders, blinking and yawning as she shook off the cobwebs of sleep. “Talk about a deep sleeper. Hey Snow White, catch,” said the blonde, throwing something thin and wooden into Zelsys’s waiting hand. It was a flat piece of wood with bristles on one end - a mass-produced toothbrush, the type that one would find in a ration pack’s accessory tin. It was pristine, and smelled strongly of menthol.

“We got mis-assigned a shitload of accessory tins instead of regular rations. Had to start hunting early on, but at least we got all the toothbrushes and Aqua crystals we could need,” Zefaris answered both of the questions she was going to ask, walking out onto the clearing soon after.

Zelsys stood up, walked to the sink, wetted the toothbrush, and just… Brushed her teeth, unable to shake the strange feeling. A toothbrush and running water. Such mundane, basic amenities felt out of place in a place like this. Her mouth filled with foam and bitter menthol, washed away by the water to who knew where. An arcane reservoir like Makhus’s Rubedo bottle? An alchemic recycler that would condense the pure Aqua into a new crystal? A regular old tank somewhere in the transport’s guts? Who knew.

She rinsed her mouth, splashed some water on her face, put on her boots and strapped the cleaver in its holster to her back. Next came the arm harness, and in her hand, the Tablet. The rays of the morning sun fell upon her face as she stepped out of the transport, and there they were, the three so-called war criminals.

Zefaris and Sigmund were around the now-dead fire-pit, busy packing things into three huge backpacks and a variety of smaller pouches, while Makhus was crouched at the still, sticking seals to one bottle with his right hand and holding another to the outlet with his left. The rot-bear’s heart had shriveled to less than the size of a fist, and still it beat inside the flask, pumping black Fog into the apparatus even with the burners off.

As Zelsys approached them, she felt Makhus’s eye upon the Tablet, and she almost palpably felt the realization dawning on him before he asked what she thought he would. “Hey, this might be a lil’ much to ask,” he began, but Zelsys cut him off before he could finish by simply walking up and sitting down on one of the logs, placing the Tablet on the ground and activating the PUT INTO STORAGE function.

She sat there, legs crossed and hands on her knees, staring at him as the Fog vortex formed. “It won’t stay open for long, and the moment it closes that’s it,” she smugged at him. “Hurry up soldier boy.”

A hearty laugh issued forth from her when she saw his eyes go wide as he reached for one of the larger seal-bottles with lightning speed, cautiously placing it onto the vortex, which was too small for the bottle to fit. It expanded to swallow the bottle, and an expression of visible relief settled into Makhus’s face as he reached for the next one, dropping it into the vortex with far less caution.

She knew that the vortex would stay open for as long as they kept adding things, but they didn’t, and the resulting momentary panic manifested itself as a mindblowing feat of sheer coordination. In less than five minutes, the three soldiers managed to store most of the seal-bottles and the vast majority of the heaviest goods they would be carrying, even including their chest-plates and weapons, with the exception of Makhus’s sword and Zefaris’s rifle.

“Last one,” the blonde said as she rushed toward the vortex. In her hands, there was a small flask bearing seals in blue ink, half-filled with ash and coals, a fist-sized gemstone the colour of dying embers sitting atop them. The vortex swallowed it the same way it did everything else, and the three soldiers breathed a collective sigh of relief. Zelsys gave them all a look, grinning ear to ear. She could tell by the rising annoyance in her face that Zefaris had already realized what she was about to say.

“Y’know, I would’ve let you store your shit even if you let the vortex close,” she admitted, “but watching you go was entertaining.”

They departed perhaps half an hour later, leaving behind most of the camp - Zelsys couldn’t clearly tell how much the sun had moved through the tree canopy, and more importantly, she couldn’t read its movements that accurately. Makhus didn’t bother even attempting to dismantle the alchemic still, instead just smashing it up with a rock before they left.

A harmless prank aside, the three soldiers were thankful for not having to carry the bulkiest of their possessions. Their backpacks were still heavy enough to slow them down, which was only compounded by the density of the forest. So narrow were the footpaths that they had no choice but to walk in single file, with Makhus in the front, Zelsys just behind him, Zefaris behind her and Sigmund at the very back. It only took a few dozen steps down the path before Makhus unsheathed his blade and began hacking away at the vegetation that stood in their way, carving a path through the greenery with inhumanly fast, precise cuts.

Five of the smaller and one of the larger seal-bottles dangled off the swordsman’s backpack, jingling against one another as the liquid within sloshed about from the motion of his swings.

“Why not store all the bottles?” she questioned, as much to get an answer as she did to break the silence.

“We’ll drink at least two of these during the hike, the cocksuckers at the checkpoint will confiscate the rest,” he answered resentfully, visibly channeling his anger into the next cleave, in which he caused a large branch to thunk to the ground. It was clear he had certain expectations of how the border crossing would go, ones rooted deeply in some sort of negative past experience. What that could be, Zelsys didn’t know - perhaps mere corruption among the border guards, or some petty discrimination based on superficial traits.

They walked as such for some time, the only sounds to keep them company being those of their footfalls, those of the trees, and those of Makhus’s impeccable bladesmanship being used to carve through weeds and saplings. Over the course of the trek, Zelsys felt her instinct going off every once in a while - each time the feeling came, she began to pay more attention to her surroundings, and each time without fail, she caught a double-pupiled eye staring from behind.

Each time, she did nothing to make it clear she had noticed - it didn’t bother her, if anything Zefaris’s gaze was a welcome distraction from the mind-numbing tedium of trekking through the woods. This phenomenon drew her attention to something far more concerning - despite the forest’s lushness and supernaturally fast growth, there were no birds. Not a sparrow, or an owl, or a woodpecker to be found anywhere.

Minutes turned to hours as they walked, a couple kilometers turned to tens, and the sun rose high into the sky as they made their way through the forest. Her appreciation of Makhus’s skill with a sword only grew every time he carved a path through a particularly nasty bramble. Wherever a large enough clearing could be found, they used the opportunity to take a break and pass around a bottle of Liquid Vigor.

One after another, they emptied three of the five smaller bottles. During the second of these small breaks, Zelsys took the time to slide the Tablet between her arm-cannon’s trigger lever and her forearm, tying it to her forearm with some of the loose bandages she had used to wrap her forearm previously. It was in part out of convenience, and in part because she wished to at least marginally conceal the weapon.

Eventually they came upon a rather well-defined footpath, following which led them to the edge of a large clearing amidst the trees. Makhus quickly sheathed his sword when the end of the footpath came into view, gesturing and hissing at Zelsys to “C’mon, walk ahead. Try to seem nonthreatenin’.”

She put on a friendly smile and did as was asked, emerging into the clearing and approaching the checkpoint with her hands to her sides. The checkpoint was a small brick and mortar building with barred windows. It stood at the side of a gravel road that seemed to begin right at the border crossing, snaking off into the woods at the other side.

The border was outlined by a razor-wire topped chain-link fence, which stretched off in either direction and disappeared into greenery after only a few dozen meters. The crossing point itself had no gate or moving barrier, but was rather obstructed by gigantic caltrops - anti-vehicle barriers from the war.

Sure enough, the building’s door soon flew open and from within emerged a man wearing stereotypical Grekurian officer’s garb, officer’s cap and huge black and gold coat included. The coat seemed to hang rather heavily on his shoulders. His narrow, mustachioed face was pale, but not quite the snow-white pale of her compatriots, and he had truly impressive bags below his dark-brown eyes.

The man stared at Zelsys, reaching into his coat to pull out a pistol with a wide barrel and an orange gemstone at its back. Though he pointed it at her, his finger rested on the trigger-guard, and he didn’t seem particularly tense.

“Approach with your hands where I can see them!” he barked, squinting at her as if he was trying to see through her. As she approached, both his expression and posture lightened, his gaze repeatedly jumping between her lower stomach, her face, and her left arm. Her smile only grew.

“Are you alone?” he questioned.

“No, sir,” she said with no actual respect at all. “There are three others, two men and one woman.”

At that, he leaned over to look past her, and she was able to pinpoint the exact moment when he caught sight of her compatriots by the sudden stiffening of his features. Despite the fact she was far closer and had a visible weapon on her back, his gun snapped to aim at the three Ikesians, his index now hovering over the trigger. His face twisted into a snarl, filled with resentment and spite.

“We’re just scavengers, officer,” Makhus’s voice sounded from behind her. The officer cackled a disbelieving laugh, as if to mock the idea of trusting an Ikesian’s word.

“Really?! And you expect me to believe that when you’re carrying Ikesian military equipment? I’m no fool, Snow White. You don’t look like the posters, but that’s a pre-war uniform you’re wearing, minus the chest-plate.”

“I also have a pre-war saber,” Makhus rebuked, audibly fighting the urge to get into a shouting match with the officer. “There’s a hundred thousand more like it in the graveyard at the center of the E.Z.”

The officer’s eyes drifted over to Zelsys, then to two other people out of sight - Zefaris and Sigmund - before snapping back to Makhus.

“Fine,” he mocked, directing his spite towards the Ikesians. “We’ll see if you’re war criminals yet. Follow me, hands where I can see them.”

His eyes leered toward Zelsys. He scanned her up and down before he added, with notably less venom to his tone, “You too, snowtop.”

She chuckled at the remark, waiting for the officer to begin walking before she did. He effectively backed into the open doorway, keeping both his eyes and his gun trained on the Ikesians that followed behind Zelsys. She had to bend down slightly to pass through the door, and once inside, what she saw was… Thoroughly underwhelming. The room was a squat rectangle, more of a square really.

At the end opposite the entryway, there stood a table with a relatively nice-looking chair at the user’s end and a pair of rickety metal seats in front of it. There were some lockers behind the desk, and a strange machine up against the wall. The machine had a bulky base which held a slot for a key, a couple unlabeled buttons, and a handle. There was a row of upward-pointed nozzles, which Zelsys suspected to be outlets for Fog. There was a metal door behind the table, clearly not intended for those wishing to cross the border.

It looked well-used, unlike everything else in the makeshift office-space. A thought crossed Zelsys’s mind as she looked around. “Does the guy live here?”

The officer took a seat at his desk, placed his gun on it, and did nothing in particular to prompt any of them to take a seat. They knew better than to try, and all four of them preferred to remain standing.

“Now,” he smiled with venom at the four of them. “Under the… Frankly generous assumption that the three Ikes aren’t war criminals or worse, why should I let you cross the border? Why would anyone of honest heart try to enter a seedbed of scum and degeneracy such as Ikesia?”

Despite his vile demeanor, Zelsys only continued to smile at him. She held no fear, and the officer could tell.

“Scan me, little man,” she rumbled, bending down to look him in the eye properly. ”Be a good soldier.”

One of his eyes visibly twitched at that and his hand shifted slightly toward his gun, but he maintained his composure as he stood and reached into his coat, pulling out a keyring of many keys and inserting one into a slot on the strange machine. With a turn, the machine emitted a chorus of mechanical ticking, a complex internal mechanism audibly coming alive.

He stepped aside, gesturing for Zelsys to approach the machine, while he kept his hand firmly on the key. She stepped squarely into the officer’s personal space, took hold of the handle with her right hand, and squeezed. The metal creaked in her grip. With some difficulty, the officer reached over and pressed two of the machine’s buttons in sequence, prompting its nozzles to sputter puffs of Fog before they began to emit continuous threads of it, much like candles that had just been snuffed out. A warm thrum spread through her hand and to her forearm.

The threads of Fog swam through the air, intertwining and contorting to form a sentence at eye height.

NO CRIMINAL RECORD FOUND