“So…” Sigmund scratched his beard, narrowing his eyes as his eyes flicked between Makhus, the semi-sentient tube baby in the display cabinet, and the notes on the writing desk. “You’re telling me that, somehow, we happened to meet the result of this supposed experiment? I mean… You’ve got to admit, it’s hard to believe that Zelsys came about through the same processes as…”

A gesture at the homunculus in the jar to illustrate his point. Makhus raised his eyebrows in response, chuckling in befuddlement as he questioned, “That’s the part you find hard to believe? Not that we just so happened to meet her, or rent this place?”

“Both o’ those are just synchronicity, happenstance. We met her because there are very few paths through the Maze of Dead Trees, and you would’ve rented this place when we eventually got out of the EZ on our own, even if we hadn’t met Zelsys and taken the easy way out. Two plus two equals four. It’s not that uncommon - most myths throughout history arose from astounding confluences of synchronicity…” the historian in Sig’s mind took over, trailing off until his own ruminations led him to a realization. He silently stared at the alchemist, eyes growing wide in epiphany.

Makhus became visibly concerned in turn, asking, “What?”

“If you’re correct, and by the dead gods do I hope you’re correct, we might be living through a milestone of history.”

“And that means…”

“Maybe nothing, maybe everything. I might just be seeing patterns where there are none, we might go unmentioned in the history books,” Sigmund mused, allowing his inner monologue to run rampant. “Or, this might be part of the Sage’s contingency plans and we’ll get dragged into something far greater than Willowdale someday soon. Can’t know which it is until the day comes, if it ever does. I’m not speaking in concrete terms, ‘case that wasn’t obvious - this is history as much as it is my personal philosophy. Irrelevant to the present, really.”

“So you believe me.”

“There’s a homunculus in a jar staring back at me and a dead man’s notes that support your claims litter this desk,” he gestured to both of these things in turn. “I don’t have a choice in the matter. We’ll know for sure once Zelsys gets back, if she does let you run all those tests.”

Their conversation was interrupted by the distant ring of the doorbell. At first they thought it was the two women returning, but a different voice came. The singer’s sonorous bellow, inhumanly loud even without the active amplification of his abilities.

“Anyone in here?” he yelled into the store. “Hello?”

Both of them made their way up the stairs and into the front of the store, with Makhus taking the lead in dealing with a stranger as was usual for them, whilst Sigmund just delivered the wizened soldier stare that came so naturally to him. After all, it was just his resting face.

“My apologies, but uh…” the alchemist began, giving the singer’s battle-scarred visage a once over. Not only was he missing an eye, not only did his face bear obvious ritualistic scars, but he stood in an awkward way that made it obvious his lower left leg was prosthetic - one with very little articulation at that. “...We’re still preparing for reopening, and we probably won’t have anything specific for a lil’ while.”

The soldier’s stare remained squarely fixed to Sigmund even as Makhus spoke his platitudes, and the historian felt as if the man was staring straight past his face and into his soul, somehow. It wasn’t his good eye that caused this feeling, though - it was the brass plug embedded in his right eye-socket, its surface briefly glimmering whenever the singer blinked his good eye.

After what felt like an eternity he at last faced Makhus, thundering out in a polite though annoyed tone, “I need some Liquid Vigor, just ran out. The merchant across from one o’ my spots is a piece of shit that charges fifteen gelt for a quarter-liter, can you believe that? Says it’s made with authentic Viriditas sourced from the Exclusion Zone. I’ve been to the E.Z., the trees there ain’t no greener than here. Just denser.”

Makhus furrowed his brow and let out an equally annoyed murmur of insults directed towards the merchant’s mother before addressing the singer again.

“Twenty gelt for a liter if you’re willing to wait,” he offered on the spot. “How much do you need?”

“A liter and a half, preferably in all half-liters. Is that alright?” the singer responded, pulling a coin pouch stuffed with coppers and silvers off his belt. He opened it, counted out five silvers and five coppers, and held them out for Makhus to take. The alchemist took the money with a nod and an utterance of thanks, quickly stepping behind the counter and stowing it into the venerable cash register to the sound of clacking machinery. He walked into the back, assuring the singer that, “I’ll have your Liquid Vigor right away, just a moment.”

The sound of glass bottles clinking together sounded out of the secondary storage room, followed by the squeak of a valve and the sloshing of liquid. Whilst Makhus filled the bottles and corked them up, the Singer continued to stare holes through Sigmund, clearly sizing him up. Just as Makhus walked up and handed him his order, the singer spoke again.

It was a simple nod of acknowledgment and a “Thanks.” to the alchemist, but he didn’t leave. He continued to stare at Sigmund, uncorking one of the bottles and downing half of its contents right then and there before he burped out a few wisps of green Fog and corked it back up.

Light-green liquid running down his chin, he finally broke the awkward tension.

“How does your excess Rubedo manifest?” he asked. “Spasms? Seizures? Mood swings?”

Makhus froze in place mid-step towards the doorway into the back, turning on a heel and making the choice to observe the exchange, quietly, ready to break anything up if the two veterans were to fight.

“Seizures,” Sigmund admitted, making no effort to conceal this. The singer already knew, which he did question with, “How do you know?”

“Takes one to know one, soldier. You stink of blood and fire and whiskey, same as I used to. You fight your demons every single day, same as I used to,” the soldier said, uncorking the half-empty bottle again and taking another swig. The ornament in his eye-socket began to glow a faint orange and his stance became more natural, the effects of Liquid Vigor compensating for the bodily damage it couldn’t heal.

“Now, for this advice, you don’t have to pay me so much as a single gelt. I give it freely, soldier to soldier - go get yourself black-out drunk on anything akin to whiskey and face the moments you’ve forced yourself to forget. Brawl your demons and put them to rest for good. Once you come out on the other side, you’ll thank me.”

“Getting blackout drunk doesn’t sound like a good way of dealing with trauma,” Sigmund doubted, yet in his mind, he knew he would attempt this ritual regardless of its empirical merits. His subconscious belief in the effectiveness of rituals was only emboldened by the brass-eyed cripple’s next statement.

“It’s ritualistic,” he rebuked, before explaining his reasoning. “They used whiskey as the carrier component of Victory Wash, so now you’ve gotta use whiskey to recreate some of the side effects. You’ve already got more than enough blood and fire in your system, your body will remember. Just get ready to be ravenously hungry once it’s over, and then every time you stoke the flames again. Don’t ask what that means, you’ll know.”

Before Sigmund could question him further, the man turned on the heel of his prosthetic left foot and stepped out of the store, taking glugs of Liquid Vigor as he went much like a drunk would, only fully lucid and fully justified in consuming his substance of choice.

The bearded historian stood stone-still for a little while, staring off into empty space whilst the singer’s words sunk in. He wordlessly walked out of the front door with the intent of buying enough whiskey to get blackout drunk, and Makhus made no attempt to stop him.

Makhus was just about to return to the lab, but after weighing his priorities, he came to the conclusion that it would be a better idea to just get a couple dozen seal-bottles filled and ready for sale. He would leverage that scumbag merchant’s attempt to profit off the scarcity of Liquid Vigor by undercutting not just the inflated price, but even the normal pre-war price. And still, he would make a killing, considering how large a reserve they had and how relatively easy it was to distill more Viriditas.

He could afford to price it cheaper than mediocre whiskey, and still manage a decent profit margin. A small taste of the liquid came first, a drop that hung from the edge of the faucet. Less aggressively herbal than he was used to, but more minty. Weaker than the military recipe, perhaps ten to fifteen percent Viriditas by volume rather than the usual twenty. The mint probably came from a mint brew meant to mask the lower concentration of the active ingredient.

No surprise, but disappointment aplenty. He’d unknowingly given the veteran a worse deal than he intended to.

“No use feelin’ guilty over unknowingly upsellin’ a customer,” the alchemist told himself as he grabbed a handful of corks off the shelf and took to filling bottles. Taking his time as he did, Makhus managed to fill, cork, and put out in front approximately two bottles in a minute.

Just as he got through filling and putting out all of the old bottles - some three dozen - and made his way back into the secondary storage room to continue this busywork, the doorbell rang. Standing from his perch with two full bottles in hand, he took a guess - was it Sigmund, or Zel and Zef? It was answered before he could see by the sound of their voices, saccharine affection dripping from Zef’s uncharacteristically bubbly giggling.

When she stepped into the store, the first thing Zelsys saw was Makhus standing in the doorway into the back, holding a filled seal-bottle in each hand, staring at them with a strange look in his eyes. It was like she could see him fighting himself to decide what he said, for but a split-second before it slipped out, “You’re back. Got a moment? I think I can figure out what you are.”

A raised eyebrow, a bemused smile, although he looked to be entirely serious.

“I think I can spare a little while, sure,” she agreed. “What’d you need?”

He put the bottles on one of the shelves, counting out, “Some of your blood, hair, and Fog. C’mon, it’ll only be a couple minutes, then you lovebirds can get back to whatever you were gonna do.”

Zelsys had to admit she didn’t expect Makhus to figure it out this quickly, let alone mention it this openly and offhandedly, but it still made her grin nonetheless when she noticed that even such a surface-level remark elicited a blush from Zefaris. Before she joined Makhus in descending into the basement laboratory, she handed Zef the Tablet, instructing her to, “Give Pentacle a look.”

The markswoman gladly took the arcane device, making her way up the stairs whilst Zel and Makhus made their way down. The moment she stepped foot in the laboratory she felt her eyes glazing over at the sight, utterly unfamiliar with most every piece of equipment she could see. Makhus made his way over to a cabinet, beckoning her to follow, and she did just that, shamelessly marveling at every piece of equipment she passed by. From within said cabinet, the alchemist retrieved a syringe and a piece of cotton.

“Right, let’s get the hard part done first,” he said, removing the cover from the hollow needle. “Hold out your arm.”

Zel did as he instructed, and without another word or moment of hesitation, he expertly traced one of her veins with the needle and stuck it in, drawing blood until the syringe was half-full. “Alright, now press this down so it doesn’t bruise,” he instructed, pushing the swab on the entry point until Zelsys took over, after which he pulled the needle out.

A few moments of digging through the cabinet’s drawers later, he retrieved a pair of scissors and stepped behind her, momentarily running his fingers through her hair before cutting out a strand from a spot in the middle of the back of her head, assuring that, “It won’t be obvious this way. Now for a sample of your Fog...”

“What, should I just breathe some into a jar?” she joked, only to let out a surprised chuckle when she saw Makhus retrieve a glass jar from the cabinet, nodding affirmatively to her suggestion as he did. He unscrewed the lid and held the jar out in front of her, expecting her to exhale Fog into it. A breath of air in, a breath of Fog out, silvery strands whirling within the glass as the alchemist rushed to screw the lid back on.

“I’ll take a little while to run all the tests on these samples, ‘specially considerin’ the work I gotta do to get the store opened…” he mused, turning the jar around and squinting as he stared into the swirling mass of silver gas within. He looked at her with a strange glimmer in his eyes, remarking, “She’s probably waitin’ for you upstairs.”

It felt like he’d rehearsed this, like he was acting out a premeditated chain of events rather than actually interacting with her. Like he was forcing himself into being cordial.

“You’re a bad actor,” she called him out, and the moment she did, his facial expression changed, ever so subtly. The discomfort wasn’t being hidden anymore, but neither was the clear guilt he seemed to feel about said discomfort.

“I know,” he confessed, placing the jar of Fog onto one of the nearby tables and turning back to face her. “Before you ask, no, it’s nothin’ I hold against you or Zefaris. I just have some personal problems that need dealing with, seein’ you two together just brought them to the surface is all.”

“If you want to talk, we can talk. Besides, I do still have to at least try teaching you Fog-breathing,” she replied, placing a hand on his shoulder.

A wry smile curled his mouth, and he let out a gravelly chuckle, “Later. I’m still up to my neck in shit to do around the store. Now go on, don’t leave her waitin’.”

When Zelsys left to attend to Zefaris, Makhus took to beginning the first and simplest of the many tests he knew he could do to determine whether she was a homunculus, largely due to the fact that, despite its simplicity, it also took the longest.

A few drops of blood, rendered down much in the same way one would render down the primordial mercury within an Azoth stone. If Zelsys was indeed a homunculus created through the process detailed in the journal, it would surely be possible to render some of this primordial mercury from her blood.

“Alkahest solution’s good… Burner’s good… Seals are good…” the alchemist murmured to himself, meticulously adjusting the tangle of glyph-etched glass and ensuring all of its myriad components were in full working order.

His mind was not entirely focused on the task at hand, but what distracted him was no longer the need to fight his own discomfort, but purely the intrigue of whether or not Zelsys was a homunculus. To his relief, even this small friendly exchange managed to assuage his inner turmoil, in no small part thanks to the towering woman’s overwhelming force of personality, which he was certain served as a social force multiplier. He wondered if even this powerful charisma was rooted in her possible alchemical origins, but giving it further thought dispelled such considerations. A traditional homunculus was a vertical slice of the original’s knowledge, but had no personality of its own. Besides, she didn’t look like any particular human he had ever seen - more like a mishmash of traits from a wide variety of dissonant ethnicities.

Sure, she could’ve come about as a result of a long and elaborate eugenics program, but such a family would quickly become famous if they had any success, not to mention the fact families who practiced human breeding were universally ethnic purists. In contrast, Zelsys was a nightmare in the flesh to any ethnonationalist. Facial structure like an Ikesian, skin like a Grekurian, eyes like a monk-noble, north-imperial ears, and who knew what those weird lines on her skin could be if it turned out they were natural. Did they have anything to do with her unnatural hair colour?

The thought crossed his mind that, perhaps, they were a visible manifestation of the way in which the theoretical homunculus would “become as one with Azoth” whatever the journal meant by that. The more Makhus thought about it in this way, the more he convinced himself of the plausibility of Zelsys indeed being a homunculus, and the more his hope grew that she would be able to show him some insight into her own nature, were she to ever uncover it.

“The Second Sage of Fog and her right hand sword-saint, Makhus of the Sword-Soul-Single-Strike,” he said to himself in a joking tone, chuckling at the absurdity of such an idea as he tightened the last valve and finally reached for the syringe, pressing the plunger until a few drops of the blood contained within dropped into the alkahest solution within the flask.

It didn’t immediately dissolve into a vague cloud of brownish-red as human blood usually did when exposed to even the lowest-concentration alkahest solutions. It remained stable for seconds, and before it even began to break down and dissipate into the expected cloudy form, seconds had turned to minutes. Makhus found himself entranced, watching this usually seconds-long process drawn out in slow motion as Zel’s blood resisted breakdown.

An idea.

“S.S.S.S. Arts: Visual Enhancement!” he murmured under his breath, feeling his vision fraying at the edges as his pupils stretched open to their absolute limits and the lenses in his eyes briefly honed themselves to the acuity of a telescope. This technique allowed him to either be extremely farsighted, or extremely nearsighted, and overuse-induced damage ultimately reflected whatever he used it for.

Even mere seconds of this strained his eyes, and more than a minute could cause permanent damage to both his lenses and his retinas if he looked into a light, but he knew the risks, knew how to mitigate them. He even knew how to brew special eye-drops to fix minor eye damage while half-blinded, which he had learned from a rather harrowing period of his military service, during which he had to abuse this technique for the sake of recon.

He had complained incessantly to his higher ups, and only three weeks later Zefaris was assigned to his squad as the reconnaissance specialist, much to his at the time nearsighted, elixir-addled self’s relief and fascination.

Staring into the cloud with his momentarily microscope-capable sight, most of what Makhus saw made sense and lined up with what he knew about the composition of human blood.

Most of it.

He didn’t recall anything about blood cell-sized Azoth stones.

Upon making her way to the upper floor and into the room from which she heard noticeable noise, Zel was welcomed by Zef’s figure facing away from her. She was standing in a strange stance opposite a full-body mirror that was leaned against the wall between the room’s two curtained windows, her right leg raised as she fiddled with a brand-new leg holster’s stiff straps.

Opposite the room’s single, albeit huge bed, atop an empty writing desk, sat both her Tablet and Pentacle’s lacquered wooden box, its lid sitting open and its contents still untouched beyond the very holster that Zef was trying on.

“The holster fit alright?” she asked offhandedly as she walked over to the desk, reaching into the velvet-lined box to retrieve the only thing her fingers could get any purchase on - a hard-cover book, sitting snugly in a recess just above the cold-iron behemoth. Zef just murmured a vague noise of affirmation, making last adjustments to the straps and moving her belt a little to adjust the loop by which the leg-holster was fastened to it.

It was obvious she wasn’t exactly used to more than a sling or perhaps a simple belt holster, but the markswoman expressed no dislike of this novel alternative either.

The manual was of no interest to Zelsys, and she just put it aside on the desk. She’d just wanted to get a good look at Pentacle in its assembled form, as Collier hadn’t shown them. She just took it into the store’s back room in pieces, then returned with that bulky box.

It was huge, complex, and beautiful. From the glistening cylinder whose surface gleamed like that of a mirror, to the dark hardwood grip and rose gold trigger guard. Beneath the barrel sat a lever attached to the ramrod mechanism, and in its assembled state it was clear to see how it would operate even without having to lay hands on it.

She would’ve happily taken it out of the box and gotten a good look at it, but… It didn’t feel right. This gun wasn’t hers. No, she waited for Zefaris to come over and, by her own words, “Do the honors.”

With a mild chuckle, the markswoman peered into the open box… And froze in place, entranced. She stared at the gun, taking in every detail for a good minute and a half before she snapped out of the trance and reached in, visibly surprised by the distinct lack of bulk as she hefted it up with little effort.

“...It’s light,” she mused, furrowing her brow as she turned it over a few times in her hands before taking hold of the grip. She cocked the hammer and dry-fired, a small puff of sparks escaping the muzzle to the melodious ring. The noise was most familiar, similar in clarity to the way Zel’s cleaver sung when she swung it.

Perhaps this was cold-iron? Some sort of near-universal arcane metal that was ideal for special weapons. Zelsys wasn’t sure, and didn’t feel like disrupting Zef’s moment by asking. She could figure it out later.

The glimmer of fascination in Zef’s eye gave way to purpose. She holstered the revolver and took hold of the manual, flipping through its pages, her eye darting back and forth from line to line. She slowly backed away from the writing desk, sitting down on the edge of the bed as she devoured the manual’s contents with gusto. Zelsys could tell that the markswoman would want to give Pentacle a test-fire, and so she grabbed the Tablet and searched for any ammunition to be found, clearly able to recall a box of paper cartridges having been present among the things the three soldiers stored in the device.

She was right - they were listed in Fog Storage. Hundreds of them. Enough to supply a squad for months, about as much as one would expect to be present in an armored transport vehicle.

x278 Sparklock Rifle Cartridge X349 Sparklock Pistol Cartridge

The assumption was that it would fire pistol cartridges, but… That cylinder was huge. Zelsys decided to retrieve one of each and see which fit. Snatching them up from the Fog vortex in turn, the pistol cartridge was noticeably smaller and had less powder, even though the ball wasn’t all that much smaller. Before she could even ask, Zef peeked over the top of the manual and remarked, “Says right here it takes standard rifle cartridges for ease of use.”

Her tone sounded half disappointed that it didn’t have some sort of extraordinary proprietary ammunition like Zel’s arm-cannon, and half relieved that she wouldn’t need to deal with such a bother. Zel dropped the pistol cartridge back into the Fog vortex before it could dissipate and selected nineteen more rifle cartridges for retrieval, tipping the Tablet over the desk and allowing the cartridges to pour out of the vortex onto a neat little pile.

“Wanna go give it a whirl right now?” she asked, herself eager to see how the gun would perform.

“I should probably finish reading the manual first, but…” Zef reluctantly agreed, closing shut the book and setting it aside as she rose from her seat. She deftly pulled the revolver from its holster and spun it on her finger, the weapon’s unusual center of mass causing her to almost fumble the well-practiced flourish. “I think I’ve got a good idea of how it works.”

She stepped towards the desk and cautiously took one of the paper cartridges from the pile, inserting it into one of Pentacle’s chambers and rotating it into place. Three quick pulls of the lever under the barrel worked the ramrod and compressed the load. Another cartridge, another rotation of the cylinder, a look into the newly-visible loaded chamber.

“Looks good…” the cyclops murmured before she returned to loading the gun with greater confidence, and in only a few seconds, she was done with all five chambers. Into its holster the gun went, whilst her eye snapped up to meet Zel’s gaze, an unspoken question already glimmering in the emerald of her iris. Before she could ask said question, Zelsys already answered.

“Pretty sure this place has a backyard where we could set up a makeshift shooting range, but…” she trailed off.

“I doubt anyone would be happy about hearing gunshots in the middle of the street, yeah. We could just go out into the fields, maybe? There should be enough things in the tablet that could be used as makeshift targets.”

A nod and a smile, and soon enough, they strode down the pale cobbled road on their way towards the same gate they had entered through. The guardsmen made no effort to stop them, and in a few minutes more, the two women were walking once again in armlock, this time down the very gravel road that brought them here.

Though the sun hung high in the sky and would do so for quite a few hours more, its rays diffused on the edges of the clouds and refracted through the myriad pollen particles that floated above the fields, forming godrays wherever one looked. It only lasted a short time, but for a small portion of their walk, it was truly like they were in a late summer’s dream.

They picked one of the side paths closer to the gate with deeper channels carved into the dirt, following in the footsteps of the farmers in the distance under the assumption that a well-frequented path would be relatively safe. A dozen meters off the main road was deemed to be far enough, and they took to setting up targets on the ground.

A rusted-through canteen, some wartime ration cans, a dented helmet that Zelsys found in the ditch - such were the targets. To start with, Zefaris practiced pulling Pentacle from its holster and putting it back in. She repeated the practiced motion a good half-dozen times, eventually bringing the cold-iron behemoth’s sights to bear on one of the cans, gripping the gun with both hands as she steadied her aim.

Click went the hammer when she cocked it back with her thumb.

The sound of the hammer striking the glyph rung out like a hammer striking an anvil. A lance of smoke and fire burst from the weapon’s muzzle. The back of the can exploded into a splash of brownish stew, yet Zefaris remained steadfast in her stance, barely moved by the recoil at all.

Another cock of the hammer. Another can. The subtle anvil-clang of the hammer striking the ignition glyph, the violent thoom that accompanied the blazing lance of hot lead. A disgusting splurge as the can’s contents splashed over the dry soil.

One more shot, seemingly just for good measure, obliterated the old helmet.

She heard an ecstatic laugh bubbling up from Zef as the blonde turned the gun over in her grip, cocked the hammer to turn the cylinder, and quickly checked for any residue in the fired chamber.

“Tha-ha-hat’s not how rifle cartridges usually fire!” she laughed, equally bewildered and amazed by the revolver’s performance. “There’s way less recoil than usual and no vision-obscuring cloud, this thing must have some sorta kinetic redirection glyphs inside the barrel!”

Zelsys didn’t have the context to understand most of what Zefaris was saying, but she guessed, “You think it makes sure the force goes where it’s most useful like the harness my cannon’s attached to?”

“I-I think so, at least. I’ve only got a rudimentary understanding of glyphs in ballist…” she began to trail off, reloading the three fired chambers as she went.

The gut feeling. It was back. While Zefaris trailed off on a tangent about the application of glyphs in the design of firearms, Zelsys felt the nameless voice in the back of her head screaming about danger from the fields by the left side of the road. She felt a vague hostility from within the corn, unsure how many people, but certain it was more than one. The wind briefly picked up, and amidst the rustling of dry leaves, she could pick out a few words uttered in the unfamiliar tongue spoken by the Pateirian soldiers.

Like clockwork a familiar face stepped out of the corn stalks only moments later, holding a sparklock pistol in either hand. It was one of the soldiers she’d seen hassling the street performer earlier that day, only he wasn’t wearing his military coat. In fact, he wasn’t wearing anything above the waist, and the state of his body perhaps explained part of it - the soldier’s entire upper body up to the neckline was covered in dark-brown chitinous plating, with thick spiky hairs protruding from the plates at regular intervals.

His eyes flitted from Zefaris, to her gun, to Zelsys and her own arm-cannon, confusion and annoyance filling his features. His upper lip twitched just before he barked out in heavily accented Ikesian, “Your money or your lives, both of you! Only the farmers who pay us tolls are permitted to pass this way.”

Zelsys couldn’t help it. She let out a chortling laugh at the farcical situation, at the utter cosmic convenience of it all, that one of her intended targets had come straight to her. Sure, he had them both at gunpoint, but what did she care? His movements were obvious and telegraphed. She was confident that she could end him before he could land a solid hit, and that Zefaris could read his body language just as well as if not better than her.

“Don’t fuck with me, filthy Ike-lover!” he chided her lack of respect, aggressively pointing both his sparklocks at her head. This was a show. She knew it. Zelsys could feel the four other people spreading out through the corn, likely preparing to charge out and kill them both. She could also feel Zef’s killing intent towards the mutant, and in a split-second, she formulated a plan.

“You can’t blame me for a little Lover’s Breath!” she exclaimed, inhaling sharply. A mixture of hyper-awareness and battle-lust flooded the senses, and she shifted out of the way in the moment between when he pulled the triggers and the powder ignited, his guns spitting sparks wildly for a good tenth of a second before they fired. Hot lead whizzing behind her she sprinted towards the corn field, momentarily turning her head as she went to breathe some Fog directly into Zef’s face. She had no way to know this would have a positive impact on the markswoman’s combat capabilities, but as many times before, she just listened to what felt right in the moment.

Leaving the pistol-wielding assailant to her lover Zelsys dove into the cornfield, cleaver in hand and trailing Fog with every step. She couldn’t see who she assumed to be the bandit’s accomplices, but she could feel them by the movement of the corn and their panicked utterances in Pateirian. The cleaver shuddered in her grasp as she neared one of these, and without so much as a second thought, she swung through the corn and uttered, “Heartbreaker!”

The blade’s course shifted ever so slightly as it guided itself towards its target’s heart. She could hear that the second one was charging her from behind, and so followed through the momentum of her swing to stab the push-saw side directly through his neck, severing its head.

It was at this moment that three clanging gunshots rang out from the road, a first one accompanied by what sounded like cracking wood, then two follow ups in rapid succession accompanied by the squelching of an exploding head. Zel was more than ready to slaughter the remaining two, but they had fled too deeply into the cornfield for her to bother following them.

She let out a breath, let go of her battle-trance, and noticed the rancid smell that filled her nostrils. Then, looking about to get her bearings, she saw who - or rather, what - it was that she had killed. The creature that lay eviscerated amidst the corn was barely comparable to the most extreme photos the Governor had shown her, yellowish ichor spilling from its neck as its arms and legs curled inward. It wasn’t even a mutant human, but rather an outright humanoid locust, grasping an old sparklock with a rusty bayonet on the end. The creature didn’t wear clothes as much as it was draped in a cloak made from the tattered remnants of a coat.

After running the cleaver through this one’s heart to ensure it wouldn’t get back up without its head as some insects were able to, Zelsys didn’t bother to look at the other creature, the rancid stench of its spilt hemolymph more than enough to confirm the killing blow. Emerging from the cornfield still gripping her cleaver, she saw Zefaris standing over the motionless corpse of the pistol-wielder, pointing her revolver at his heart and breathing heavily. Her face was flushed pink, Fog pouring from her nostrils with every breath.

She looked… Disturbed. Extremely so. The reason became clear when the soldier’s burst-open head raised from the ground, his mouth curled into a manic grin. Though he had no eyes, he turned his head towards Zelsys, and though the speech center of his brain lay splattered in the dirt, he spoke, wisps of Fog rising from the corners of his mouth with each word.

“Even in dishonor, we serve the Divine Emperor. You stink as all of the pretender-sage’s works do, and by this stench we will always find you…” the dead locust-mutant mocked and accused, his skin visibly clinging to his bones and turning pallid as if he was burning the last shreds of his life to deliver this message of spite.