Fog poured out between her grinning teeth and a high-pitched buzz sounded as the cleaver’s sawteeth came alive.

A melodious laugh rung out from the Mantis’s mouth, and just like that… She disappeared. The woman stepped back, sinking into the wall of bodies that stood arrayed behind her, vanishing near-instantly without a trace - one moment she was there, and then there was just a wall of dead-eyed locust-men. At that very moment, the constant chittering of the drones died down. They momentarily froze in place, their feelers twitching about, only to come surging forward as a flood of swiping and snapping mandibles.

Zelsys charged headfirst into the coming flood, wordlessly channeling the Beheading Saw technique as she slaughtered her way through drone after drone. The Lightning Butcher’s sheer mass combined with her superhuman strength to turn her into a whirling dervish of growling metal and stinking hemolymph, the saw perfectly severing the heads of locust after locust with little perceptible resistance whilst the superheated cutting edge cleft their bodies and limbs asunder in wide, bulldozing swipes.

The sounds and sights of her allies fighting registered on her senses, but they were out of focus, sensory information of secondary priority to her immediate surroundings. Pentacle’s gunshots, Twitcher’s pained screeching, the whooshing of fire and singing tones that accompanied the Inquisitor’s very literal flaming sword as she carved a path of her own through the locusts.

“One… Two… Three… Four… Six…” she counted in her head, using the record of her slaughter to maintain an iron grip on her breathing. Just as she performed a wide right-handed swing whilst readying herself to finally fire a shotshell into the horde, she felt it. For but a split-second, she felt the air displacement of an approaching, annihilating force - the Black Swordsman’s colossal weapon, stabbing down towards her faster than she could get out of its reach. Out of the way, perhaps, but not out of its reach.

Without thinking, she held out her open left palm and exhaled through her skin, unconsciously approximating the weapon’s approach velocity. It was faster than she could get out of the way, that was true - but it was nowhere near faster than she could perceive.

With an open palm shielded by nothing but silver light and rising wisps of Fog, Zelsys met the two-hundred kilo mass of speeding metal… And sent it careening upward over the Black Swordsman’s head at nearly full speed. Nearly. The timing was off. Only by a split-second, but here even a hundredth of a second mattered.

Even scattered across her entire body by the arm-harness, the small fraction of kinetic energy that she had failed to deflect was enough to send Zelsys sliding backward, a sharp pain momentarily shooting through her body before the body-high of Fog drowned it out. The giant maintained his grip on the great weapon as it drew a perfect arc and cleaved an entire tree through the middle on the way down, embedding itself solidly in the ground. Unbothered, the giant ponderously turned and began pulling it free, turning his head as he struggled and giving Zelsys a puzzled look.

Even as she let out a brief, bloody cough, Zel couldn’t help but grin at the giant, struggling with the sheer bulk of his own weapon. “Sheer size has no intrinsic merit!” she laughed, exhaling a full lung of Fog to muster a surge of strength of sufficient potency to cleave asunder the three locusts that were nearly upon her from a standstill. Two-thirds of her exhalation were normal, whilst one-third was burned as fuel for Stormsurge, forcing the muscles involved in the upward swing of her cleaver to painfully contract at their absolute maximum power.

Meanwhile, the sound of Strolvath’s grand throat-singing finally resounded and the locusts’ carpaces began to warp under resonance, yet they seemed mostly unbothered. Their movements became choppy and erratic with brief moments of utter motionlessness between sharp and faster than usual movements, but this made the fight no easier - only different.

She liked different.

Zel rolled her shoulder and pushed through on what the Black Swordsman had so rudely interrupted, gut-punching the nearest locust with her left arm whilst she used her cleaver’s blade as area denial by swinging it in wide, flowing arcs to sever libs and inflict imprecise wounds. It didn’t need to be precise or fast, it just needed to keep the other locusts off her for long enough to get a shot off.

Click. Click… Boom.

Strolvath knew by heart the tones to resonate a locust drone’s carapace, but he also knew they weren’t the greater threat here. It was that gigantic beast of a warrior he needed to put out of commission. To start with, he murmured his prayer to the dead gods and began throat-singing, and from there started tuning his voice in an attempt to find the frequency that would affect the Black Swordsman.

It didn’t matter how, whether it resonated his chitin to weaken it or made his hemolymph boil. Invocation after invocation, lyrics sung in such deep tones that none other than he could hear them. No. It wouldn’t work. Not quickly enough.

All he could do was try to render the drones a non-threat whilst the others dealt with the two mutants. If the mindless, near-identical members of the hive were Drones, what were the unique individuals? Warriors, perhaps? No, too narrow. Locust Nobles fit better.

A thunderous expulsion of unfettered force sent his train of thought off a metaphorical cliff.

Outside of Zel’s self-centered slice of the battlefield, the Inquisitor took a breath and pulled her blade free of its sheath. A slender, double-edge blade of cold-iron, barely a meter long. Its center of mass sat squarely below the crossguard, for that was where its power source was set into the metal - an Ignis crystal caged in brass, a minute of burn time before it turned grey and became inert quartz.

An unheard utterance to invoke well-rehearsed combat techniques. A calm advance along the outer edges of combat, picking off targets that made the mistake of directing their attention towards her. The few locusts who managed to strike her did no more than score the Fog-infused fabric of her coat, and even these small marks vanished in mere seconds when the living threads knitted themselves back together.

There was no reason for her to dive headfirst into the line of fire. Her purpose here was to pick off stragglers, to weaken the enemy’s strongest. A limb here, a kill there. A Fog-empowered jump, a flaming sword driven into the Black Swordsman’s wide-open back, just as he raised his weapon to bring it smashing down so he’d slip up and fail to properly translate his strength into a swing.

Before her influence could be felt, the Inquisitor delved yet deeper into enemy lines, cutting down locust after locust while the bulk of the drones’ swarm-minded attention remained directed towards Zelsys.

She just barely avoided the wave of fire, shrapnel, and insectoid viscera that was sent flying at the barrier dome.

Though she was confident in her own ability to kill with a bayonet and reload quickly under duress, Zefaris knew that it was in her best interest to maintain range. The bayonet would come out when it was needed, and not a moment sooner.

Besides, this was a situation she was very familiar with and very fond of. She’d seen many a soldier witness a charging battle-line and despair in the face of superior numbers, but to her? This was a target-rich environment. Three shots rang out, and with each out, she let out a little bit of breath, partly to mitigate recoil, partly to sharpen her aim, and partly in an attempt to produce a practical technique. They were small increments - little enough to replenish with a quick inhalation while she re-cocked the cylinder.

Each shot, a spearpoint of flaming lead that rode atop sparks and smoke. Each shot, forceful enough to go through a drone and kill another, sometimes even wound a third if she lined up the weak points in their chitin just right.

All the while, she kept much of her attention directed towards the twitching freak with those outlandish forearms. That stance, those tiny steps to either side, that indecisive tilt of the head. Even with black beads for eyes, Zefaris could tell that he was trying to find a good firing angle. What he would fire and what it would do was a quite a bit harder to discern.

Finally. Twitcher’s mandibles clicked to the sound of an insectoid equivalent to manic cackling. He raised his arms, slamming them together as their protective digits opened up and locked together on impact. Zefaris wasn’t willing to wait and see for what his arm-cannons did, considering the fact that they were pointed squarely at Zelsys.

Were she wielding any other weapon, she would’ve been too late. There would’ve been too long a delay between the trigger pull and the ball leaving the barrel, or it wouldn’t have been imparted with enough kinetic energy to strike on time, even infused with Fog.

Pentacle suffered from no such shortcomings.

“Move!” she unconsciously exclaimed as she aimed, fired, forcing every ounce of Fog present in her lungs to come bursting out. Hammer struck glyph to the melodious ring of cold iron, and a lance of blazing lead and Fog came rocketing out of the barrel. Her world came to a crawl and froze for an imperceptibly short moment, marking the birth of a new technique.

The bullet struck Twitcher’s left arm-shield just as a torrent of superheated gasses erupted from the nozzles on his arms. At the very moment of impact, a dozen tendrils of Fog spread out from the bullet, spreading out its amplified kinetic energy across his entire arm.

He lost balance, struggling to fight the colossal recoil of the veritable rocket engines that were his arms at this very moment, unable to stop once he’d started firing. His pillars of alchemic fire tilted sharply sideways and down, barely nicking the Black Swordsman before Twitcher went flying.

Zefaris still had a shot left in the cylinder, and she made it count. A small tilt of her arm, a slight lead, and hot lead ripped into one of his essentia sacs, spilling an off-color mixture of bodily fluids and volatile essentia all over him. He screeched bloody murder as he careened into the treeline, trailing smoke. Her immediate instinct was to get behind a tree and start reloading. She’d already figured out that it was faster to place a cartridge in each chamber and then simply ram them all down in sequence, but it still took precious seconds - an eternity in the blazing inferno of combat.

Just as she reached a tree and ducked behind it her ears filled with the mighty roar of a high-powered shell being fired, the ground trembling underfoot from the vibration as the dying screams of drones who didn’t die instantly echoed.

Zelsys exhaled her full lung capacity as she fired the arm-cannon in anticipation of its colossal recoil, even stabbing her cleaver into the ground with its flat facing her, intending to use it as an anchor.

Click. Click. Boom.

One moment, her sight was full of locusts and her own exhaled Fog. The next, it was all fire. As great as the recoil was, it was not enough to make her let go of the Lightning Butcher’s handle. No, that was achieved by the sudden presence of an overhead shadow and a gust of wind.

Zelsys let go of her cleaver, leaping backwards as part of the recoil propelled her out of the way of the Black Swordsman’s downward swing. His blade once more scored the earth, an ironclad wall between Zelsys and her sword. He didn’t even bother to try pulling his sword free, instead pulling back his chitin-plated fist to smash her into pulp.

With her lungs empty of Fog, Zelsys didn’t have the time to restart the Breath Engine. “This better fuckin’ work…” she thought as she took as big a breath as she dared, exhaling some of it as Fog and burning some of it to fuel Stormsurge. With all the speed her body could muster, she forced herself to perform the motions of reloading in painful, jittering snaps as electric arcs of pure silver leapt across her skin whenever a muscle was forced to contract at full force.

A shotshell in the chamber and her hand on the lever, she faced the unstoppable force of his fist as if to meet it head-on. She’d set a precedent, now she bet on the giant’s trust in her repeating the same approach. He either fell for it, or just didn’t know how to deal with a problem that raw overwhelming force couldn’t defeat. Zelsys herself would’ve been more than happy to fight him head-on, were it not even more suicidal than butchering a lightning bolt.

She finally saw his punch cross the point of no recovery and grinned. A step to the side, exhaling all the Fog she had - barely a fifth of her lung capacity, but enough. It wasn’t her strength that was necessary here. As she stepped aside, she used this moment to push the trigger-lever until it was on a hair trigger. Two clicks, lost amidst the noise of combat.

The giant’s fist struck the ground, and unlike his sword, he had no issue pulling it out - but it was still stuck in the soil, for but a moment, a moment enough for Zelsys to execute her gambit. A shallow breath in and an equally shallow breath out, slamming her arm-cannon’s muzzle into one of the weak points in the Black Swordsman’s armor, a proportionally small patch of exposed soft tissue in the pit of his elbow.

A tiny move of her wrist, a thunderous noise and blinding light, an almighty recoil impulse that threw her into the air due to the downward angle at which she had fired. Zel landed and regained her balance, ready to continue fighting, but… The Black Swordsman was staring her in the eyes, unmoving.

His stump arm gushed blood, but… It wasn’t hemolymph. Where even the less-mutated pistoleer’s blood was contaminated, the giant’s blood was entirely normal. It even smelled exactly like human blood. His tired, bloodshot eyes drifted to his stump, then back to her. With a slow nod, he stood and began to simply stomp into the treeline, leaving both his severed forearm and his weapon behind.

“...What?” Zelsys blurted out, flabbergasted by what she’d just witnessed. A screeching locust drone pulled her back into the present, for some reason having taken the care to walk around the giant blade rather than climb over it. Its talons sunk into her skin and ripped her flesh, but that was where her external injuries ended - Zelsys just punched through its head, once more using her arm-cannon as a force multiplier.

Finally free to take a breath and direct her attention towards the rest of the battlefield, she saw that it was all but won. There were considerably more than twenty-five dead locusts littering the ground and spreading their stench, with some seven more still skittering about and trying to lash out. Strolvath’s voice had fallen silent at some point between the last time she paid attention to it and now, with only the occasional whoosh of the Inquisitor’s sword or the death-screech of a drone to liven up the soundscape.

The last two drones approached her after having eluded the Inquisitor’s blade, only for both their heads to explode to the melodious sound of Pentacle’s gunshots, Zefaris having just finished reloading.

Strolvath could’ve maintained his voice for the entire short duration of the battle, but he saw no need to exert himself any more than he absolutely had to. Not yet. More importantly he couldn’t focus both on singing and channeling the Brass Eye simultaneously, though it was the latter’s functionality even in the absence of complete focus that made him go silent.

The moment Zelsys fired her arm-cannon a second time to sever the Black Swordsman’s left arm had pulled Strol’s gaze towards the giant man, and what his Brass Eye saw inside that man was not the soul of a locust. It wasn’t an animalistic, feral swarm creature as the drones were, and it wasn’t quite like the souls of the other Locust Nobles. Of course, the souls of Locust Nobles were just human souls - but they were universally guarded, they were universally the souls of hardened soldiers with spiritual walls twice as tall and twice as thick as those of most civilians.

But this man - this man didn’t just not have walls. His soul was actively spilling out, screaming to be heard in the absence of a means to do so physically, to the point that he could catch glimpses of the man’s surface thoughts. Only children were less mentally guarded than this. Having just barely managed to fully awaken the Brass Eye before the Black Swordsman disappeared into the treeline, Strolvath discerned a short snippet from the train of thought that the man was constantly broadcasting.

It wasn’t even an internal monologue. Just raw emotion interspersed with fragmentary snippets of words that began as abruptly as they began.

“Hurt… Arm gone… Failed… Dishonored… Mother punish...”

The chitin-plated titan forced his way into the trees, a strange red-colored protuberance pulsing in the gap between the collar of his chest-plate and the back of his neck. In the final moment before the Black Swordsman vanished out of sight entirely, he froze solid and his broadcasted thoughts shifted with a momentary flash of lucidity.

“What’s happening?” thought the giant man, his head whipping around as quickly as his ponderous frame and armor allowed. He reached up to the back of his head, a deep, muffled rumbling emanating from his direction. “Everything itches. What is that thing? I don’t…”

The red-coloured part of his anatomy pulsed, visibly inflating before it deflated again. Strolvath watched it happen in the span of a few seconds, saw the Black Swordsman’s thoughts return to a child-like haze as he let his arm down and finally vanished into the treeline, his passage marked by the shaking crowns of trees.

He let go of his focus, and alongside it let go of any consideration for the Black Swordsman. With a swift thought, extracted information and possible emotional hazards were compartmentalized in neat little boxes, alongside all the other horrible truths of war that Strolvath dealt with on a daily basis.

Whether it came from within or without, the Black-armored titan was mentally damaged. It was possible that the bright-red organ had something to do with it, or it was something entirely unrelated to his mental condition - it didn’t matter. There was no reason to be concerned for one of the targets of their extermination assignment.

The Counter-propagandist sighed, reached into his bag, and popped open another bottle of Vitamax. It would be needed for the precarious task of reaching the barrier-dome without stepping in locust guts.

With the flames of battle and side-effects of Fog-breathing subsiding, Zel’s senses were assaulted by the all-encompassing stench that hovered over the battlefield. Locust guts and gunsmoke.

“Smells like victory,” she chuckled, suppressing the tears in her eyes and bile in her throat as she holstered her cleaver and walked towards the barrier-dome, hoping and praying that it would keep the smell out. The Inquisitor was already inside, leaning against one of the shack’s stilts and polishing her sword. A small tilt of her head and a brief, knowing glare hit Zel’s ego harder than any of the strikes she took in the fighting.

It didn’t even feel like the Inquisitor saw past her outward presence, but rather was convinced in some ulterior motive, some darkness lurking under the surface. It only made sense, if she truly was what her title suggested.

Zelsys still didn’t like that stare, brief as it was.

The barrier’s first layer was like pins and needles washing over her, whilst the second was a faint, warm buzz. It served to remind her of the annoying sting of her scratches and of the muscle pain that suffused her entire being, though she supposed it was a preferable alternative for getting crushed to pulp. To her relief, her hope for the barrier was justified - the air within the bubble was free from the stench of locustkind, even if the smell of gunsmoke permeated it to a noticeable degree.

Zel sat down in the grass, taking a deep breath and a big gulp of Liquid Vigor to soothe her pain. The cycloptic gunwoman was next to enter the dome, briefly shuddering once she did so before approaching Zel and sitting down in the grass next to her. Immediately, she pulled a small wooden box from her bag and manipulated a part of Pentacle’s frame to pop the cylinder out of its housing for cleaning. Strol just about neared the barrier after he stared off after the retreating giant, only for a rustling to rise in the treeline.

To all their surprise, Twitcher stumbled out, resembling some surrealist art piece - so badly melted and burned his chitin was. The sac of his right arm was burst open whilst the left one weakly pulsed, the nozzle stuck open and perpetually burning with the strength of a blowtorch. His face twisted into a grin at the sight of Strolvath approaching the dome, the locust’s deranged mind inferring from the crippled soldier’s gait the fact that he was faster than Strolvath.

Twitcher knew he could get to Strol before either the scarred man reached the dome, or anyone inside the dome could intercept.

Strolvath knew more than well that he couldn’t reach the dome before that freakish thing got to him and either tried to burn his face off or just bludgeoned him to death. Maimed as it was, he saw the strength hiding under that thin veneer of chitinous plating. All of the damage it had suffered was of its own making, its own raging power turned against it by a couple well-placed shots.

It leaned forward, breaking into a sprint towards him, allowing its right arm to flap powerlessly behind it. Strolvath was faced with a choice, and readying himself for the pain it would cause, he took it.

He dropped to the ground, pulling a knife from his left boot. Turning and flipping up its pommel revealed the mouth of a small flask, hidden in the handle. It held no elixir, no essentia, but still it held the ignition key to his greatest strength - whiskey.

A tiny sip, and he managed to close shut the mechanism just in time. Just as the creature set upon him, holding out its blowtorch arm, he felt fire spreading through his body and his beard beginning to smolder, yet not burning.

A tiny sip indeed, and a proportionally tiny reaction, by the metric of what he’d just done. Without time to make the necessary preparations, it would be a few scant seconds of this blazing strength, paid for in ravenous hunger and scorching pain for hours to come.

“Hrrgh… Victory Echoes!” he roared, and fire issued forth from his mouth. Twitcher’s blowtorch of a left arm was met with his fist, plugging shut the muzzle then splitting it wide open until the insect’s forearm fell apart at the seams. Somehow, the essentia sac remained intact even as it fell to the ground and spilt its volatile, noxious contents onto the dirt.

Twitcher turned his body to swing his entire right arm into a vague approximation of a punch, but Strol countered by grabbing the bug’s stump right arm and pulling in the other direction, throwing him to the ground.

A quick downward stab to the head turned the screeching maniac to a gibbering corpse, murmuring its death-rattle. Deranged gibbering was replaced by the oh so familiar reverberating tone, that of prophetic speech, and Twitcher spilled the last sparks of its soul into heavily-accented Ikesian, but comprehensible Ikesian nonetheless.

“You will not burn much longer,” it said. “You will not burn, for it is too honorable a fate for scum like you. When all this is over, your kind will be bred down into perfect serfs just barely intelligent enough to function, to consume, to serve. That is the fate of all those who dare oppose the Div-urgh!”

Strolvath’s boot-heel silenced the bug’s speech. He’d heard a variation of it a dozen times over, and each time, it only elicited greater fury in him. With every death-rattle speech, he felt himself slipping further into the very anti-Pateirian propaganda he had helped conceptualize and spread. Letting out a deep breath and putting the knife back in his boot, he kicked the bug’s corpse with all the strength he could muster, taking care to use his prosthetic leg. It bounced off the dome just as his strength faded and the fire in his gut was replaced by wrenching hunger, the blazing strength in his limbs replaced by what could be described as pins-and-needles if they were heated to just below the boiling point of water.

In short, searing pain and equally searing hunger consumed his being, but he was used to it. More used to it than he wanted to be. A swig of Vitamax dulled the pain enough to make his way to the barrier and cross it, collapsing in the grass with a plea of, “Y’mind dragging me inside?”

The three of them took to the task, each of them breathing Fog to hoist his considerable bulk into the shack on stilts. It was almost humorous, that he was the most thoroughly trained in aethermancy, probably had the highest aether rating out of all of them, yet was the only to not know some form of Fog-breathing.

They set him down on one of the four cots, where he remained for the remainder of the day and night. Strolvath spent the rest of the day keeping to himself, drinking Vitamax and grinning through his pain as he made repeated attempts at grasping the method of Fog-breathing that Zelsys had described, each time with no result beyond yet greater self-inflicted pain.

The shack had no cooking utensils, but it did hold mixed rations sufficient for both the rest of the trek and the return trip, plus a small cask of… Something. None of them could figure out what it was, beyond the fact it was some type of restoration elixir. It was light-golden and tasted somewhat like short-aged mead, but also carried the trace aftertastes of Viriditas and conferred similar boons.

Partaking of this beverage relieved pain to a greater degree than either Vitamax or Liquid Vigor, but it also intoxicated the mind in a manner not unlike normal liquor.

Strolvath quickly inebriated himself off the nectar, and took to ruminating on the state of things as pertaining to the threat that locust-men were whilst the others did… Whatever it was that they did. Sitting, talking, drinking, eating, that was where his attention to detail ended for the moment. He didn’t have spare mental energy to focus outward.

When the scarred singer invoked those words, Zelsys swore she could see the fire of a funeral pyre blaze behind his eye. The brass ornament in his other eye-socket lit up like a beacon, glowing white with incredible heat that somehow didn’t so much as sear his flesh.

That tiny moment, those scant few seconds of explosive power served to remind Zel that she was among equals, even if they chose not to employ their raw strength as liberally as she did. When he crossed the barrier and collapsed in the grass, the air filled with the smell of whiskey, blood, and smoke.

“Y’mind dragging me inside?” he slurred, looking up with a blank, unfocused stare.

Seeing him on the ground like that, what he’d just done called forth the memory of a conversation she’d had before they crossed the border. “Victory Wash?” she asked Zef with a Fog-filled breath as the three of them hefted the agencyless veteran up the shack’s ladder.

“Looks like it to me,” the markswoman affirmed once they put him down on one of the cots. “No burns, but he’ll be out of it for a lil’ while.”

After that, it was all silence. With the rations and the cask of mead-like nectar being simply set on the ground, they just took their share. The Inquisitor filled one of her empty bottles and slowly sipped the honey-flavored elixir while she ate some of the dried fruits that were found in the shack’s store of food, all along taking meticulous care to not reveal her face.

She even turned aside in the scant moments when she did pull her gas mask up.

Zel and Zef did much the same, using their own empty seal-bottles for vessels. Once she’d eaten Zefaris returned to cleaning Pentacle, and soon enough asked for the Tablet.

After she retrieved the device from her cleaver’s holster and handed it over, she decided to just take the holster off altogether for the night, setting it down on the ground next to her cot. With this great weight off her back, she even took off the ammo belt and her arm-harness in an attempt to assuage the pervasive muscle pain she’d caused herself.

It was fading, that much was true, but it would still be a little while before it was gone - much the same was the case for her visible wounds.

She sat on the cot with her eyes closed, leaning against the wall, resting her head on Zef’s shoulder while she sipped the golden nectar. A breath of Fog in, a breath of Fog out, and the pain faded a little more. The silvery threads snaked their way through the air, drifting towards the ground as they slowly faded out. But a few of them reached the Lightning Butcher, and its metal teeth drank the Fog like the maw of a parched beast, ringing with soft metallic notes.

The Inquisitor’s piercing glare affixed to the blade, then snapped Zel’s face to grab her attention. The beast-slayer felt it, but she didn’t have the mind to reciprocate. Not yet. Another gulp of sweet, herbal elixir.

“This is better than Liquid Vigor,” she thought to herself. Still, the Inquisitor persevered in her burning stare, and so Zel deigned to lazily open her eyes and return a lazily haughty glare of equal intensity.

Even through the gas mask’s small eye-holes, the Inquisitor’s incredulous eye-twitch was clear to see, much to Zel’s amusement. She let a small smirk show through as she took another sip of nectar, just to drive the nail a little deeper. Even still, what the Inquisitor signed next blindsided her.

Her gestures carried resentment, but the question they conveyed implied the benefit of the doubt.

“That thing,” she pointed to the cleaver. “Why do you have it?”

Zel didn’t feel like speaking, and for once preferred the silence, so she put the bottle down and with some difficulty, signed an answer.

“Why do you think I will answer?”

“It’s a symbol of rank. Either you took it from a dead officer, or you were not as uninvolved in the war as you claim. Which is it?”

Before Zelsys could be bothered to answer Zefaris broke the silence and spat a vitriol-laden reply of her own, “It never reached the intended owner. Our Captain died to protect us from the likes of you, Inquisitor.”

“Calm yourself,” the Inquisitor signed, turning a cold gaze towards Zefaris. “I risked my hide to challenge false war-crime accusations, cyclops.”

“Then why does this feel like an attempted interrogation, huh?” Zel smugged at the masked woman. Whether it was, she knew how such interrogations worked - she knew the most powerful leverage an interrogator had was fear. The Inquisitor had no power over her, she was all too self-assured to ever be coerced into submission.

The Inquisitor stared at her, then sighed forcefully enough to hear the air rushing through her mask’s exhaust valve.

“Old habits die hard,” she signed with visible resignation, only to reiterate her question. “So, how did you obtain it? They’re not exactly a common sight, since most were reclaimed for raw cold-iron.”

“It was payment for a beast-slaying job, more or less,” Zel signed a half-truth.

“If it ever comes to it, know that they are symbols of station,” the Inquisitor surprised with genuine advice. “Even today, a Captain’s Cleaver’s obedience gives you a measure of authority as far as Ikesian military laws are concerned.”

That was where their brief conversation ended. The Inquisitor made no further attempts to interact, which bothered neither Zel nor Zef.