There was a geyser of steam and blood, a brief gurgle, and the man was dead, his spine, esophagus, and carotid arteries all cleanly severed. Just to make sure he wasn’t awake in his own dying head, she brought his club down on it and crumpled it like an empty can before finally turning her attention to the open front door and the scene unfolding just outside.

Walking out of that door, right hand drenched in blood, her attention was focused squarely on the two soldiers. The jaundiced man, he just stood there, nervously looking around, gripping his wheellock so tightly the wood creaked in his grip.

On the other hand, the boy was a complete twitching mess, visibly on the verge of tears, knees shaking, an Ikesian stick grenade in his hands, the bottom cap already screwed off and the pull string hanging out with a bronze talisman of a bird instead of the ring.

She recognized the boy with the grenade, because she had seen him in the street before. He had stood out to her for his distinct lack of eagerness to antagonize the locals, half-heartedly repeating what his elders said just loud enough to blend into the chorus of obnoxious would-be occupiers.

“C’mon kid, I can tell you don’t want this,” she said, keeping her eyes on him while her attention was, in actuality, on the older guy. “Put that thing down.”

The kid raised the grenade, pulling the string taut, tears welling in his eyes… And then his arms dropped and he just broke down, muttering in a weird mix of Ikesian and Pateirian as he curled up into the fetal position. She caught enough of it to understand that he had been conscripted, that he had grown up too close to the border to ever view Ikesians as “Snow Devils”, and had never been in real combat.

Seeing this, the older soldier turned his gun from Zelsys to the young boy, sneering with rage and clearly about to say something about treachery as he pulled the trigger.

Clang.

Zel had simply reached out and blocked the shot with the flat of her cleaver. Disappointingly, it bounced high into the air instead of back into that war-dog’s face. She couldn’t bring herself to hate him, feeling a mixture of pity and disgust.

“Really? Killing your own? How pathetic. You don’t even deserve my cleaver,” she spat, both figuratively and literally, already burning her breath for more Fulgur. He crawled backwards a bit further, pulling another pistol with his free hand and pointing it at her. The wheellock spun, she tilted her head, and his shot missed by half a meter, embedding itself in the town hall’s wall. She wouldn’t butcher him, but erase him, like the stain that he was, and the last thing he would see would be beautiful - myriad dancing fireflies.

This would not be anywhere near the magnitude of the technique’s first manifestation, lacking both the tremendous Retributive Battery charge and Aether-rich atmosphere of the Dungeon. Moreover, she wouldn’t deign to speak the full invocation. Three phrases though it demanded, she would not waste them in full on this man, at least in part to limit the technique’s potency.

“Beast Butchering Arts…” she invoked, expelling the first lungful as threads of fog, balling them up into ephemeral beads attached by hair-thin umbilicals to her silver conduits. The errant lightning which had already built up around her latched onto the beads and soaked into them, already igniting them like tiny little stars before the real payload of Fulgur could come.

His eyes went wide and he began shuffling backwards, he even flipped over and started crawling on all fours - like the rabid dog he was.

The bystanders wouldn’t let him pass, but they did not strike down at him either, merely shoving him away. In moments the soldier’s determination to strike down an innocent child stuffed into soldier’s clothes became weeping, begging desperation, and he kowtowed before Zelsys slamming his head into the cobbles uttering pleas in Pateirian that she knew to be dishonest. Were she to let him live, she felt in her gut that he would try to rip out her throat the moment she turned around. Like the rabid dog he was.

“Burial by ball lightning...” she continued, now forcing out two lungfuls worth of Fulgur as writhing tendrils of searing white that leapt from her skin and slithered into the nascent beads of lightning that hovered around her.

She had feared that invoking another technique would somehow cause the Essentia Crucible to spill over, but as she forced that delicate mixture of Fog and Fulgur out through her skin, she felt that the compressed ball of Aether in that second gut did not stir even a little bit.

...And he looked up, forehead bleeding profusely and tears of panic welled in his eyes. He turned to the young boy, rattling off something in Pateirian. The boy looked to the older soldier, then at her with a reached-out hand, beckoning, “W-wait, he says he’ll do anything! Even betray the Divine Empire!”

It seemed that survival instinct had overpowered what veneer of self-respect this dog of war had possessed. Zelsys, full eager to make use of this opportunity, said to the boy: “Tell him to proclaim the names of those who put you up to this. Translate.”

There was a brief exchange, and the bearded soldier looked at her cleaver as if considering whether to just throw himself on it. He gulped, nodded, and, his voice breaking, expelled a croaking yell: “Zheng Zemin hé Luo Mu!”

No translation came from the boy. He just looked around at the crowd, which had readily taken the jaundiced man’s scream for truth. Kneeling there, staring into the sky, he repeated it.

“Zhen Zemin hé Luo Mu!”

Again.

Again.

And again.

And his hands reached for his neck, twitching as he visibly struggled to stop them, veins bulging from his forehead and teeth clenching. Grinding. The sound of a molar cracking came out of his mouth.