The whole purpose of this exercise was to help flesh out a combat style decisively not designed with nonlethal sparring in mind, though it was surprisingly effective against opponents considerably larger than the user, perhaps because it had been born in the dungeon’s Warrior-bug filled halls and faux-trenches. Unfortunately, due to the lack of overall kinetic energy, firing a Concussion Impact didn’t so much knock Zef’s partner back as it slowed her down a bit, alongside sending visible shockwaves rippling through her flesh.

Zef’s knife and gun style focused mainly on maintaining the firing line and managing spacing, as was perfectly reasonable. She occasionally managed to read even those of Zel’s moves that the amazon had thought to lack telegraphing, and that was only with one eye open. It was not until Zel had “won” several times in a row that the blonde finally decided to open the Philosopher’s Eye, at which point the tide shifted in Zef’s favor.

Between a near-prescient ability to predict what Zelsys was about to do and liberal use of Concussion Impact in the form of unfocused force blasts from the eye, it forced Zelsys into making a concerted effort to fight, even more so considering the fact she had to make absolutely certain she didn’t go overboard. In her mind, overboard didn’t mean one accidental “real” punch, but rather breaking a bone or performing a truly injurious move.

For a while they trained like this, until Makhus and Sigmund arrived at half to four in the afternoon to the minute. Makhus still looked to be in some degree of pain from his new tattoos, while Sigmund couldn’t have looked more spry, happily taking to beating the absolute living hell out of a target block. The flames of his Victory Echoes felt different somehow, but Zel couldn’t place how.

As for Makhus, he agreed to help with polishing Zef’s fighting style, but she snubbed him with a remark of: “In a bit, I need to write something down.”

“How cold…” he whined exaggeratedly, only to return to his normal self and pull out a thoroughly bound-up, bulky stick, pointing it at Zel and yelling a challenge. Oh, she got what was happening. He was intoxicated, twofold at that. She could smell plum wine on his breath and there was a subtle yellow tinge under his nose.

Zel gladly took him up on the challenge, however, pulling her own wooden paddle from storage and taking to seeing how badly his reflexes were impaired.

The answer was… Not at all.

In fact, the added bit of aggression made him harder to deal with.

Just over and over, Evil-cleaving Slash after Evil-cleaving Slash, blat blat blat again and again, the sturdy wood which he wielded bending and reverberating under the force but showing no sign of breaking. She couldn’t get a good swing in, forced to use her paddle as a shield with both hands.

Then she burned some breath and let go with her right hand, funneling Fulgur to the left to lock up her muscles and to the right to snap it into position with a forceful bicep contraction. A twist on her heel and a forward thrust of her fist sent the overly-aggressive swordsman backwards, at first skidding across the dirt before he lost balance and doubled over altogether. Then he let out a wheezing breath, struggled to breathe, and puked up bright-yellow liquid.

“Heheh… Might’ve overdone it a bit, huh?” he remarked, staring into the puddle before he stumbled to his feet and shook his head. He muttered something about purgation, did a gesture, and proceeded to puke even more yellow liquid, and like that, the manic energy vanished from him. Zef and Sig bothered to only for a moment look away from that which busied them to express their amusement in laughter, the bearded baldo exclaiming: “I fuckin’ told you she’d punch it out of you!”

“Sorry ‘bout that, I uh… I didn’t have any Liquid Vigor ready to go and the Viriditas still was still full of burnt shit so I started drinking the mix with Daytime Dust in it.”

“It sure didn’t make you any worse with a stick. Hell, I could see you kicking back potions in a fight to get an edge, the kind of thing only an alchemist can make safely,” Zel grinned back, confident in the idea that an alchemist could use combat elixirs that would be dangerous or impractical at best to non-alchemists.

“Yeah, I could probably rig up an injector system on the suit…” he murmured before he shook his head again, stepped over the puddle of his own sick, and raised the stick again.

“Another bout, then? Properly, this time. Try and do that thrust with your stick and I’ll see if I can block it.”

And so the rest of the day was trained away.

They made good on their mutual intention to break-in the elder’s quarters that night, the dust of his remains having long been cleaned out by the groundskeeper after he had asked permission to do so.

The bedchambers were the first choice, but the bath won out by the virtue of habit from their days of visiting the bathhouse.

She was so cute. Ever in control, ever looming over existence, even in these private moments - until the moment Zef got her fingers on and in her. Every single time, Zel would melt into what Zef would describe as a great big pile of fuzz. Heavily muscled and downright aggressive at times, but a pile of fuzz no less.

Perhaps the most notable part of that night - at least to Zefaris - was the presence of a noticeable lump of flesh under the surface of Zel’s stomach, between the lowest pair of her abs, where previously there had only been soft tissue that readily yielded to her fingers. Now there was a quite noticeable mass, pressing upon which still elicited a satisfying response from her lover, but also caused a curious reaction in the form of the flesh nub atop Zel’s womanhood slightly protruding outward. She’d already noticed it slowly changing shape over the last several days to a subtly pointed form, initially thinking it to be a minor mutation, but…