Tok. Tok. The clacking of a rod against the ground, from the same direction as the deer. She looked away just far enough to see who it was, maintaining focus on the cross-spear wielder to make sure he wouldn’t try anything funny. It was, as expected, a Locust Noble, distinguishable from the others by the visibly weathered chitin, the slightly hunched gait, and the black-stone staff in his hand. Most egregious of all was the complete absence of a visible control parasite.

The main reason she didn’t just raise her arm-cannon and blast him away was the fact he pointed the staff at her, and a pale-green arc of lightning sprung forth. It gouged a nasty, albeit small burn into her skin before she absorbed the bulk of the jolt, much to the locust’s terror. His beady, black eyes stared as he struggled to remain upright, leaning on a pillar while his body spasmed uncontrollably under the strain of his own magic.

“W-w-who…” he stuttered out in utterly normal Grekurian. “That was meant to fry you!”

“You’re twenty watts, I’m a lightning bolt,” the beast-slayer said, receiving no response.

Breathing heavily, his mandibles clicking together, he stared her down. Then, he waved his hand in a dismissive gesture. “Just… Do your job, exterminator.”

It was strange. The moment he realized he hadn’t killed her, all the hostility vanished from the locust. He just… Stood there, waiting to die.

Thump. Thump. Thump. Crack. The door would fall sooner rather than later.

The standoff was interrupted when Zefaris rushed around a pillar in her combat-ready stance, pointing it at the staff-wielding locust, then at the spear-wielder, then at the deer, her eye dilating to the full extent as she struggled to make sense of the scene.

Something was very clearly different about these two, at least as clear as Zel’s trust of her gut could make it. The beast-slayer looked at the staff-wielder, pointing her arm-cannon at him as she made an observation, “You’re different from the others. No control parasites. Why?”

Visibly surprised, the lightning user looked up at her, his mandibles opening and closing a few times as he visibly struggled to word his explanation.

“I… We… We were exiled. Sent to the Orchid Mantis,” he said, still breathing heavily. “He read our fortunes, set us free. We work with the subcore, maintaining this floor, trapping dangerous loyalists down here. Got caught in the cogworks, weren’t supposed to be in this chamber. The Parasite mistook us for loyalists.”

“There are rebel locusts here?” Zefaris cut in, audibly surprised.

Both of the Traitor Locusts nodded, the Spear-wielder stammering out that, “We li-live in the cogworks. The Dungeon provides all we need for doing the work that golems would do. P-please, we can help you reach the Core!”

The beast-slayers exchanged looks and decided to take the risk of letting these two live. Still, they wouldn’t risk letting their guard down. They ushered the two bugmen to walk in front of them as they made their way out of the forest of pillars and towards the door. Zel kept her arm-cannon pointed at the Caster’s head, and Zef did the same with Pentacle and the Spearman. They didn’t put up resistance, the Spearman looking over his shoulder once or twice while they walked.

Still, the impacts against the door resounded. Thump. Thump. Crack. Thump.

The door was a gaudy mix of bright-red glyph and cyan cracks, the combination having mostly drowned out the original matte-black colour. For a minute, they waited, watching the cracks widen and spread. A minute became two, then three.

“Any clue about-” Zelsys began an impatient question, but the Caster interrupted with an instant answer.

“Door’s jammed,” he sighed. “The loyalists somehow severed the door’s signal conduits and jammed the mechanism with black-stone rods right after the Parasite overrode the proximity open command. Delta has to break it down. Were it connected, he could’ve just made it crumble.”

Raising an eyebrow, Zelsys inquired further, “How do you know all that?”

Instead of the Caster, the Spearman answered this time.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

“We were down there trying to fix the conduit. The loyalists mistook us for their saboteur friends. Safer to follow along and disappear later than try to fight,” he said.

Thump. Crack.

Thump. Crack.

Thump. Crash.

One moment, the door was there. The next, it was reduced to matte-black, inert gravel, spilling out around their feet.

In the intermediary chamber stood a towering humanoid golem wrought of black stone; its body covered head to toe in glowing cyan lines, all converging in a cyclopic eye in the center of its chest. It had no head, yet stood taller than the Sister but shorter than the Black Swordsman.

The eye instantly locked to the two beast-slayers, slowly strayed to the bugmen, then snapped back to the two women.

“You may lower your weapons. My subordinates are not aligned with the Parasite, despite their forms,” Delta thundered, its voice calm and collected, but almost human.

It ticked Zefaris off immediately, and she questioned the subcore as she hesitantly holstered Pentacle, “If you don’t mind me asking, why do you speak as you do, when Sigma spoke in a manner more befitting a machine?”

A chuckle sounded from the huge golem, a grinding thunder that perfectly fit its form. “Observant. My brother uses shells sparingly, as tools to be discarded. He deals with other sapients just as sparingly, forming a new personality for each interaction. I can not afford either of these luxuries, and thus have developed a semi-permanent personality.”

It fell silent, freezing in place, its eye flickering a staccato. When the golem resumed motion, it turned in place and began to walk with a titanic sense of urgency, beckoning them to follow in its thunderous voice.

“Come, we do not have time. I must expedite the trial if you are to have a chance at purging the Parasite,” it proclaimed, and the quartet followed. The locust-men without hesitation, the beast-slayers with a slight semblance of it.

They walked through the intermediary chamber, its door already open, into a long chamber segmented into three sections with thick glowing lines on the floor. The first segment was a deep pit with large, densely-packed black-stone spikes at the bottom.

There was no path across, no control handle, no terminal… Delta and the two locust-men just walked into the pit as if nothing was amiss, walking across thin air as wisps of bluish Fog rose up around their footsteps. They trailed a slowly fading, glowing path across the pit. Hesitantly, Zel and Zef followed suit.

While Zelsys simply followed the path while curiously looking around, Zef’s gaze quickly strayed towards the ceiling. Up there, she saw it, outlined on the ceiling panels; the path, outlined in a continuous line of outcropped panels. She decided it’d be easier to just follow the footsteps.

The path across the pit was long and winding, the pit filled with corpses both old and new. From ancient, bleached human skeletons, empty locust husks, to rancid beetle-boars corpses, bloated with decay. What felt strange was the distribution; it was everywhere, even under the path.

When Zefaris pointed it out, Delta responded with a chuckle and a remark of, “I change the path every once in a while, and set the Fog Bridge to semi-random low capacity when this chamber isn’t in use. The loyalists haven’t figured out the first part, they keep falling off midway through the crossing.”

Reaching the other side of the pit, they crossed the first glowing line. The line flickered out, and a wall of pillars rose up behind them. A huge glyph lit up across the wall’s surface, forming into a projection that soon cleared up into a mirror image. Ahead was a seemingly clear floor, until Delta stepped forward and the panel lit up beneath its foot. Another step, another lit up panel. One after the other, the golem plotted out a path across the floor, and they followed rather than take a risk. Zelsys looked back on the mirror-wall, and saw that it showed two lit-up panels ahead of where Delta was at any given moment, thus showing the path.

Still, they were curious, and Zelsys spoke out, “First it was a pit of spikes, what’s this one? Will a pillar splatter me across the ceiling if I step in the wrong spot?”

“Some will,” the Caster murmured. “Others will fry you, or burn you alive. This one used to be a floor of eyes with flamethrowers in the pupils. You were to only step on eyes with a particular pattern in the iris, but it was too easy.”

Step by step, they traversed along this path too. As with the Fog Bridge, this path was winding, but unlike the previous one, it had awkward u-turns and even a few gaps that they had to step or jump over. At the other side, crossing the glowing line made another wall of pillars rise behind them. This one had no glyph, it was in fact just a wall.

At the third segment, a number of pale-yellow lines across the floor lit up in a regular interval between where they stood and the door. Myriad holes opened up in the walls, from small ones barely big enough for an arrow to ones tall and wide enough that Zelsys wagered she could squeeze into them if she really tried.

Delta almost stepped forward, only for a line to turn bright red when his stone leg crossed it. A barrage of black bullets ripped from the wall, saturating the whole area as rows of black-stone spears and blades stabbed and slashed forth from the larger holes.

The golem rumbled a noise of discontent, “She’s rigging the trap to be unbeatable. I’ll just…”

A stomp sent a pulse of cyan light radiating out, a few glowing lines rocketing about through the seams between the panels, traveling down the length of the chamber. One by one, the glowing lines flickered out and the walls sealed up. Grumbling in a manner reminiscent of rocks grinding together, the golem walked ahead towards the exit from the chamber.

“The Parasite’s attempts at manipulation have been getting more and more desperate since you four entered the dungeon,” he complained with no attempt at hiding his annoyance. “Crazy bitch would sooner try to absorb the Core or jam the cogworks than face opposition. Doesn’t even care that she’ll die unless she cooperates.”

“I think she’s very much aware, but unwilling to accept her predicament,” the Caster said with a sense of schadenfreude. “She thinks herself a queen, better than an ancient machine. You know how much the loyalists hate the Three Kings’ works.”

Zefaris felt the need to genuinely think back on their conversation in the Fog Transit chamber when Zel nodded and, without missing a beat said, “Yeah, I do.”

She recalled that she had indeed told Zel of what Sigma told her, having omitted the parts regarding her brief mental connection to the machine-intelligence and the resulting humanlike corruption of its speech patterns.

Stomp. Stomp. Stomp.

Heavy as its footfalls were, the top-heavy idol that was Delta’s body moved with unnatural grace, only a subtle grinding audible whenever it took a step. Following it up close from behind, Zefaris made out certain details that were inconsistent with its general image of a headless, angularly simplified human male figure. Most notable were the backs of its forearms: each had a groove down the middle that unnervingly reminded Zefaris of the rails that bayonets were slid onto.

The wall-mounted traps spat increasingly bizarre things, activating right after they passed out of the trap’s effective range. Jagged shards of black-stone, Spitter acid, tiny darts with bright feathers, even fire of every conceivable variety from mundane spouts to jets of CP-T like substance that stunk like tar, earthen oil, and sulfur.

When they reached the door at the other side, it partly lit up only to stop and turn red.

Delta raised a hand and balled it into a fist in a crushing motion, causing cyan cracks to cover the door before it crumbled to pieces. At a glance, it seemed like it had given way to a particularly ominous Fog Gate, dark grey shapes roiling beyond the door frame. Then the sound of the cogworks hit them, immediate and not muffled as it had been previously. Distant pistons thumping, cogs click-clacking and turning, myriad other sounds that they couldn’t distinguish - overwhelming, all-encompassing, yet not loud at all. The ground didn’t shake, they couldn’t feel it in their bones, yet the sound of the dungeon’s internal organs consumed all other sound into its symphony.

Moments later, it was gone. The sound of something large slamming into place was heard from just beyond the grey fog, and the grey fog dissipated. An intermediary chamber lay beyond, which led to a hallway, which led to a wedge-shaped door that neither Zel nor Zef had seen closed from this side, but which both recognized. It was because of this clue that they knew what to expect on the other side.

To no surprise on the slayers’ part, the door was the corner of a sprawling trigonal arena, with trigonal floor panels. It was easily as large as the Fog Transit chamber, perhaps sixty or seventy meters across from wall to corner. Not as plain as those either Zel or Zef had been in before.

In fact, each corner was a door, and alcoves with statues filled every centimeter of empty wall space. They were arranged in three columns, some housing the usual abstract humanoids whilst others depicted skeletal soldiers in modern uniform, wielding modern weapons. The vast majority, however, were empty. There were pristine statues, chipped and broken ones, even statues that were held together by tiny pieces of black-stone.

All of them possessed glowing, cyan lightgem eyes.

All of them stared down at them. Not at the group as a whole, at the two beast-slayers in particular.

Approaching the center of the chamber, Delta explained that, “Under normal circumstances, the trial would go on for hours. We do not have that much time.”

He stopped and turned around, even as the Caster and Spearman continued towards the door. Delta raised his arms, causing two pillars to rise from the ground to either of his sides. Each was hollow, and each held a different black-stone blade - one a long shaft with a huge axe-head on the end, the other an equally long cleaver that rivaled the Black Swordsman’s original weapon in sheer mass. Their spines were shaped such that Delta was able to slot them onto his arms, and the stone melded together the moment they were in place.

“I cannot let you pass until you have bested me,” he thundered. “But I can let you choose the contest.”

The moment Delta spoke of his offer he saw a daredevil grin form on the tan slayer’s ever so smug face, whilst the pale cyclops maintained a visage of calm professionalism. Until she noticed her counterpart’s flaring ego, that is.

“Your bayonet enhances strength, right? Lend me it,” Zelsys said, her voice giddy with excitement. At that moment, the one known as Zefaris changed from calm planning to worry in the face of uncertainty, even if it was for only a moment. Still, she handed over the stone-blessed blade.

When the silver-eyed one’s right hand gripped the weapon, Delta saw an immediate flare of confidence in her eyes. For a few seconds they remained fixed to the tarnished blade before she pointed it at him and, with a grin of utmost confidence, declared her challenge.

“Swing down at me,” she said. “I’ll take it and hit back even harder.”

Delta’s eye started flickering again, in response to which Zefaris quickly retreated a few dozen meters out of the way. Zel used this time to take a deep breath, filling her lungs to their utmost capacity. Her plan was to expend her full lung capacity on fuelling if necessary, something that Breath Engine would interfere with.

“Style: Slayer…” she uttered in a near-silent tone, so as to preserve Fog. The icy-hot sensation returned once again, but it didn’t numb her pain. Instead, it furthered her awareness of her own body, steadied her hand such that she felt like she could stack needles on their points.

A few seconds later the flickering stopped and Delta accepted the conditions in an utterly robotic tone, “Trial conditions accepted: Gimmick Duel.”

The colour of Delta’s eye changed to orange, and he raised his left arm, rearing back to put his entire body mass into the swing.

“I can only hope you’re as capable as you are confident,” the golem said, now in his usual humanlike tone. Then, with a step forward and a twist of his torso he brought the huge black-stone cleaver on his arm crashing down.

Zefaris had seen her do this before. Back in the forest, she’d watched Zel send the Black Swordsman’s hunk of metal flying over his head. Even still, she couldn’t help feeling trepidation as she watched every second of the brief exchange before the golem took its swing. Zelsys took up a wide grappler’s stance with her arms held out, the bayonet nestled in the pit of her thumb as it hung onto the pinky by its finger-ring.

The cleaver-arm came crashing down with all the expected speed and force of an immortal machine, almost too fast for even her Homunculus Eye to see.

In a split-second snakes of Fog coiled out of and around Zel’s arms, and she grabbed the cleaver as one would a falling log. One moment Delta’s entire mass had been moving to slice the beast-slayer down the middle, the next it was brought to a complete halt and a jet of Fog as long as her arm was now gushing from Zel’s right eye.

Zelsys let out an exhilarated laugh, exhaling some Fog as she pulled herself up onto Delta’s arm and ran up it.

“My turn!” exclaimed the slayer, pulling back her arm as she sucked in a deep breath. Delta didn’t resist or even try to shake her off. It just stood there, anticipating the strike to judge whether it truly would be stronger than its own.

A gout of Fog poured from Zel’s face in the moment just before she struck, and Zefaris could’ve sworn she saw the jet of Fog form into an antler for the moment before it too was spent. What she couldn’t see, however, was the stab.

Obscured by Fog as it was, that wasn’t the sole reason; so fast and so forceful was the strike that even she couldn’t track the movement with the obstruction. The next moment, she saw her bayonet buried up to the hilt in Delta’s headless torso, cracks spreading out across the black-stone titan’s surface. And atop him Zelsys stood still gripping the knife, her chest heaving with labored breaths as she laughed her victory.

Then, she yanked the bayonet out. Crack. Crack. Crash.

The small cracks quickly became two large ones, bisecting Delta down the middle. His eye turned back to cyan only a moment before the two cracks met and he fell apart, with Zelsys having already jumped onto the ground.

Zefaris ran over under the assumption that the so-called duel was over, and she was right - when Delta’s larger form fell apart, it only exposed a human-sized form within, one that was staggeringly similar in form to Sigma’s.

When Delta began falling apart, Zel's first thought was to save herself the fall and jump off. The first thing she saw after she rolled across the ground and regained her bearings was a smaller, human-sized golem standing among the rubble, his solitary eye flickering cyan.

She felt Zef come up to her and handed the bayonet back, uttering a statement of thanks while her attention remained fully focused on the smaller golem.

He stood there for a moment, gently swaying in place as he stared off into the middle-distance. The flickering stopped, and with it, the motion; he raised his hands in command, two more pillars rising from the floor.

Instead of putting its hands down, it began slowly clapping and its eye snapped downward to meet Zel’s gaze. It sounded less like clapping and more like a pair of rocks banging together, and thankfully he stopped before he spoke again.

“I expected you to pull it off, not to one-shot my boss shell!” Delta laughed in disbelief, all of the mechanical stiltedness now gone from his voice. The golem spoke more like a deeply relieved and pleasantly surprised older man, if one ignored the fact his voice still sounded like a millstone made to speak.

“Barely even Second Circle and already crossing the sound-speed barrier,” he continued. “I’ll gladly let you pass and have my subordinates guide you through the third floor, but… That doesn’t fulfill my obligations.”

Delta’s gaze shifted between the two slayers as he answered their unspoken question, “I am required to reward challengers who best me, whether they do so the intended way or through an agreed-upon alternative. Name something materialistic you want, and I’ll do my best to meet your request. Exhausted as the dungeon is, there is an empire’s worth of treasures in these walls - I wager that’s part of why the Parasites want control. So c’mon, name your treasure.”

The two slayers exchanged looks. With the encouragement of a smile and a nod from her counterpart, Zefaris pulled Pentacle from its holster and spoke her request.

“Reloading, aiming, target tracking. I struggle with numerous targets and extremely fast ones,” she said, gesturing about with the gleaming handcannon. “I need something to help fill the holes in my combat style.”

“Yeah, yeah I think I can help with that,” nodded the sub-core, eagerly raising his right hand and snapping his fingers. Strange mechanical noises could be heard from within the pillar to his right, and after a few seconds it opened up to reveal a black orb the size of an eye. So black was its surface that, at a glance, it looked like a hole in the world. As Delta turned it about in his fingers a gleam of light reflected off its polished surface, reaffirming the orb’s physical existence.

“Philosopher’s Eye,” he said, slowly walking over to Zefaris. “High-precision motion tracking, universal essentia conductor for versatile self-defense…”

After trailing off for a moment he reached out to hand the orb over with the words, “Damn things used to be all over the place.”

Zefaris seemed hesitant to take the eye, staring at it with tangible trepidation.

She muttered, “I-I don’t… I’m not sure...”

Zel wanted to say something, but she wasn’t sure what to say herself. It felt like Zef was fighting her own instincts, struggling against a visceral aversion.

“Huh? You are missing an eye, yes? I can tell that there’s nothing in the left socket, even if you keep it closed. It’s not like you’ve gotta hook it up to the nerves or anything, just slot it in like a glass eye and it’ll connect on its own,” Delta continued to encourage her, nudging it into her hands. Zef’s hesitation waned at the reassurance that it could simply be placed into the eye-socket like a glass eye and she quickly took the eye, stowing it in her pocket.

The golem seemed to take the hint, adding one last comment, “Put it in once you’ve got some down time, good idea. It usually takes a while to get used to one of these, so just don’t use it too much early on and you’ll be good. Now…”

Delta looked over to Zelsys, raising his left hand in a prompt to make her choice. She genuinely couldn’t think of anything in particular she wanted for herself at that very moment, but she did have an idea. Before she would put her idea into words, however, she had a question that would gnaw at her mind until it was answered.

“I have a question first,” she said. Delta gave a simple nod, to which she asked, “What did you mean when you said I was “Second Circle”?”

He froze in place, his eye flickering for a few seconds as he made a continuous “Uhhhh…” sound. When it stopped, he conceded that, “I suppose that explaining to you where you stand won’t count as helping you skip ahead on the path. Very well.”

“Fundamentally, it means only that you are fully unified with your Azoth, possessing no single Azoth Stone. You are the lowest form of what could be considered beyond human - whether the surface world’s name for it is Philosopher, Adventurer, Hero, Cultivator, Sage…” trailed off the golem. “You get the idea. Now please, make your choice. There is little time to spare.”

“Can you make a mechanical device out of black-stone?” she asked the golem, committing his previous words to memory as best as she could.

He nodded, almost boastingly adding, “I can even carve simple glyphs on the spot, yes. Much of what I can do was put in place just to ensure I could fulfill as wide a range of requests as possible.”

Smiling, she pointed at Pentacle with her thumb.

“The gun,” she said, causing Zefaris to double-take. “Make a handheld device that can reload it in less than four seconds, and do so multiple times in a short span of time. If a hack-fraud self-taught alchemist can make a bottle bigger on the inside, you can pull it off for gunpowder and lead.”

Delta’s eye began flickering again. He looked at her, then looked at Pentacle, then at her again, then at Pentacle. He stared for a few seconds before looking Zefaris in the eye, reaching out.

“I-I’d like to examine the weapon,” he said with barely-constrained giddiness.

Zefaris hesitantly handed over her precious hand-cannon, to which the golem took it in his hands and just… Held it in front of his eye. Its light flickered, and he turned the gun in his grasp at every which angle. He half-cocked the hammer and lowered it a few times, turned the cylinder, fiddled the ramrod lever, even looked down the barrel.

“Mechanically simplistic, but I must admit it’s an impressive piece of work. The internal glyphwork is beyond even my own abilities, if I am to be honest,” Delta commented, handing the weapon over. Zefaris eagerly took her property back and put it in its holster, just as the golem raised his left hand and snapped his fingers.

As with the previous one, strange mechanical noises could be heard from the pillar to his left, only they were louder and lasted considerably longer. It brought to mind the sound of a high-precision lathe, and something else. Whirring and screeching, even hissing.

Then, the pillar opened up and revealed… A cylinder.

A plain, black-stone cylinder, as wide as a forearm and a little longer than Pentacle itself. Delta took it from within the pillar and brought it to Zefaris, and when the markswoman took it from his hands the object came alive. Its top half split into two halves, each of which had a centimeter-wide circular hole that could be covered by a swiveling shutter piece, a small projection glyph that showed a zero in rectangular text, and a raised surface next to the hole. On one half the surface was a single large bump, whilst on the other it was a number of smaller bumps.

Zefaris began examining the device immediately and with great curiosity, and Delta seemed all too eager to explain how it worked, “Bullets go in the left hole, powder goes in the right one. Slide the recess over the cylinder until you hear a click, then just think about reloading and it’ll do the rest of the job. Oh, and don’t even think about reverse-engineering it. It’ll just turn into black sand if you try to crack it open. And with that...”

The bottom half also changed, folding open and exposing a deep recess that Zefaris recognized as being perfectly shaped for Pentacle to slide into.

It clearly went far deeper than the cylinder would physically allow, but everything past a certain point was obscured by vague grey Fog - the same was the case when she had looked into Makhus’ Rubedo bottle. What little she saw in the dark interior made some sense, going by the presence of two holes to either side of where the barrel would sit it looked like the gadget would load two chambers at once.

Delta spread his arms and looked to each of the slayers in turn. The pillars behind him fell away into a bottomless pit, and the sound of the cogworks filled the chamber again.

“...My obligations are fulfilled.”

With those words, he took a step back and fell into the grey, foggy emptiness. The moment he vanished from sight, the missing pillars slammed back into their place as the floor, across which the two slayers walked towards their exit from this floor.

It opened without delay to a Fog Gate that also came alive nearly instantly, and a few seconds later, they stepped through. The filth of combat scoured from them and their wounds lessened, they emerged to what seemed at first glance to be an empty Fog Transit chamber.

The chamber itself was almost identical to the one after floor one, with the only major difference being the number and size of doors. Instead of three on each wall, there was a single utterly colossal gate occupying most of each wall.

A more than cursory look showed that the Caster and Spearman were present, but they kept to themselves to the furthest degree possible. They’d already raised a number of floor pillars into an impromptu mini-chamber off in the corner, with only a single-pillar gap for a doorway.

Zel immediately walked over to the projection glyph altar, grasping its control handle and willing a few pillars to rise next to it so they’d have a measure of privacy, though near enough to the two bugmen to see their hidey-hole with a simple lean. She also made a few pillars rise into the same table and seats pattern as last time, for when Strol and the Inquisitor inevitably arrived.

After sitting down on the ground in their partly walled-off corner, Zel and Zef sat there leaning on each other for a few minutes, doing nothing and resting. The thought crossed Zel’s mind that she had technically fulfilled the trait advancement criteria for Stormsurge, but she didn’t feel like fiddling with the Tablet. Besides, it probably didn’t do much to change how the trait worked.

Minutes passed. They tapped into their rations, both eating only small pieces of dried fruit and cheese, washing it down with small glugs of elixir. They weren’t hungry or thirsty, seeing as by now they’d spent nearly as much time in this chamber as they had on the preceding floor.

“Why this?” Zefaris raised the speedloader, making no effort to hide her smile. “That was your part of the reward.”

“Couldn’t think of anything that would help me in a fight,” Zelsys smiled back. “Besides, I’d rather be the one playing catchup.”

Zefaris curiously tinkered with the device, inserting and removing Pentacle a few times to get a feel for it.

“I need your powder horn and something to catch loose powder. Oh, and some cartridges,” she finally piped up. Zel handed over the powder horn and pulled out the Tablet, certain she had something appropriate in Fog Storage.

After a few seconds of warm thrumming and a readout of SCANNING, the device showed another readout.

UPDATING RECORD UPDATE SUCCESSFUL TRAIT ADVANCEMENT

Though she was glad that her assumption had been right, she was also annoyed at having to wait for the machine to perform its actualization. Zefaris didn’t seem bothered at all, simply pouring powder into the speedloader’s powder slot while she watched for the Tablet’s updated readout. The counter glyph for the gunpowder storage portion of the device had ticked up to twelve by the time Zel’s Tablet finally showed which trait had advanced.

STORM ENGINE Type: Essentia Synthesis and Manipulation Trigger: At-Will (Consumes Fog or Metabolized Essentia (Fulgur)) Effects: Electrokinesis B- (B in Beast Style), Kinesthesia Enhancement B+ (A- in Slayer Style), Body Control Enhancement A+ (S- in Slayer Style), Manifestation Spec.(Beast Style), Self-Resuscitation Advancement: Unknown