The automatically-assigned trait name was really quite self-explanatory, and it was not necessarily anything new, as much as it was a representation of the mutations her body had undergone to accommodate her soul’s housing of seven thundergods instead of just one. In practice, from what she had observed, she could now produce smaller amounts of Fulgur at-will even without Fog-breathing, could directly burn her body’s essentia reserves to produce Fulgur, and the efficiency at which her Fog-breathing could facilitate Fulgur production had improved significantly. Air already contained most of the fundamental building blocks, she just had to substitute in Aether for the missing Ignis component.

However, phenomenal elemental might or not, even with the best Makhus and Ozmir’s collective expertise could offer, sometimes recovery just took time. Indisposed as she was, she had no choice but to limit herself to lighter training, forcing her to polish her technique and magical ability over the systematic self-brutalization she so fondly referred to as a “proper workout”.

In the first two months alone, she became known as a brutal, uncompromising taskmaster, a living monument that would knock you flat on your ass, then reach out a helping hand while succinctly pointing out your shortcomings, only to compliment small improvements even you yourself had not noticed. As the winter set in and the first of the so-called “Fourteen Reborn” statues was raised, the further benefits of the sect’s shielding system presented themselves: As it turned out, the courtyard’s barrier could be made to somewhat effectively contain heat, this, alongside with its ability to keep snow out, allowed it to be used even in cold weather.

Zelsys laid on her stomach on a platform at the top of a tangled, elevated obstacle course of similar beams which had been set up in the courtyard using leftover supplies from the spectator stands. Several people scaled the course, wielding iron rods thickly wrapped in leatherbound fabric, which they used to strike her back with when - and if - they managed to reach her, after which they climbed back down and repeated the process.

She mentally graded their performance based on how often and how strongly they struck her, easily discerning each individual solely by how they struck her.

This whole exercise was one she had lifted nearly one to one out of one of her predecessor’s handwritten books, having modified it into the impromptu massage which it was, making it far easier to estimate the disciples’ progress in doing so. It was a truly elegant solution, as far as she was concerned - even if she had to reassure them that it would be fine and that she wouldn’t get angry on the off-chance one of them actually hit hard enough to cause damage.

For the third time in a row, a young man that Zel had taken into the sect based purely on gut feeling even in the absence of exceptional attributes hesitated to take a proper swing. She let the gutless strike slide this time, but cracked an eye in anticipation of the next time he scaled the scaffold, throwing out impulse comments on the form and strength of those who reached the top between the last and next time he did.

When she saw him yet again raising that steel rod for a halfhearted swing, Zel caught it mid-air and turned her head back just far enough to be a bit unnatural, scolding him: “If you’re not gonna take a proper swing you might as well not swing at all, understand? Proper swing now, left side, below the lowest rib.”

The young man’s next swing came with surprising strength, finally loosening up a stiffened muscle that had been bothering her since earlier that day.

Meanwhile, in Willowdale’s city hall…

A regularly scheduled senate meeting regarding ongoing construction projects was underway. All had gone as normal, with the governor using a new piece of equipment to illustrate his points - a projector, operated by a lanky young man who happened to be one of the few people familiar with the device.

“Furthermore, in light of the Stone Watchers’ effectiveness during the Blue Moon War, I wish to propose a secondary defensive initiative…”

A click. An assistant cycled the projector to a new image: Eight words in big, bold text.

WILLOWDALE DEFENSE FORCE REPLENISHMENT INITIATIVE

“IRON WATCHER PROJECT”

Another click. This time, it cycled to mechanical diagrams and artistic renditions of what looked to be a curious mixture of the Stone Watchers’ classical forms, but rendered using modern mechanical design.

“The project would entail the development and construction of defensive automata in cooperation with Iron Brotherhood engineers, relying upon recent technological advances derived from the Zeroth, First and Second-model tankmen, as well as the expertise of Mrs. Collier and certain other Tactical Supremacy Assets whose identities can not be disclosed for their own safety.”

Estoras looked around the room, intentionally gazing at several senators who he knew had grown fond of cutting-edge repeating firearms for their hunting hobbies.

“Those among you familiar with Mrs. Collier’s products can attest to their balance of reliability and economical design. Next slide, please,” the governor continued, his assistant responding instantly. Click. A painting depicting the city’s north gate, a theoretical new guardian standing atop the wall, wide-legged and cross-armed. Its exterior was a new version of the original statue, with a cutaway showing a mockup of its would-be mechanical internals.

“Furthermore, due to the inevitable industrial overhead of producing these automata, they will be developed in concert with a third generation of tank suits which will make use of the same parts as the aforementioned automata, and the technology will be adapted to civilian applications, beginning with construction machinery. Thus, in a single stroke, Willowdale will obtain superior industrial capacity alongside the ability to independently produce her own armaments, which we will be able to export out to other city-states and private individuals - which, as you all know, is an exceptionally secure investment in our unstable era.”

A raised hand. A question.

Nodding in acknowledgement of the question, he said, “I will answer your question in a moment. Lastly, development and adaption of more advanced essentech will inevitably allow us to more easily break into other fields - all-terrain vehicles akin to those seen in the Kargarian caravan, for example. The civilian variants of the theoretical third-model tank suit would be an evergreen export regardless of wartime economy or lack thereof: Why, Rigport has already offered to pay us to let them test our prototypes.”

The raised hand went down. That last part seemed enough to get even the few remaining stickers over to Crovacus’s side, and the proposition was passed with an overwhelming majority of votes in favor - one senator abstained, and one voted against.

The meeting continued on, moving to the issue of increasing dangers caused by arcane wildlife and overall upheaval - in short, monsters were being either created wholesale or spurred to activity by the aftermath of the war in increasingly high numbers, doubly so in Willowdale’s territories due to Ubul’s actions.

Thus, yet another initiative was put into motion - the Farmstead Defense Program. In reality this came down to giving farmers hazard pay, weapons training, and armaments, alongside a direct emergency line to the Slayer’s Guild. A significant initial expense, but one which quickly paid off when many of the city’s wintry crops were saved from annihilation by rampaging False Drakes thrice within one month. The hunting of these pseudo-draconic creatures and the selling of their parts alone brought in enough money to offset the cost - the question was, why were there so many in the region? They weren’t native to the area, and these ones breathed green flame, rather than the off-purple produced by the False Drakes of Stonog, the nearest known False Drake habitat.

It had been seven long, long months.

The bitter cold of Ikesian winter still lingered, and while much of the country languished in a struggle for life under occupation, Willowdale defiantly clawed her way back into what seemed an impossible state of prosperity. The Estoras family, the Kargarian merchant clans, the Counter-propaganda Bureau - all worked covertly in support of the city-state, all for their own reasons, leading inevitably to the formation of the Free Cities Alliance: Initially a trade accord between Willowdale and Rigport, this agreement had spiraled - with nudging from interested parties - into a full on alliance that fell only a half-step short of the formation of an entirely new state.

In these seven months, many things transpired.

Three of the statues that would make up the Fourteen Reborn were raised, and the Willowdale Defense Force Replenishment Initiative proceeded apace. Though it was still far from even a first production run, prototypes were being made and submitted for field testing at a rapid pace, the resourceful methodology of Iron Brotherhood engineers aiding to shore up where the methods of former Ikesian military engineers would have bogged the project down in the same way as the original tankman project had been.

No wonder-features, no extreme concepts, no ultra-high-performance features that had a tiny chance of actually making it into the final product. Just a war machine possessing the best aspects of the First and Second-models. These Third-models, in order to be dissociated from the Ikesian state military, were given new designation:

Macro-Troopers.

Standing at a little over 3m tall, they possessed the overtly humanoid design of Second-models and bulk approaching First-models, this design chosen intentionally in order to smooth out the learning curve for their direct control interfaces, a barrier to entry which had been among the primary reasons for the rarity of First-model pilots. The improved aesthetic appeal was a secondary, but very much intentional benefit.

While they didn’t have the continuous, massive output of First-models and their fulgur-igneic engines, Third-models had a hybridized system that, in its own way, was superior to its predecessors - so much so that retrofits to First-models were drafted in order to accommodate a version of the system. It was a simple solution: Using the advanced essentia storage technology used in Second-models to supplement engine output. The main advantage of a Second-model’s power cells was their ability to discharge energy at an exceptional, perfectly steady rate with relatively minimal processing equipment between the battery and the drivetrain. Conversely, the main advantage of a First-model’s engine was its staying power and its ability to just keep putting out energy, but the engines necessitated some heavy-duty engineering for their output to be made consistent enough for the tank suit’s needs, and even then secondary output improvement methods like Thunderchargers could completely destroy an engine that wasn’t tuned correctly.

Thus, Third-models and retrofitted First-models were given the best of both worlds, with a bank of rechargeable batteries near the engine, and additional batteries placed across the suit. This, combined with a redesigned drivetrain and power supply system, eliminated several critical single points of failure. Zero’s kinetic sleds were also incorporated into the design, but were only actually included on special high-mobility units due to the difficulty in sourcing Ankhezian hovercraft parts.

Meanwhile, the first of the Iron Watchers were already being manufactured, and the Guardian of the Wall was still some distance in the future. The great automaton would require heavy industry to produce. The G-Kaisers were contacted for the task of forging the construct’s internal skeleton, a contract to which they were more than happy to oblige.

Tales of a blood-red walking tank possessed by a bloodthirsty demon spread across the country, reaching Willowdale in the midst of winter. Strake was, unfortunately, unable to leave, as much as he wanted to, because Zero was currently being retrofitted at the time. By the time the tank was in operational condition he seemed to have changed his mind, for some reason. Perhaps the -22°C temperatures had to do with it.

Meanwhile, Zelsys spent a great deal of her time writing, both expanding the foundations of Sturmblitz Kunst, and detailing her exploits, peppering in bits of exaggeration here and there. She had contacted the Hanging Feudalist Printing Company regarding the possible publishing of a pseudo-autobiographical pulp novel, specifically one detailing her dealing with the Dungeon and, of course, the Blue Moon War. Strangely, they accepted without even asking for a manuscript to look at, instead requesting that she detail the events to her best recollection and simply send that in.

They then had a ghost-writer create two manuscripts based on her account, sending them over for her review. After three rounds of such back-and-forth, both sides were happy with the twin manuscripts, covers were commissioned, and the two novels were sent to the presses. Just as with other novels the covers were just black prints with a bit of colour for highlight, creating a striking appeal of its own that fully painted cover artwork simply couldn’t produce. At the end of it all, Zelsys had in fact written a significant portion of both novels, part due to her ego and partly because she couldn’t help making changes, especially when it came to improving the numerous combat sequences in both novels and significantly cutting down the actual dungeon-crawl part of the first book, despite the fact it had indeed been tedious in reality.

The novels’ titles were:

STURMBLITZ KUNST:

IN DEFIANCE OF THE EMPEROR

STURMBLITZ KUNST 2:

RECORD OF BLUE MOON WAR

Alongside these novels, Zelsys penned something entirely of her own, which the HFPC was all too happy to print: Compact martial arts manuals, pamphlets detailing the foundations of Sturmblitz Kunst, basic bodily training, and psychological exercises and advice that Zelsys considered to be useful. In effect, they were pamphlets designed to lead people down the right path towards self-cultivation. Her decision to create such things was spurred on when she had learned of a method to create writing that would expand upon the page as it was read, allowing a great deal more information to be fit onto a page without complex, high-level magicks. When questioning the HFPC, she also learned that they already had the means to print such text, as several higher-end cookbooks and encyclopedias made heavy use of the technology, and that it would cost roughly four times as much to print in such a way.

Zelsys gladly paid the cost, having several thousand of these pamphlets printed out, disseminating a number of them throughout Willowdale by handing them on a whim to anyone who came around to the sect and seemed like they would make good use of such a manual. The rest she stored away in her tablet, planning to pass them out when, inevitably, she journeyed across Ikesia, whenever that time came - and it would be sooner than she even expected.

Unsurprisingly, the novels were instantly popular with Willowdale’s youth, as were Zel’s martial arts manuals, all of which quickly spread throughout Ikesia over the months… Far more quickly than they would’ve naturally. Indeed, while the actual success of the novels was real, both their all-too-easy creation and their rapid proliferation assisted by Counter-propaganda Bureau agents.

Jorfr returned a mere two weeks before the end of winter, bearing a few new scars and, somehow, a few more pounds of weight… And with no motorbike in his possession. When questioned, he explained that he had, indeed, reached his far-northern home of Borea, but that he had lost his Faux-Sturmgandr in the fields of Titan’s Bane, as the “Cursed Automata” of that place seemed to be terribly aggravated by its presence. He said that the machine would’ve been able to outpace these creatures, but that he had been caught off-guard and forced to scale one of the great arms that reached into the heavens to survive, waiting up there for days before he could climb back down and simply walk north, unbothered by the ancient machines. He lost a great deal of weight in venturing so far north, forced to burn many thousands of calories to keep himself warm - a key ability that permitted the Boreans to live in such a harsh climate, he explained, fuelled by the supremely nutritious flesh of Borea’s megafauna and megaflora, which both thrived near geothermally-heated arctic oases, wellsprings of lifegiving heat, water, and mineral wealth.

The impression Zel got from him was that he was explaining a little too in-detail, and when she brought it up, he just spilled the beans: The starmetal he had intended to bring back just wasn’t there anymore, the fallen star having been taken wholesale by someone else, despite Jorfr’s certainty that he had been the only one to learn of its location.

Thus, the Borean had decided to search for another, and failing in that task, decided to ask his own clan for a favor… A favor to which they agreed, on the condition that its beneficiary - Zelsys - actually meet them in person and prove that she matches up to Jorfr’s lofty descriptions of her.

So it was that Zelsys decided to venture north, still not having entirely recovered from her injuries, and leaving the sect to be run in her absence, trusting the foundations she had built. Whether Zefaris would come with wasn’t a question anyone even thought to ask - it was a given.

And thus, another breath of change passed. The Blackwall’s net had quietly been loosened, the ambitions of a Duchess in Red stirred up north, and a cursed, abominable thing that had once been a man stalked the north-eastern wilds, tormenting a remote hamlet in the guise of a resurgent deity.

The Divine Emperor watched from his mountain palace with great amusement, but a bitter taste stained the flavor.

Was this… Doubt?