The shop was set up in a repurposed jail, with four cells in total. It was a place of organized chaos, with tables, barrels, and crates all stacked high with weapons of all qualities. Crates of bullets, lead stock, bullet molds were at the back next to shelves similarly stacked with various firearms, while gunpowder was securely locked inside a cell that had been repurposed as storage. Two other cells were also filled with displays of presumably high-quality merchandise, while the fourth had been repurposed as the counter, with a section of bars cut away to make a window.

“A-ah, greetings! Welcome to my establishment, can I help you find-” the middle-aged, somewhat greasy merchant began when he saw her, but stumbled over his own words the moment she looked at him.

“Can I help you-” he began again, but she interrupted him, part out of annoyance and part to end his own misery.

“It’s fine, I can find what I want,” she said. The incident still stuck in her mind, and she hoped to banish the mental image of that woman with commerce.

He deflated where he stood in relief, uttering: “Alright, good...”

She walked through the jail-turned-store until she saw a barrel full of robust-looking swords, clearly intended for chopping and advertised as high-carbon spring steel. Taking one from the barrel, she gave it a cursory look. It was a thick, strongly built chopper, with a wicked point that would make it good for use with Fulgarrow.

Weighing the chunky blade in her hand, Zelsys spun it around a few times. Something about the center of mass felt off, as did its magnetic properties - Zel couldn’t pin it down just by feel, but it certainly didn’t feel like a spring steel blade.

“How’s the metal composition on this, do you know? Forging? Crystal structure?” she offhandedly asked the merchant, not expecting an answer. It was, more than anything, a justification for what she did next: She stuck out her tongue, and then stuck it out some more. And more. And more, until what at first seemed like a particularly long tongue was revealed to be a thirty-centimeter tentacle more than anything else. With sparks dancing across her tongue’s surface, she licked the blade along its entire length as if to taste it, and her tongue shot back into her mouth in a blink.

Her brow furrowed.

“This is pig iron,” she uttered, turning a gaze to the merchant. “Did you know it was pig iron?”

To her satisfaction, the merchant appeared aghast at the revelation, his eyes going wide. He opened the cell door and walked out, standing next to the barrel with his hands crossed.

“I-I’ve received more complaints than usual in recent months, but I thought it was just that the quality of product was overall lower ‘cause all the good stuff got bought up for the war! Ah, what will I do now… How am I supposed to know which of my blades are trash, now?” he ranted, throwing up his hands in dismay.

A grin grew on the beast-slayer’s face, and she squatted down before the merchant. Even now, she barely had to crane her head to meet his gaze.

“I know a few tricks. I’ll teach you how to test your blades and you give me the pick of your stock, how’s that? You lose some good blades, and gain the ability to never get swindled by an Ea-Nasir again.”

“Some? I-I would need to know how many blades that entails to make such a choice...”

Of course. He assumed she’d drive him into bankruptcy, as a normal person reasonably would when dealing with an unknown cultivator.

“Two-dozen,” she offered.

“Without more concrete immediate payment, I can not shoulder that sort of loss. The ability to ascertain the quality of goods is invaluable, do not mistake me, but… I do not have the sort of financial cushion to be able to gamble on a long-term investment.”

She shrugged, “Fine. A two-thirds discount, with the number of swords I’ll take off your hands you’ll be set for two, three months easily.”

“I’ll do fourth-fifths off, on the condition that you teach me the metal-testing secret…” he said, then smacked the side of the barrel. “And take these lemons off my hands. They ought to be of some use to you; I can’t sell this shit with a clean conscience, besides.”

Held out a hand. The merchant met it, reaching down. A slight squeeze was enough to make him wince. Zel grinned, letting go: “Deal.”

She went on to scour the merchant’s entire stock top to bottom, left to right, sorting through his numerous blades and picking out nearly thirty specimens in total - of these, thirteen were truly good quality blades. Of these thirteen, most were some variant of a double-edged straight sword, well suited to throwing, but two were massive cleavers which the merchant agreed to hand over for free. His reasoning was such: “People keep coming in asking if they’re Captain’s Cleavers. They never come back when I tell them no.”

“Wait, you mean to throw them? In that case why not just use javelins, or even sharpened steel rods?” the merchant questioned.

“Maybe in a pinch, but I’d rather be able to properly use my weapons in melee when someone wises up and closes the distance… And I don’t know jack about using pure thrusting weapons,” Zel conceded, shrugging.

“Ah, no point questioning a cultivator about her own fighting style I guess… Alright, let me ring you up,” he sighed, gesturing for her to hand over the blade. Even with the merchant’s inhuman proficiency in the use of a mechanical cash register, it took several minutes to tally everything up.

“Do you only take gelt? I’ve got some muddled Huén from the Kargarians, if those would work,” she offered. “Muddled” Pateirian Huén were an ideal currency for under-the-table dealings, as they still had arcane safeguards to ensure authenticity and value without being traceable by scrying like normal Huén. The merchant looked around to ensure nobody else was around, and gave an eager nod, hissing: “You should’ve said so earlier, I wouldn’t have haggled as much. Some of my suppliers charge hand over fist if I use any currency other than muddled Huén.”

Once the monetary transaction had been completed and she'd stowed all of the swords away, the time came to uphold the rest of Zel's side of the deal. To her relief, the merchant had good handwriting and as such it wasn't too much of a pain to teach him the very simple talisman patterns necessary to produce ones which would identify metals. She wrote down several patterns for different alloys she thought he might want to test for.

"Now, this is important," she said, holding up one of the example talismans she'd made. "One of these will only go off if the object you affix it to fits the metallurgic criteria inscribed in the talisman. Even if they seem arbitrary and unscientific, it will work, as long as the criteria are sensical. When you use one of these you're making a deal with the local Metallum spirits in exchange for a bit of your own spiritual energy, so if you use these a too many times a day, you'll get a splitting headache, think of it like a spiritual version of muscle exhaustion. You can eventually develop a stronger affinity for Metallum and even raise your Aether rating from using and making these frequently."

"R-right, thanks again," the merchant uttered, enamored with the slight glow of a talisman he'd made and affixed to a steel saber.

Zel left the man to his talismans, relieved that it had worked. Talismanic magic was an art related to glyphic magic, ritualism, and shamanism. A talisman could work for anyone, but making new ones required certain affinities. In this case, the talismans were so fundamental that a normal blacksmith could be expected to have the Metallum affinity from metalworking. That the merchant had the necessary affinity proved he wasn't just selling weapons because it was profitable.

Meanwhile, back at camp…

Sitting by the fireside, Victor looked to Zefaris with a question: “Lady Zefaris, I uh… I had a question on my mind, since that time at the obelisk. The… Spell I used. Fight the Night. I did it more or less the same way I usually do, just with an unintentional addition of Aer into the mixture, but it came out completely differently. Adding Aer into the flamethrower usually just made it go further… And it had never registered as a unique technique until that point, for that matter. What do you think caused the sudden change?”

Briefly considering whether she should reveal the more esoteric knowledge that the Newman Sect had unveiled in the past few months, Zefaris decided to just come out with the simplest and clearest answer she could think of. Opening her left eye, she funneled a marginal amount of Pneuma into it, and projected a weak kinetic beam to carve a pictogram into the soil. It was a simplistic humanoid between pictograms of the sun and moon, foregoing the more esoteric glyphs for the Solar and Lunar principles.

“Pyromancy responds strongly to the Solar, or Driving Principle. The sudden upsurge of Solar Principle in your soul could have influenced all of your pyromancy.”

The young man squinted, and furrowed his brow, before realizing aloud: “...Is that really it? My spiritual disposition influencing my-”

He stopped. A groan of annoyance came from him, annoyance at himself.

“Dead Ones, I’m such a moron, I remember reading about this when I was eleven. I… Apologize for wasting your time,” he said.

Zefaris shrugged, “It could also be the staff, or the use of incantations rather than arcane mathematics to focus your mental state.”

A sudden spark lit up in Victor’s eyes. He got back up while leaving his staff by the fireside, walking over to the makeshift target range that they’d set up. Holding out his hands in those stiff gestures, he began a steady breathing exercise. Not a word came out of him as a bead of black flame formed before his outstretched left hand. Then, a gust of sticky flame blasted out, splattering across the log and quickly consuming it in flames that didn’t spread beyond their intended scope.

“...That was still much stronger than usual, even using arcane equations,” he sighed, looking at his hands.

“Then it must not be just one influence, can’t say I’m surprised,” she said, picking up a mess tin half-filled with soup and beckoning him with it. “Come on, the soup will get cold.”

“Well I won’t complain about having more firepower, I’ll need all I can get if I hope to ever match up to Lady Zelsys’ expectations,” the young man laughed, sitting back down before he took the mess tin.

As if summoned by the mere mention of her name, the sound of Zel’s motorbike carried on the wind as she approached.

Zelsys returned to camp to the pleasant smell of a rich stew, sharing the events which had transpired with her comrades, with one exception: The assassin. She decided to only share the incident with Zefaris for now, and even then, she would do so in privacy. With the sun soon to set, they ate their fill and Zelsys rested, downing half a bottle of Liquid Vigor elixir. Zel took some time to fiddle with her tablet and browse her new stock of swords, before moving on to traits and techniques.

One thing that particularly irritated her was how the logic automaton categorized techniques that were pure expressions of certain traits under their own categories, as this got out of control rather quickly when half of her martial arsenal didn’t necessarily fit under Beast-butchering Arts or Formless Butchery, the former being pure weapon techniques designed to handle beasts, while Formless Butchery contained more esoteric arts or ones not intended for use against beasts, such as the anti-materiel All-severing Scream. As such, she created a separate category for techniques that fit neither of these first two categories: Geheimnis, meaning “secret” or “mystery” in Old Ikesian. This name choice was based purely on the fact it felt good to say.

NAME ZELSYS NEWMAN SEX FEMALE SPECIES TRUE HOMUNCULUS FORCE A+ PRECISION A+ HARDNESS A- AETHER B+ TRAITS>

A swipe to the right. The projection flickered and changed.

SKILL TRAITS Greater Primal Magic Inhuman Physiomechanics Greater Fog-breathing Greater Great-cleaver Expertise (Saw-cleaver Spec.) Advanced Martial Artist (Sturmblitz Kunst Spec.) Advanced Gunmanship (Arm-cannon Spec.) Armament Intuition (Blades) SPECIAL TRAITS Slayer’s Instinct Osmotic Essentia Absorption Metabolic Alkahest Eternal Beast Essentia Crucible Core of Earthly Iron Engine of Retribution Despot of Self Storm Reactor ARTS Beast Butchering Arts Formless Butchery Geheimnis

Fulgarrow fell under Beast Butchering Arts, logically enough. Already, a potential improvement to the technique had come to mind, and she retrieved a leatherbound notebook and one of her predecessor’s special bottomless pens to note it down. It was true that she could just record her thoughts in her Tablet as a mnemonic record, she found that writing things down helped work through the thought process.

The idea for the tentative new technique was a re-application of things she already knew: Binding a disposable blade to the Broken Butcher through Fulgurkinesis. It would be an iteration upon the same principles that allowed her to create a semi-tangible connection to the Butcher with a Fulguric arc. The technique fell under Geheimnis, the Arcline. She'd only developed the technique a short time before leaving Willowdale, barely having had time to explore alternate applications until now. If applied correctly, she could use it to extend the Butcher’s reach with “burner blades”, or lengthen the arcline for a whip-like effect which would enable long-range melee combat or the use of a whip motion to launch the blade at immense velocities; this would rely upon the pre-existing skills she had developed to facilitate her Thunderclap Sting technique.

She could feel a grin creeping onto her face and Victor glancing at her with curiosity. Then, the flow stopped. She was done, and she had filled up nearly four full pages with notes and conceptual diagrams of how the technique could theoretically function and fit together with Fulgarrow to form a ranged specialization. Stowing the notebook and pen away, she got up and picked up everyone’s now-empty mess tins, uttering, “I’ll go wash these, I think the map said there was a stream nearby. Might catch something while I’m at it.”

As she walked out of the fire’s light, she glanced back at Zefaris and gave a nod. The blonde got up and followed in her stead without another word.

Vic looked up from staring into the fireplace, questioning Jorfr: “It’s been three hours. Do you think something might’ve gone wrong?”

“Mrrhmm…” the norseman grumbled without opening his eyes. “Nah. They’re probably screwing.”

“Eh? How do you know?”

“I made the mistake of going looking the first time twenty minutes turned into two hours.”