Red struggled to her feet at last, the Subcore’s glimmering form returning to the palm of her hand, absent its octagonal casing. A hideous grimace gripped her features and the cosmic waters underfoot stirred, but before she could go through with whatever she had planned, the waters’ surface gave out under them; they fell into the very waters they had been standing on. Reality rushed back in, and they found themselves back on that dirt road, neither the signs of their battle nor Zel’s companions anywhere to be seen.

Yet again they clashed, tossing aside conceptions of complex tactics and arcane techniques.

Red’s blade sailed through Zel’s neck… And Zel’s did through Red’s.

Both spat out blood. The next moment, both their wounds knitted together; Red’s vanished altogether with an iridescent glow and the ringing of her horns, while Zel’s flesh forcibly pulled itself together before the seam metallized. Neither of them fell, or even budged.

“It seems… We’ve come to an impasse. By the time either one of us falls for good, the slavers will be gone with the wind,” the beast-slayer grinned, satisfied in having arrived at the outcome she’d hoped for.

The crimson lady’s left eye twitched, and a moment later, she retracted her arm blade.

“I will kill you,” she said. “One day… But not today.”

Glancing about for a few moments, she added: “I suppose it would be best to wait for the others.”

“They should be back by now, unless…” Zel furrowed her brow.

Red nodded, “Time dilation, yes. My False Dungeon has a factor of one to three.”

“Well, if you want to rush ahead to try laying siege to the Meat Market by yourself, I won’t… Alright, I will stop you, I’m not risking you being in the same boat with those slavers after all,” the beast-slayer stated plainly. For a moment, the murderous aura that had all but gone from her returned in full force, only to fade as quickly as it came.

Red let out a frustrated sigh, summoning a row of meter-tall pillars with the gesture of one hand and conjuring a Fog Vortex with the other, from it emerging a familiar bottle as the Lady in Red sat down. She gave Zel a passing glance, a tacit invitation as a second, noticeably larger section of bench rose up from the ground. A sense of relief washed over Zelsys at the realization that the person Red had become was a little closer to herself in attitude towards potentially lethal violence. It was… A welcome reprieve from the expectations of normal society, to be able to just go from trying to kill one another to casually sitting side by side to pass the time. Taking up the remaining space on the impromptu bench, Zel raised one foot to the edge, resting her left arm on it, so as to not strain one of the cuts she’d been left with. A short while passed wherein neither of them spoke or tried to interact, Zelsys just taking a few moments to reload her gun and refill her ammo belt, replacing the spent Type-1 shell with a surplus stick grenade. She slipped a phial of orange gel labeled “CP-T” into her pocket, the mere sight of it causing Red to go aghast.

“...That-” she pointed a claw-like left-hand finger, daintily holding the now one-third empty bottle of blue liquid in her right hand.

“What? I’m not sticking my arm down a Locust Queen’s throat again… And the seal won’t just come open on its own,” the beast-slayer grinned back. Her gaze happened upon the bottle, prompting her to remark: “Tengri’s Tears, huh? Y’know, I have some of the original formulation with me, none of that consumer-grade shit…”

She pulled out her tablet, retrieving two bottles of the same design as the one in red’s hand, both plastered in hand-made stabilizer seals, both with a plain, white label that read:

“TENGRI’S TEARS”

FORMULATION No. 4

BATCH 6

The seals covering the corks cleverly incorporated the bottles’ numbers in the batch, 16 and 17 out of 20. Zel handed over the one labeled 17, biting the other open and taking a long swig as she did. Clearly not one to refuse such charity, but also not one to trust so easily, Red took the bottle and looked it over, even conjuring her Subcore to shine that strange light upon the flask before she was comfortable with opening it up and taking a sip. To Zel’s amusement, the mantis visibly stifled an ecstatic sigh after that initial taste, and she couldn’t blame her. The consumer-grade stuff had to be safe for normal humans, but with the likes of herself or the sect’s venerable gourmand Ozmir as testers, the testing batches could be orders of magnitude stronger, thus amplifying any inconsistencies that needed to be ironed out. Batch 5 had been the last testing batch, with any further ones being made purely for in-sect consumption.

They sat and drank in silence for several more minutes. While Zelsys found comfort in the silent wait, quietly manipulating things on the inside as she worked to accelerate her own healing, Red seemed disconcerted. It took until Zel shot the mantis a lazy sideways glance to get her talking again.

“I do not wish to make it seem as though I would spurn an offering such as this, especially given the circumstances, but you should understand that despite my changed appearance and demeanor, I am still…” the Lady in Red began, but it didn’t even take another look from Zelsys for her to stop herself. It couldn’t have been more obvious that she didn’t believe what she had intended to say.

“No, you’re really not, at least you don’t have the same presence as your puppet self. It was little more than an extension of the Locust Queen’s own aura, which… Makes sense, if she was puppeting you the whole time. By my reckoning, you’re not the same person as back then any more than I am the same person as the woman whose face I inherited… And I trust her judgment as to your nature more than my own gut, besides.”

Red chuckled bitterly, “So she told you, did she? That certainly explains why you recognized me. Tell me, did she truly say that Judging Eye of hers did not see me to be the same person as my previous self? That the Black Dragon of the Ninth Wind gazed upon this wretched form and judged it to be someone other than the lieutenant of the Dungeon-sinking Locust Queen?”

“Mmhm,” Zel nodded in affirmation, taking a long swig of her drink. A short while longer passed in silence before she asked a question of her own: “How’d you come to be like this? You obviously didn’t just shed the parasite armor.”

“Do you truly expect me to tell you, just like that?” the mantis laughed in disbelief. The homunculus just shrugged.

A few minutes more passed, and finally Red decided to speak: “Tell me, what stood out to you about the Dungeon’s Fog Gates when you passed through them?”

“They repaired minor injuries and removed unwelcome foreign objects; stingers and poisons and the like,” the beast-slayer replied with a smirk, referencing the fact she’d learned about this property of the particular Dungeon’s gates when one such gate had removed Red's own stinger from her heart.

Red nodded, “Precisely. My teleportation talisman misfired, or rather, it was thwarted by the Dungeon Core. I was caught in the net of its gate network’s security measures, and it… Got to work. Every parasite, geas, false implanted memory, it cut and burned out everything that had been done to turn me into the “Me” you fought, reshaping all the crystal that had erupted from my head into these…” she said, raising the bottle and tapping on one of her horns; even this gentle tapping produced a twinkling sound.

“The thrice-damned automaton gloated that my punishment would be, ahem: “To walk the land a sovereign, and thy free will’s buckling against thine manufactured allegiances shall be thy punishment,” or so it went. It dropped “me” in a cave, half my Maxims-damned skin sloughing off of me alongside my armor, my gut full of dead parasites. I do not recall the weeks afterwards beyond the fact I rebuilt myself, and that I eventually made my way to Rigport to take my position as Cao Hu’s advisor,” she continued, lying about her own memory of that horrific time. Spitting aside in disgust at having recalled it all, she took another swig.

Her gaze turned to Zelsys again.

“I’ve answered your question, now answer the same one for me,” she requested.

“Well once we had offed the Queen, we found the comms array in the back of her chamber and had a little talk with the Emperor,” Zel began, exerting more effort to simplify and break things down as much as possible than to actually remember them. She wasn’t about to explain how exactly she’d obtained any of her current abilities, so a simplified account of the “How”s and “Why”s had to suffice. “He seemed to have been amused by the fact I went out of my way to metaphorically spit in his face at every turn, so he gave me the Blue Moon Prophecy, warning of how the next time a blue moon rose Ubul would wake up… And that sort of just set everything into motion. More or less everything I did between the moment I left the Dungeon and the rising of that blue moon was in service of obtaining the means to deal with his awakening. It truly was that simple, in the grand scheme.”

Glancing over at the Lady in Red - flabbergasted as she was at Zelsys so proudly claiming to have “spat in the Emperor’s face” - Zel asked: “Of course, I did write about it. I’ll let you look up the details yourself, being that what’s in those books is as much as I’m willing to tell you.”

“...I did read them. How truthful are they, exactly?”

“Eh, I’d say seven-tenths.”

They both finished drinking in silence, with Red glancing at her own bottle, then at Zel’s wounds.

“I suppose I owe you now, at least this much…” sighed the Lady in Red, raising a hand. The Subcore emerged from her palm and that crystalline ringing started up yet again, rainbow serpents swirling about her. Though the slayer eyed her with caution, she didn’t feel any alarm in her gut; she didn’t feel the need to be particularly cautious to begin with, having found that unlike people, whether a magick was infused with hostile intentions was easy to read. This one wasn’t. Red muttered an incantation under her breath, and at her command, the Fog-serpents slithered through Zel’s form in the spots of her more severe wounds, leaving behind seamlessly mended flesh and an intense thrumming sensation that faded in moments. Zel felt the sudden exhaustion of Vitae in the area, cluing her in on what exactly Red had done, a guess that the mantis herself soon confirmed after downing another long gulp of DDLV.

“...I cannot simply rebuild someone else as I do myself, but this will have to suffice. It will have exhausted your reserves as much as healing the wound properly, so do take care to replenish them.”

The sound of Sturmgandrs approaching soon became audible.