“One more thing,” Zel kept pushing. “The end of the message, when they panicked. You didn’t translate that part.”

Red chuckled, and a grin worked its way onto her face.

“The more authoritative man - the Commissar - instantly recognized your face. He screamed that the Arches Outpost had been lost to “The Heretic’s Daughter” before cutting the line. I suspect that the soldier who failed to recognize you is being beaten as we speak.”

That noun: The Heretic. It was among the derisive words used by Pateirian loyalists to refer to the Sage of Fog, that enigmatic man who had united Ikesia, orchestrated her ascendance into technological supremacy, and led the war before his untimely disappearance… That disappearance which had so conspicuously coincided with the Blackwall’s rising. Surprised at the epithet, Zel asked: “They think of me as the Sage’s daughter?”

“The Heretic’s Daughter, the Manufactured Paragon, the Living Heresy Against the Heavens, the Walking Tribulation, you have all sorts of epithets, yes… As do I. And her-” she pointed to Zefaris. The mantis’ grin became ugly. Bitter. For some reason she didn’t like having to recall these epithets, perhaps due to the epithets Red had heard used in reference to herself. “They call her the Reaper’s Bride. Trench Ghost. Evil Eye. As I said, we Pateirians have a habit of assigning epithets to significant figures.”

Making sure to commit every epithet Red mentioned to memory and taking great pride in each and every one of them, Zel returned some information: “After all of that, I owe you some forewarning, at least: A couple rats got away through a Fog Gate dialed to the gate in Von Wickten’s family mansion. The gate is in a library in the basement. I suggest you fumigate the place… And clean up the Dragon Knights as a whole while you’re at it.”

“I do not control the-” Red began, but Zel wasn’t having it.

“Do you not? Really? Come on. It’s obvious to anyone familiar with the mental acuity of these inbred nobles,” the beast-slayer smugged back. “You wouldn’t go by “the good Lady Karmesin” otherwise.”

The good Lady Karmesin deigned not to respond, instead commanding her firefly to float into the air in preparation for departure. Before she could leave, however, Zelsys stopped her.

“I wasn’t finished. In the coming weeks, a messenger from Willowdale will arrive with a very generous offer. You would do well to set any grudges aside and consider it on its own merits.”

For a few moments, the mantis was silent. She had, after all, staked her life on a plot that would have led to Willowdale’s destruction, had it come to fruition. The stifling of that very plot had caused her to become what she was now, with all the horrific suffering that metamorphosis had involved. Despite this, she calmly replied: “I shall rebalance the budget to prepare for an industrial expansion. I expect that we will be supplied with appropriate equipment including Third-model geoframes.”

Not waiting for a response, the Lady in Red departed.

Zel stood aghast, not sure what to think. She wagered that Red had agents in Rigport and Willowdale, but she hoped that these agents were not in positions of power, even if she would soon become a trade partner for the Free Cities Alliance. Moreover, the term “geoframe” was only ever used in reference to non-military siblings to tank suits, such as the very test unit whose up-armored form the Red Locust Bandits had been transporting. The production of mining-spec geoframes had not been made public, meaning Red had either guessed, or she knew more than she rightly should… Or she was just bluffing.

Not being in the mood to rack her brains over matters of intel security at the moment, Zel filed the concern away for later. She would send word back to Willowdale and inform the bureau, and that would be that.

Thus, the four of them departed, returning to Arches to set things right. An atmosphere of tension hung over the town, despite the daily goings-on remaining undisturbed. The gate guards just waved them on through before they even said a word, one of them uttering something about how cultivators shouldn’t just be allowed to do whatever they want “just because”. The streets were notably lacking in Dragon Knights, with militiamen stationed in common street-corner guard spots; what few Dragon Knights they did come across not only didn’t seem antagonistic, but shrunk away from them, visibly hurrying away as they passed. Zelsys overheard a knight with rather light mutations and plain armor arguing with his noticeably larger superior, clearly hearing him say: “I’m not getting fried in my armor just ‘cause a bunch of degens took the dragon thing too literally. No, I told you a thousand times that this is a job for me, I won’t kill myself to pay for the knight-captain’s drug habits!”

While Jorfr took Victor back to his home to work things out with the landlord, Zel and Zef made their way to the Von Wickten estate first and foremost, in the hopes of catching or drawing out the rats who had escaped, to no avail. They had agreed to meet up at the Duma School, and so they did, but not before visiting the bathhouse.

The staff of said bathhouse didn’t seem at all perturbed at their presence, though its public nature meant that the duo didn’t feel comfortable going through with their usual after-hunt carnal ritual. Despite their public and often shameless displays of mutual affection, they weren’t exhibitionists. After swiftly cleansing themselves of as much filth as possible, they made their way to the Duma School.

Jorfr and Victor arrived at the Duma School well before the other two. The place was deserted save for Duma himself, one of the instructors, and three students, all of them busy cleaning the place up; among these was Reiner as well, putting his prodigious strength to good use. Resved instantaneously noticed their arrival, placing down a heavy piece of furniture as if it were a chair before he turned to meet the two men. His eyes initially drifted to the norseman’s imposing frame, but quickly shifted to Victor, noticing the broken spear tucked behind his belt.

“I am relieved to see you are well, and you retrieved my spear as well… Broken as it is. You needn’t tell me of what transpired since we last spoke - in fact, I would prefer that you do not… I’ve heard the short of it already from the Lady in Red, even if she didn’t mention your involvement. Come, let’s go inside,” the Old Man said to Victor, already leading him and Jorfr into the burned-out building. It didn’t appear nearly as burned out as it had last Vic had seen it, the greater structure and much of the furniture seemingly unharmed beyond surface-level charring. Victor wondered if the old man had anticipated arson and proofed his property against it, or if this resistance to mundane fire was merely a side effect of its long-lasting construction.

“Your aura, it has changed. A life… Nay, several lives have been extinguished by your hand. I shan’t question your reasons, for there is only question that truly matters now: Do you, after all, intend to leave Arches?”

Vic nodded. A sorrowful smile grew on Duma’s face.

“Come. Let us have tea, at least.”

And so they did, right in the midst of the burned-out school building. Unsurprisingly, a blaze fuelled by mundane gunpowder and lamp oil hadn’t done much to damage ancient, two-millennia-old pottery from the Ankhezian Empire. The old man commented on these pieces: “I have had these for the better part of a century, and I still find them marvelous. The kettle heats itself, and both it and the cups keep the tea at perfect drinking temperature.”

His enthusiasm for mundane applications of arkatek didn’t do much to mask his sorrow at Victor’s impending departure. At one point, Duma asked to see the spear, questioning as he examined it: “I presume you intend to have it repaired. Does Lady Newman possess a fitting stock of material for such a repair? I think I had some ironwood somewhere around here…”

“It won’t be an issue,” came Zel’s voice in response from just outside line-of-sight, and a moment later, she entered with Zefaris in tow, who was busy leafing through newly-taken photographs as she walked.

The old master looked up at the beast-slayer with a degree of respect that Victor had never seen in the man. His presence seemed to recede without shrinking, as if he was going out of his way to spiritually make room for her naturally dominating presence. She briefly pulled out her Tablet on the way over to the table, setting down a jar of golden paste as she sat down. Atop the jar were two lengths of bloodwood, both far too short to make up a spear OR staff shaft.

Duma glanced over, murmuring: “Azoth-auric Amalgam, and that much of it… I dare not ask how long it took you to gather the Azoth Stones to make this, or what creatures these stones came from.”

“This…” Zel flicked the side of the jar. “...Was willed into being by a Dungeon Core. The Willowdale Locust Queen had been forcing it to produce arcane treasures and clothing in an attempt to make it sink through exhaustion. I mean to join the spearhead together with a staff which we retrieved from the Red Locust Queen’s possession, but I will need three supporting-pillars to carry out the joining.”

Resved nodded without hesitation.

“We can go through with it right away, if you so wish.”

“Tea first. My tongue feels like a dead snake. Do you mind if I eat here?”

“No, no, please go ahead! I can sense the exhaustion in you, and you stink of ozone besides. Considering that you are in any state to speak with me, I take it that my advice regarding internal balance helped stabilize your transformation.”

“So it did, so it did. Incorporating lesser muscle groups to use them as Fulgur ballasts helped soften the essentia fluctuations, and using my own body heat as a secondary source of Ignis eased the Pneumatic load for Fulgur generation. To think it was there all along…”

“The human form is among the most complex constructs of essentia there is, one needs to but know where in the body to find them and what state of being generates them. Why, the Victory Wash elixir is a perfect example of these principles, merely applied via external alchemy.”

Vic felt himself zoning out as the two masters debated jargon that sounded like a blend of technical specifications and high-minded philosophy, their discussion fading into background noise. He looked around and saw that Zefaris had set her camera into its carrying-case and began meticulously cleaning her revolver, while Jorfr just… Sat there, eyes closed. The norseman muttered something under his breath in Borean, his body tangibly growing colder by the second to the point where Victor felt it from nearly a meter away. Some sort of meditation, perhaps.

So it went on for a while, the better part of an hour. At some point Zelsys pulled a package out of Fog Storage, some sort of metal container covered in green-blue seals. The calligraphy was utterly perfect, each sigil simultaneously no larger than it needed to be while still being beautiful. He could scarcely imagine what treasure was within, until she cracked it open and the scent hit him.

It was food; three, perhaps four full meals worth of strange bluish meat slathered in a translucent lilac sauce, accompanied by chopped, steamed leaves that, for once, he recognized: Culca leaves. It was a rare, arcane plant with nearly universal applications in alchemy and magic, and as such it only made sense that someone of Zelsys’ stature would use it to recover after such a terrible battle. To his bewilderment, it was letting off fragrant steam as if the meal had been sealed up only minutes ago. However, a question roiled in Vic’s head. It was obvious that this meal had been cooked by none other than the Newman Sect’s culinarian-alchemist, one of the few members grandfathered into the new sect from its Black Horse predecessor: Ozmir. From the pulps, the descriptions of Ozmir’s cooking had stuck in Vic’s mind most vividly.

“Do you keep those in storage ready to go just in case?” he asked.

In the midst of chewing a fist-sized chunk of the meat, Zelsys nodded.