The four senior cultivators witnessed the young man mouth something, but they heard nothing, and by some trickery of the manner in which the staff-spear moved across his face as he spun it in his hand, neither could any of them read his lips beyond one or two syllables - excepting Zefaris, that is. She, however, didn’t care to reveal the name, just as she hadn’t really bothered revealing the name of Tempesta.

Afterwards, there was not much time to waste - they had to leave town in order to find the nearest leyline crossing so that the Butcher’s seals could be reapplied properly. Thus, they departed, with Zelsys beckoning the others to go ahead and fire up the Sturmgandrs, saying: “I won’t be long, I just have a question for Duma.”

Once they had left, the question came out.

“The Eight Onbashira, the shrines, the divine connection - was that all true?” she asked.

The old man nodded.

“I genuinely do think that staff to be one of the Eight,” he said.

Furrowing her brow, Zel voiced her concern: “Then… Is it possible that the eight shrines housed Ankhezian God Tombs? That the priestesses of these shrines drew power from the gods interred within, with the staff acting as a medium?”

Duma gave a second, solemn nod.

“Whether this staff maintains a connection to its god, and whether the god is in any way able or willing to interact with its wielder, is a whole other question. To assuage your concerns, I know for a fact that the deity which Pateirian God’s Blood Elixir is based on, that foul mutagen, was not interred in one of the eight shrines; Itrian mythology speaks of a wrathful mantis-demon who could turn into a centipede that could wrap around Mt. Rauja seven times, and for his hubris, he was imprisoned beneath that mountain in times long before Itria was Itria, pinned in place by Black Rods.”

“The rods again…” she sighed.

“They just keep showing up, don’t they?” the old man laughed. “At least we can guess the time of that myth’s origin, as the rods were considered artifacts of prehistory even in the earliest records of their existence. Tell me, do you plan to take the long road to the north?”

Zel shook her head, “The long road is beset by blizzards and beasts that would slow our journey too much. Jorfr intends to guide us through Agartha.”

“Ah… Then you shall get to see one of the Black Rods for yourself, if the path hasn’t changed too much since I passed-” Duma began, only to stop himself. “I mean, since I last read about it. I shan’t delay you any longer, then, but I do have one last question: How is Kanbu?”

“Good. He's stopped pretending to be just a retired beast-slayer,” the beast-slayer replied.

A cackle came out of the old man.

"Of course, it's not as if waking the Guardian Statues is something a retired beast-slayer can do. He would be a fool to keep up the charade. Tell me, how many fallen did he rouse to re-enact their battle against Ubul? Forty thousand? A Reignition of that scale is not a genie that will go back in the bottle of its own accord, that battlefield will be haunted for a year or two at the least," he said, before he caught himself again and shooed Zelsys towards the exit.

"Ah, I won't keep you. Go before I spill more secret history."

With that, she left the old master to rebuild his school. Upon returning to her companions, Zel noticed that Victor was already wearing the staff-spear on his back. A leather harness hanged out from under his jacket, affixing the spear in a secure position on his back.

As it turned out, after his first significant payday from working as a militia hunter, he’d spent a significant sum on having a custom, Fog-infused spear harness made. The reason was, as he himself described it: “Because the militia-issue harnesses stunk like horsepiss and chafed like sandpaper. They weren’t designed for Boarkiller Spears either, so the balance was completely fucked with the shotgun attached.”

As Zelsys had planned, the group immediately went on to search for a site where the Broken Butcher might be re-sealed properly. Before they could begin the search for a site of high magical potency where the ritual might be fastest to perform, Victor suggested the Broken Obelisk where he had finalized his Devil’s Teeth technique. Having dealt with such edifices in the past, Zel agreed to investigate the site, as the presence of an arcane monument was a good start.

Not wanting to draw too much attention by ripping through the forest and potentially smashing a tree or two, they left their Sturmgandrs some distance from the footpath that the redhead had pointed out.

A little while into the trek, the subject of Von Wickten’s fate came up, partly because Zefaris felt the need to show Zelsys one of the photographs she’d taken. Between the angle and the expression on Von Wickten’s face as impurity-tar had begun coming out of his ears, the macabre image elicited a raucous laugh from Zelsys. She, in turn, felt the need to show it to Victor. Though it did make him blurt out a brief bout of laughter, the youth didn’t find it quite as humorous due to not being quite as desensitized as his seniors. Instead, it made him curious, because one of the things the pulps didn’t cover were the specific contents of the Willowdale Locust Queen’s hoard or the final rewards the party obtained from the Dungeon Core itself – it was merely described as a hoard of great treasures and trash alike.

“Those pills. Do they really just make you expel spiritual impurities?” Victor asked.

“Well… Yes, but it’s a side effect of their real purpose, forcing the ascendance from First to Second Circle,” Zel answered. “They crack your Azoth Stone and force your body to expel the impurities making up the shell while absorbing the Azothic Mercury inside.”

“So you’ve taken one?”

Shrugging, she shook her head: “No point. I don’t have an Azoth Stone. The pill would just come out the other end undigested. It likely formed and broke down at some point before I even came out of the tank.”

A look of remembrance came over the young man; this fit in with what he’d read in the pulps. It was written as having been called out by “the Sister”, an alchemist who had worked on the homunculus project before betraying Ikesia at some point. “If those lines on your skin mean anything, you’ve already surpassed the Azoth Stone,” she had supposedly said. Victor didn’t know nearly enough about the spiritual or philosophical aspects of cultivation to make deeper inferences, and didn’t bother trying to do so; he just deferred to Zelsys’ knowledge on the subject.

For much of the rest of the trek to the site, Victor continued to be uneasy, and no wonder. It seemed that Red’s magic still had some residual effect on him, as plates of bone rapidly grew over his neck, spreading from the point where Burgghusen had stung him. By Zel’s count, he retrieved from storage and absorbed enough bone matter to form a whole leg… And correspondingly, the growth accelerated with each bone.

“It won’t fucking stop, by the Dead Ones…” he complained under his breath, until, eventually, the growth reached his jaw, and both his complaints and new bone growth abruptly stopped.

A rite of monadic communion performed by Jorfr revealed to the norseman that it was indeed a place of great magical potency, but due to a confluence of factors.

When Jorfr initially performed his ritual, he uttered one word: “Irminsul…”

“Er… It is a great pillar, yes, but what does that have to do with its function?” Zef raised an eyebrow, being the only one other than Jorfr to understand the definition of what he had just said. In her pursuit of glyphic magic, she had dived deeper into the Borean tongue than Zelsys, who had only bothered to learn it to a conversational degree.

Upon questioning, he explained himself: “There are others like this in Borea. Sacred trees and obelisks: Man-made or at least man-managed leyline wells. This one seems to run several hundred meters into the ground, acting as a stable crossing for the local leyline network. Ubul’s death and the leyline shifts it caused seem to have overstrained it somewhat, but it clearly still functions.”

“Wonder why the temple to Koschei wasn’t a more suitable place.”

“I suspect that in the process of defacing it, the Emperor went out of his way to destroy its function as a leyline well. These minor sites escaped such a fate by virtue of relative insignificance.”

“Very good, then let’s get this done,” Zel nodded, pulling out her Tablet. It was a multi-hour ritual even with favorable circumstances such as these, after all. She joined with Jorfr at the base of the obelisk, the both of them mixing their blood into a herbal concoction of which hey both drank in preparation for the ritual.

Afterwards, the proper talismans would have to be prepared, special fabric woven from the stalks of arcane Culca plants being cut into the correct lengths and shapes. This took another twenty or so minutes.

The next step - drawing the ritual circle in both participants’ blood - would take the next half-hour… And so it did. On and on the steps went, with the final step - actually enchanting the talismans - being the most strenuous and time-consuming. Zelsys and Jorfr both entered into a ritualistic trance, leveraging their own souls against the flow of the leylines below to draw power from them.

It was then, just as she had taken a photo of the scene for posterity, that Zefaris noticed something was off. The distant sound of heavy boots. Alerting Victor, she set down her camera and pulled Pentacle from its holster, retrieving a handful of coins with her other hand.

Dragon Knights - eight of them.

“The ones that got away…” the blonde uttered before she breathed on her coins. As the parasitized knights maneuvered between the trees in an effort to close the distance, Zefaris just threw all four coins high into the air in sequence.

Four earth-shaking clangs resounded.

Four cold-iron-tipped lances of flame and smoke erupted from the muzzle of her gun.

Each struck true, ripping through wood and steel and flesh alike.

Six survived the first shot. One of these six continued stumbling on even as half his head hung from his neck and as his brains spilled out. She opened her left eye. As it rapidly spun back and forth in its socket, the pinpoint of light that was its pupil shot back and forth. In moments, she’d mentally mapped out the positions and most likely bearings of all the surviving assailants as well as Victor, based on their current velocity, head position, and posture. Based on this information, she decided to leave the two knights nearest to Victor to him, while she herself would eliminate the remaining four.

Zef holstered her revolver, pulling Tempesta from her hip as she walked at one of the survivors and unloaded shot after shot directly into the split-head knight’s brain before pulling her bayonet. In a smooth motion while walking towards the second survivor, she slotted it to the shotgun’s muzzle, swatting away her target’s sword and stabbing him through his chest plate before she fired her remaining shells into him. It wasn’t necessary - in fact, it was overkill, a waste of ammo even, but she didn’t care. This was for her.

The third survivor fell to her when he thought to employ ambush tactics, as she simply drew in a full-chested breath and burned it for Gelum. In a flash, a beam from her eye carved a glyph onto his chestplate, while she reloaded Tempesta. The glyph had cost perhaps one-fifth of the essentia available to her - the remaining fourth-fifths went into Tempesta, its brass receiver frosting over and the belladonna flower in its stock taking on an ominous glow before a frost-wreathed slug erupted from its muzzle. The moment it contacted its target - the glyph on the Dragon Knight’s chest-plate - the man was frozen solid inside his armor. A second shot shattered him into half-frozen fragments, leaving only the fourth survivor, who appeared to be the ranged specialist of the group going by his wide stance and his throat, bulged-out like that of a frog, lit up by inner flame.

Zefaris holstered Tempesta, and pulled out a coin. On this coin, she had previously carved a glyph by hand, in order to eventually test the applicability of using her Ricoshot technique on enemy projectiles. Theoretically, it had no reason not to work, but the hard part was getting it just right so that it would properly embed in her spiritual muscle memory, allowing her to replicate the technique consistently with far greater ease. She waited until the spitter-knight did his thing - she needed to see the projectile at least once, and sure enough, it ripped through the air and she just about dodged it by taking cover behind a tree.

While the knight approached and charged another shot, Zefaris, too, prepared, invoking an entirely other technique to ensure her timing would be perfect.

“Headpiercer Arts: Flicker Step…”

For her, it looked like the world stopped for a split-second when the technique went off.

For everyone else, it was as if she - and her coin - had stuttered forward by that same split-second.

In the end, the result was the same: The coin sailed through the air, flashing just as it met the knight’s firebolt. The blast of flame suddenly changed direction - not merely going back whence it came, as its originator had since repositioned, but re-aiming itself directly at the Dragon Knight’s head. He wasn’t fast enough to dodge his own projectile on reaction, and the blast took off his face and his lower jaw. Zefaris finished the job with a headshot from Pentacle, already having decided on a name for the new technique.

Headpiercer Arts: Chargeback