Meanwhile, Victor spun his staff-spear from his back, having already prepared in advance just as Zefaris had. The rings about his staff’s head took on a green glow as wisps of Bonefire sprung into being around its head. He taunted the last survivor with a gesture, running over to the knight who had fallen after a single shot, standing over him. With his free hand he reached out, grasping the man’s ribcage and ripping out its constituent Ossum through the back in the form of bone spikes. Each one came off in turn, floating around his right hand as he reshaped them, into Devil’s Teeth in seconds. The Bonefire which he’d conjured served to enchant them, and with the staff he launched them at his assailant. The fact that it took him several shots to down one of these crooks where Zefaris could do so in one or two didn’t make a difference to him; Victor was still proud that he was even able to kill a single Dragon Knight.

A second approached him from behind thinking to ambush him, but he’d been through this song-and-dance before. A bit of focus, some Aer drawn from the air and Ignis pulled from the earth. Staff or no staff, it was unsettling how much easier it had become now that he had the full intent to kill. He felt a grin forcing its way onto his face. Why was he excited? His gut resolutely insisted that this was a life or death, but some cackling, mad thing deep in the recesses of his brain told him it was fun. It came from the same place whence the blazing, murderous fury had originated when he first witnessed Von Wickten’s true wretchedness.

The dragon knight was at hand. He retreated, meeting the man’s wild sword-swings with the sword-spear end of his spear. It was terribly convenient, this staff, but Victor still wasn’t used to it, and so resorted to incanting out loud. He’d always used arcane mathematics to help himself get into the headspace, but finding that they just didn’t work anymore even if he tried, he instead made up an incantation based on something that elicited the correct feeling to perform pyromancy. Sturmblitz Kunst 0 explicitly recommended taking inspiration from art or myth, and so, his mind defaulted to a song lyric - a song which a band in the Kargarian Caravan had performed both times they had passed through Arches.

First, however, he needed a blast of Aer to knock his opponent off-balance. After that, it was just a matter of aiming the spell, knowing the lazy, sluggish spray of dirty flame it would produce. He instinctively held out the staff with his left hand and aligned the magic circle on his right hand with its largest ring, for no real reason beyond the fact it felt right.

“Unleash, fire and flames alight…”

A stream of flame flowed forth from his hand, fingers stiff in an igneic gesture, coalescing into a bead in the ring’s center. The four smaller, jade rings realigned into even spacings around the main ring.

“Full force, strike…”

The jade rings began spinning in place, their green colour briefly changing to white and sparks flying from them. Even now, the bead continued to grow, the black-white stream of Ignis gradually replaced by a translucent, barely-perceptible shade of Fog. Unknowingly, or perhaps carelessly, Victor had blended Aer into the mixture.

"C'mon Oculus, don't betray me now..." a thought went through his mind, but the only answer he got was the reassuring thrum of a stable arcane connection between wielder and artifact. This was the name which had come to him - Oculus, the Ninth Onbashira. Doubts assuaged, he chanted final part of the incantation: “Fight the Night!”

The gesture, the mental pattern, the essentia involved - this had previously produced a gout of dirty, sticky flame, sluggish and slow-moving. This time, though, the first time he’d used it since meeting with Zelsys, it was something entirely different. It felt as though, for a split-second, time froze. He could see the bead of flame compressing and deforming, nearly forming a ring with a hollow center. A loud crack erupted from his staff as a sudden blaze ripped forth all at once, its pure-white corona leading in harsh streaks and causing a blinding flash of light while its pitch-black core followed, shielding Victor from being blinded by his own magic. The recoil of it sent him reeling, stumbling backwards, the heat washing over him in a sudden wave. Before he could get his bearings, time resumed.

When it cleared, the Dragon Knight was left burned and blinded, his eyes seared out of their sockets and the skin of his face bubbling, even the edges of his armor had taken on a cherry-red glow.

Vic stood stunned at what he had just done, for but a moment, before he lunged forward and cut the knight’s throat out.

“Did you just… Did you just turn a lyric from a Knights of Rebellion song into an incantation?” came an amused question from Zefaris, interrupted by a brief chuckle in the middle. It was accented by the subtle click-clacking of her revolver’s dungeon-tech holster as its arcane mechanisms reloaded the empty chambers.

She had already slain all the other knights, and had merely been watching what Victor would do with this last one.

“Y-yeah, I… The pamphlet said-” Vic blurted out, but before he could muster up a response she walked over, and to his immense confusion, put her hand ontop of his head, a faint smile on her face. She was perhaps half a head taller than him, a fact that hadn’t truly dawned on him until now for one simple reason: Though Zefaris was tall, she was still shorter than Zelsys and Jorfr. As this realization sunk in and he fruitlessly grasped for words to form into a sentence, she finally said something.

“Good choice! They told us to use lyrics in training camp, too,” she praised him, lightly patting him on the head as she did so before she just turned around as if nothing had happened, walking towards the obelisk. She sat down and pulled out her Tablet. The manner in which the blonde had just beamed with warmth completely caught him off-guard, considering how harshly it contrasted to her usually cool, professional aura. Still processing what had just happened, Victor slowly put his staff on his back and pulled out his own Tablet, also making his way into the broken obelisk’s general vicinity as he browsed through the device. Unknowingly, his reason for doing so was the same as Zef’s - taking a look at the newly-registered technique and officiating its name in the device’s records.

It took some finagling to get the device to pull up the list, since he hadn’t used this function very many times at all. Most of his techniques fell under Lesser Glyphic Magic, with everything that involved devilbone and/or didn’t involve glyphs being categorized under Devilbone Arts. To his surprise, there wasn’t one new unnamed technique, but three.

LESSER GLYPHIC MAGIC Air Gust Mud Slick Flame Weapon Flame Trick Strength of Earth Bramble Growth DEVILBONE ARTS (UNIQUE) Devil’s Teeth Boneyard Armor Unnamed Technique Unnamed Technique Unnamed Technique

He put it down for a moment, squatting down next to Zefaris as he turned his attention towards Zel and Jorfr. They sat inside the ritual circle in a silent trance, seemingly ignorant of the outside world. The blonde put her Tablet away, her left eye cracking open so that she could see him.

“Unsettling…” a thought shot through his head. The matte blackness, the swirling, spiral-shaped pupil, the way it moved in the socket, freely spinning.

“Say, Lady Zefaris-” he began.

She interrupted: “...Just Zefaris is fine. Go on.”

“Why did you put your hand on my head like that?”

“Oho…” came a non-response. Then, out of nowhere, she did that exact thing again, turning her head to look at him head-on. A startlingly lackadaisical grin on her face and tone in her voice, she answered: ”You just remind me of a soldier I used to know is all. I can stop, if it makes you uncomfortable.”

That wasn’t it. Victor just hadn’t expected anything of the sort - maybe a pat on the back at the end of a training session.

“N-no, it doesn’t…” he trailed off, allowing it to go on for a short while before speaking up again. “Alright, you can stop now, I’m not a cat.”

As her hand pulled away he sat down, taking his Tablet back in hand. This time, Zefaris glanced over.

“Aer, Terra, Ignis, Aqua, Viriditas… And Ossum. The full wizard kit. At your age it’s a bit sad how much time you must’ve spent just to learn the basics of all those,” she remarked.

Vic let out a sigh, agreeing: “Ossum and Ignis come naturally, at least, but you’re not wrong. It is what it is, I’d rather not think back on it.”

He willed the Tablet to close the listing for glyphic magic, and started going through the details of his three unnamed techniques. One by one, they revealed themselves and he named them.

DEVILBONE ARTS (UNIQUE) Devil’s Teeth Boneyard Armor Volcanic Fist Fight the Night Bone-eating Hand

After that point, nothing much of note occurred. They waited out the remainder of the ritual. Victor asked how much longer it was likely to take, to which Zefaris answered: “Two hours or so.”

With that much time to spare, Victor decided to go around and rob their assailants for everything they had and burn the corpses, not to dispose of evidence, but to dispose of the inevitable smell.

“You think plate armor will sell?” he asked at the beginning of this time-killing endeavor.

The answer he got was equally pragmatic: “The parts that are easy to refit, maybe!”

It made sense. The Dragon Knights’ bodies were considerably more sizable than those of normal people. And so, taking his time, Victor set each of the bodies alight with Bonefire one by one, burning them out of their armors, sitting down for a little while while they burned before moving on to looting them. As he did this, Zefaris took some time to clean her gun, as had become a habit for her. What money they each carried added up to a good sum, even if a considerable portion was in Huén. As for their weapons, most were good-quality, but mundane swords - two of them had carried guns, the same rolling-block pistols as Victor already had. Still, he took them.

Zefaris took quite a bit of interest in these pistols, asking for one to examine and commenting on its construction: “That’s a clever way of handling a breech, looks like a proper scratch-built gun instead of a refitted sparklock. Looks to be chambered for standard paper musketball cartridges, good bit of kick there… I’ll have to send word of this innovation back to Willowdale, if only so that Collier develops a better mass-production pistol than those jam-happy volcanics.”

“Won’t that put Collier in direct opposition to whichever Gunsmiths’ Guild the manufacturer is registered with? There’s all sorts of vested interests to keep in mind…” Victor raised an eyebrow in question, tilting his head to the side.

“I don’t think she cares much, given the fact she’s using secret military knowledge as the basis for much of her current work. Hell, see this?” she said, pulling Tempesta out of its holster. It sat folded in half, only to snap together through the motion of unholstering alone. This being the first time Victor had seen the gun unholstered up-close, he couldn’t help but blurt out: “Ooh… Can I see that again?”

As if she’d been waiting for that exact reaction, Zefaris released the latch holding the gun together at the top, folding it in half in her hands. Then, with a flick of the wrist, she unfolded it into its complete state. She rested it in her lap, remarking: “Oof, it’s too easy to get used to it feeling nearly weightless with that bayonet…”

The Stone-blessed Bayonet, that inconspicuous blade which had soaked up Ubul’s earthen might while it was stuck in his back during his years-long self-petrification. As the books described it, the blade’s latent power was unlocked by a Dungeon Core as one of the trial rewards, causing it to impart a strength boost to its attuned wielder significant enough to bump up a D+ Force rating up to C+, a full letter grade. For some reason it had slipped Victor’s mind despite being mentioned in the books, perhaps because it was so utterly overshadowed by Zef’s use of firearms.

“Anyhow, where was I… Right, Tempesta here - it’s actually a scaled-down version of the intended armament for First-model Tank Suits, the Macroshotgun. The same thing goes for the self-contained cartridges, it’s just a downscaled, simplified version of cannon shells.”