Three knocks on the door: Two, then a short pause, and the third. The code for an injury that needed treatment, but wasn’t an emergency.

A deceptively clear voice rang out from behind the door: “Come in, come in!”

Inside, there was a room with two sections split off by partitions, and another, much bulkier door across from the entryway. Resved’s wrinkled hand stuck out from behind the left-hand partition, waving Victor over.

“Come, come,” came Resved’s voice again, the sound of pouring and stirring accompanying it. The old man glanced at Victor, did a double-take, and stared him down for a moment, seemingly looking through his chest at the exact height of the gash. He let out a sigh, turned around, and picked up a gourd covered in seals written in green ink, pouring something aggressively herbal-smelling and briefly mixing it before he turned back around, in his hands a wooden bowl filled with a familiar greenish goop. Healing Poultice, clearly based on the green-coloured essentia of greenery and natural vitality, Viriditas, though Victor couldn’t hazard a guess as to the other ingredients.

“Shirt off, turn around, sit down. And next time don’t downplay an injury of this sort, even if you think you can distance yourself from the pain,” the old master commanded, and Victor obeyed.

“Hrrm… Distancing oneself from physical reality in order to ignore pain is not necessarily a desirable skill. You’ve merely submitted yourself fully to the Lunar Principle, thinking detachment to be freedom from the pains of your reality,” grumbled the Old Man, spreading that mint-smelling goop on Khestun’s wound with a long stick.

Victor sighed, despite the pain it caused him, snapping back:“Can you say that without the mystical bullshit?”

Duma stopped, putting the stick down for a moment. The noise that came out of him sounded, at first, to be grumbling, but it soon became a quiet, measured chuckle.

“Very well,” he said, tapping Khestun’s shoulder. “Look at me.”

The young man did, and with a smug aura about him, Resved Duma looked him in the eyes.

“You’re a sheltered child of bourgeoisie, struggling to cope with the fact you’ve been separated from your home, family, and lifestyle, possibly permanently. You don’t have the guts to actually act out your nationalistic fantasies, your thoughts of “If this happened to me I would do X”, so you engross yourself in fiction about people who do have that wherewithal, and you’re far from alone - were you an exception, you wouldn’t be able to buy those stories so cheaply and so easily.”

Victor stared into Duma’s old eyes, feeling a dull pressure rise in his chest as the old man’s words flowed into his ears. Another lecture trying to psychoanalyze him - he’d been through such lectures a thousand times at home, and he always found himself dislocating from the present moment without any conscious effort towards that goal, the words flowing through him and being compartmentalized as a flat, emotionless memory to be disregarded.

But… It wasn’t happening. ome otherworldly light in the old master’s eyes kept him anchored, his voice reverberated through Victor’s skull and made him fully acknowledge everything that was being said. What Victor didn’t notice - what he couldn’t notice - was the fact that Resved was actually using a powerful talisman wrought from the brainstem of a Skullmonger to amplify his already considerable mental abilities. This, in concert with the old man’s mastery of Evil Eye Hypnosis and the Great Master’s Word techniques, had allowed him to be such an effective teacher of martial arts even if he himself had been a mediocre martial artist even in his prime; using his skills to help students find their way through spiritual troubles, even if they didn’t want to, was among what he considered to be his duties.

“Instead of escaping from reality, you must confront it without allowing your dire situation to consume you - by finding balance between the Lunar and Solar, between Calm and Rage, Form and Drive, you may become a “Man of Action”, as your pulps so often describe their characters.”

“To say it in mundane terms: Stop wallowing in the schizoid depression you’ve developed as a coping mechanism and face reality - take that numb detachment and make of it something useful, turn it into sheer primal rage if you must! Anything - ANYTHING - is better than total indifference.”

Resved blinked, letting out a shallow breath, and the undefinable shine vanished from his gaze. He locked eyes with Victor once again, this time putting on a slight smile, exaggerated by the canyons old age had carved into his face.

“I heard of what you did yesterday - keep going like that and you’ll get somewhere. I don’t know what there is, only you can figure that out - but it’d certainly fit you more than…”

Duma looked Victor up and down, with his meticulously-kept haircut, perfectly hairless face and body, and clothes that he had gotten tailored to him because the “Men’s” selections didn’t fit him.

“...Well, a lopsided, walking self-contradiction. You’re practically dripping with insecurity. Now turn back around, I need to finish sealing the wound before you bloody up my bamboo mat.”

A short while more passed, with Duma instructing Victor to put his shirt back on once his wound was sealed. As the young man dressed himself and began to walk outside, the old man added: “Do not think to toss aside who you are for a mask… But wearing one to help you keep to the path towards who you wish to be may not be a bad idea.”

Victor knew to leave quickly at this point, his mind already dwelling on what the old man had said to him regardless of how hard the young man tried to purge his thoughts of it. He rejoined the class and waited out the rest of the day quietly, doing his exercises with caution so as to not reopen his wound again, and then burying his nose in his pulp the moment the instructor dismissed the class. His classmates passed by with offhand goodbyes, but otherwise just went on their way, passing Victor by as he walked leisurely down the street, reading.

A brief, but bright thought went through his mind: “For all the time I spend with them, I don’t even know half their names.”

Though he dispelled it as quickly as it reared its ugly head, he couldn’t do anything but acknowledge it as true; Victor had, albeit unconsciously, remained an insular artifact of the city, failing to really integrate into his new community in any meaningful way. Yet again, he chose to smother such thoughts in fiction, but…

…Even engrossing himself in the fictitious heroes’ descent into a dungeon’s eerie depths, where reality and the Sea of Fog were separated by a hair-thin sheet, was no longer enough to let him detach himself.

On his way home, Victor found himself coming across a towering, plate-armoured man accosting a group of workers, a red-scaled, similarly armored tail swishing about behind him. He instinctively hid his book before he passed, keeping his head down, but unable to do anything besides listening in. Between the guttural growl of the Dragon Knight’s voice, the echo of his helmet, and the worried platitudes of the workers, he only managed to catch some thinly-veiled threats, while the workers insisted that something one of them said had only been a joke. Just before he got out of earshot, though, he heard the knight open his visor, and with its opening, what he said next couldn’t have been clearer:

“Very well, I will let you off this time… But if you hear any more untoward rumors about Lord Hoedorff or the good Lady Karmesin, you bring it to me instead of spreading them, understand?”

The Dragon Knights had been trying to get people to sell out dissidents for months now, and the more time went on, the more willing to depart from their chivalrous image they became. Of course, such departures didn’t truly hurt the knights’ public image, in no small part because they put nearly as much work into making themselves look good as they did into all their other duties combined. Victor himself only really took note because he couldn’t help noticing it, having been made to participate in ridiculous events for the sake of face many times. He just made himself look small and continued reading once he was sure he was out of eyeshot.

Victor’s enjoyment of the book gradually decreased as he neared his temporary home, until by the time he actually finished the pulp late into the evening, he had skimmed through a good portion of its last third, only reading the major battles. Consumed by frustration, Victor slammed the book face-down on his table, its spine splitting down the middle like a rotted tree struck by lightning.

“What did that old bastard do?!” he questioned in his mind, but no answer came. Only more wrenching, nagging feelings of insecurity and inadequacy, a deeply-rooted desire to change and grow struggling to break through the conceit and schizoid depression of a barely-noble family’s heir, things his ancestors had suffered with just as he was, but things that they had coped with through far more alchemical means; means which he would’ve likely used as well, had his family been in any position to obtain them during his lifetime.

Of course, Duma had done nothing. While he had used magic to make Victor actually think on what was said to him, Duma had no control over how the young man processed it or what conclusions he arrived at.

Ignoring the growing hunger pain in his gut, Victor picked up the second book, its thickness somewhat contradicting the fact it was a pulp. They were usually two-hundred pages at most, this thing neared six-hundred.

“All the more for me,” he thought as he dove into the book, finally managing to engross himself in it deeply enough to forget the world, even if only for a few hours. He woke up with a stiff neck, having fallen asleep at his kitchen table.

Another day: Training from nine in the morning to one in the afternoon, then an hour’s rest, and then guard duty to pay the bills. It all went quite well, but Victor’s mental state continued to degrade as the thoughts that Duma’s words had sparked in him gnawed away at foundations of the mental spire at whose top he isolated himself. Even his otherwise good technique had been disturbed, forcing him to marshal conscious focus just to land kicks and punches properly - and that was just on a stationary dummy! Frazzled as he was, Victor wasn’t about to try worming his way out of sparring because of what he considered - what he HOPED to be - just a temporary mental disturbance. He got put up against the closest thing to a kindred spirit he had in his class, a phlegmatic, yet conspicuously muscular blonde whose aura of calm apathy was only matched by his entirely age-inappropriate muscularity. His brick-like forehead and jawline, alongside his literally snow-coloured skin, betrayed where his propensity for the physical likely came from. Reiner had to be one of Hallgrim’s Sons, a bonafide Borean Descendant if he’d ever seen one.

Victor had fought him quite a few times and had come to consider the matchup to be effectively a coin toss between his own skill, toughness, and magic versus Reiner’s raw, yet refined physicality, but… He didn’t quite feel like that, now. Reiner’s calm apathy now felt like an oppressive aura of confidence, undermining Victor’s own self-assurance such that he overanalyzed Reiner’s straightforward fighting style, misreading straightforward strikes as playful feints or fakeouts. He struggled to the full extent of his ability, using earth magic to trip Reiner by burning a bit of Terra he’d drawn up during the pre-match countdown, and even drawing in some Aer through a breathing technique, intending to use said Aer to lend propulsive force to his next strike and knock Reiner off-balance. In that same breath he had also drawn in a relatively small amount of Pneuma, his body automatically metabolizing this universal arcane essence, briefly boosting Victor’s overall physical attributes enough to let him duck a right hook with a wide-enough window left over for a solid liver punch, but…

He saw Reiner’s body shifting, seeing the larger boy’s core tightening up as he braced for the strike which Reiner thought to be imminent and knew to be beyond his ability to dodge, but… He mistook it as Reiner readying to counterattack, despite the fact Reiner was physically too large to actually deliver such a strike at this angle, causing Victor to panic, jumping out of the way and right out of the sparring circle, automatically awarding the win to Reiner. The young man sat there, hyperventilating as he stared wide-eyed up at Reiner’s pallid-white hand, held out in an offer of aid.

“You alright? You don’t look alright,” said the apathetic musclehead with an uncharacteristic tinge of concern.

Meanwhile, during this uncharacteristically short sparring bout while all of the students were occupied, the Instructor had quietly made his way inside the main building. He returned with something tucked behind the sash around his waist just in time to see Victor take Reiner’s hand to get back up, insisting that he was alright and that he had just tripped. The young man dusted himself off, and obviously putting on a brave face as he saw the Instructor return, he looked to Reiner and asked: “Best of three?”

Reiner, true to his nature, agreed as eagerly as his stone-cold demeanor would allow, the two returning to the inside of the sparring circle. By this point the other sparring pairs were already finished, and so the rest of the class observed these two for the time being.

“Three… Two…” the Instructor began to count down, inconspicuously making his way over to where Victor had set his book down, seamlessly slipping the pamphlet between its pages. He interrupted his own countdown to call out to Victor, as if he’d just remembered something: “Hey, Khestun, how about some of that bone magic of yours? C’mon, can’t get better at it if you don’t use it!”

Turning to look at the mustachioed man Victor visibly tensed up at the consideration, clearly fighting himself on how he should respond. Looking to Reiner, the musclehead nodded that he was alright with it, and so Victor settled on a compromise: “Alright, but if I break a bone, it’s on you.”

“Hey, if you’re that worried, I’ll ask Duma about including calcium supplements in your tuition fees, be cheaper that way than buying that stuff yourself,” the Instructor laughed, sitting down, but he clearly meant what he said. With a sigh, Victor took up a fighting stance once again, doing all in his power to mentally center himself, drawing in a deep breath and hoping that his fundamental breathing technique would work. Threads of silver Fog escaped his mouth and nose on the breath out, the circles on his hands taking on a bone-white glow. The breathing technique, as was norm for such things by Victor’s reckoning, had an egregiously long name:

True Breath of the Lukewarm Spring Breeze

One lungful after the next, he gathered Pneuma and directed it into the bones in the areas he wanted the spell to affect, the visible exhalant being an arcane waste product - just as there was oxygen left in exhaled air, so too was there Pneuma left in this exhalant, having been agitated and thus made visible for a few short seconds.

“Never shall I ask for lighter burdens…” he incanted, rolling his shoulders as he did so, reciting the words with no agreement for their message, only repeating the incantation that had been drilled into him in childhood. The pertinent glyphs ran through his head, filling out the circles on his palms - one core pillar in the center, three smaller ones around it. An insufferable sensation rose up within the bones of his hands, climbing up his arms, spreading onto his ribcage, neck, and jaw; it was a cross between itching and the numb pinpricks of a fallen-asleep limb, radiating outward towards his skin as his bone plates grew. What had previously been only a strip of bone plates covering his knuckles expanded out to cover each of his fingers down to the first joint as well as the back of his palm, the root site itself thickening to the point of easily equaling knuckle dusters in size. The self-same growth took place everywhere else affected by the spell, his elbow developing a bony spur, his forearm becoming mostly covered in plates, while his jaw became so thickly encased it practically taunted Reiner, tacitly goading him to break his fist on it.

Victor hated every second of it, the encroaching stiffness, the thrumming itch, the constant, nagging fear that it’d just make his actual bones break like twigs, even though he knew the deleterious side effects of Ossomancy weren’t that severe. He finalized the incantation at this point in order to stabilize the spell: “...but with the bones of my ancestors shall I build myself wider shoulders.”

“Fight!”

For all the effort he went to, reinforcing himself like this didn’t help Victor’s mental state much at all. He still overanalyzed Reiner’s movements, he still had to actively fight himself just to keep focused, and he absolutely didn’t have the focus to continuously use a breathing technique. At best, he could choose to forgo an opening to take a breath of Fog instead, whyever he would wish to do that. Reiner came after him with his usual measured, calm assault, being a bit more careful than in the last round. Despite the fact he was sure he could actually withstand a hit from the musclehead as he was, Victor wasn’t so sure that he wouldn’t just get thrown out of the ring anyway, and so did all he could to dodge, or failing that, block Reiner’s punches with his elbows.

One of Reiner’s jabs plowed right into his sternum like an Fulgur-Igneic engine piston, sending Victor skidding backwards all the way to the very edge of the ring, but… He was fine. Despite the fact he clearly felt the outer layers of his chest-plating crack, he was fine, and it was absolutely bizarre, enough to stun him for a moment. Even using bone magic, he hadn’t been able to withstand a real punch from Reiner before - as he shook it off and got back into the fight he thought that all the body hardening he’d been doing must finally be paying off, and… That knowledge alone helped him focus.

It took over a minute of circling one another and exchanging blows, but after the third time Victor had blocked one of Reiner’s strikes, the musclehead stopped using his right hand as much, resorting to leaving the arm in a defensive position and striking with his left. Victor managed to fully focus for long enough to plan a course of action and execute it, taking a moment to draw in breath, placing his open left palm against the underside of his arm at an awkward angle. He ducked under a left jab and delivered a punch straight to Reiner’s side, at the same moment firing off a pre-prepared blast of wind through his left palm. Reiner faltered under the pain, losing his balance just as the concentrated blast of air pushed him off his feet, briefly lifting the Son of Hallgrim and throwing him out of the ring, albeit just barely.

Just as Reiner lost his balance he instinctively pulled his free arm back in, slamming his elbow into Victor’s back, driving it right into his wound and dragging it across his back as he got thrown out of the ring. Between his being completely off-balance and the intense surge of pain, the young man crumpled like a tower of cards. Unfortunately for Victor, within the Duma School’s rules for “Soft Sparring”, downing your opponent and them staying down to the count of five was considered a “stronger” victory condition than a ring-out, and so…

“One! Two! Three… Four… Five! That’s a knockdown, Reiner wins!” the Instructor called out.

The musclehead didn’t seem all too happy about it, strangely enough - not even to his usual, rather reserved degree. No slight smile, no quiet utterance of “Nice”, nothing.

As Victor came back to his senses, the young man realized that he had lost by a hair’s breadth. Normally, he would’ve just shrugged it off, leaning into the idea of good sportsmanship and detaching himself from the loss, but frustration and outright anger bubbled up within him instead; not towards Reiner, but Duma and most importantly himself. He got back up, staring daggers at the Instructor.

“Let me see Old Man Duma, I need to speak with him about our conversation yesterday,” demanded the young man with anger in his shaking voice. The Instructor brushed him off with a sigh and a flat remark of: “You’ll have to wait until tomorrow. Duma isn’t available today - he is meeting with visitors from far down south and said he was not to be disturbed.”

He pulled a pocket watch out from behind his belt sash, glancing at it before putting it back, adding, “Speaking of tomorrow, that’s when we’ll reconvene. Since you’ve all done well today, I don’t see a reason to hold you any longer. You may stay and use the equipment, but as always, please go home by sundown.”

Victor’s anger and frustration persisted, and he thought it a waste to just dispel these bone wrought arms when he had already paid their price, and so took the option to spend some more time in the courtyard alongside two others from the class - Reiner and one other, a lanky, blue-eyed redhead. Boy or girl, he couldn’t tell, and didn’t care enough to ask. He allowed the frustration building inside to take control to a point, smashing his fists, elbows, and shins against a log dummy until he was out of breath, turning his anger-driven focus towards using and maintaining the True Breath. Reiner ended up leaving much earlier than Victor remembered him leaving the few times he’d stayed after hours, and upon offhandedly asking why the musclehead was leaving so soon, he explained: “Ah, we have a distant relative over, passing through on his way back to Borea or somesuch.”

Well, there it was - a small tinge of self-satisfaction for guessing his classmate’s ancestry correctly. It took Victor well a half-hour of continuously assaulting that dummy before a punch finally made the extra mass crack and burst off of his hand like it was plaster.

An elbow strike had the same effect, the additional bone breaking off with no trace. Though certainly glad to be rid of it, Victor also noticed that… His mind wasn’t as clouded anymore. He noticed that Duma’s advice - to turn apathy into anger - had been correct, and it only frustrated the young man even more. In a huff, Victor left the grounds and returned home to prepare for his work as a mere guardsman later that same day. He didn’t even look into the pulp again until he came back from his job at ten in the evening, legs aching from walking all day and mind still swirling with self-conflicted thoughts as the foundations of his tower of self-isolation burned. The mind-numbing nothingness of menial work was perhaps the only place where he could still detach himself from reality, and even then only halfway, so to speak. As he shoved pierogi he’d bought from a street vendor into his mouth and flipped through sturmblitz Kunst’s many pages, breathing in the smell of the paper in a futile attempt to calm himself, something dropped out onto the table: A pamphlet, about as tall as the book, two-thirds as wide as its pages, printed with a stylized silhouette of the protagonist: Zelsys Newman.

Even in silhouette, it was unmistakable. The figure, the hair, the stance. His brain screamed at him that she had to have been the woman that killed that drake, but he swept the thought away by reading the title.

STURMBLITZ KUNST 0:

Foundations of the True Art

The way it was laid out made this little pamphlet out to be a prequel to the novels. He thought that it might detail a real martial art by that name, like some pulps detailed possible versions of their fantasy concepts or weapons - an infamously dangerous headscissor takedown detailed in the aptly titled “Learn the uragánrana, and other lethal maneuvers from far-off lands!” came to mind. It was a preposterous notion upon first consideration, but… Why did he feel trepidation at even opening the pamphlet? Surely, it was just a prequel short story about how Zelsys came to find herself in the Exclusion Zone, perhaps some of her adventures on other continents that explained how she had come to learn the martial art which the books described her as a master of.

After staring at the pamphlet for a few moments, he set the book down next to it and, for a little while, left them both alone, deciding to clear his mind a bit. Neither a shower in lukewarm water nor a short while to cook dinner helped in this pursuit, the lack of stimuli only forcing him to further dwell on his situation, whereas usually, these were moments of thoughtless tranquility. Sitting down at his table, towel around his neck, Victor chewed on a piece of grilled, salted, garlic-spiced pork and another of seared, salted broccoli, staring at the pamphlet’s cover as he ate. No longer able to help himself he took the pamphlet in his left hand, flipping it open to the first page. The paper was suspiciously supple to the touch, not pulp at all.

It had a short foreword in quite small, dense writing at the very top, which then transitioned to impossibly dense, seemingly unreadable text. Even before reading the foreword, Victor knew what it was - an arcane printing technique that allowed an otherwise impossible amount of information to be printed, with the text unraveling to a readable scale as it was read. Some of the academic books Victor had read - or rather, been made to read - in his childhood used such print. Even with modern printing tools, it was expensive to do, terribly so compared to pulps, at least four or five times the price per letter by his approximation.

“This little booklet probably cost at least… As much as half the second book to print! It wasn’t any more expensive than the first, so why? What motivation could those southerners have to undercut themselves like this?”

As he thought this, his eyes drifted over the foreword, and it answered his questions.

If you are reading this, you likely found this booklet in a library, a convenient public place, or the pages of one of my pulp novels, as retailers have been given instructions to insert these into the purchases of people of martial background.

Perhaps someone just gave it to you, I don’t know.

Whatever is the case, if you have a propensity for martial arts, or even if you’re just a violent person, you will find the contents of this pamphlet to be useful.

Sturmblitz Kunst seeks to be a comprehensive foundational system for practitioners to build upon and customize to their needs, drawing upon basic, practical principles and real combat experience, rather than centuries of tradition, mysticism, and sparring in controlled environments.

This page contains an index for this booklet’s contents, which is printed in condensed script. In order to properly read it, simply think of the word “Albedo” with the intention to read the script, and it will unravel into a readable form.