In the upper floors of the Von Hoedorff family manor, the young duke sat behind his desk, his back turned to the door as he looked out through one of the windows built into the titan’s eye sockets, thinking on the state of his domain. He was overjoyed over the great prosperity brought in by opening his domain to the World of Martial Arts, effectively subsuming the stable grey markets of neighboring, now occupied states.

However, something gnawed at him, a burning question demanding an answer. The Occupationists - a faction within the dukedom’s upper political echelons - demanded that the domain be integrated into the greater Pateirian dominion as a vassal state, and that the so-called “Land of Lingering Smoke'' be “conquered” or at the bare minimum extremely tightly controlled, citing that it was a seedbed for dangerous subversive elements… And yet, Lady Karmesin held a differing opinion, despite her self-admitted affiliation with the Pateirian Empire. As if the world itself sensed his thoughts, the doors of his writing-room opened at that very moment, and by the sound of her footsteps he knew that it was her - her left foot sounded like solid stone.

“Lady Karmesin, what fortuitous timing!” he exclaimed, turning around in his chair to be met with that familiar, crimson-cloaked figure. “I would ask a question of you.”

Karmesin insisted on entirely obfuscating her identity by wearing a crimson robe down to the ground and a three-horned, voice-distorting mask, even in private settings. Von Hoedorff was one of the few people who did not find it strange in the slightest, feeling compassion for the woman for what must’ve been truly grizzly disfiguring mutations, just the same as many of his own relatives suffered. Such was the lot of nobility - one had to pay the price in suffering, if one wished to surpass the limits of man.

She approached and seated herself, then tilted her head to the side, tacitly gesturing for him to continue speaking. A long curtain of gleaming, jet-black hair slipped out from under her hood. Von Hoedorff took a few moments to form the sentence in his head, as he at times found it difficult to express himself without stumbling over his own words. He also, at times, heard voices from nowhere, which he chalked up to a spiritual medium in his ancestry whose powers had been partially passed down to him. The duke’s sudden mood swings were a little harder to explain.

“Why, pray tell, does your stance on the Land of Lingering Smoke differ so from the Occupationist faction?” he asked.

“It is simply much easier to deal with them in the open than to play a losing game of cat and mouse,” she answered instantly, crossing her legs under the robe. “To think a state apparatus, no matter how efficient, could conquer the Land of Lingering Smoke is… As foolish as insisting that one could pluck the sun from the heavens with a pair of chopsticks. Our Bureau of State Security has convinced many that there is no such thing as a Land of Lingering Smoke in the heartland, but in truth, Pateiria’s underworld is nearly as large as the public-facing side of the empire’s society, it is simply the nature of things.”

“I firmly believe in the philosophy of Dualism, that all things have two sides - just as humans are at once sages and buffoons, philosophers and degenerates, diplomats and war-dogs, so too do human societies possess their own underbellies. The governing power can only learn to live with it, try to manage it. At best, one can hope to rip out by the roots the truly despicable aspects of such an underbelly, and even then independent, and therefore unreliable third parties are often necessary.”

“Ah, I see…” the duke lied in an effort to appear smarter than he was, rubbing the scaly scruff of his chin.

Karmesin took full control of the conversation, leaning back in her seat and stating, “If my answer is satisfactory, then I would move on to the reason I’ve come to you today rather than sending a messenger.”

“I- Of course, of course,” the duke snapped out of his moment of self-indulgent faux-contemplation, waving his hand halfheartedly.

“It seems those who took your Red Locust Bandits contract have neither returned, nor reported in by aetherwave. I would strongly recommend deploying the Dragon Knights to ensure the bandits do not run rampant, and more importantly, to rescue any survivors from the original party,” explained Lady Karmesin.

Aghast at the suggestion, the good duke gasped in disbelief, arguing: “But… The Dragon Knights have a parade tomorrow! And- and and- Captain Adalbert is set to defend his title as the champion of Scarlet Silk Road tonight! I can’t possibly drag my knights away from such vital matters of state!”

“Perhaps send more independent contractors and have militiamen drawn from the Duma School support them?” Karmesin suggested, knowing full well that arguing against the duke on matters of fancy using logic was as foolish as trying to pluck the sun from the heavens with a pair of chopsticks. He was an archetypal descendant of the so-called “Heroic Families”, inbred mutant degenerates born from the Divine Emperor’s genial, half-millennium disinformation campaign regarding the true nature of cultivation. In truth, families that pursued dead-end methods of this sort were not uncommon even within the heartlands, but it was a price the Emperor was willing to pay for stamping out would-be usurpers before they could even arise. It was fortunate, then, that the vast majority of these so-called “cultivators” had wiped eachother out in the War of Fog, leaving mostly those unable to fight, or those with just barely enough intellect to somehow keep their little kingdoms of dirt out of the mess.

Von Hoedorff was dim, narcissistic, schizophrenic, and unfortunately, the legitimate ruler of his demesne. If Karmesin wanted to wrest control of the city-state, she first had to figure out whether the tales of the manner in which the Von Hoedorff family’s primacy had been secured were true: tales of a sleeping dragon beneath the manor that would wake and wreak untold destruction, should the rightful ruler’s life be severed by a would-be usurper’s hand, and if so, she would have to puppet the duke while she worked on defusing that particular dead man’s switch. All that would come in time - for now, she had to get rid of those braindead mutant war-dogs that thought themselves war heroes whilst robbing innocent, economically vital merchants, and what was more disgusting still, engaging in the slave trade.

It didn’t matter that slavery was very much legal under Pateirian law, because this wasn’t Pateiria, and Karmesin frankly didn’t care for the legality of such degenerate practices. Her past self had tolerated them, but that woman was long dead, and as far as she was concerned, a dominion reliant on slave labor was just begging for revolt.

“Speaking of Adalbert, I take it he’s still working on his investigation into the slave trade,” she prodded the duke, trying to wring at least something useful out of the manchild.

“I- Yes, yes of course! Why, just yesterday he swore on his life that he had a lead. He wouldn’t lie, I’d have to have him killed otherwise!” insisted Von Hoedorff with the certainty of a very, very naive child.

Karmesin had to suppress a deep sigh. Instead, she reiterated what she had already told the buffoon, trying for the reliable seduction approach out of desperation. Even just her voice and the implication of a chance at ending up in bed with her had worked before, it would work again. She just had to invent a bold enough lie and tell it confidently enough.

“Alberich. Listen,” she began, the use of the duke’s first name finally managing to center his fruit fly-like attention span onto Karmesin’s eyes and voice. “I’m sure you wish to know why I must wear these heavy robes and this inconvenient mask. You see, I must hide my appearance with these suffocating robes because a great slaver warlord once took a fancy to me, and had me kidnapped from my family’s ancestral home. After suffering in captivity for years, I took him unawares and cut off his manhood in his sleep before escaping through the window. He’s been searching for me ever since.”

The duke listened to every word without so much as a glimmer of doubt in his eye. Karmesin could scarcely suppress the urge to laugh, as the tale she had spun was nearly directly lifted from a fantasy novel detailing the life of an escaped slave.

After a brief pause, she finally got to the point: “Get those slavers out of my- er, your city, and I shall no longer have a reason to conceal myself like this.”

Despite having reptilian eyes and gleaming scales in place of a beard, he certainly didn’t have the cunning of a dragon. She was beginning to think that the founder of Arches, Gustav Von Hoedorff, had in truth gotten a little too chummy with one of his pet drakes, and desperately tried to cover it up. It certainly explained how the bloodline degenerated so consistently rather than erratically mutating like the other families that practiced dead-ends like Azoth Stone Cultivation.

Von Hoedorff’s countenance hardened as he obviously tried to make himself look as manly as possible, even artificially deepening his voice when he spoke: “Very well. I shall see to it personally that the scum of slavery is driven from my demesne.”

The moon rose above the Town of Arches… And its underworld came alive.

Barely-concealed speakeasies and brothels opened their doors, merchants with compact, mobile carts peddled their wares, and the ever-popular sport of organized one-on-one violence thrived yet again in an ancient, open-air amphitheater. Many lights shone into the heavens, the raucous sounds of merriment and trade carried into the night.

Two figures cut through the crowds in the street so aptly named Scarlet Silk Road - two women, walking hand-in-hand, both long-haired and tall, both magnets for attention by the mere virtue of their presence. Peddlers, merchants, criers alike did all in their power to get the two women’s attention, each and every one failing to snag anything beyond an offhanded glance.

“Those eyes… By the Dead Ones, those eyes…” thought Nestor, the fat, normally boisterous proprietor of a grilling stand as he quietly turned over a sausage. He was old, old enough to have dodged the draft, and more importantly, old enough to know what a real cultivator felt like. Old enough to know that getting their attention was like praying for interesting times - nothing but trouble.

“All these idiots blinded by bloody money, stickin’ their hands inta guillotines ‘cause there’s gelt in the headsman’s basket…” he thought, fighting himself to not look at those two, even if he knew it was a pointless struggle. Before he had managed to tear his gaze away from the tall one’s implausibly shapely rear, enveloped in equally implausibly fitting trousers doubtlessly wrought of magicked self-shaping fabric, Nestor had already taken in the gist of both women’s appearances… And burned the damn sausage.

Even as he grumbled to himself and scraped the char off of it in hopes of selling it to a customer too drunk to notice, those women remained seared into his mind’s eye... But he could sense them. And he knew to stay well away.

It was a hunch he had developed in his time, a gut feeling by which he could always determine a real-deal, hundred-man-killer cultivator from a wannabe. It wasn’t the way they looked - not the build, the clothes, the weapons, the eerily-glowing eyes, no. The higher-ranking Dragon Knights had all that and more, doubly so the knight-captain, Adalbert Von Wickten, but it was the felt presence that made a cultivator.

Cultivators brought with them prosperity and death in equal measure.

As far as Nestor’s experiences with cultivators went, they were temperamental, violent, and narcissistic - every last one of them. Such was his experience with what few cultivators he’d seen, or worse yet, met in person, each and every one of them the descendant of a “Heroic Family”, and each about as unstable and downright mental as the last.

…And now the tall one had turned around, and the two had begun walking straight towards his stand.

“Right. Of course they don’t need to see you to tell that you’re looking at them, dumbfuck. Keep calm, just play the subservient peddler and you’ll be fine…” the griller told himself as he tried as hard as he could to stay small and not look at them.

His own eyes betrayed him, and he gave up in trying to avoid getting a good look at them, knowing that he wouldn’t have a choice either way.

The smiling, two-meter-tall barbarian stomped about in metal, brass-plated boots, wearing unreasonably tight snake-leather pants that barely contained the tree trunks she had for legs, her left arm entirely encased in a gleaming gauntlet with a damn field cannon on the forearm and her waist wrapped in a belt holding said cannon’s shells.

Meanwhile, the rest of her unrealistically chiseled yet simultaneously shapely upper body went mostly uncovered, four straps of black and gold fabric the only things somehow holding in her considerable bosom. Six thick, calf-length red braids dangled behind her, each tipped with a short, wicked-looking blade, their bell-like jangling belying their magickal nature - they were wrought of cold-iron. The hair atop her head, strangely enough, was as white as snow. Strange, unnatural scars that glimmered like the joins of silver-mended pottery separated her right arm and neck from her torso, and another scar still could be seen just under her left armpit, all three implying dismemberment and reattachment. Her face was… Distinct, to say the least, her facial structure being halfway between that of a typical Ikesian and Grekurian. Her eyes sat half-closed, yet a baleful blue light burned just behind the silver colour of her irises. She didn’t seem to have any weapons, but then, a cultivator’s body was a weapon. He also noticed a half-open leather sheath strapped to the barbarian’s lower back, a blackstone handle poking out on the right side, strange talismans wrapped around it and billowing in the breeze.

The other woman’s entire appearance outright screamed “Snow Devil”, as if she had gone out of her way to lean into the wartime propaganda of Ikesian warriors as inhuman fighting-machines, just like the actual machines they used in war. What first grabbed Nestor’s eye was her long, platinum blonde hair and markedly pale skin, both due to contrast with the dark colours of her clothing. The second was the gas mask around her neck, designed as the lower half of a skull, and the third thing was her single open eye - emerald-green and double-pupiled. A Homunculus Eye; though not exclusive to soldiery, it was near-perfect proof of the blonde’s legitimate military background, as it was the result of a notorious mutagenic procedure used to help soldiers cope with the loss of an eye wherein one eye was modified, and the other replaced with an arcane seeing-apparatus that had to be nailed into the brain through the empty socket - a Brass Eye. Where a Homunculus Eye allowed one supreme sight of the mundane world, a Brass Eye saw beyond, allowing users to see spirits and people’s souls at the cost of terrible mental strain. She was about a head shorter than her counterpart, by his reckoning.

She wore knee-high combat boots whose tops were covered by a strange, black-red dress that reached just below her knees, its design a blend of modern, fashionable aesthetic with grim militarism, including epaulettes and an officer’s cap. Both were designed without any identifying marks, as though to state that though she was a soldier, she answered to no higher authority - except for the preserved belladonna flower pinned to her cap, a symbol of death. A gigantic pistol of some sort sat holstered inside a cylindrical holster of blackstone on her right hip, while a weirdly folded-in-half rifle of some type sat in a leather holster on her left.

“Did she get that in a dungeon? No, can’t be…” the griller thought at the blackstone holster, only to find that they’d already come within spitting distance. The tall barbarian loomed over Nestor’s stand, briefly glancing down at him, then at his wares, a few of the most commonly ordered ones sizzling over the Ignis burners.

An electric tension surrounded her and her presence felt absolutely colossal, but this up close, the tall woman’s aura was… Magnanimous. Warm, jovial even. Looking up at her felt like staring up at the clouds of a welcome rainstorm in the middle of a dry summer, no fear of being struck came into his mind.

She looked down on him, smiling as she politely ordered with a husky, cordial tone of voice:

“Two racks of calf ribs and a half-dozen bear-meat skewers, please. Extra chili on half of the order.”

“Sure one rack will be enough?” the blonde asked with a quizzical smile as she looked up at her… Friend? Nestor wasn’t so sure, and he wasn’t about to guess. The barbarian smiled back, then changed her order: “Make that four racks of ribs instead, extra chili on three of them and on half of the skewers.”

“Right, it’ll be just a moment,” Nestor said and did as asked, clearing some space on the grill. The two watched him put the meat on the grill and, to his surprise, patiently waited for it to be done. Not only that, but when it came time to pay, they made no attempt to haggle the price down through implicit threat, instead just paying what was due and even leaving a tip that totaled nearly a fifth of the total price. That was rare even before the war, let alone in this economy.

As the duo went on their way, he overheard them speaking to one another, the barbarian questioning how Arches had such a large underworld despite its small size. It was a fair question, a question of whose answer even Nestor wasn’t sure. Business had just been uncharacteristically good since the war.

Despite knowing better for his own good, Nestor had to wonder.

“Just who are those two?”

“Hrm… How does a place that barely qualifies as a city have a larger underworld than a metropolis six, seven times its population?” Zelsys asked between stripping ribs with her teeth.

Her counterpart, Zefaris, furrowed her brow in thought for a moment, finishing a skewer before she answered: “Think about it - a remote, independent municipality with strong natural defenses, ruled by a single family under hereditary claim that goes back to the Three Kings Era. Arches is all but immune to political finagling from either side, and therefore, a perfect place for legally grey elements to move to from occupied cities.”

Zel just grunted affirmatively, horrific crunching noises emanating from her mouth as she moved onto the bone part of a rib rack. They were quite small, but still easily hard enough to not be quite edible for any normal person. Nevertheless, she ate them, too - not just the marrow inside. As they ate and idly wandered in the general direction of the amphitheater, Zelsys took in her surroundings, scanning the side alleys and thinly-veiled black-market establishments that lined the sides of Scarlet Silk Road. This place was impressive, but… Only in the context of what a tiny town Arches was. It didn’t even come close to matching the economy-shaping grandeur of commerce and excess that the Krishorn Caravan had brought with it to what she considered to be her home: The sovereign city-state of Willowdale. Despite having bought considerably more food of the two, Zelsys had downright devoured her order by the time Zefaris was on her third skewer, now having idly set her arm around Zef’s waist as they walked.

The moment Zefaris was done with her food she tossed the wooden skewers into a nearby fire and leaned into Zel’s side, her head resting perfectly against the side of her counterpart’s bosom, her arms wrapping around the bronze-skinned woman’s waist - the right stroking across the rock-like muscles of her stomach, while the left found its way squarely onto her rear. As amused by such public displays of affection as ever, Zelsys shifted her own hand down a bit and squeezed as softly as she could, eliciting a momentary blush from Zefaris where, a few months ago, it would’ve made her face flush pink in its entirety.

Despite a few sideways glances and strange looks, there were none in Scarlet Silk Road - not even among its violent thugs - that would have dared try to accost the two lovebirds as they made their way to the amphitheater. It wasn’t as if what they were doing stood out in the slightest, considering the vulgar sounds of sex that emanated from damn-near every fourth house on this road of hedonism. Soon enough they reached their destination, making their way inside to see that its quite spacious interior had been modified to house two counters and four fighting pits, the first counter being a bar, and the second serving all the needs of an establishment such as this, from betting, to fighter registrations, payouts, and everything in between. While three of the pits were familiar, their walls lined by leather-wrapped wood and filled with sand, the fourth was twice as wide and about half again as deep as the others, with a barred entryway on one side. A number of heavy-duty tables stood arranged all around the space, many placed where the amphitheater’s original seating arrangements had once been, elevated in concentric ovals of increasing height. Already, the three smaller pits each contained two fighters - two strongfat Ikesian men in one pit, a lanky Ikesian and a downright obese Grekurian in another pit, and a muscular Grekurian covered in burns versus a coal-skinned, one-armed Scorchlander in the third. The Scorchlander’s pitch-black, hairless body was completely covered in glowing veins, his fist and feet both glowing with inner heat. As impressive as the Scorchlander looked and as good as his technique was, none of the fighting-pits contained who they were looking for.

People milled about the amphitheater, being mostly spectators, with a notable minority of those who Zelsys could look at and instantly know that they had what it took to get down in the pit. Peoplewatching, however, wasn’t the reason they were here - even fighting in the pits wasn’t the reason, even if Zel knew it to be inevitable. The reason why they’d come here in the first place was the fulfillment of a responsibility, as well as a means of accruing both wealth and leverage with the forces beneath Ikesia’s surface.

A boxy array of Fog-writing nozzles hung above the betting counter - a column of five rows with luminescent, agitated Fog lazily spraying out of them and forming the names of the top five fighters ranked top to bottom.

Adalbert Von Wickten Baldwin von Burgghusen Wolfgang Masonson Jacob Hillerin Gideon Rÿser

“I’ll register for the tourney, find a good seat to watch me beat some manhood into Von Wickten alright?” Zel asked Zef jokingly, splitting off from her lover and heading towards the betting counter; her real intention was to speak with a contact who was to hand over crucial intel, but as she would soon find out, the part of her that truly wished to fight the knight-captain would soon be vindicated.

Zef had already picked out a spot, of course, and shamelessly staring at Zel’s rear as she walked for a few seconds, she made her way over to the table.

The counter was manned by a slick-looking Grekurian, his curly brown hair done up into a ponytail and his face so aggressively handsome that it couldn’t have been natural. Still, he just barely fell short of looking unsettling. His hazel eyes glanced at Zelsys a few times as she approached, the man disappearing somewhere behind the counter only to return with a small piece of paper palmed in his hand, which he slid across the counter before she could even speak. As she came within hand’s reach of the counter, she felt the noise of her surroundings fade out, a subtle thumping reverberating through the air - the unmistakable signs of an active Sound Barrier Generator, a means of keeping sound from escaping its area of effect.

“Directions to the auction,” he said, only barely lowering his voice. “Your friends at the Bureau have discerned some new information since you accepted this assignment - the auction won’t get you all the info you need, not without a passphrase to make them trust you as a referred customer. Adalbert knows the phrase, so call him out. Get him to fight you, and take him seriously - he’s a hubris-ridden fool, but he exaggerates his strength much less than you might expect. Bet him a jade ornament, he’ll bite - his Noon Dust dealer only takes jade. Once I snap out of this, ask me to register for the tourney - I’ll conveniently find a free slot, courtesy of the Bureau.”

The moment he finished talking, the man shook his head and blinked a few times, looking Zelsys up and down.