The young man couldn’t quite make out the terse, rapid-fire exchange between her and the two other in-the-flesh pulp characters, though going off the fact Reiner’s face took on the self-same disgust as the amazon’s, it seemed that his classmate was able to handle drink a great deal better than him. Despite the general sense of awe which now suffused Victor’s perception of everything, the confirmation that Zelsys would go toe to toe in the pit with knight captain Adalbert was… Not entirely positive. Much like Reiner, he had a generally positive outlook on the knight captain, blaming the duke for the misuse of the Dragon Knights.

Somehow, the murderous aura of three cultivators combined just washed over him, whereas it made even Reiner try to make himself look small. However, the docile torpor of his drunken state wasn’t spared, for the presence of these three and their seething fury only stoked Victor’s curiosity as to what exactly was contained in that mnemonic record. Perhaps the honorable knight captain had shared some secret record obtained during his open secret of an investigation into the local slave trade? Victor thought to simply ask a question, but as he stood up, his first thought was to pick up the Tablet, and his total lack of balance combined with this unrestrained train of thought resulted in him thoughtlessly doubling-over onto the table and grabbing the Tablet. The device’s logic automaton didn’t distinguish drunken curiosity from a legitimate mental command, as it had never needed to do so and Zelsys had not seen fit to ensure it could make such a distinction.

Despite his intoxicated state, the mnemonic record came through as clear as if he’d really been there. In fact, the degradation of his mental barriers had only rendered it more vivid; it felt as if he was truly there.

The stench, the atmosphere, the… The slaves? Why was that voice from beyond the door vaguely familiar? And… Why was one of his classmates here, in that revolting, perverse getup, branded with the Pateirian numeral for 4? Last Victor had seen him, he’d helped him slip away from a couple of particularly nosy Dragon Knights, weeks ago…

What in the seven hells was that on the back of his neck?!

The scents, the sights, the emotions of disgust at what Zelsys had witnessed and her murderous disdain towards the knight captain, it was all clear and vivid to a degree beyond most of Victor’s own memories. The senses of a cultivator created mnemonic records that no normal person had a frame of reference for, causing them to come across as a hyper-real exaggeration. Even though it all flashed through his head in moments, and even though he knew it to all be a recording by virtue of how mnemonic records worked, the recording spurred a disgust and anger inside Victor that he had never felt before, because he had never so vividly stood witness to such vileness, let alone vileness perpetrated upon someone he had considered a friend.

Before he knew it, his knees gave out and he collapsed off to the side, falling onto all fours before he emptied the contents of his stomach onto the ground, much to the amusement of the people at the tables within eyeshot.

The calm voice of Zefaris came from above while Victor’s mouth was still playing the role of a revolting fountain spout: “...You alright?”

A moment passed. Her voice again.

“I told you he was a lightweight, what now…” she continued, but Victor had more or less recovered by then, coughing and hacking as he dragged himself back up to the table. The first thought he had after puking his guts out wasn’t cleaning himself up, or the burn of stomach acid in his throat, but wrath, such wrath as he had never felt; it was a caustic, violent impulse that he had not been able to even conceive of feeling up until this very moment.

The melancholy prince of a bonewrought castle sat upon his throne atop the tallest spire, wilfully ignoring the reality of his demesne’s decay. He had built this place as a prison for the beast atop whom it stood, and as an impregnable fortress of isolation for himself.

And yet, as the beast below was stirred into catastrophic fury, the prince felt no need to calm it, no need to repair the walls of its prison or the chains which bound it. The beast’s righteous anger was shattering his castle around him, yet the prince could only think of how long it had been since they’d been one; of how sorely he’d missed his own other half, not caring for the danger its freedom would bring to the kingdom of flesh they were both rightful rulers of.

As his head rose above the table, his gaze swept over the gunwoman, the norseman, and finally the beast-slayer herself.

There was an expectant curiosity in her eyes.

“Y’know, I didn’t… HEUGHCK-” he began, only to be interrupted by a sudden retch, but there was nothing left to puke up. “I think I finally get the… The whole beast-slayer spiel that you repeated in the books, about butchering beasts regardless of… HGUCK-”

“...Of how many legs they walk on, or what honeyed words they sph- spew.”

A grin entirely unlike himself forced its way onto Victor’s face.

It was an expression of malice, of giddy expectation for ultraviolence.

“You’ll kill it… Right? That wretched beast on two legs. That thing and all the sycophants that protect it, like you said you would, in the pulps.”

They all felt it, that newly-ignited murderous aura. Zelsys saw something there, behind his eyes - the blazing will that she had thought to be present inside the young man, but buried, deep inside. She’d thought it would take weeks, maybe months to tease it out of him, but just a glance at his face made her drop that line of thought altogether for a brief moment of inner monologue: “My my, there it is. Just how long have you been repressing yourself, young man?”

Zel couldn’t help laughing to herself.

The vomiting was an entirely expected reaction given the mnemonic record’s contents, but this… This was a pleasant surprise.

“Of course I will. I wouldn’t be much of a beast-slayer if I didn’t do my job, would I?” she said to him, fishing up a couple coppers that she tossed over to him. “Here, get something to wash the taste of vomit out of your mouth.”

Once he had made his way down the stands, Zel finally took her eyes off of him. “I think we can chalk this one up as a happy accident,” she said to the others, much to Reiner’s confusion.

“...This may be a foolish question, but what do you mean? What did you do to him?” the young man asked plainly.

“Nothing, the recording was normal,” Zefaris shrugged. “Being faced with something truly detestable was just what it took to fully break down the mental barriers he’d put up to escape reality as a coping mechanism. Hard to keep up those barriers when you pour a figurative casket’s worth of gunpowder onto the smoldering embers of who knows how many years of repressed anger.”

Reiner sighed, sipping from his drink.

“I don’t think I will ever understand this cultivation mysticism,” he sighed. “I just lift weights and punch hard. Works well enough, the money’s sure good.”

Considering the fact that he wasn’t even twenty, Zelsys thought that Jorfr’s remote nephew was doing quite well. The only cultivator of any note younger than him that she knew of was Halxian Estoras, and besides being the scion of a family wealthy in material possessions as well as genetics, he was also an insufferable fuckhead, even after he’d been force fed a few dozen portions of humble pie by the Blue Moon War.

In preparation for the fight, Zelsys took a few moments to retrieve several items from storage: A silver, lightly tarnished mug, a small metal box, and two bottles. One was wrapped in red-bordered seals with smooth symbols written in green ink, while the other had similar seals, but instead bore green-bordered seals with angular symbols in red ink; the first bottle contained a lightly glowing, emerald-green liquid, while the other held what looked like uncongealed blood; Viriditas and Rubedo, the two “living” essentia found most commonly in nature, distilled from rich sources and stabilized with glyphic seals. The mug had two lines on the inside, clearly visible, as well as a glyph at the bottom.

Zel uncorked the Viriditas bottle, emerald-green Fog rising from the syrupy liquid as she poured it up to the first line. The scent of Viriditas was known to be different person to person, evoking things that deeply appeal to a person. For Zelsys, it smelled like mint and Zef’s body.

The contents of the other bottle, on the other hand, smelled like blood and a vaguely musky smell, and Zelsys only left the bottle open for as long as she had to in order to pour up to the second line, taking care not to inhale the ruby-coloured Fog. It wasn’t a pure essentia, but rather a Rubedo-rich, boiled-down form of chicken’s blood, as this worked better than the pure form of Rubedo for this specific purpose.

“Can’t you just transmute it in your second stomach?” came a question from Victor, who’d just returned to the sight of Zel doing something he vividly remembered the description of from the books, in his hand a tankard filled with small beer of the sort that one could drink liters of without becoming drunk. It was a somewhat primitive, but highly potent restorative, allowing one to fight harder and for longer, to resist fatigue in battle and recover after the fact faster.

“...I could, but Deep Blood is disgusting,” she stated plainly, performing strange hand signs over the silver mug for a few seconds, exhaling silver Fog the whole time. There was a slight iridescent shimmer across the liquid’s surface, and it shifted colour from a bloody-green swirl to a uniform, pale pinkish red. She kicked it back, licking the mug clean with her freakishly-long tongue that moved more like a serpent than anything else. Victor’s dumbfounded expression made it obvious that he wondered how in the nine hells it fit in her mouth. Unfortunately for his curiosity, even she didn’t know.

The next object of interest was, of course, the metal box, containing a number of round, metal pills, each stamped with a glyph for “Iron”. Newly emboldened, Victor questioned: “What’re those? They weren’t in the books.”

“Alchemically activated iron,” she answered, holding up a pill between two fingers, before sticking out her tongue and, with its uncanny dexterity, snatching the pill. “They don’t do much, but they help.”

The sudden sound of the stage door opening grabbed her attention, and before Von Wickten even spoke she had already risen to her feet, staring down at the knight captain as he walked out in a heavily-adorned, but distinctly more practical suit of plate than his “dragon-scale” suit. An opulent sword sat at his hip, its crossguard in the shape of two dragon heads with rubies in their mouths.

“A CHALLENGER FROM THE FAR SOUTH NOW SEEKS TO USURP MY CHAMPIONSHIP!” the knight captain belted, a microphone grasped in one hand and the other outstretched to point at Zelsys. She drew in a deep breath, burning it to propel herself through the air and to the edge of the fighting pit, landing in a violent crash that cracked the ground immediately around her and sent up a cloud of dust.

“...BUT I AM MAGNANIMOUS, AND I SHALL ACCEPT THIS CHALLENGER! TONIGHT, I SHALL DEFEND MY CHAMPIONSHIP ON THE CHALLENGER’S TERMS! BRING IN THE REFEREE.”

Von Wickten seemed a little too eager to get into the fight. He thought he had an ace up his sleeve. Nevertheless, Zelsys gladly got in the pit, with Von Wickten doing the same just as a pudgy-looking Grekurian in a stained apron was led out onto the edge of the stage by one of the pit attendants.

There was a shallow circular depression on the right side of his chestplate, a proof mark of some sort stamped on the inside. The armor’s gauntlets were only partial, leaving his scaly fingers and wicked claws out in the open. He clearly noticed her examining his equipment, boasting about the resilience of the suit as the grandiose orchestra of his entrance theme started up and the bookie rattled off his many titles.

“Most suits of plate are proofed against sparklock pistols and rifles, but as you can see, mine can withstand that impact of Ikesia’s strongest field cannon, the Type-19! None other than the model said to have struck down Ubul, the Walking Mountain!” he bragged. “I look forward to seeing how you intend to get past my armor, should you even bypass my defenses.”

While he talked himself up, Zelsys had already spotted several weak points in how the armor was attached - straps and buckles that would’ve otherwise been more than sufficient for mundane plate. It seemed that the knight captain - or perhaps the duke - had access to good smiths, but they clearly didn’t know enough about the production of arcane armor to consider these weaknesses. Even mass-produced arcane armors, such as Grekurian Inquisitor’s Plate or the Second-model tank suit, were designed to prevent a sufficiently strong opponent from just ripping the suit off the wearer without having to overpower the armor’s actual material strength. When it came to Von Wickten’s battle armor, however… Zel wagered she could rip it off in a few seconds at most, even if the straps were Fog-infused drake leather and the buckles were high-grade cold-iron.

It had taken a good twenty seconds of admittedly grandiose marching music for the bookie to rattle off everything he had likely been forced to list before he got to the knight captain’s name, and in this time, a considerable crowd had gathered around the edge of the pit, spectators only stopped from leaning over the edge by the pit attendants. The atmosphere was off. Her previous two fights had elicited a sense of excitement from the crowd, but now, their palpable anticipation for the impending spectacle was more akin to the expectation of an execution than a fight. Zelsys couldn’t wait to simultaneously subvert and prove their expectations right.

“...Lord Adalbert Von Wickten!” the bookie finished. A raucous, but stilted wave of cheers erupted as Von Wickten drew in deep breaths and exhaled gouts of fire skyward, drawing his sword and seemingly setting its glyph-etched blade ablaze with a breath. The glow of the gems in its crossguard revealed the truth - the fire came entirely from the weapon, the gems serving as Ignis batteries. The fire was… Weak. Wrong. It burned like an oil-drenched stick instead of concentrating near the edge in a manner that would actually enhance the weapon’s destructive properties. It was as if whoever made this sword had attempted to mimic the operation of an Inquisitor’s Aquila Calibur without knowing why the flame made the weapon more effective.

Next came her own introduction. The bookie’s voice and the blasting of music were undercut by equally stilted-sounding boos and jeers.

“...Zelsys Newman, the Conqueror of Storms!” the bookie yelled, just in time for the end of her entrance music.

“Awaken, Conquering One, the Wanderer, Unchained!”

She felt no need to showboat, instead choosing to just stretch in place, allowing her own physique to speak for itself. As she did this, she took a moment to explain something:

“First among the manners in which I hobbled myself: I did not use Engine Breathing.”

A mental switch flipped, shifting the respiratory neural circuit to an altered state. One lung expanded, the other contracted. As slowly as she was doing it now, it looked downright unsettling. The heretofore subtle silver lines under her skin took on a milky-white glow, spreading out across her entire body as she exhaled serpents of silver Fog.

“Second was the fact I did not use my full strength in any capacity. I did not control my heart rate or blood pressure…”

Her heart visibly sped up, pounding in her chest as veins bulged and muscles subtly swelled under her skin. Though few actually recognized the importance of this detail, the silver conduits under her skin took on a metallic sheen as Zelsys used her monologue to draw Metallum from deep in the earth, burning up the iron pill in the process to magnify the quantity she dredged up, and evenly distributing it throughout the exposed parts of her skin. The knight captain’s anger was downright palpable, his fury at being upstaged culminating in him sucking in a deep breath and flooding the pit with flames, engulfing Zelsys… Just as she’d expected.

Flame was overwhelmed by a sudden cloud of kicked-up sand. The sound of a sword striking metal followed, and when the sand settled, there was Zelsys, unburned, holding the knight captain’s sword in her armored left hand, while her right was about half a meter away from his chestplate.

“...Should’ve let me finish, wouldn’t have made this mistake,” she smugged at him.

Von Wickten put on a strained grin to hide the disbelieving anger in his face, hissing through gritted teeth: “Is that so?”

“I did not use my Core of Earthly Iron until now, by whose power I render my own flesh as Iron. Flame doesn’t melt Iron - rather, yours certainly doesn’t,” she continued, yet again monologuing to buy herself time, suffusing her right fist with what Metallum she’d saved whilst channeling yet more and saving it in her second stomach. Moreover, she saturated the muscles she knew would be involved in a right-handed punch with several times her lung capacity worth of Pneuma. She could’ve just used those breaths to generate Fulgur, to coat her hand in lightning and very possibly put a hole straight through Von Wickten’s armor, but she didn’t want to do that. Zelsys wanted to turn his own armor into a walking coffin, to make it suffocate him.

Then, surprising even her, Von Wickten marshaled the strength to rip his blade free, its edge struggling through her palm as it scraped against the trigger-lever of her gun, cutting through the glove’s Fog-infused fabric and the skin of her palm alike.

She reflexively unleashed her punch, her fist imprinting itself in the enchanted armor with a sound akin to a gong. Von Wickten emitted a pained grunt as she leapt backwards, but remained upright, taking up a proper, low swordsman’s guard. Glancing at her hand, she half-mockingly remarked at the staggering mutant: “My, you truly are strong!”

Her smile widened to a grin, exposing razor-sharp teeth as the rest of her facial features grew harsh, the soft blue glow in her eyes replaced by a nearly white, bestial shine.

“...But I’ve killed stronger.”

“Your claims of glory mean nothing, foreigner,” proclaimed the knight captain unconvincingly. “Stand and deliver!”

“As you wish.”

Zel gave up the pretense right then and there and came at Von Wickten with every bit of violent malice she held for him. It was true that he was fast and strong enough to actually keep up to some degree, but he failed at a vital point: Technique. Despite his guard, and despite the fact he was a competent swordsman, competence was where his skill ended. He’d grown complacent, relying on the raw might granted by his degenerate cultivation method, a trait, she’d learned, consistent across nearly all “False Paths”. A promising start, diminishing returns, occasional illusions of advancement, and continuous degeneration.

Each of Von Wickten’s swings was predictable. He scarcely bothered to feint, and he outright telegraphed a great deal of what he did. Even that which he didn’t overtly telegraph, she could anticipate by the raising of his scales before he did it. The flame of his sword was barely felt through her gauntlet, and it couldn’t burn her metallized right hand either, let alone cut it. Right hook, cross, side kick, grab the sword, yank it out of his grip, toss it into the sand.

She began burning lungful after lungful just to animate her braids, twisting them together in two bundles of three to form faux-fists, not because it was anything remotely approaching efficiency, but because she knew it would demoralize the knight captain: Being beaten by hair.

Victor didn’t entirely understand what he was feeling, but he understood that he felt good.

“Why?” a thought shot through his head, instantly swept away.

This burning malice, this hatred in his chest that spurred him to shout his throat out and cackle like a psychotic madman every time the thunderous impact of Zel’s fist rang out against the knight captain’s armor. Everything felt so vivid, as if he had suddenly become anchored, his mind no longer passively wandering anywhere other than the current moment. A tickling pressure built just behind his forehead, akin to that which someone felt when they first put on a pair of sorely-needed glasses and the world finally came into focus for the first time.

Despite struggling to make sense of what was happening, Victor now actually recognized nearly everything Zelsys was doing. The flashes in her muscles whenever she made a sudden, snappy movement - that was Thundercharger, the technique wherein she saturated muscle groups with Pneuma in order to, through some complex arcane interaction, allow the muscle to contract at full power repeatedly using only Pneuma and without building up waste product.

Her punches and kicks, too, were ones he recognized, ones which the pulps had inadvertently drilled into his head by detailing the actual process of their invention. Perhaps the only thing he didn’t recognize was the hair trick, but he could clearly tell that she was just playing with the knight captain.

There was no way in hell that was an effective use of energy… But it made Von Wickten look like a chump.

Zelsys had to admit at least one thing: The armor held up. She’d exhausted a considerable portion of her connection with the earthen spirits to harden her fist as well as to deflect Von Wickten’s repeated and increasingly focused attempts at burning her, and his armor was yet to give. It was terribly deformed and clearly constricting his breathing, but it still held up, and so she decided to just do away with it.

After getting past his guard and kicking his knees out from under him, she grasped the upper collar of his chestplate on either side and pulled, marshaling all her strength as terrible arcs of lightning slithered down her arms and gouts of Fog erupted from her nostrils. The metal bent under her fingers, enchanted leather stretched to an unnatural degree, and buckles bent. Something finally snapped and the deformed mass of cold-iron went flying into the sand in two pieces.

She had intended to say something about how, no matter how good armor was, it meant nothing if it could just be removed, but for once… The knight captain had caught her off-guard. Just as she had ripped the plate from his torso, his clawed hand had scored across her stomach, his talons digging right into muscle. Blackness spread out from the gash, the veins around it rapidly turning black as the venom worked its way into her body. An outpouring of black blood ran out of the wound as Zelsys stumbled back, still grinning as she swiped a handful of the liquid from her stomach, looking down at it, then at Von Wickten.

“Fleshrot Venom,” she uttered. “Rapidly denatures bodily Viriditas into Nigredo, causing a chain reaction. Best targeted at the intestines, where the concentration of Nigredo in any human is densest, said to melt a human into sludge in minutes...”

The look of smug satisfaction on the knight captain’s face was priceless, truly priceless in its misguidedness. He didn't seem to care that this would cause him to lose by disqualification if it happened to work. Zelsys hadn’t even considered his envenomed claws enough of a threat to account for.

Something writhed under the skin of her stomach, as if she had some monstrous lamprey instead of intestines. An unsettling ripple went out from her heart, subdermal muscles subtly contracting in radiating waves. Her breathing accelerated, arcs of bluish lightning writhing over her skin for a few moments before she retched, twitching in place for a moment while flashes of light issued from inside her torso, rays of light bursting out the wound. A moment later, Zelsys projected a glob of pitch-black liquid right back in Von Wickten’s face.

“Did you really think that’d work?!” she cackled at him as tendrils of congealed blood whipped across the gashes on her stomach and pulled them shut.