Victor looked up at the strange hood-sleeve-thing behind the counter, then at a pair of long, armored boots. His knowledge of fashion screamed and thrashed as he pulled it apart and conceived of an outfit akin to what Zelsys was wearing, a set of clothing that so flagrantly defied good taste it would loop back around and become the peak of fashion.

“Shorts with the fur lining sticking out the top,” he proclaimed, grinning. Zelsys and Zefaris had both followed his sightline, and burst out laughing at the mental image.

“Why are you laughing? You should be rejoicing. You’ve found one who shares your ridiculous tastes in fashion,” the Craftsman admonished Zelsys jokingly. “But, that drake leather… Hrm… You know you could sell that for a couple thousand as a whole piece, yes? I’d hate to fleece you.”

“It’s degraded and covered in scars, nobody who wants a drakeskin rug will buy this thing,” Zel dismissed, already having pulled out her Tablet and began the process of retrieving the false drake’s still-bloody hide from storage.

“Alright, give it here. I’ll have the piece ready in a couple days, would you rather come pick it up once it’s ready or just pay in advance and have me send a runner to deliver it?”

“I’ll pay in advance…”

So it was that Zel and Zef turned Victor’s newfound motivation away from being far too brave for his own good towards his natural sense of vanity. The top ended up being the priciest of the bunch, as it turned out to be lined with cold-iron chainmail on the inside and enchanted to ward against lightning, betraying its origins as some Kargarian noble’s commission that they had failed to pick up. The boots just happened to be one of the Craftsman’s projects of fancy, being entirely unremarkable in any particular aspect beyond their high standard of quality.

Much to the duo’s disappointment, the auction equaled the boots in mundanity, excepting the impossibly creepy parasite-ridden guards. No slaves were sold, and even that which was being sold was mostly recreational drugs, foreign jewelry, or talked-up cultivation supplies that screamed of falsity; of these, Zefaris purchased two pieces of jewelry in order to create a sense of legitimacy as customers, using funds the Bureau had allocated to them specifically for this use. There were two items of note: A deck of Jade Dragons with twenty-thousand gelt as a starting bid, and a jar labeled with a Pateirian symbol that the auctioneer translated as “Gu”. It supposedly contained an immensely potent insect that could instantly allow someone to become a powerful cultivator if they consumed it.

She chose not to bid on it, being suspicious of anything to do with Pateirian merchants.

At the end of the day, the auction turned out to primarily be a way to wring money out of those with more cash than sense, with a sliver of possibility towards more serious ends.

It was here, after the auction, that Zelsys finally took her opportunity, and used the passphrase.

“The red sun rises over bloodstained peaks.”

The auctioneer, in all his superhuman sleaziness, smiled at her, stating, “Just a moment.”

He returned with a sealed-up envelope.

“Here you are. We look forward to your patronage.”

The envelope itself had instructions written on the back, instructing the reader not to open it until the listed date, and stating that the map within would burn up after twelve hours.

“Looks like we’ve got our ticket to the Meat Market.”

A rhythmic knocking pattern on the door. A familiar, professional voice.

“May I come in?”

Karmesin sighed, dragging herself out of the depths of meditation into full consciousness. For all the benefits of no longer needing to sleep, she almost missed it, taking a few hours each night to meditate as a replacement. Even this brief respite from her accursed existence, it seemed, would be denied to her tonight.

She stepped out of her bed, donning her smalls and lazily draping her cloak around herself. It barely covered anything the way she preferred to wear it, but it didn’t matter in a private setting such as this, given the identity of the man beyond the door. Her left foot, a prosthetic of gold-lined blackstone, clacked annoyingly against the marble floor tiles.

“Enter!” she commanded, striding across the room towards a table upon which sat two brass chalices and a simple bottle full of blue liquid, one of the stabilizing seals cleverly doubling as a label. It read “Tengri’s Tears”, the first half of that name being a Kargarian word for a clear, blue sky as well as an old, traditional sky deity. A small stamp on the label marked it as something produced in concert with the Krishorn Clan, a dominant Kargarian mercantile family. An unassuming man in an unassuming martial arts outfit slipped in, instantaneously closing the door behind himself while carrying a metal Tablet in one hand. A mass-produced form of a previously rare and expensive luxury, this model primarily a storage device. Another convenience of Ikesia’s industry that Karmesin had embraced, while her Occupationist peers publicly decried anything produced by the country’s surviving industry… While still investing in that same industry, in an effort to subvert and take control of it company by company.

Similar products from the southern Free Cities Alliance had begun flooding Ikesia’s unoccupied territories in recent months, sold en-masse in places exactly like Arches to smugglers who exported them to occupied regions and resold them at massive profit. Karemsin poured herself a chalice, taking a sip.

A new elixir imported from the far south that invigorated the body and mind alike without the side effects of older alternatives.

The man walked over to the same table, the Tablet producing its meager vortex of Fog from which he retrieved a bottle of the self-same liquid. Then, another, and a third. It was Tian Meng. A broker from Pateiria’s own Land of Lingering smoke, a ghost in human skin, so unassuming he looped back around to being extraordinary in his own way.

Karmesin would’ve demanded an explanation for a disturbance at this time of night, had it been anyone else. However, Tian Meng was not the sort to ever do such things without reason. The elixir delivery was obviously just a matter of convenience. This man - Tian Meng - this actual nobody, had exhibited more professionalism and loyalty in her months working with him than all of her highborn, honor-obsessed superiors ever had. He finally piped up when she had drunk most of the liquid in her chalice.

“One of our agents in Scarlet Silk Road just confirmed the presence of Zelsys and Zefaris Newman, together with a Borean and two pupils of the Duma School. Zelsys directly challenged the knight captain, forced him to transform during their match, severely damaged his liver, and sawed off his horns as a submission tactic. She was later spotted near one of the suspected Red Locust Bandit auction locations.”

A deeply-rooted murderous impulse surged within the Lady in Red at the mention of that name: Zelsys. It had been bad enough, seeing those pulps that so callously fictionalized the true events leading up to the death of Karmesin’s past self, those books that so maliciously, so accurately characterized her past self as no more than a puppet for the Locust Queen. It didn’t exactly help that Karmesin hadn’t been able to stop herself from reading both books, out of a desire to know even a fictionalized account of events outside her perspective. But knowing that Zelsys was here, very nearly within reach… It incensed her very nearly beyond reason.

Despite the seething, all-consuming grudge that had caught fire anew within her, Karmesin retained self-control. To show up, humiliate the knight captain, and just vanish seemingly into thin air: It was exactly as obnoxious as she had expected those two to be. The last time she’d seen either Zelsys or Zefaris, she was still more or less a parasite-ridden mind-slave, in the core chamber of a particular dungeon down south, but what little of her past self remained was consumed by the desire to kill that homunculus. It had been the actions of Zelsys that had driven the Locust Queen to such desperate measures as forcibly imbuing her lieutenants - Karmesin among them - with the primordial essence of the Dungeon Core, and it had been through that damned homunculus’ victory that Karmesin had been driven to retreat, unwittingly subjecting herself to the Dungeon Core’s whims when she used a teleportation talisman to flee through the Sea of Fog.

“It would be foolish to interrupt the enemy when they are doing my work for me,” she uttered as she crumpled the chalice into a hunk of scrap metal. “However, once that work is done… There may be a prime opportunity to exploit their battle fatigue.”

She would yet get to fulfill the promise she’d made to Zelsys back in that dungeon; the promise to kill her the next time they met. It was only a question of how long it took her to find the correct opportunity.

Death had no grip on her, after all. The accursed Dungeon Core had made sure of that, in its ever-so-cruel choice to purge her of everything the Locust Queen had afflicted her with except for her imbuement with the Dungeon Core’s own eternal essence. A part of her believed such a feat to have been beyond even the Core’s reach, such a deeply-rooted corruption of body and soul alike; her brain and nervous system had been completely crystallized into a magickal construct akin to the Core itself, sections of it erupting outward after running out of space to grow. Those crystalline horns jutting from her hairline were proof of what she was, a one-of-a-kind abomination born from a combination of the modern and the ancient.

Her reward was the inability to die lest her brain be destroyed, and the power to wield a magick akin to the Dungeon Core’s own functions. She drew in a breath, burning her lungs’ contents to extrude a short-lived construct solely for the purpose of reaching across the room and picking up a pipe that she’d bought from a passing-through Kargarian merchant. She filled it by hand and lit it with a snap of her fingers, toking from it in an effort to calm herself down.

Once, a rudimentary feat like this had caused her intolerable pain, her innermost being threatening to splinter and split open from the resonance of her horns. What little remained of her past self was utterly appalled at what she’d become, eagerly walking a path that entirely circumvented everything the Emperor would have deemed an acceptable form of cultivation.

But then, Red had already chosen to serve the Empire’s best interests according to the Divine Maxims, guidelines the Emperor himself had drafted for the running of his Empire before it was even founded. Red had chosen to pledge her loyalty to the Maxims, rather than the Emperor's current, misguided state of mind.

“Manufactured paragon, embodiment of scientific triumph…” she sighed a smoke-filled breath, picking up a pulp with the image of Zelsys printed on the cover. “By the Maxims, how I resent that this monstrosity is the only person I feel true kinship for. Perhaps when I kill you I’ll feel strongly enough to weep.”

She sighed, turning to her servant.

“Inform all of our lookouts of the trio’s appearance. No confrontation, no active trailing - just have them report back as soon as possible. If they take a contract, buy something, walk by an agent’s storefront, I want to know it within the hour. If Zelsys is pursuing the path I think she is, we may yet have our slavery troubles dealt with without moving a finger… Just make sure the duke stays in the dark.”

“Yes, Lady Karmesin.”

Victor was welcomed to the land of the living by a splitting headache, a mouth as dry as a mausoleum, and two parts of a ridiculous getup hanging from one of his chairs. Going through the motions of his morning routine with all the half-asleep clumsiness of a necrogolem, he found himself reflecting on the previous night, particularly the tail-end of it all, though he was unable to fully scour the revolting memory of that mnemonic record from his mind’s eye. He had a good reason to pick out such a ridiculous outfit, beyond just wanting to mimic Zel’s mode of dress. It was so ridiculous, so beyond any reasonable sense of fashion, that he would have no choice but to make it work by actually acting with the same self-assured confidence that Zelsys seemed to exude without even trying. Victor feared that, once his momentarily-elevated state faded, he’d only be left with a smoldering hatred for the knight captain and the same schizoid urges as usual, so he figured he might as well dress in a way that would give him no choice but to act the way he wished to act, lest he look like a total fucking tool.

Most of the clothes with which he’d come to Arches were now long gone - he’d sold them to keep himself fed when the shortages were particularly bad.

So it was that he dressed himself in his normal clothes, heading to the markets, spending a chunk of the money Zel had given him to buy fresh fish, yoghurt, cheese, a rack of ribs, and a good amount of animal bones on their own. Victor’s distaste for the very idea of eating bones had not magically vanished or even decreased overnight, but he was certain that if that woman continued to be consistent with her portrayal in the pulps, she would give him no choice but to get over the aversion. Moreover, there was a macabre hunger for bones in his core, almost like the same thing that had screamed out in rancor at the sight of Von Wickten’s crimes also now hungered for the self-same bones that Victor’s thinking self disliked.

He heard the terrible noise of the parade starting up as he made his way back from the markets. A part of him was relieved that the duke imposed a day of rest onto the populace in hopes of driving attendance for the Dragon Knights’ parade, but another part itched for the same exertion through which he had rotely and mechanically drudged before. There was also the fact that, considering the not-quite-friendly relationship between the Dragon Knights and the Duma School, plus yesternight’s events… Victor knew better than to take the risk of showing his face at the parade, or anywhere it would pass through, meaning the main artery that connected the town’s North and South gates. Later that same day, he learned that the knight captain led the procession exactly as had been planned, but that he was obviously injured and wore one of his horn-covering helmets, which he had refused to remove for any reason.

Given the state of affairs, he took some time later in the day to go running in the forest, making his way through a portion with no paths, following a small stream and the shape of the terrain. He eventually came upon a broken blackstone obelisk, one of the more-or-less surviving edifices of the Three Kings Era. His lungs and muscles both burned equally by now and his wound threatened to open up again, so Victor returned to town.

Days melted away more than they passed, and the flame in Victor’s chest showed no signs of going out. Rather, it spread out, permeating every fiber of his being. Each day he felt the itch to train and push harder, following the same running path and continuing to train at the broken obelisk. At its fore was the desire to murder the knight captain and those who enabled his degeneracy, but that had, in truth, merely been the ember, the spark that had set ablaze something which could no longer be put out. Victor’s inner barriers had been washed away in the deluge, and they wouldn’t return unless he allowed himself to sink into schizoid escapism all over again.

On the second day the spring sun smashed down with an intensity otherwise reserved for the summer, driving Victor to make practical use of his new top, which dominated his outfit due to the blandness of his other clothing. He derived great amusement from leaning into his classmates’ strange looks and remarks, making fun of himself and playing up his own egoism to a cartoonish degree by claiming he had bought it because he wanted to show off his physique without losing the convenience of a hood. By the end of the training day it was no longer just a joke. Something had changed; the training day had gone by even faster than usual, despite the fact Victor only spent a fraction of the usual time with his nose in a pulp. Despite the fact he could again immerse himself in the book’s world, he no longer lost awareness of his surroundings the way he had done before, noticing a suspicious increase in how many Dragon Knights he saw on his way home.

After spending two hours to eat a light meal, shower, and rest, Victor went out for a run once again. He followed the same path out of town and into the forest. Though he paid it no mind, a seemingly random Dragon Knight on the street corner took note of him. Vain as he was, he wrote it off as the inherently eye-grabbing nature of how he was dressed, briefly considering just how much attention he would attract once he actually took time to put together a congruent outfit.

Victor had barely noticed four days flying by, only keeping track of time by cycles of self-inflicted pain and its fading, his daily consumption of Ossum-rich foods, and notable events. Some of the aforementioned foods, like dairy products, were just fine, pleasant even, but they were not sufficient, only supplying his body with the components to produce its own Ossum. He had been taught that direct consumption of bones was the only way to efficiently fuel Ossomancy, but… Crunching down on hard bones was far from palatable, or even plausible in some cases, and bones that had been softened by boiling were even more disgusting. At best, he could scrape the marrow out of larger pieces, or perhaps crush bones up into powder and mix them into other foods. As he sat there, fiddling with a pig’s rib that he’d just stripped of meat, he thought to ask a question that his mother’s overbearing authority had previously smothered.

“If Ossomancy allows one to control bone, then what law of magic is there to stop me from using Ossomancy to break down dead bones and just usurp them for my own use?”

The answer to such questioning of his family’s methods had ever been shouting, non-answers, and circular logic. “It is so because my grandfather’s books say it is so,” and so on. But… Why couldn’t he just test it for himself? His logical mind had led him to experimentation, as his education in the arcane arts conflicted with his parents’ claims by necessity, as otherwise he would have never grasped the arcane equations that he did know, which he used extensively in concert with glyphic magic to cast in his own way. The few times he’d tried to experiment with Ossomancy beyond what he had been explicitly allowed to do when he was younger, his parents had quickly nipped it in the bud with what was, in retrospect, a suspicious degree of zeal.

He pulled out a paring knife and took to scraping glyphs into the bone, drawing on his limited repertoires of elemental and Ossomantic glyphs to create a primitive sign that by his reckoning should have enabled him to easily break the bone down under his own strength. After settling the rib squarely in the middle of his palm and the magic circle tattooed upon it, he attempted to center his mind as he drew in a deep breath to generate Pneuma as fuel for the spell… But nothing happened. The glyphs didn’t even glow. Undeterred, he cleaned up and spent the entirety of his night toiling away at different possible glyph designs, working backwards from his own existing knowledge to arrive at the same method by which he leeched Ossum out of his own skeleton to fuel his Ossomancy.

As he worked Victor’s mind latched onto the idea that they must’ve been trying to keep him in check, keep him dependent on them. All those times his mother had so callously forced him to eat bones in disgusting forms had to have been some ridiculous way of dissuading him away from using his ancestral right, the magic which his hack fraud of a father had so pathetically failed to grasp.

Victor connected the dots in his mind, filled in gaps, made sense of the trauma-filled shitshow that were his childhood memories. The actual truth of his upbringing didn’t matter, and Victor couldn’t hope to grasp it even if he did possess an objective viewpoint of his own memories; they were fragmented and bleached by depression.

What he had truly needed was a reason, a way to give himself permission to burn the last remnants of his connection to his surname by flagrantly disobeying all that had been drilled into him in regards to his genetic inheritance, to treat Ossomancy as no more than another elemental aspect for him to pick apart and experiment with.

This was his truth.

And it was enough.

The bone broke apart and sunk into his palm.

The relief that washed over him also washed away the last threads of defiant will that were keeping him awake.

The fifth day came. Despite having slept only a little over four hours, Victor awoke without issue and compensated for any loss of sleep by breaking open his small reserve of Liquid Vigor. It was a light restorative elixir based on Viriditas and alcohol with herbal tea making up the rest of its volume, so common and widespread that near enough every village wisewoman had her own version. The aforementioned reserve totaled around 1.4l across two seal-bottles, now reduced to less than a liter.

__________________________________________________________________________________

One of the Duma School’s teachers paced before a class of students, lecturing and asking questions. The Instructor still had not returned. A pair of Dragon Knights across the street were just openly staring in through the gate.

“Dahnengi, Woengari, Ippok, Grekurian Hestogah, the Song of Spring - what do these arts have in common?” the Teacher asked. A hand was raised. “Yes, Joseph.”

“...They’re all mystical, venerated arts?” the student answered uncertainly.

The Teacher nodded, continuing with more questions: “Yes, and what else? Anyone? No-one?”

An apathetic voice came from the back: “They’re all overspecialized and useless in a real fight without a proper foundation.”

“Very good Reiner, but raise your hand next time. Go use the shin-rollers until I tell you to stop,” the Teacher reprimanded, not even bothering to gesture for the bloodstained metal rods. They were immaculately clean in reality, but they had been used for the same grisly purpose for so long that it had permanently seeped into them. The apathetic-looking young man stood up without a word of backtalk, pulling up his trouser leg up to the knee and grabbing a rod with his free hand, pressing it against the base of his shin. With a quick upward motion, he dragged the rod across his shin, a sickening popping sound audible as it raked across his already-bruised skin. He gritted his teeth in pain, but he neither complained nor slowed down.

Meanwhile, the Teacher continued: “As Reiner so succinctly elucidated, these mystical arts are extremely specialized. They were created for a specific purpose, as tools, but that identity has, in many cases, been lost - many grew to treat the art itself as a universal martial toolkit due to the supreme mastery of a scant few edge cases, the egoism of said masters not helping the issue. In truth, such arts will not do you any good on their own. You require a solid foundation first - can anyone think of such foundational, basic arts?”

A raised hand. A second, a third. The Teacher pointed, the student answered.

“Tesava Kickboxing?” asked the blonde, blue-eyed Ikesian.

“Very good, yes. Victor, can you think of one?” nodded the Teacher towards an androgynous young man with fluffy, red hair. A bizarre piece of clothing adorned his top half, a high-quality hooded top in a Kargarian style, yet missing the entire front section such that it exposed the young man’s chest for all to see, thick plates of bone covering its upper half. A brilliant-blue gemstone hung from his neck, clattering against the bone.

“Baritsu?” Victor smirked, much to the teacher’s own amusement.

“Perhaps, if you already carry a cane on a daily basis,” the teacher chuckled at the very idea of that eclectic martial art. “How about a real answer?”

The smirk on Victor’s face turned to a full grin, and the Teacher already knew his answer.

“Sturmblitz Kunst.”

“That’s… Correct, yes,” the Teacher admitted with feigned hesitation, as without the pamphlet which Duma had had him slip into Victor’s pulp, he would’ve had no way to know of such a recent development, let alone one from so far down south. “Where did you learn of it?”

Victor reached into his bag and pulled out the fateful pamphlet, holding it out as the Teacher approached.

“I printed it myself. Someone had loaded a mnemonic copy onto the public terminal in the town library,” he said, twisting the truth to cover himself, just in case. There was indeed a public terminal, and the local printing-house did offer their services for small orders, but Victor lacked the technical know-how to operate the former, and not only could Victor not hope to foot the bill for two-dozen of these things, the printing-house didn’t have the necessary hardware to begin with.

In reality, two-dozen Sturmblitz Kunst 0 pamphlets had arrived at his doorstep alongside a package that contained the last piece of his outfit and a note with a date. The date was the same as that which had been written upon Zel’s “Ticket to the Meat Market”, as she had referred to it, though Victor had no way of knowing this. Being in the state of mind he was in, Victor had taken this as an instruction to distribute the pamphlets before that date.