He went running again later, same as the previous days, taking along a few of the ribs from his dinner in Fog Storage. The idea of carrying bones openly on his person was repellant to him; plus, the act of breaking down and absorbing them was time-consuming enough that he didn’t even consider doing it in the middle of a fight to be an option. Vic spent some more time than usual at the broken obelisk, forming variations of the same projectiles he’d come up with yesterday, shooting them at the nearby trees and re-absorbing them. Again, and again, and again. By the end of the hour, he’d done it over a hundred times, gradually getting a better grasp of the process, and thus becoming faster at it. He came to form them around his own fingers, using his own claws as the starting points, and thus, at first, thought of them as fingers.

“Devil’s Fingers?” he considered as he fired one off at a tree, the projectile tumbling and bouncing flying far past the tree, which had been stripped of bark by repeated impacts. Trees near the one he focused on bore impact marks as well, his bone-rockets tending to completely veer off-course. Drawing power from the environment felt easier here, somehow. Vic wondered if the obelisk itself had some sort of magic-amplifying effect, or if it had been just a marker placed over a natural leyline crossing. From a simple hollow, pointy cone, he slightly altered the design on the inside such that the propellant would burn in a twin-tailed, spiral shape, causing the projectile to spin in flight. He also added three spiraling grooves to the outside, running the entire length of the cone, as this was much easier to form than creating distinct stabilizing fins.

Eventually, after some trial and error, he came upon an iteration of the design that actually worked how he’d envisioned; most of the struggle had been figuring out a glyph that would be both simple to form from bone, and could guide the propellant as needed. He filled the internal cavity of a projectile with as much Ignis and Aer as he thought practical for use in combat, aimed, and set it loose. It ripped through the air not with a trail of sparks, but with a twin-tailed, focused jet of monochromatic flame, smashing into the tree and chewing through it as the remainder of its fuel caused it to drill into the wood.

A few more iterations to add more grooves and make the ridges between them sharp, and Victor had both a mostly-final design, and a name, one appropriate to how these little monsters seemed to chew into targets.

“Devil’s Teeth.”

Victor knew he still didn’t have a complete grasp of the would-be technique; if he did, he would’ve felt it, that moment when the world would seem to freeze as the exact moment was captured in spiritual memory. When one truly grasped a technique it was unmistakable, an attribute reader would list it clear as day. He was certain that this one was only a matter of time.

Moving on from working on the Devil Teeth for the time being, Victor turned to Bonefire, and Pyromancy in general. He’d always had good control, having been able to mold and shape flames since he’d learned basic Pyromancy, and it was the element with which he was most proficient. The problem had always been generating power for him, somehow Victor had always struggled to power his spells, despite on paper having the affinity and lung capacity. He placed his hands together, drawing in a deep breath, filling his lungs, running through arcane mathematics equations in his head, but… The equations didn’t seem to have the usual mental effect. He couldn’t even finish most of them, they just sort of trailed off and vanished.

And yet, even without the meditative effects that he’d been taught were necessary, through feeling alone he was able to guide Pneuma down his arms. Glyphs took form within and Silver Fog escaped out of the octagrams on his palms, burning in black and white. Something didn’t feel right about this. Victor continued breathing, burning evermore Pneuma and adjusting the flow of it through his arms and out of his hands, until, without even realizing, he changed the glyphs. Wispy, controlled flame erupted into a blaze that filled his palms.

Was it just the leyline crossing amplifying his magic? No, that wasn’t right.

These glyphs were not what he had been taught. They were violent, jagged, and boisterous, instead of the elegant and controlled glyphwork that had been drilled into him. And all this flame, where was it coming from? He found himself breathing in a faster, yet still controlled manner, exhaling forcefully but steadily instead of the slow exhalation he’d been taught.

This… This felt better.

He’d always wanted to use Pyromancy for its classical, purely offensive purpose, but not knowing how to do anything better than just congeal the flame and throw it, he thought to use his limited knowledge of Aeromancy instead. Containing the flame with one hand and using a blast of air from the other to propel it turned out to be as effective as it was simple. Compressing and congealing the mote of fire as much as he could, he set loose a blast of air, aiming it at a tree. The globby, greasy flame splattered against a tree and erupted in a shotgun-spray that enveloped the grass behind it, the flame catching well enough that he felt the need to put it out rather than risk it spreading out of control.

As he did so, he found himself further altering his normal Fog-breathing along the guidelines he’d read in Sturmblitz Kunst 0, effectively changing the steady, continuous breathing method he’d been taught for the more precise, explosive style of Sturmblitz Kunst’s own: The Shifting Winds of Eternal Spring, or more simply Spring Breathing.

Victor didn’t know whether he had simply not clicked with the methods of his forebears, or if he’d been taught wrong on purpose to keep him under control, but his mind latched onto the latter option… And he decided to completely defy the legacy of his family’s arcane method from then on. Instead, he decided to apply the teachings of Sturmblitz Kunst to not just martial arts, but magic as well, inspired in no small part by the pulp descriptions of Zelsys spending long stretches of time devising techniques from nothing, based purely on observed behaviors and interactions of her own abilities rather than manuals.

“To hell with arcane mathematics. This feels right.”

He returned home, and the next day came without further incident. Despite this, Victor struggled to fall asleep. Something was wrong, he could feel it. A foreboding tension in the air.

The next morning, when he arrived at the Duma School, his suspicions were confirmed. Students and civilians alike swarmed the place, Dragon Knights keeping the crowd under control. Victor stood aghast at the sight; the main building had been burned down.

“It’s… It’s gone,” he uttered. Duma noticed him, breaking off a conversation with three other students to come talk to him, smugly shaking his head as he approached.

“What is gone? The building? It was just old wood,” he said. “Did you think I had not foreseen this possibility? I have copies of all my manuals, safely in Fog Storage, right on my person. Then again… Those bastards did try to kill me, so perhaps they knew.”

“Who? The Dr-” Vic snapped, biting his tongue before he could blurt out the rest. The Old Man got the message nevertheless, smiling at him.

“No, I do not think so,” he shook his head, looking around. “Come, let us take a look. I’ve already excused the others, seeing as today was to be a rest day to begin with.”

Duma led him into the building, through the burned-out structure, the stench of burned wood and paper still lingering. There, in the midst of it, the master made the student cross the threshold to his inner sanctum. Victor felt the glass of that cabinet creak beneath his boots as he looked around. Everything was haphazardly pulled apart, smashed up, and burned, but…

“...It doesn’t look like they were actually looking for anything. More like they were just destroying thi-”

He cut himself off before he could finish when his eyes fell upon the charred stand down the left side of the room. That spear. It was gone. Duma had followed his gaze, and let out a deep sigh, walking over to it.

“Yes, I am certain they were after my spear. I had… Offered to sell it to a man I had met in Scarlet Silk Road. I’d made the mistake of mentioning that I was also considering passing it onto one of you, and that slant-eyed bastard must’ve decided to just take it by force. What a fool I am. A senile, trusting fool.”

Duma put his hand on Victor’s shoulder, staring right into his eyes. That strange look flared up in the old man’s gaze again.

“It matters not. Go home for the day, you’ll need to be rested when the red sun rises.”

Had the old man spoken with Zelsys since then? He must have. Without any desire to deny Duma’s suggestion, Vic thought to leave and just go home for now, to enjoy what he expected to be the last time he’d have a boring routine for a long while.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said, re-summoning his mask of haughty self-assuredness.

As he walked out of the burned-out building, he heard Duma speak again: “One more thing. I suspect my spear may end up in the Meat Market, or elsewise in the hands of the Red Locust Bandits. Should you find it… Keep it. Perhaps it will come to like you more than it did me.”

Victor decided to visit the broken obelisk again, this time choosing to take it easy and just spend some more time polishing the Devil’s Teeth. It was a little earlier in the day this time, just after he’d left the Duma School, because it was not quite as warm out.

Unfortunately for Victor, an unassuming bystander saw the glamorous young man making his way out of town, confirming his higher-ups’ prediction that he would take the same path as the preceding days. The bystander alongside one other man quietly followed in his path, taking meticulous care to go unnoticed until they thought he was vulnerable.

Unfortunately for the two pursuers, however, Victor had already been on edge before the break-in, and learning of the Duma Spear’s theft had only made him more cautious. In fact, noticing that he was being followed elicited a strange sort of relief: Relief that he’d been right to gut his stove for its fuel gem, which he now clutched in his palm.

He jogged through the forest at a relatively leisurely pace, using Spring Breathing in short bursts to stop himself from becoming even slightly winded. At this pace, he could keep going more or less indefinitely, or rather until more serious exhaustion set in. Were they just normals? Mutants, maybe? Locust-men? They couldn’t be drones, they were visibly human. What kind of person would those who supply Von Wickten with slaves send to capture a known martial artist and magic user? As he neared the broken obelisk and gradually gained distance from his pursuers, Vic made himself breathe with increasing intensity and intentionally ran more sloppily to fake exhaustion. Those two were fast, all too fast to be normals, considering how quickly they caught up to him while he was sitting atop the obelisk’s toppled upper half. He caught glimpses of the would-be kidnappers circling around, trying to get into his blind spots. In fact, he had barely even seen them, only able to make out that they wore cloaks in a shade of green that blended in quite well. It was their wake that had betrayed their presence and path, the disturbance of foliage and forest critters.

Vic got his answer when he caught a whiff of the unmistakable scent of Viriditas: For Victor, it was cinnamon.

“Of course.”

It clicked in his head. Even if drawing Viriditas directly from plants was a high-level technique, it was still one of the most easily accessible essentia in its distilled form. They would try something with the most common manifestation of Viridimancy: Brambly vines to incapacitate and bind. Was that other one also a caster, or just meat? Mulling over what to do, Vic sat there with his legs crossed. They had already proven that they could keep up with him, and even if he did get away, they would run back to their superiors. If he got unlucky he’d be hunted through the streets, and the Dragon Knights would conveniently miss the commotion.

“It can’t be helped. I’ll just have to incapacitate them,” he thought, sighing inwardly. He began to draw Ignis from the gem, while simultaneously building up devilbone around his right arm, murmuring about how he didn’t pay his tuition just to be told there was no training in an attempt to deceive his stalkers into thinking he had come out here to practice. A form approximating that of an armored gauntlet took shape, a concave hollow at the elbow that he filled with Aer-Igneic propellant.

The reason Victor and most other casters avoided drawing from essentia gems if at all possible was the terrible, terrible instability. Even those who practiced the ancient method did so with precautions and special tools. What he was doing all but assured the gem’s destabilization and detonation… Which, as he’d hoped, began to happen. He stopped drawing from the stone just as he felt it begin to heat up in his hand, instead forming stabilizing glyphs in his palm into which he poured Aqua-coded Pneuma to slow the cookoff.

The two men stepped into plain sight behind him a moment before Vic finished armoring his right arm.

“My, what a coincidence!” the one to his right exclaimed with badly-feigned surprise. He sounded… Normal. No accent. A sympathizer, then. A filthy occupationist. He walked clear-as-day into Vic’s sightline, pulling down his hood, revealing his pockmarked features and an ever-closed left eye. There was something wrong about his right eye. His iris was segmented. Both his legs were artificial, and a steel plate was bolted to the man’s left temple, stamped with a Pateirian symbol; Vic knew a bit of that revolting tongue, enough to read the pictogram as “Captive” or “Prisoner of War”.

It couldn’t have been clearer that he was trying to occupy Vic’s attention while the other man snuck up from behind.

With grease dripping from every word, he continued the charade: “And here I was, thinking my secret spot was known only to me, myself, and I…”

He squatted down, looking off towards the stream and letting out a contented sigh, before he turned his head to look at Victor again.

“Victor Khestun, right?” he asked. “Seen you around Duma’s place, terrible shame what happened there last night. Say, what is such a strapping young lad doing out this far into the forest? Training, I take it?”

“More or less. You’re a war vet, right?” Vic prodded, continuing to covertly build up his gauntlet. Wishing to know if the vet was just an opportunistic, man-shaped beast, or a locust in human skin who directly served the Pateirians, Victor decided to prod. Pateirian loyalists, those who had adopted Pateirian ideology and with it the concept of “face”, would be unable to let an insult towards their faction go unanswered, even with a subtle show of anger.

“Didn’t know the bugmen ever repatriated any of their POWs. Can’t expect much better from bugmen; barely any difference between the average cat-eater and a full blown locust mutant if you ask me.”

Though he’d let his mouth carry him a bit further than intended, the results spoke for themselves. The vet spat off to the site, speaking with barely-concealed anger: “Don’t be a fool, kid. Speaking like that about your rightful rulers is just courting death.”

A chuckle escaped his mouth.

He grasped inside himself for something, anything to say. The jagged fragments of what he’d read in the pulps took shape, forming something new. Somehow, the fact these weren’t his own words made them easier to say.

“You know, I would’ve been a non-factor if you just left me be; I would’ve left this shithole before the end of the month,” he lied, standing up and drawing in a partial breath. He burned it to fuel a long jump away from his pursuers, the edge of a bramble-whip licking his boot as he went. He spun around upon landing and tossed the unstable gem at the war vet’s feet, pulling out his hand-axe with his free hand.

“But you just couldn’t leave well enough alone; now I’m obligated to kill the two of you, your slaver friends, and that subhuman Von Wickten!”

The vet sprung up to his feet with uncanny dexterity, the veins on his neck bulging as the humanity drained from his face, his expression growing distorted. It… It was an expression of pain. A moment later, the gemstone erupted into a pillar of flame just as the vet tried to dodge, enveloping him in fire as he stood frozen in place, seemingly struggling to stop himself from stepping out of the fire. He twitched in place, and a moment later his left eye shot open, from the hole erupting a writhing… Centipede? It was a long, parasitic insect, but it didn’t have enough legs to be a centipede, and its tip had a thick stinger. A chitinous spike shot out of the bug, whizzing past Vic’s head as the bug undulated and pushed out another spike.

“Not a stinger. A quill launcher.”

The vet’s right eye popped out of its socket, revealing itself to be the parasite’s other end. He lurched forward, sprinting after Victor while still wheezing: “Khiiiill… Mgheeee…!”

“Khill mheee-” he wheezed. Meanwhile, the Viridimancer - an almost brown-skinned Pateirian - tried to circle around, lashing at Victor’s feet and obviously trying to trip him while he fumbled with his free hand for another of the Viriditas bottles on his belt, his camouflage cloak getting in the way. It was too big for the man, probably tailored down from something made for Ikesians or Grekurians. Vic’s flight instinct was drowned out by an overpowering impulse, something primordial roiling in his gut. It wasn’t a personal, conscious desire to kill, but an animalistic impulse. Half of it was survival, and the other half was ego. These fools had the absolute fucking gall to try snatching him to be made into some perverse living sex toy. Killing them quickly would be a mercy.

Vic decided to create a bit more distance; the gauntlet wasn’t ready yet, and it would only work once. He spun around and began sprinting, zigzagging around between trees in an effort to avoid getting hit with that insect’s doubtlessly poisoned darts. Hearing the both of them trying to chase after him and the thumping of darts into nearby trees, Vic veered off the path towards a nearby stream. He formed a Devil’s Tooth as he ran, firing it off towards the veteran. It ripped into his leg, drilling inward as blood gushed out around it, causing him to fall to his knees. Meanwhile, the Viridimancer’s whip, as if coming out of nowhere, wrapped itself around Vic’s axe-arm. With his lungs half-full he grabbed onto the whip and dug his heels in, burning what Pneuma he had alongside some of the Ossum he’d drawn out to finish his gauntlet to set the arboreal construct ablaze. A ravenous wave of Bonefire rushed down the bamble-whip’s length, turning it into a brittle, pale-white shell as it went. Even if he wasn’t particularly strong, he was able to rid himself of the whip’s calcified remnants without issue.

Panickedly letting go of his whip so as to not be burned, the Viridimancer briefly fell back, grabbing for a third bottle… Just in time for the charred, walking corpse that was the veteran to finally begin catching up. Somehow the Devil’s Tooth hadn’t hit any important parts, a steady trickle of blood running down the vet’s leg.

Aqua and Terra were both easy; the soil near the stream was full of groundwater, after all, and the air around it was humid. He thought to draw from the environment, but the fact his pursuers could keep up with him made the young man reconsider. If he dedicated effort to drawing essentia from the environment, he would have to stop pulling Pneuma, which would leave him at the mercy of his muscles’ natural exhaustion point. He would gas himself out. So, inefficiency be damned, he just kept using the Shifting Winds breathing method, forming a great glob of slick, greasy mud between his hands that he more or less just lobbed into the veteran’s path. It spilled out underfoot, his prosthetic feet completely losing traction and causing him to briefly run in place before he toppled over, clearly throwing himself sideways so as to not risk harming the insect.

With the Viridimancer a short distance away and just about finished with chugging down another of his Viriditas bottles, Vic took the opportunity to just sprint headlong towards the veteran, kicking his feet out from under him as he tried to stand up. A downward swing with the axe split his skull, a sideways prying motion to wrench it free cracked him open like an overripe watermelon. A tsunami of yellow-tinged brain matter spilled forth, small insects writhing within it. The centipede writhed and wriggled, but it was threaded through the man’s entire brain it seemed, taking up much of where his frontal lobe had once been. Vic blasted the thing with Bonefire, setting ablaze the corpse, too, which without life now had no resistance to the calcifying flame. It was just meat.

He yanked the Devil’s Tooth out of the vet’s rapidly-calcifying flesh, the flames harmlessly licking his fingers. After reabsorbing its constituent Ossum, he used it to finish the devilbone gauntlet… Only for the Viridiancer to catch him off-guard, lashing at him with a newly-formed bramble whip, yanking the axe straight from his hand. Screaming rancor and fury, Victor charged at the would-be kidnapper and set off what he had prepared. Black flame erupted from the back of his elbow and his fist rocketed forward with inhuman force, pulling him with it as it crashed straight into its target’s face and caved it in. What fuel remained kept on burning, pushing the man down and Victor on top of him.

Vic felt the man’s face crumple inward under his fist as he thrashed about in utter panic, his whip flailing about and cutting bark off of trees with Victor’s axe. Teeth and pieces of facial bones erupted through ruptured muscle and eyes burst from their sockets, from which blood and pulverized brain matter then gushed. There were ribbons of yellow amongst the red. Once the flame sputtered out he pulled his fist back and the devilbone gauntlet fell to pieces altogether, crumbling from the front. His elbow and wrist both screamed in pain.

Looking over what he’d just done, the realization sunk in and Victor felt… Relief. Where he expected some sort of dread change to come over him, or at least the sudden upsurge of vomit that was so prevalent in pulp novels when a character killed someone for the first time, there only came relief and a sense of satisfaction.

“I’ve never killed anyone before. Kinda fucked up that I don’t feel bad in the slightest. This should make me want to vomit, right? Why doesn’t it?” he thought. He sighed, and retrieved his axe, washing both it and himself in the nearby stream. It was a small mercy that none of the blood had gotten in his hair. It clicked in his head.

Killing other people was something to be considered, something that demanded a reason. However, regardless of the fact one of them could have very well been a meat-golem being piloted by some sort of Gu parasite, the moment they chose to kidnap him into slavery they had forfeited their lives. They had chosen to become beasts, as far as he was concerned.