“Just following orders,” the Dragon Knight parroted emotionlessly, taking one of the rib-racks off of the fire, sticking it in a tarnished military mess tin, and tossing it over to Victor such that it landed right next to him. Vic glanced at the meat, then up at the knight, allowing his distrust to bleed through.

“It’s not poisoned, doesn’t need to be. Any foodborne paralytic I could use is worthless compared to my own venom. Look, see?” Burgghusen pleaded, walking over, taking the rib rack, breaking it in half, and biting off a huge chunk of meat which he swallowed without even chewing. Vic finally noticed the telltale stench of organ meat wafting from the knight.

He was obviously trying to be nice on false pretenses, but… Why? To come across as anything other than the subhuman slaver that he was and reduce the risk of a captive trying to break free? Perhaps to placate his own guilty conscience? Didn’t matter. Vic took the food, pulling out the bone and putting the meat aside. At the Dragon Knight’s raised eyebrow, he lied: “What? I have to eat bones. I’d crumple like a fucking crouton if I didn’t. But, er… This is too big. Can you break it up?”

After staring him down for a few seconds, Burgghusen just nodded and took the whole mess tin, breaking up the bones in his hands into smaller fragments and allowing them to mix in with the meat. Since he couldn’t exactly carve breakdown glyphs into these still quite large fragments and absorb them that way, Vic had no choice but to actually swallow the bone fragment by fragment, chewing up some meat before putting a fragment in his mouth to help it go down without getting stuck.

As he struggled his way through the meal, Victor pondered why Burgghusen hadn’t taken his Black Marble Tablet. While aetherwave comms were a new and not widely-known feature, there was no way he wasn’t aware of the device’s ability to store and thus conceal weapons. It was one of the, if not the oldest feature of such objects, with even ancient examples from pre-Ankhezian ruins possessing Fog Storage functionality. The Dragon Knight must’ve been terribly confident in the effects of his own venom… And rightly so, much as Vic loathed to admit it.

The whole scene felt more creepy than serious. Burgghusen just kept staring at him with those dead, emotionless eyes, which made the knight’s apparent normalcy all the more impressive in retrospect. Vic couldn’t help glancing up at him as he cautiously chewed a mouthful, as to not cut his own gums or break any teeth by biting down hard on a bone fragment. He could see the gears turning behind Burgghusen’s eyes, the emotionless, sociopathic automaton in his skull cautiously laying out a course of action.

Pick a stick out of the fire, stoke the embers, look aside for a moment, cough awkwardly, then a look back at Victor.

It was bizarre. Burgghusen almost came across like he was actually trying to be compassionate, but only almost. He even nearly came across like a real person in public, and in this very moment, he’d nearly fooled Victor as well. If it weren’t for the constant, unceasing demand from within to put that human trafficker down where he stood, he may have very well fallen for the deception. Vic knew that he didn’t have the means to kill Burgghusen, of course. Not now, not here, not in the state he was in… But that was all he could think about. Time slowed around him, as if in a continuous state of fight-or-flight, his every mental resource dedicated to devising some method to kill or at least cripple the Second Strongest Man in Arches…

…And the plan relied on what he’d done to Burgghusen previously. The scales on the side of the Dragon Knight’s neck had fallen away, the flesh beneath them calcified and crumbling with even slight movements, exposing bare meat underneath, pulsing with the Dragon Knight’s mighty heartbeat. Just puncturing the artery wouldn’t suffice; if Vic wanted to take the man down and survive doing the deed, he would have to also sever the spinal column. With how tough Dragon Knights were, that meant he would have to slip a blade between the vertebrae.

A knife in the side of the neck and a sharp tilt of the blade would likely do the trick, severing the trachea and arteries as well as the spinal cord, thus crippling the Dragon Knight regardless of how strong he was… It was only a question of where to get a knife and how to get it done.

“You’ll probably be fine, just…” the knight began talking. It was almost natural, but Vic could discern a pre-prepared speech, one that had been repeated before in one form or another. How many times had this scum-sack used this to lull his victims into a false sense of things not being as bad as they seem? “Think of this as a ransom situation. You’re a noble, they ought to have taught you how to behave as a prisoner getting ransomed. That Newman woman doubtlessly has enough money to outbid Lord Adalbert for your bill of ownership… However, you’ll still have to get bugged.”

“Bugged?” Victor questioned. His mind went back to the novels, their descriptions of bright-red insects on the backs of people’s necks that turned them into blubbering mind slaves, as well as the purple variant he’d seen in Zel’s mnemonic record.

“Hey, chin up, it’s not so bad. I had a Compliance Gu for a little, after I refused to follow Lord Adalbert’s orders once. Only lost a couple months’ memories.”

“...A little while?”

“A couple hours or so. As I said, you don’t have much to worry about; there will be at most two, maybe three hours between you getting your Compliance Gu and the auction, after which point your new owner can choose to just have the bug kill itself… Though you’ll feel that as if it was your own death, unfortunately.”

Von Burgghusen stood up again, dumping a bucketful of dirt onto the fire to put it out and continuing: “Right…”

He jabbed Vic in the side of the neck again, in the same exact spot. This time it took him two attempts to actually get through, a bone plate having already grown over the spot due to the large amounts of Ossum Vic had recently consumed and his own desire to obstruct the slaver-knight’s efforts. Was he just acting out some strange retribution for what Victor had done to him in self-defense?

The last of the numbness and weakness finally began to fade, and just as it did, Burgghusen pulled out a pair of manacles, shackling Vic’s hands behind his back before he could react.

“You’ll have to walk the rest of the way to make sure the venom dissipates properly. It’s a good two hours’ trek, so you’ll have plenty of time to get the stiffness out,” he continued, pulling him up to his feet. “Don’t try anything funny.”

Letting out a sigh, Victor began walking in the direction he was ordered to, not an iota faster than the bare minimum speed that made his captor stop glowering at him in a vaguely threatening manner.

His head began to ache. The Tablet was drawing from him to charge for another broadcast pulse.

“Look, regardless of what I do, I have no way out of this predicament. That means using Fog-breathing to make the march easier for myself shouldn’t be an issue, yes?” Victor asked as innocently as he could. The slaver-knight, confident in his own abilities, didn’t even think to doubt the motive behind the question, giving an affirmative nod and grumble.

So it was that Victor went into a steady pace of Fog-breathing, drawing Pneuma from the air. Though the manacles were tight around his wrists, they were built for an adult man, likely being the self-same manacles used on regular criminals. With pain, effort, and magical grease, he was certain he could slip his hands free. Now he just had to build the rest of his course of action before doing anything.

A Devilbone blade grown from his own nails, imbued with Bonefire. Yes, that would do… No, it wouldn’t. What was he thinking? Entering into a contest of physicality with Burgghusen would be playing into his cards, it would be a roll of the dice that Victor could only win if he rolled sixes and Burgghusen rolled snake-eyes.

No, he had to think outside the box. What if he didn’t need to slip free of his manacles at all?

What if he used a Devil’s Tooth, grown from the nascent bone plates on his back?

No, Burgghusen walked behind him and would thus notice the bulge…

The bulge…

The pieces clicked into place.

Just as his mutation replaced facial hair with bone, it did the same to all other body hair; combined with the spacial enchantment of his new garments would allow him to create a Devil’s Tooth in a place where it wouldn’t be detected, paying only the cost of discomfort from having a bone rocket down his pants. With this long a trek, he figured he’d be able to pack it full of propellant and ensure it was both tough and sharp enough to bite through Burgghusen’s flesh.

He already saw it playing out in his mind’s eye: He would ask to relieve himself, using kineticism to align the Devil’s Tooth, and then launch it into Burgghusen’s neck with as much raw power as he could generate through his crude grasp of the kinetic arts, the projectile’s actual propellant serving to ensure it drills its way through the bastard’s neck.

With this plan in mind he began his opus, somewhat regretting his choice by the time he finished the main body of the construct, given that he could feel it chafing his leg as he walked, and not just his leg. At least it really couldn’t be seen as anything more than a curious outline that didn’t exactly bring to mind the image of a bone missile… At least not in the true sense of what it was. He breathed and worked to fill out the tooth’s hollow with propellant as densely as possible before he would, before its use, finally alter the shape to give its fins their sharp edges, but that time didn’t come: They rendezvoused with a group of bugmen and other Dragon Knights, at what Vic estimated to be the halfway point by the passage of time. There were two other captives just like him, also being chaperoned by Dragon Knights, who also happened to be good-looking men; one was a recent graduate of the Duma School who had joined the local Slayers’ Guild, and the other was some rando that he didn’t recognize.

The Dragon Knights were more or less homogenous, each clad in well-made plate armor with small draconic flourishes, but nothing so kitschy as what the knight-captain insisted on wearing. Vic wagered a good number of them weren’t even subhuman psychopaths, just cowards too afraid to put themselves at risk by going against their corrupt commanding officers. Conversely, the locust-men, numerous as they were, differed greatly one from the other, being entirely unlike the homogenous brown horde described in the pulps. Every single locust-man had a unique, complex pattern of plates, a subtly different silhouette, different antennae and facial features, they fit the descriptions of the Red Mantis more than locusts; they were clearly actual individuals, which only made Victor hate them and desire their deaths all the more. The fact they were individuals with agency places the onus on them, rather than their leaders, be that a Locust Queen, Von Wickten, or some other, unknown slaver.

They were using a farm tractor to tow a cargo wagon, loaded with various crates and boxes alongside cages that held two False Drakes, one green and one blue, both in much better physical states than the one Zelsys had killed back in the forest. A significant portion of the space on the wagon was taken up by something nearly as tall as those two cages, draped over with a tarp. Metal glimmered underneath whenever the wind blew.

As he walked, and as Burgghusen’s dead-eyed, apathetic glower was by far preferable to the lecherous eyes of these others, but something inside Victor enjoyed the attention; it was a part of him that didn’t demand violence the way the animal self did, but rather reveled in the idea of inflicting harm upon those who had wronged him in the same way one reveled in the idea of a succulent meal. He didn’t care to question whether this was a healthy mental outlook, and just took what he could get to keep himself more or less calm and focused in this grave circumstance.

“What now, what now?”

Zelsys had decided to subvert the laid-out path in order to ambush Vic’s captors, instead going through the forest itself. As the trio rode through the woods, it quickly became apparent that the forest’s entirety was somehow bewitched. Zel’s instincts constantly gnawed at her, insisting that something was wrong here, her sense of direction occasionally going haywire, while Zefaris had no such issues. Where Zel’s resistance to illusions was derived from instincts, Zef saw through them wholesale by the nature of her eyes, and thus, the two switched places atop the Sturmgandr.

Delving deeper into the forest, they were soon set upon by a pack of huge, terrible Beetle-boars, creatures born from the attempts of Pateirian mutagenicists to commandeer native wildlife as bioweapons. Free of their handlers, these beasts became super predators wherever they were found. Their hides were too thick and their stomachs too acidic for parasites to take root in their bodies on their own; instead, their tusks had mutated into articulated, snapping pincers that could go through a tree, and their hides were wrapped in Armor Centipedes. Their matron was the size of a farm tractor, while the smaller ones were easily as large as a brown bear each.

A plan came together in Zel’s head, a part of which she voiced to her companions, yelling over the sound of engines, thumping of hooves, and general furious boar noises: “Let’s stop somewhere around here! I’ll disable the big one and hitch it to the back of my bike, you keep the smaller ones occupied, but don’t kill them! Freeze them if you can!”

Just as she had laid out, the plan was put into motion; Zel stood up on the motorbike while it was still in motion and leapt onto the matron’s back, and soon the Sturmgandrs were brought to a halt. Awakening the Broken Butcher’s sawteeth with an influx of Fulgur, she began sawing into the matron’s back to sever its spine and cripple it without killing the beast, while Zefaris and Jorfr disembarked and pooled their icebound magicks to immobilize the rest of the pack.

Jorfr, using his connection to the earthen spirits of ice, chanted an inefficient, but quick invocation: “Hoarfrost, halt my prey!”

With a stomp of the norseman’s foot, a wave of frost surged forward and momentarily froze the smaller beetle-boars’ feet in place, giving Zefaris the time she needed. Having jumped up into a tree she charged her left eye with a full breath’s Pneuma, and from it issued a flashing beam of white. In a few brief flashes it carved a complex glyph into the ground which the boars stood on, a glyph invoking the stillness of a long-abandoned graveyard or crypt, the serenity of an overgrown skeleton leaned up against a tree deep in the forest.

The glyph took on a combined glow in bone-white and pale blue, and a moment later snow erupted upward within its perimeter, freezing mid-air before it could begin to fall… Alongside the boars.

THE STILLNESS OF DEATH UNTO ALL THINGS

HEADPIERCER ARTS: ETERNAL SNOW

It only lasted a few seconds, but it gave Zelsys the time needed to hitch the matron to the back of her Sturmgandr and for the trio to ride off, the smaller boars now in pursuit as their pack-leader squealed impotently and snapped its pincers while being dragged.

“Really? You stopped time for some boars, but not a False Drake?!” Zel laughed, much to her lover’s chagrin.

“It would have been a waste, I would have only delayed the inevitable!” the blonde snapped back. “Mutant animals are much easier to stop than a magic beast, besides!”

Sooner, rather than later, Zefaris spotted a small convoy through the small gaps in the trees, and through making full use of her supreme visual faculties, she spotted a familiar redhead among them. An exchange of glances was all it took for the three to agree on a course of action, for they had done things like this several times before in the course of their northward journey.

The Tablet had sent out two more broadcast pulses by now. Victor had resorted to burning some of his Pneuma to fuel it, rather than suffer the migraine.

His eyes landed on a particular locust, a particularly large and individualistic one, wearing the lower half of a Grekurian-style suit of plate, a sleeve of bronze, segmented armor in a vaguely southern style, and a chestguard that covered his heart with a thick steel plate, and nothing more. And why would he need to wear any more, when every exposed part of his body was thickly layered in bright-red chitin? Where the split lower jaws of other locust-men chattered, his clacked and smacked together, so thick they were. It wasn’t the armor that caught Vic’s eye, though; it was the weapon in his right hand. The bugman grasped a shaft of blood-red wood with silver veins spidering throughout it, and at its top was fixed none other than the tip of Duma’s Spear. He knew what it was: Bloodwood, one of the most magically conductive materials that could be bought with money. All too expensive to arm some locust with it, thus making it clear that either this locust was very important, or that he was carrying the weapon for someone else. It became obvious someone very wealthy was behind the theft… Von Wickten? No, his view of polearms as footsoldier weapons was well known as the reason for the Dragon Knights' exclusive use of swords and axes. The locust? The Locust Queen? Vic had no way to know, and at this moment, something else tugged at his attention.

At first, it was the feeling of being glared at from behind, from far, far behind, by a focused, calm eye. Next came the howl of a motorized vehicle. He’d never heard it before, but he made the connection by how it had been described in the pulps: A Sturmgandr. Another noise accompanied it, something terribly heavy being dragged along and smashing into trees. The sound passed the convoy and pulled ahead, as if someone were driving at breakneck speed through the dense forest around them, with only the setting sun to light the way.

Everything came to a halt when the motor noise ceased, and a mutilated boar the size of a tractor flew out of the treeline and into the middle of the dirt road.

A few moments passed. Victor’s heart raced ahead of its own accord, anticipating a slaughter, knowing of only a handful of people who owned Sturmgandrs, and knowing that Von Wickten was not among them.

Two women rode out into the open in the dead boar’s stead atop a two-wheeled monster belching flame and lightning from its exhaust; one was a musclebound bronze titan, the other a blonde Ikesian in a militaristic red-black dress and an officer’s cap. The former grasped the boar’s leg, and hammer-threw it right across the road into the other side of the treeline. A third figure emerged behind the convoy riding a slightly smaller, albeit still monstrous motorbike; he was a snow-skinned, topless Borean who quietly hailed one of the rear guards, uttering something about a red sun and bloody peaks that somehow made them just let him join without quarrel. Meanwhile, at the front, the spear-wielding locust-man barked with a thick Pateirian accent: “THE RED SUN!?”

Without missing a beat, Zelsys shouted back: “RISES OVER BLOODSTAINED PEAKS!”

The sense of readiness for combat evaporated from the convoy, hands leaving the pommels of swords and grips of guns, and a few lungfuls of Fog were exhaled unused. Zel and Zef approached the convoy as if to join without further incident, though as they did, they made it crystal-clear that they had noticed Victor, before stopping some twenty meters short, with Zefaris standing up atop the motorbike, sweeping her gaze from one side of the road to the other. They intended to do something, he could feel it.

The leading locust saw that they’d stopped, turning to look at her as he barked again: “WHAT IS IT?!”

“BOARS! I SHALL SHOOT DOWN AS MANY AS I CAN, BUT THERE ARE MORE OF THEM THAN I HAVE BULLETS!” she yelled back, opening her pitch-black left eye, and as if to corroborate her claim, beetle-boars did indeed emerge from the treeline, setting upon the convoy. A bright beam in pale-blue and bone-white erupted from her eye, freezing one of the boars in its tracks, soon followed by her raising a giant revolver and firing a shot in the same direction. The terrible power of her gun, whose shots were more akin to flaming lances of lead and smoke than mere bullets, shattered the beast into chunks of frozen meat.

“Great, they probably… Damn things right to us... What happens when you let a cultivator’s wealth speak louder than your good judgment…” Vic heard one of the nearby Locust-men grumbling to the normal Ikesian next to him, only catching pieces of his complaints through the thick accent. Wearing a beaten-up chestplate and possessing a lanky, stiff, mechanical prosthetic for a left arm, the Ikesian looked to be a veteran just like one of the two men who’d tried to kidnap him. He nodded in agreement, leaning on the boarkiller spear in his hand, the veteran nodded agreement: “One would think that obtaining and controlling a Philosopher’s Eye would be hard enough to filter out fools such as these, but who knows anymore.”

Kinship among Ikesians and Pateirians, both former soldiers at that; who would’ve thought. It would’ve been nice to see, were they not both slaver scum, no more than dead meat walking. And like the dead meat that they were, they sprung into action alongside the other locusts and humans that made up most of the convoy, setting their spears, blades, and guns to the grim task of dispatching these huge, murderous beasts that made normal boars seem non-threatening by comparison. A man was split in two at the waist in the first clash. Vic couldn’t help noticing the number of rolling-block pistols among these slavers; they must’ve stolen a shipment of these new guns or somesuch. The spear-wielding locust glared straight through the two women, nervously clacking his mandibles as he spun Duma’s Spear in his hands as he joined his men. Meanwhile, the Dragon Knights deigned not to involve themselves, reluctantly drawing their blades but remaining behind the line of bodies.

Great gusts of Fog erupted from Zef’s mouth as she breathed, firing pairs of short beams and bullets as she went, continuously switching between her revolver, Pentacle, and her strange, slide-action folding shotgun, whose name Victor knew to be Tempesta. Vic knew the cycle like the back of his hand; the blackstone cylinder was a dungeon artifact that reloaded her revolver in a flash, and did the same with speedloading tubes for her shotgun.

Only the most attentive in the convoy were quick enough to notice that she had not shot a single boar since her initial demonstration, and that both her beams and gunshots actually aimed at trees all around the sides of the road. Alas, they were not quick enough to alert the remainder of their comrades; but Victor knew what she’d just done and what was to come, and he stayed where he was, trusting in the gunwoman’s precision… But something felt wrong.

Why was he this calm? In the midst of a battle, surrounded by death, anticipating the slaughter of his captors; it was wrong to be so phlegmatic in a circumstance like this. He knew it to be so in his heart. It angered him that he’d slid back into total apathy to cope with his circumstances, and with this spark, Victor felt the serenity of detachment wash away again, nearly doing something stupid before he realized that he was, indeed, still manacled.

Calming himself, he turned his attention forward once again and noticed Zelsys glancing backward at Zefaris, the two exchanging nods. Both women disembarked their motorbike, approaching the convoy side by side.