Zel pulled the Broken Butcher from its sheath, her countenance shifting from relaxed, to wild-eyed and wreathed in lightning in the span of only three breaths. Her braids came alive with the lightning-wrought beastly heads at their tips, blades as their tongues.

Zef, meanwhile, continued firing into the treeline as if nothing had changed, alternating between eye-beams and gunshots, but her left eye began emitting a long, whipping trail of pale blue and bone-white, her movements flickering. It was as if, every other second, she skipped forward in time by a moment.

The Dragon Knights had already raised the alarm and formed a defensive, front-facing line, some manifesting mutations that transformed their heads to those of dragons while others suddenly sprouted tails with poisoned barbs or spiked maces, but it was all too late.

Zelsys had already leapt high into the air with a crater where she had stood, while Zefaris put on a disdainful sneer, uttering something that Victor could not hear as she raised four coins between her fingers, exhaling a great plume of Fog over them. There was something there, right next to her, revealed by the Fog for a moment before it vanished. A humanoid figure.

She tossed these enchanted coins into the air, suddenly stuttering forward and firing three gunshots near-simultaneously. All three came down like lightning from the heavens, smashing through the helmets of three Dragon Knights. To Vic’s surprise, only one of them fell.

It was then, when Zel finally landed atop one of the cages and smashed it in, that the chaos truly began; not because of the thrashing False Drake whose spine she severed with a single incredibly violent dragging-cut of her blade, but because of the gunfire that would soon erupt from all around.

Vic felt a pair of huge hands grasp his manacles, the presence behind him somewhat familiar. It had to be Jorfr, and it was.

Zel and Zef had agreed; it would only be right to go all-out here, regardless of whether it was too much. Wastage of resources, exhaustion, it didn’t really matter. This was about making a point, about putting down these slavers hard and fast and igniting the flames of aspiration in the rescued slaves who had such potential. So it was that Zefaris had affixed her mask to her face, its skull-faced visage belying the mechanisms of a Fog Infuser; a device that, contrary to its appearance, saturated the air which one breathed through it with whatever essentia was contained in its canister. The only problem was that the device was quite fragile on the inside, with tight tolerances, making it impractical in a melee. Its canisters weren’t much more resilient; the particular canister loaded in it right now was filled with ground-up, high-purity Pneuma crystals, effectively amplifying the output of her breathing technique by an order of magnitude for as long as it held out.

It was this device that allowed Zefaris to bridge the gap and draw out the full potential of her arsenal while still having a comfortable surplus to use otherwise or charge into her left eye.

To call her shotgun, Tempesta, “just a gun” was a grave insult.

To call her revolver, Pentacle, “just a gun” was, in the words of those she most often leveled its barrel at, courting death.

Pentacle had claimed over a thousand lives; it had been elevated beyond mortal craftsmanship by a Dungeon Core’s reality-warping might; the spears of lead and fire which it spewed had smashed apart the body of Ubul, the Beast Reborn in Stone, a being that had once been a Divine General whose death had consequences that reverberated hundreds of kilometers away from the site. With the sparklock rifle that had been rebuilt into Tempesta, Zefaris had killed hundreds, had waged war for years before she had even thought of becoming a cultivator; she had put down cultivators and monsters for her country.

It had only been a matter of time until either gun developed a spirit of its own, but neither was universal, neither embodied how she fought in full, and so in the months following the Blue Moon War, she had not settled for learning how to draw out just one of these weapons’ spirits.

“Now, Pentacle, Tempesta… Let us share our friendship with them, shall we?”

The smoke plume which erupted from her gun’s muzzle took on the form of a cackling, human skull; simultaneously, the great plume of bone-white Fog which she had exhaled gave plainly visible form to two phantoms, figures without form. The left-hand one saluted in a stiff, professional manner, while the one on the right lackadaisically flipped a phantom coin between its fingers.

“Praise gun, our savior…” Zefaris uttered under her breath, the left-hand figure mouthing in perfect sync with her as it stepped into the space behind her. She finished the invocation, the right-hand figure mouthing the second half: “...Hail death, the master!”

They were words from a song she’d often heard in the trenches, sung by soldiers who thought their deaths were nigh.

Out from the space behind her stepped a defined, clear figure, a ghostly humanoid wrought of bone-white Fog. It held the image of a skeletal Ikesian soldier in full lieutenant’s uniform, any distinguishing marks replaced by the sign of a five-petaled flower, the ends of its petals split - that flower was the Giltine Belladonna, a legendarily poisonous blossom cultivated by the Black Horse family long ago, the self-same flower which was inlaid into the stock of her shotgun. A baleful, icy blue glow issued from the phantom’s mouth and eye sockets.

PRAISE GUN, OUR SAVIOR

HAIL DEATH, THE MASTER

GUNSOUL UNION: DEATH’S LIEUTENANT

Zefaris fired again. Emitting a voiceless cackle, Death’s Lieutenant mirrored the motion with a slight delay, a ghostly missile erupting from the sparklock in its hand. Both bullets struck true; both ran a Dragon Knight through, one leaving scorched flesh, the other a trail of frozen meat. Death’s Lieutenant was as simple a weapon spirit as it was terrifying: it did nothing more than play Zef’s double, mirroring anything she did if she willed it so.

Focused on keeping up ranged support, Zefaris dedicated the vast majority of her breathing to a technique she’d first grasped in the battle against Ubul, when she had witnessed what she fully believed to be Zel’s death, and thus fully grasped a deeper understanding of what it meant to walk side by side with the reaper without ever meeting him. By burning significant amounts of Pneuma and Gelum, Zefaris was able to tap into the stillness of death and “compress” her own flow of time, thus gaining the appearance of flickering ahead by a moment.

So she went on, gladly providing fire support from outside the crucible of battle while she waited for all the pieces to move into position. Zel had entered into an unarmed brawl with three Dragon Knights simultaneously, cackling through a grin of razor teeth as she fought a knight using nothing but her own animated braids, one strangling him while another had burrowed up his sword-hand’s forearm and the third had gotten inside his chestplate. With each passing second, he was being turned to mush from the inside, made to twitch in place like a grotesque marionette while he died. Meanwhile, Zelsys played with the other two more than she fought them in earnest, as she too was waiting; due to continuously using her Core of Earthly Iron to dredge up Metallum with which she empowered her defensive techniques to render the knights’ attacks completely impotent, she had already manifested a pair of metal antlers, one iron and one brass. The ghostly top half of a beast’s skull sat atop her head between these antlers, and it too was slowly taking physical shape.

Zef felt her Tablet buzz, and saw that Jorfr had finally managed to shatter Vic’s manacles. She smiled under her mask and set loose what she had prepared. A spark of will was all it took.

For a moment, those making up the convoy felt utter panic; they thought they had been tricked into an ambush, that an entire enemy force had somehow been led through the bewitched forest and had surrounded them with the boars acting as a distraction. What else could explain dozens of bullets and shotgun slugs erupting from the woods to either side of the convoy all in rapid succession? Dozens of ghostly soldiers appeared in the treeline, each born from the arcane waste-product of its corresponding glyph, their forms blowing away in the wind moments later.

Such panic was then put to rest, for nine-tenths of the convoy now laid dead, for each bullet had been unerringly aimed at its target. In eras past, great archers had made use of such stratagems using arrows and sling bullets, many of their arts lost in the dark age of cultivation and martial arts that the Divine Emperor’s genocide five centuries prior had brought about.

Yet, these ancient stratagems had come to be for a reason, and now they were reborn in a form befitting this new era.

BELLADONNA SIGN

ILLUSORY TRIBUTE TO IKESIA’S FALLEN

HEADPIERCER ARTS: GHOST BATTALION

This technique nearly lived up to its name by creating the illusion of many soldiers firing on the victims from all directions at once, albeit not to the degree of an actual battalion. Zefaris achieved this by carving over a dozen kinetic mirror glyphs around the area layered over with what she had come to call kinetic snare glyphs, which captured her projectiles and stopped them mid-air until she chose to release them, or the glyphs ran out. This, combined with Flickering and Death’s Lieutenant, allowed her to achieve a truly staggering volume of fire… A volume of fire sufficient to, in a single volley, mow down dozens of Red Locusts and a good number of Dragon Knights, while remaining precise enough to not strike any of her allies.

This was what she had, at the suggestion of an old man in white, named the Walking Way of the Eternal Soldier.

Burgghusen had just been shot, a slug having been aimed at his heart and sent off-course by his armor into his liver. Were he not who he was, it would’ve at least disabled him, but this was a minor injury. Already, his draconic heart was pushing the bullet out and sealing the wound shut.

Though he was sociopath, he wasn’t an idiot or a coward; so, after giving Victor a warning glare, he too drew his blade and went to meet his fate. Unlike Von Wickten’s flashy, yet pointless blade, Burgghusen’s sword had a plainer design, with a power cell the size of a fist for a pommel, and a cable that snaked from it to the base of its damascened blade. It came alive when he swung it at Zelsys, the blade’s edge alighting to a bright-yellow glow that trailed wavy, heated air.

It was this moment when she gave up all pretense of equality and caught his sword between the Broken Butcher’s prongs. She willed her body to remove every restriction that was still in place, the intoxicating high of an artificial fight-or-flight reaction flooding her system as she twisted her weapon just enough to lock up her opponent without tearing the sword out of his grasp.

“Shame,” she uttered. “I’d given you the courtesy of holding back in the pit, but you just had to go and confirm all of my suspicions, slaver. Tell me, before I turn you into a pretzel: How many among your subordinates are “just following orders” like you? Will I have to set fire to all of Arches to rid it of your filth, will I have to call upon the Charred Judge to carry out her grisly work upon your duke?”

For a few seconds he stared up into her eyes, weighing the consequences of his death against revealing his own past and possibly surviving. There were few things that could elicit something approaching a real, human emotion inside him, but among those was this woman’s arrogance combined with his recently-obtained knowledge of who she was. Burgghusen hadn’t known the Newman Sect by name, but he had known that the Willowdale Branch of the Black Horse Family had been succeeded by a new sect that disregarded tradition in favor of what its pragmatic founder considered “practical cultivation”. Only recently had he learned that the woman who stood before him was that disrespectful cur.

“I…” he began, only to suddenly twist his sword free whilst delivering such a sudden and forceful kick that it sent Zelsys sliding backwards. The Dragon Knight drew in a deep breath, his stance suddenly shifting from typical low guard to a high stance taught solely to disciples of the Black Horse Family’s Founding Branch. “...I have no obligations of nicety towards a Southern Tarpan. The existence of your heretical sect is an insult to the very idea of cultivation, and I will not be admonished by one such as you. I, too, gave you the courtesy of holding back, knowing the consequences of revealing myself as a Black Horse; a mistake I will not make again, Tarpan.”

He began Fog-breathing and set upon Zelsys with all his might, maneuvering to place her between himself and that accursed gunwoman. Even the other survivors’ gunfire hadn’t done anything to that blonde, as she seemed to just flicker out of the way, as if she could predict when a bullet would strike her.

The knight set upon her with the measured fury of a real martial artist, one who had seen through the pointless mysticism and grasped the true nature of an ancient art. Burgghusen’s handling of his superheated blade was downright impeccable, the unrelenting assault emblematic of the Black Horse combat style littered with feints, kicks, and the spewing of flame as a diversion. Nevertheless, he didn’t live up to Ubul, to the Krishorn Matriarch, or even Red in her parasite-armored form. Were Jorfr not busy smashing the life out of an errant beetle-boar, she would’ve just let him take over so she could focus fully on that spear-wielding locust that was so anxiously waiting for an opportunity to strike her down.

Zel had to give Burgghusen one thing: He had surprised her. The way he had fought in the pit had made her think he’d had formal martial arts training, but not that he was a former member of one of Ikesia’s two most prevalent sects. And that epithet… Southern Tarpan. It was an insult invented by the Founding Branch to distance themselves from the Willowdale Branch, effectively branding them as barbarians. That the grudge ran so deep as to carry over onto an unrelated sect that merely repurposed the old sect grounds only made her wonder just how deep the feud had been. His breathing technique was basic but well-polished, focused on a steady intake and output cycle that granted an evenly-spaced rhythm of waxing and waning strength while being easy to maintain. It went counter to Spring Breathing, the technique which Engine Breathing was rooted in, which focused on more hands-on control of one’s respiration to achieve bursts of high output timed such that they were most effective.

After baiting Burgghusen into a powerful swing, Zel once again captured his blade between the Broken Butcher’s prongs, this time stepping around him and getting him into a standing grapple from behind, restraining his arms with her own while using her braids to further restrict him, using one to choke him.

“Impressive though your skill is, I couldn’t care less for the grudges of a Black Horse reject that turned to a False Path,” she smugged into his ear as he thrashed against her grip. He even briefly caught her off-guard and managed to move his hand enough to scratch her, numbness spreading out from the site. For a moment, her leg grew weak and stiff, before her body subsumed the venom. A venom of this type, no matter how potent, would never work on her again.

She’d intended to go all-out here, but… It would’ve been a waste, she felt. It was a more meaningful victory in her eyes, to defuse Burgghusen’s skill with her own rather than overpowering him by sheer superiority of attributes. She could just end it here and now, break Burgghusen’s neck, maybe have one of her braids burrow into that calcified weak point on the side of it, wherever it had come from, but she had noticed something - or rather, someone. It was Victor, murder in his eyes, and… A weird, oversized bullet made from bone, floating within his palm, bladed fins running down its length. For some reason the fly of his shorts was undone.

An exchange of glances was all it took to make her understand his intentions, and she couldn’t have been happier to play along, even as she felt the spear-wielding locust approaching from behind. She turned such that the weak point in Burgghusen’s neck was plain for Victor to see, simultaneously beginning to build up a Fulgur charge in her armor sleeve and shifting her iron grip on his left arm so she could grasp her arm-cannon’s trigger lever. Just as the young man leveled his curious projectile at the struggling knight, the spear-wielding locust tried to lunge at her, only for a green-tinged bullet from Zefaris to smash into him, briars rapidly growing from the wound and enveloping him, immobilizing his spear-arm. A simple, quick manifestation of Viridimancy that withered in seconds after its growth, but it bought enough time. The Devil’s Tooth rocketed forward through the air, twin tails of flame trailing behind it before it struck the weak point which he’d burned into Burgghusen’s neck, drilling into his flesh, blood and viscera spraying out through the grooves between its fins. Only when Zel felt it strike, when she felt the knight shudder in her grasp and emit a gurgling, wheezing cry, only then did she spin around and throw him right into the spear-locust’s path, the Dragon Knight’s far greater mass barreling the bugman over.

The moment her hands were free she raised her gun, releasing every bit of built-up Fulgur as she pulled the trigger. The shell loaded in the gun was a high-penetration Type-1a, overkill for this purpose even on its own.

“Thundercannon!” she invoked aloud, despite not needing to. This technique hadn’t gotten a proper use in months. An eruption of lightning-wreathed cold-iron split both men down the middle, the blast shredding Burgghusen’s armor along with the lower two-thirds of the spear’s shaft, leaving the afterimage of a roaring beast’s head in the wake of its impact and the projectile itself continued on into the treeline, only brought to a halt after felling several trees.

The tremendous recoil, even reduced and distributed evenly by her sleeve, pushed Zelsys several meters backwards, right up against Jorfr’s ice-cold back. The norseman’s ice-wreathed fists were now busy pounding the life out of two not exactly imposing Dragon Knights simultaneously, the broken corpses of several locust survivors at his feet and the other captives having gathered by his side.

“Got a handle on things back here?” she asked, working her arm-cannon’s bolt handle. Knowing that the port on its side would vent a great cloud of electrically-charged Fog, she turned her arm such that neither Jorfr nor the captives would be caught in the cloud, catching the ejected shell with one of her braids.

“More or less,” the norseman chuckled under his breath, kicking one of the Dragon Knights away before he ripped the chestplate off the other and broke the man’s back over his knee. “Some of these chumps could get beaten by an angry dockworker, don’t even have a proper warrior’s instinct; just sycophants drunk on strength that isn’t theirs. Pathetic.”

Zel loaded a new shell, a standard Type-1 this time, remarking: “Always the same story with these types.”

Before she could move ahead to sweep the areas outside Zef’s field of view for stragglers, Vic rushed right past Zelsys in the wake of her technique, pulling the hand-axe from his belt as he did so. A wounded locust-man survivor that had hidden under a dead boar attempted to lunge at him, grasping for his leg, only for the redhead to stomp on the mutant’s arm as he raised his axe. An exhalation of Fog escaped his mouth and black flame enveloped the weapon as he brought it down between the red locust’s antennae. One swing, two, three before the locust’s yellowed brain matter sprayed the soil. He left the axe there, still burning for a few moments, as he scanned the ground and leapt for what he had been looking for: The spear. Rather, what was left of it; as it was, the thing was more of a shortsword with a long handle.

With only a few survivors left over Zefaris had stopped shooting, removed her mask, and dispelled Death’s Lieutenant. She was now just sitting on the Sturmgandr, aiming Tempesta at the remaining False Drake, her left eye carving the third glyph circle in a row into the air in front of its muzzle. It was plain that she intended to kill the second drake in one shot, and neither of her comrades meant to stop her; Zel trusted Jorfr to protect the remaining captives while she followed in Victor’s wake, her gut telling her that there were survivors somewhere at the other side of the tractor. Unsurprisingly, her gut instinct was right, as a knight sprung up from beneath the vehicle and got a hold of Victor, wisely maneuvering to place the boy in Zef’s line of fire. Letting out a sigh, Zel leapt up onto and over the vehicle, landing right behind the knight and grabbing him by his arms before he could do anything… Though, with his sword still in its scabbard, there wasn’t much he could do. He spat a litany of curses, threats and insults, impotent puffs of greenish flame issuing from his helmet’s breathing-holes. The knight stank of piss and alcohol, pounded into a rancid underlayer by overpowering perfume.

His attempts at resistance felt just about average by comparison to the other Dragon Knights she’d fought. Zel decided to let Victor do the deed, for she could see the killing spark in his eyes as he got his bearings again. Throwing the knight to the ground and stepping aside, Zel looked to the redhead and gestured with her head towards the knight.

“All yours,” she said.

The redhead hesitated for only a split-second before he turned his attention fully to the knight, not wasting a moment before he drew in a breath, burned it, then drew in another. For a few moments he fought with the Dragon Knight in earnest, parrying several of his blows and dodging others, but it quickly became evident that the knight held an unquestionable advantage in raw strength and experience. Vic leapt backwards to try creating distance, but the knight chased after him, not letting up. So they went back and forth, the young man remaining on the defensive as he looked for an opening to sway the balance in his own favor.

As if out of nowhere, a gigantic spear of translucent ice flew overhead, running the second drake through head to rear. The beast grew still, not as if frozen, but as if stopped in time. It was Zef’s “Fragment of Lost Hyperborea” technique, and Victor, having read about it and recognized the signs of it being cast beforehand, snapped out of his stunned silence far quicker than the knight did. In this brief moment he used what Pneuma he’d gathered and transformed it into a concentrated blast of air, toppling the knight over. He got right back up and charged Victor head-first, but the mage had already prepared yet another trick, having spent the time when his opponent was down to dredge up Terra from the leylines.

A spray of greasy mud erupted from his palm right into the knight’s path, who swerved to dodge… Only, Victor had already slid to that place using the last bit of his own grease spell, scrambling back to his feet and thrusting the spear right into the back of the knight’s knee. With a sharp motion, he cut the tendons and ripped the spear out, kicking the other leg out from under the man before he could get into a good position to fight while kneeling. Vic stomped on his hand when he tried to go for his dagger, impaling his sword-hand to the ground while he himself unsheathed the shorter blade and slipped it behind his belt.

“What a disgrace to your armor you are,” the young man laughed disdainfully.