Unfortunately, even an average Dragon Knight wasn’t the type to be put down by two relatively minor injuries, a wide plume of flame blasting out of his helmet, the blast swinging his visor open and forcing Victor to back away. It was obviously not meant to strike but to give the knight some space, though Zel left that remark for later.

“Rrrrgh… Dragon Arts: Tail!” the knight invoked. A long, muscular, but quite thin tail erupted from the end of his spine, emerging from the space between his chestplate and trousers, emerging shrouded in blood and a thin membrane of placenta-like flesh. He struggled to his feet, wrapping the tail around his injured leg to prop it up. Instead of trying to go after Victor, he pulled a pistol from a holster hidden under his armor’s faulds, glancing briefly at Zel as he raised it and aimed. It was a threat betting on her superior reactions, a threat that she chose to walk right into rather than risk the alternative outcome: She dashed into the bullet’s path before it was fired, feeling her would-be protegé trip over a corpse as he backed away in an effort to not be barreled over.

She burned what Metallum was still in her system, hardening the skin of her torso in anticipation and inadvertently completing the beastly skull atop her head with the waste-product. The bullet slammed against her sternum and ricocheted, but the knight had already managed to get behind the tractor such that Zefaris couldn’t aim at him from her position. Zef swiftly carved a kinetic mirror glyph into a tree using her left eye and attempted to shoot the knight down that way instead, but Dragon Knight that he was, he survived despite the bullet having ripped through the back of his chestplate. The sound of a metal hatch opening and closing could be heard, soon followed by the whirr of multiple essentia converters and the familiar, clunky click-clacking of a particular mechanism, one which she recognized.

Victor felt as if he was slipping out of reality for a moment, his awareness of his surroundings lapsing for just a few brief seconds as he tripped over a pile of corpses and tried to regain his bearings. When next he opened his eyes, she was there, holding out an armored hand in an offer of aid, grasping the Broken Butcher with her right, grinning wide. That murderous, beastlike glow filled her eyes, but it now only inspired reassurance, and nothing more.

Three of her braids writhed about by her side as they billowed in the wind, animated by lightning-wrought beast heads at their tips.

“...That’s a Third-model,” Zel uttered right after she pulled Vic back up to his feet. “Where the fuck did they get a Third-model?!”

The ground shuddered as a pair of ironclad, tracked feet stepped off of the trailer, the machine whining and hissing as it scooted across the ground and around the trailer, slowing to a walk only when its tracks got jammed with the armor of a dead knight.

Jorfr had followed in its stead, observing from the side and rear. It was a machine of humanoid shape, enveloped in roughly-hammered iron armor clearly intended to resemble a knight, power cables haphazardly snaking around its exterior and hanging from a boxy power unit on its back, within which a cluster of brightly-glowing fuel gems glowed. It had three fingers on each hand, a head with one cycloptic eye mounted on a horizontal 180° track, and tank tracks on its feet, echoing the design of the First-model Ultracompact One-man Tank, though its shape was too humanoid. Jorfr swore under his breath at the realization that he’d left his Tablet, and thus his hammer, with his motorbike. The norseman remained behind the suit, to cut off its vector of retreat. He wasn’t well-versed enough in the design of such machines to discern its origins or relation to other machines of its kind, and it wasn’t aided by how much stuff had been bolted onto the underlying frame willy-nilly. There were several articulated arms on the back, but they were empty and just stiffly twitched in place.

However, at a glance, Zelsys felt an uncanny familiarity. It moved clumsily, it didn’t quite look like any one-man tank she was familiar with, but something about it felt familiar. She met it in direct melee, turning its mechanical movements against it. It could throw out surprisingly fast punches, but they were perfectly consistent, and thus predictable. Zel needed to see only one punch to predict the next, meeting it with her own, channeling Pneuma to her fist and coating it with a short-lived kinetic mirror made of Fog. It was the foundational defensive technique which, in one manner or another, had led to all her other defenses: Rebound Pulse.

When their fists met, the force of the armor’s punch was instantaneously reversed and sent back up its arm in addition to the force of Zel’s strike. Heavy-duty machine that it was, its own strength didn’t break it, but it did throw it off-balance and gave Zel a gaping-wide opening in which she leapt atop the suit, jamming the Broken Butcher into the slot of its eye-track to impair the pilot’s vision before she began pulling off armor plates with her bare hands. It took a full lung to marshal the strength necessary, but with the flashes of Thundercharger going off beneath her skin as she pried metal from metal, she got the confirmation she’d wanted.

An identifying mark, stamped into the outer casing of the drivetrain, just above the power unit - the back of the mech’s neck.

RGP-T-01

TEST UNIT 6

This explained the hackneyed power pack, the hanging cables, the armor and lack of real weapons, the clumsy movement; it explained everything. It wasn’t a combat unit.

“Seriously? Those stolen industrial-type test frames were you lot?!” she cackled in disbelief, her hands quickly finding the manual override levers for the shoulder joints. The access panels had been welded shut, but she forced them open with brute force and worked the levers. The suit’s fingers opened, its arms slowly returned to its sides, then went stiff. It tried kicking at Victor, but ponderous as it was, it couldn’t close the distance, and no matter how it tried to shake her off, Zelsys held on. Cackling as she went, Zel yanked cables from their slots. The machine struggled to move after only two out of four, fuelgems bursting and the pilot swearing.

It was a pathetic thing to begin with, but having assisted with dangerous test runs of the Third-models during her time recovering from the Blue Moon War, Zelsys couldn’t stop herself from commenting on how bad these modifications were. Before they’d departed, the third batch of test frames had been sent off to Rigport, and their performance was a harsh comparison for the first test batch, one of which this monstrosity was built around.

“The first run of prototypes were a pain to work with, but seriously? Is that the best they could do, just some bolted-on armor?! And this power pack, it’s pathetic! This is…”

Another cable. She ripped a piece of the power pack’s outer casing, finding herself thrown into surprise-induced laughter all over again. “By the Dead Ones, it’s just the power packs from six Second-models grafted together!”

In truth, a jury-rigged power source made sense, since the first test batch had only been used with portable Fulgur-Igneic reactors to test the effects of prolonged operation on the drivetrain, with even these miniaturized reactors having been as large as a full Third-model suit and an order of magnitude heavier. Zel just couldn’t believe that they’d settled for this abomination, which couldn’t possibly have an operational combat time beyond maybe ten minutes.

With the suit disabled, she pulled the Butcher out of its eye and jumped off, prying at its cockpit hatch, which was located on its front end such that the pilot could climb up and drop in. It was stuck, an issue of the first test batch that was well known to her. This was the eighth or perhaps ninth time she was forcing one of these open, and it came open all the same this time, despite the extra metal on the outside. She fully expected the knight to blast her with that fire breath of his when the hatch came open, and indeed he did, but Zel had remained out of the line of fire and only reached in to drag him out afterwards. He kicked, screamed, whipped with his tail and tried to bite, like some sort of man-shaped beast, and so she decided to treat him like a beast, using him as little more than a rite of passage for young Victor.

Zel jumped back down once more and turned on a heel, walking over to Victor with the knight held in a grapple, ignoring his thrashing. She restrained his hands behind his back and tied them with her braids, holding him up and gripping his neck with her left while her right was under his jaw. Pulling it up, she held him out for Victor to put down like the animal he was, his throat exposed.

“It wouldn’t do for me to deny you this kill,” she said to him. ”A beast more vile than any animal…”

“...as no animal has the intellect to be truly evil,” he finished, repeating a line from the pulps. Zel had never said such a thing in the course of the events leading up to the Blue Moon War, but it didn’t matter; she believed those words to their fullest, and it was during those first months that she had arrived at this belief.

The knight tried kicking his way out of the grab, but it only prompted her to squeeze until his scales broke under her armored fingers and her glove’s claws sank into his flesh so she could zap him, albeit it took enough Fulgur to fry a normal human. She’d expected him to hesitate and require encouragement, but he didn’t; there was no shudder in his posture, no undue trepidation. He approached his kill-to-be, and with Duma’s broken spear in hand, he breathed, staring into the Dragon Knight’s eyes. The glyph circle in his palm took on a bright glow, spreading up the silver veins in the wood of the shaft before it reached the blade and set it alight in white-black flame.

“Now thrust it under the jaw, up into the brain. Just use the uppercut movement from the pamphlet,” she instructed.

Still thrashing about, the knight gurgled: “Pleaghse… I am sgh… Sorry…”

Unfiltered, burning hatred filled the young man’s eyes at that. Vic spat in the knight’s face before he ducked slightly and rammed the broken spear into the knight’s skull from below, through his mouth and up into his brain. The spear’s flame sputtered and spat, but didn’t go out, for Victor kept breathing and funneling more Ignis-coded Pneuma into it. Reddish-purplish liquid began to issue from the knight’s eyes as though tears, also dripping out of the wound and mixing with his purple blood. A boiling slurry of brain matter and cerebrospinal fluid.

“You’re not sorry for anything you’ve done. Just for getting caught,” he said to the still-living, but now quickly-dying man, words filled with a sheer hatred and disdain that Zelsys had not felt inside Victor since that time at the amphitheater. Another line repeated from the pulps.

“Very good. Now tilt it side to side a bit, make sure he doesn’t get back up,” Zel advised, and Victor did as she suggested. He tilted the spear side to side, front to back, and ripped it out, keeping his gaze on his kill as Zel let go and the corpse slumped to the ground. Something… Didn’t quite fit.

“...Have you killed a man before?” she raised an eyebrow.

“Oh, right… The way I got into this mess in the first place…” he sighed, wiping off the spear on his sleeve, sliding the spear behind his belt. The gunk just ran off the fabric once he was done, leaving nary a mark. He walked over to one of the dead bugmen, retrieving his axe before he turned to Zel, asking: “Can I explain elsewhere? I’d… Rather leave the “getting used to the smell of corpses” part for later.”

“It’s a passive process, I’ve found,” Zel chuckled. She nearly walked off towards her Sturmgandr, but caught herself just in time to glance back at the two other captives who very clearly weren’t nearly as eager as Victor to go and butcher a gang of traffickers. Sheathing her blade, she grinned at the two, tiny and confused and cowering as they looked amidst the corpses. There were embers in those boys. Even if they weren’t quite the primordial furnaces of violence present inside Victor, she could feel flames there; they just needed a bit of stoking, was all. Letting the grin work its way back onto her face, Zel approached them, squatting down in front of the two.

“The town might not be safe right now so we’ll take you to the same person we took the others who weren’t so fortunate as you two, alright? You’ll just have to sit tight in a safehouse while we exterminate the scum behind all this,” she said to them, hoping that they would understand the venom and violence in her words wasn’t directed at them.

“B-but who would-” one of the boys began.

“Von Wickten,” Vic interrupted. The sound of him spitting off to the side came after. She couldn’t help chuckling in pride at that; such righteous fury filled his voice that Zelsys could scarcely have imagined herself saying it with more gusto.

“Yes, just the same. Well, he’s likely not behind the human trafficking ring, but he’s the one letting them operate without reproach in Arches, seeing as he’s their biggest customer. If they’re to stay gone, we’ll have to… Kill him and put his head on a fuckin’ pike, really. Once that’s done, we’ll- Well, that’s not important. What’s important is that you two will be safe to return to your lives once the knight captain is made an example of. Now! To actually get you to that safehouse… My machine can carry four people tops, so-”

Zel pointed at one of the boys as well as at Victor.

“-You two will ride with Zef and I, and you-”

She pointed at the other boy.

“Will ride with him,” she finished, flicking her finger to Jorfr. “There’s still what, an hour and a half before the auction’s supposed to start? Plenty of time.”

Some time earlier…

Among the upsides of residing in the duke’s ancestral manor was the fact that one could get a perfect view of the demesne in its entirety from the Panopticon, a spire in the manor’s center with an observatory at the very top.

Red enjoyed watching the duchy from up here, despite not being able to doff her disguise. It was calm up here, she got a good view of what could more or less be considered hers, and most importantly, she didn’t get any of those pesky reminders of the accursed dungeon. Stuffy writing-rooms, doubly so those without windows, had a habit of dredging up bad memories for her… As did full submersion in water. And insects. And sometimes the gigantic, matte-black ribs that gave Arches its name, when she glimpsed them at an angle that approximated those horrific tendrils that had burrowed into her flesh and scoured everything that had once made her what she was, from parasites to mental conditioning.

Nevertheless, this was preferable.

She swirled bright-blue liquid about in a glass, taking a sip. Lukewarm. A breath, a gesture, and a pulse of resonant ringing through her skull were all it took to form ice in the liquid. Another sip. The mintiness of Viriditas, the vaguely citrusy flavor of Daytime Dust, complimented by the semi-illusory taste that Viriditas induced, drawing on the consumer’s favorite flavors; though it had once been green tea or, at times, sweet rice cakes, Red’s time working to take control of minor holdings in Ikesia had changed that. Now, it was the cloying sweetness of a Winter Peach. This small, tiny detail of flavor elicited feelings of treason in the good Lady Karmesin. A shard of glass leftover from her otherwise shattered past self.

As the name suggested, it was a fruit that could only grow in rare circumstances such as those of Willowdale’s soil, fertile yearlong for some mysterious reason. Pateiria, too, had fruits like this, grown in the imperial gardens and within the grounds of major sects, but they were ever out of reach for a person as unimportant as her. Yet here, these fruits were sold freely, expensive though they were.

For all the hate she held for the dungeon, for Zelsys, that snow devil lover of hers, and the two others who had put a stop to the Emperor’s plan to harness a Dungeon Core’s death as the means to bypass the Blackwall… Red preferred what she was - who she was - now.

To her relief, her second downward spiral into inner conflict this week was smothered by the sound of someone ascending an upward spiral; this being the Panopticon’s exorbitantly long staircase. A series of knocks on the door. It was Meng.

“Enter!” she beckoned, turning a tired gaze towards the broker. “Something truly important, I presume. Has Newman been spotted? Did the Duke finally decide to deal with those Occupationist fools?”

With a sharp nod, the broker confirmed her first guess: “One of our agents spotted Newman at the northern gate, alongside her partner and the Borean. Soon afterward they headed to one of the residential areas, where they split up. Approximately fifteen minutes later, one of our plants in Von Wickten’s guard contingent reported Zelsys causing commotion in front of the Von Wickten familial estate, while the two others were nowhere to be seen. I personally spotted them heading north-eastward some a short while later.”

“Down the old road to what’s left of the local Temple of the Second King?” Red asked, smiling under her mask, and Meng must’ve caught the subtle excitement in her body language, as he continued:

“Yes. However… There is one other thing. It’s the duke. From his demeanor, he appears to have suffered a mental breakdown of some sort…”

Retrieving a sealed missive from his pocket, the broker further added: “He demanded that I deliver this.”

Opening the missive, Red found herself torn. Its contents, distilled down into their true meaning, were effectively a statement of trust and an urgent request for her presence.

The grave nature of recent events compels me to entrust the secret of my line to a trusted other. Please contact me as soon as you are able, time is short. I shall await you in my writing-room.

Forced to choose between pursuing revenge and possibly securing her hold on the duchy, Red chose the latter; instead of scaling the Panopticon’s staircase, she simply opened the window, intending to jump and slow her own fall. Before she did so, however, she turned to Meng: “Prepare the Dragonfly, please.”

The broker nodded in affirmation, and Red leapt head-first out of the window, rolling forward and springing up to her feet upon landing. Her impact carved a shallow gash into the soil, but fixing that was the groundskeepers’ job. Making her way through the manor, she passed a maid and informed her of her “unfortunate fall”, reassuring her that she was fine before she moved on. Upon knocking at the door to the duke’s writing-room, she instantly got a response: “COME IN!”

It was the duke, no doubt, but there was a cocktail of intense emotion in his voice; stress, anger, sorrow, fear. Just what had happened?

Wild-eyed, his face distorted by tear-smudged makeup, his normally proper suit messy and half-undone, Alberich Von Hoedorff leapt from his chair at the sight of her. He ran to her with all the authority and stateliness of a young boy, ranting and raving: “L-Lady Karmesin, I must apologize for calling you over on such short notice, I… Oh, it is just terrible! A true catastrophe! My- No, our whole duchy shall be ruined if this ever comes to light, an-and with Adalbert gone, you were the only one who came to mind…”

Red let out a sigh under her mask and grabbed him by the shoulders, dragging the broken-down duke to an upright stance against his will, staring up into his bloodshot eyes.

“What a fucking ruler, you are,” she thought. Even after she’d rebuilt herself, after she’d given herself an extra head’s worth of height, Red was still shorter than the average Ikesian man, and Alberich was a good bit above average in height, standing head and shoulders over her… Yet he felt so small. His sense of presence, his aura so to speak, had all but gone.

“What happened?” she questioned. “I have other urgent matters to attend to, so let us handle this crisis as quickly as possible, whatever it may be.”

“Oh, I cannot bring myself to speak the words…” he sighed, slouching yet again before looking up at her. A grim sort of determination flared up in the duke’s eyes, the likes of which Red had never seen in the man. “I suppose showing you is my only reproach. Come, the only path to it is in the manor’s basement.”

So she followed, keeping a cautious eye out on her surroundings, but her caution was unfounded. The duke led her two floors below the earth, through two secret doors, beyond which was an unsettling laboratory that stunk of blood and viscera, with jars of distinctly purple drake’s blood and pieces from these beasts preserved in jars. Through the laboratory still the duke rushed, reaching a short-range Fog Gate that itself led to a circular lift chamber wrought in blackstone, lit by the milky-white glow of lightgems embedded in the walls and ceiling. It was easily twenty meters across and half as tall. There was another, much larger door connected to the lift; it was almost akin to that accursed Dungeon, but not quite, with slight differences setting this architectural style apart.

The duke stepped into the center of the lift, a pedestal rising under his feet by perhaps twenty centimeters. He spoke something in what sounded vaguely like Ikesian, but the pronunciation, words, and sentence structure were so far removed from modern Ikesian that Red couldn’t make out more than “dragon” and “ancestral line”. Once he went silent, the lift came alive and began to descend at a breakneck pace, only slowing down abruptly after what must’ve been a several-hundred-meter descent, evidenced by the height of the shaft above. This was not surprising in the slightest to Red, but her lack of surprise seemed to, in turn, surprise the duke, though he did not make it heard.

A great door awaited at the bottom of the lift, which lit up with glyphs at the duke’s approach and opened by sliding into the ground with nary a sound, revealing a sprawling cavern. The stench of not-quite-rotting meat and stale air filled Red’s nostrils.

“This place is…” Alberich began, as he walked through the door. He sighed, turning around to correct himself. “This was the birthplace of the Dragon Knights. Come. It is not far, now.”

Indeed, it was not. As they entered into the cavernous space, a great deal of mining equipment came into view, alongside partial Three Kings Era architecture: Broken obelisks, other lifts whose platforms had been ripped off and embedded in the walls, great chutes leading up through upward shafts. It became clear that there was another level to the cave as they approached a cliff that overlooked it, the duke grimly remarking as they did: “You must’ve noticed the marked difference between the likes of knight-captain Adalbert and the other knights. Not merely in skill, but in the nature, extent, and potency of their mutations. Once, knights of Adalbert’s caliber were the core stock of the duchy’s forces, each having had their heart replaced with one grown from the Dragon’s undying flesh, but…”

Red didn’t entirely understand where this had come from. Alberich absolutely wasn’t the type she expected to know such things, let alone understand them, but he spoke about them as if he’d studied the Dragon all his life… Was this some form of genetic memory?