Soon they crested the edge of the cliff, and a sprawling cavern awaited them below, its sheer scale best compared to Arches itself; stalagmites and stalactites the size of buildings framed the vista as though immense teeth. The cavern’s vast sprawl was dominated by the corpse of a tremendous dragon, or at least the uppermost third of it; matte-black scales, each the size of a building and overlaying the next, shrouded the immense creature as a suit of armor, many of them missing like the tiles on a shattered mosaic with purple flesh underneath, and many others still were broken. At the end of its muscular, gilled neck sat a six-horned, four-eyed head. Of its body, only the upper half of a torso and a proportionately tremendous arm were left; its arm was atop its head, covered in cuts with two of its clawed fingers having been severed. Its amber-coloured eyes were open and pristine, but glassy, without the slightest motion. A small lake of purple blood had pooled around the body, and from it unearthly purple-tinged flora grew in abundance, emitting Fog in abundance; the dragon’s fingers floated within it.

The gaping hollow of its torso bore a singular intact, unsettlingly humanlike lung, the other ripped-open and tattered, and no other visible organs; its was filled with pustulous sacks inside which vaguely quadrupedal forms floated, attached to the dragon’s unrotting, unwithering flesh. Several burst-open sacks betrayed their contents: Wolves and dogs, halfway turned to False Drakes. There, in the center of it all, was the dragon’s six-chambered heart, stone-still and dead. From this distance, it looked like the heart was covered in pustules, or perhaps tumors. Though her knowledge of these beasts wasn’t exhaustive by any measure, Red had gone out of her way to learn as much as she could about Dragon Descendants in order to facilitate her goals in Arches. A Dragon Descendant’s number of eyes evidenced its closeness to its ancestors; True Dragons each had four pairs of seeing-eyes in addition to a crystalline extra on their foreheads that served as an amplifying medium for their immense arcane power, with Dragon Descendants losing pairs of eyes the further removed they were from their ancestors. A dragon with three eyes, no matter how titanic, was inherently lesser than a five or seven-eyed cousin, and a dragon possessing only a single eye was an abominable thing barely above an animal in intellect. Such mono-eyed dragons were so far removed from their ancestors that many Pateirian scholars considered them to be no more than arcane beasts trying to mimic Dragon Descendants, derisively labeling them “Sorcerer-Lizards”.

“The Dragon of Arches withered away over time, and when its Fifth Eye closed at last, so too did the growth of new Dragonhearts cease; those growths you see on its heart are…” the duke spoke up again, gesturing vaguely in the dragon’s direction. His hand shook, and with a heavy gulp, he continued: “Unripe ones, so to speak, now never to ripen. In my lifetime, it only produced two, and even these were weaker than their predecessors. Because of this, my grandfather’s mutagenicists had devised a method for imbuing beasts with a sliver of draconic essence, and by performing a full transfusion using the resultant False Drake’s blood, a False Dragon Knight could be created. The method was also incorporated into the rearing of True Dragon Knights in order to reinforce their waning powers, but….

Alberich looked to her with sorrow in his eyes, leading her a ways to the left, onto a walkway that extended along the cave wall and over the Dragon’s head. It was slick with purple blood that still glimmered with iridescent colours, betraying its freshness in the absence of clotting. It was atop this walkway that the reason for the god-beast’s death became clear: Its Fifth Eye was gone, cut out of the socket.

“It must’ve been constantly using its Fifth Eye to keep itself alive…” she thought.

“I knew not what to do, nor who to tell, when I had learned of what had happened…” the duke said, his tone filled with a swirling mixture of disbelief and grief. “But worst of all, I know not who did the deed. It seems one of my own sought to usurp the Dragon’s remaining power for himself, either an ordained Dragon Knight or one of my mutagenicists. I only pray Ser Adalbert wasn’t involved.”

Raising an eyebrow under her mask, Red questioned: “Where is the knight-captain?”

“He took up a search-and-rescue assignment for a group of hunters who hadn’t returned…” the duke trailed off.

Red pushed him: “...From where?”

“A Red Locust Bandit hideout,” he relented. “Ser Adalbert requisitioned two parties of twelve, one for himself and one for Ser Baldwin. He said the location had to be the Red Locusts’ headquarters in the duchy if it was so heavily defended as to capture a group of six beast-slayers of might comparable to Dragon Knights without at least one escaping.”

“Of course it was Adalbert. Who else could it have been? After how badly that homunculus humiliated him, his ego must’ve snapped in half…” Red thought, only just barely managing to stop herself from voicing the thought.

“...While I am most honored that you trust me enough to share these grave news with me and ask my counsel, I have urgent business which, unlike a dead dragon, will not wait,” she said, retracing her steps over the walkway before the duke could try to stop her. ”I shall leave Tian Meng with you if you want for further advice. The lift returns to the surface on its own, yes?”

The duke nodded, and with that, Red left him. Upon reaching the surface, she was nearly instantly greeted by the inconspicuous broker, waiting for her in the central courtyard by the Panopticon. He was watching over two groundskeepers as they fixed the damage her landing had caused.

“Watch over the duke while I’m gone, I suspect he may need guidance,” she said to him. “Is it ready?”

Meng simply nodded, prompting her to smile under her mask.

“Very good.”

Construct Seven, the Dragonfly, the name didn’t truly matter.

She’d stashed it away in an abandoned manor at the edge of town, along with her other works; a construct of blackstone, it was the most complete manifestation of Red’s proficiency in wielding this “blessing” of hers. The Dungeon Core’s essence allowed her to give form to the formless, to seemingly create things from nothing, but the effort to make something real was an order of magnitude above making temporary constructs.

Red had toiled without relent to grasp this power, knowing that it was in direct defiance of the Emperor’s will, that it was courting death, but what was the point of her otherwise? To have all this power, and not use it.

“Your actions were what forced me onto this path, my liege; the Walking Way of the Living Monument. I may as well walk it,” she thought as she strode through the deserted halls.

Red had learned how to create and shape blackstone, how to make it move, filling in for what she couldn’t make herself with parts procured through her contacts in the Land of Lingering Smoke.

The Dragonfly was the result; an elongated blackstone construct atop six spindly, insectoid legs, possessed of four articulated “wings” made up of triangular panels. Her intention with it had been to create a vehicle to let her ride the leylines the same way mythical cultivators did with their flying swords, and though it did work for this purpose, the Dragonfly could only hover under its own power, and in operation resembled a motorbike more than anything else.

She opened a Fog Vortex in the palm of her own hand; a deceptively useful aspect of what she had become was the possession of her own personal Fog Storage, albeit limited in capacity. From the vortex she retrieved a fist-sized sphere of iridescent crystal, which she slotted into a depression in the Dragonfly’s “head”. A Subcore; this crystalline orb was wrought from tremendously compressed Pneuma and Azoth, the primordial mercury of life, of which the False Drake population was a plentiful source. The Azoth Stones of those beasts were worthless for anything to do with cultivation, laden with impurity, and so distilling them down to blank, pure Azothic Mercury was a perfect use. It was an amplifying medium and an extension of Red’s will at the same time; a means by which she could fuel her constructs without exerting herself or even being there, she could even see through it if the need arose. She’d only been able to make this single one, but it sufficed.

The machine came alive, its wings tilting back and forth for a moment before its legs retracted and it floated into the air about a meter off the floor, emitting a slight crystalline ringing. From the Subcore sprung forth a windshield of translucent arcane matter and Red impelled the Dragonfly out through one of the mansion’s shattered windows, catching the updraft of a leyline before descending down to ground level once she reached the fateful forest road, the tall grass that covered much of it having clearly been trampled only recently.

Mere minutes of riding down this path, and already Red saw what she’d hoped for: Two huge motorbikes, and driving the larger of the two was…

Her.

The party rode down the road which they’d previously circumvented, the two rescued captives holding on for dear life, fear plainly evident in their faces; meanwhile, Victor was obviously doing all in his power to make it seem like he wasn’t absolutely terrified of falling off the screaming steel beast from whose exhausts spewed fire and lightning. Things were going altogether smoothly so far; a bit too smoothly, by Zel’s reckoning. As if in answer to her expectation of a hitch, an unfamiliar, black-red shape came into view as they rounded a bend.

A blackstone dragonfly hovering a good meter off the ground, its wings reaping what tall grass hadn’t been smushed down to the ground as it bolted in their direction. Atop it was a horned, masked figure cloaked in red, its visage unmistakable.

“Is that Red?!” Zef questioned from behind, shouting over the engine’s howl.

“Has to be! Probably involved with the traffickers!” Zel shouted back.

She slowed down and brought her machine to a halt, with Jorfr following her lead.

“If it comes down to violence, just grab the captives and take them to safety. By the time you come back it should be over,” she said to Zefaris, who nodded without a flicker of worry in her eyes. The captives stuck with the norseman at the back as Zelsys - and Zelsys alone - walked out ahead to meet the Lady in Red, who had also brought her bizarre essentech vehicle to a halt. Zel and everyone she trusted knew who it was, under that mask; she’d been briefed on the Rigport Incident, on how Red had somehow been reborn into the role of a “moderate” imperial agent that balanced out the extremism of the Occupationists. She didn’t trust that act one bit.

“Lady Karmesin, is it? What is a noblewoman such as yourself doing on a back road at such a late hour?” Zel questioned coyly. She didn’t expect Red to fall for it; the recognition in her eyes and tone of voice were all too obvious, but deception wasn’t the point of this song-and-dance.

The Lady in Red tilted her head to the side. A curtain of black hair fell out of her hood. “There are matters of state to which only I can attend. Furthermore, I could ask you the same question: What is the Prime Slayer of a separatist city-state doing on a back road at such a late hour, and with two missing youths in tow?” came Karmesin’s voice in reply, distorted and amplified by her mask.

“We are merely following up on the same investigation that brought us to this duchy in the first place: The location of the Red Locust Bandits’ so-called Meat Market. You wouldn’t happen to be heading to that self-same Meat Market, would you? Surely, the duke’s trusted advisor wouldn’t be involved with slave-driving, parasite-using traffickers.”

Zel made no effort to hide her accusation, grinning at the Lady in Red.

“To level such baseless accusations at me is courting death. But then…” the horned advisor rebuked. Her tone betrayed no offense taken, only anticipation. Despite the distortion her voice was familiar, but it also lacked an expected Pateirian accent. She reached up to her mask, pulling it from her face, revealing that the mask’s horns were, in truth, her own. A moment later, the mask was gone, having vanished into a Fog Vortex that had sprung up from Red’s palm. Red lips, chitinous plates covering only the lower jaw, slight disfigurement on the cheeks, but an otherwise normal - even beautiful - face. Her robes parted down the middle, exposing a body clad only in chitinous armor and a red fundoshi. That visage exactly fit how she’d heard Red described; nevertheless, Zel couldn’t quite believe her own eyes. She could, however, see where this was going, considering the killing glow in Red’s eyes and the near-psychotic sneer on her face, and so she mentally switched gears. Breathing patterns shifted, heart began to pound, a fraction of her internal reserves was released. The stench of ozone filled the air as the air around her grew charged. Perhaps the only tool in her repertoire she left untouched was the Core of Earthly Iron, not willing to risk dropping below the Mantling Point - an arbitrarily-determined arcane rainy day fund.

“...It makes no difference. A promise I’ve made, and a promise I’ll keep - you shan’t walk away from this place, Zelsys Newman!” proclaimed the Lady in red, erupting from a standstill quickly and erratically enough that Zel had to actually focus to keep up. They clashed in the middle, exchanging blows faster than any onlookers but Zefaris could see, the mantis-mutant swiping at the homunculus, summoning up stakes of short-lived blackstone from the ground and thin air, trying to blindside her in any way conceivable. Yet, besides a few minor injuries in the initial assault, Zelsys quickly adapted; just as most opponents, Red had a tell for whenever she used her special ability, in this case that unmistakable crystalline ringing, quiet as a chime and demanding razor-sharp focus to pick out in the fray of combat. The stakes she didn’t dodge outright were robbed of momentum or conveniently slipped off her skin, Red’s own mantis blade ever found itself bogged down between the Broken Butcher’s prongs, her attention incessantly divided by the assaults of Zel’s animated braids.

Out of sight was the tremendous amount of effort Zelsys was continuously putting in to maintain such a defense, mentally acknowledging every single stake, predicting its time, point, and angle of impact, and then deciding whether to use Siphoning Pulse or Graze Pulse to rob of it momentum or make it slip off respectively. Both techniques only lasted a fraction of a second and covered a relatively small area of skin due to their prohibitive energetic cost, siphoning tissue-dissolved Pneuma from the area of their use to fuel themselves and thus weakening Zel’s offense using that limb. Each stake respectively stopped or made to miss fed into her Retributive Battery, the former charging it with kinetic energy and the latter with pure Fulgur, the former manifested as no more than an intensifying glow in her eyes while the latter caused the same thing as any other Fulguric charge in the body: Errant arcs of lightning. It was all an incredibly complex balancing act, held up by the lynchpin of the Walking Way of the Despot of Self: That vital enabler of active cooperation between the conscious mind and bodily systems down to the muscle-fiber level.

It wasn’t the stakes that she needed to be careful about, regardless; they were a distraction and little more than that. Red’s golden mantis-blade was the true danger, its edge seething with iridescent Fog each time the mutant made a swing; what was more, it didn’t seem to rely upon any sort of kinetic force to cut, as Zelsys learned when she had stopped it dead with a use of Siphoning Pulse. It was a good centimeter away from her skin, yet it still left a gash as Red pulled it back for another strike. There was no choice but to dodge or block it the hard way.

Red’s own defense was none the shoddier. Physically she wasn’t quite on Von Wickten’s level, but that shortcoming was more than made up for by the mantis-mutant’s near-prescient tactical sense, perfect union with her own blade - it being a part of her body - and, perhaps the most potent of her abilities, her ability to just summon things out of thin air. At every turn, Zel found herself blocked not by armor and blade, but by plates of blackstone that flew into the path of her blade and broke under her violence, but slowed her enough to make her attack ineffectual.

All this stress, this complexity, this sense of flow. Zel knew she could end it, she could take this to the ground or blast the mantis, but she didn’t feel like it just yet. The way this felt, it wasn’t the Red she remembered; this wasn’t a psychotic, barely-sapient drone. Even the immense malice behind every strike, the malice that burned behind those eyes; it was strange and shifting, as if even Red herself wasn’t quite sure about the reason for her own killing intent. Zel managed to catch the mantis-blade between the prongs of her own weapon yet again while immobilizing Red’s other arm with her braids, briefly bringing the battle to a standstill as the two of them struggled.

“So… Karmesin, is it?” she squinted at the mutant, having only heard her appearance described, and only now getting a good up-close look at her. She scanned Red up and down, taking note of the fact that her left foot was still prosthetic, and that while her mutations were extensive, her body wasn’t disfigured to a significant degree and there were no signs of parasite infestation. “You look… Good, all things considered.”

This only seemed to incense the Lady in Red even further, who broke free of the grapple and redoubled her assault. It wasn’t until a gunshot from behind rang out that the mantis broke the clash, somehow dodging the leaden spear as it sailed centimeters from Zel’s side, only to conjure a pillar between herself and Zelsys, leaping backwards off of it. She held out her hand towards her dragonfly-shaped vehicle, the crystalline orb in its “head” levitating towards her.

“Is that a Subcore? Where’d she get a Subcore?” Zel wondered, recognizing the orb’s general size and colour.

“No interruptions!” the Lady in Red proclaimed, her words punctuated by that terrible, all-permeating noise; the ringing. With an imperious gesture of her left hand iridescent Fog began to swirl about her form, her cloak billowing in its immaterial breeze as the Subcore smashed into the soil, burying itself. The formless being given form, an imposition being made upon the material realm. A bright flash issued from her horns, and trigonal pillars of black rock erupted from the ground at haphazard angles; from each pillar erupted smaller branches at every-which angle, forming a tangled dome of stone over the two of them. The ground cracked and crumbled to dust underfoot, being at least partly transmuted to fuel this impressive display.

IMPRISONMENT TRIGRAM

CRIMSON COMMAND: KILLZONE MANIFESTATION

“CREATE SOMETHING FROM NOTHING”

Thinking quickly, Zel leapt backwards to the still-forming dome’s outermost perimeter, reassuring Zefaris: “Just go. I’ll be done here by the time you return.”

They shared a brief kiss through a gap between pillars, then the blonde retreated. One could hear two Sturmgandrs starting up and driving around the dome. Zel readjusted her stance, approaching Red yet again as she willed her wounds shut. Her mind still dwelt on how Red had been able to predict supporting fire in advance, but a tiny flicker in the mutant’s eyes gave her the solution: She’d been keeping an eye on Zefaris this whole time, likely because the last time Zel and Red had fought, Zefaris had interfered on multiple occasions.

“You, who cursed me with doubt! I would fulfill the promise my former self made to you!” Red howled as, pillar after pillar, sight of the exterior grew more and more limited. Soon their arena was an enclosed dome lit by numerous light-shafts, not a single one originating from a hole wide enough for Pentacle’s barrel to fit through. “Your life; I shall take it to fulfill mine!”

A strange atmosphere set in when the last pillar slammed into place. The light coming in had become milky-white, and the scents of the road had vanished. Moreover, Fog-breathing suddenly became a little easier, as if there was an unnaturally high concentration of free-floating Pneuma in the air. This… Felt like the interior of a Dungeon. As she pondered whether Red could just manifest a miniature Dungeon out of nowhere, one legitimately submerged in the Sea of Fog and thus partially distanced from conventional reality, Zel weighed her options, staring down the woman that had once been a glorified meat-puppet to the Locust Queen.

This wasn’t a puppet, or a beast; from what she knew of Red’s alter-ego as Karmesin, she had been a legitimately positive influence on both Rigport and Arches, pushing back against Occupationist elements in both municipalities. This wasn’t the Red Mantis she knew, plain and simple; she felt it in her gut. Nevertheless, this new woman had made an attempt on her life, and Zelsys wasn’t one to moralize in combat… Especially not when a walking Dungeon Core had just begun raising pillars from the ground to try and crush her against the dome’s interior. Each gesture equated a pillar, each pillar rocketing upward at a speed easily comparable to a cannonball. It was frankly a little intimidating, even to her; enough that she felt the need to not just dodge, but stay well clear of those things. Breaking into a sprint around the outer perimeter of the dome, she burned the contents of her lungs to produce Fulgur, drawing on the Pneuma her sleeve had siphoned from her previous use of the arm-cannon to make up the Ignis that she couldn’t just pull from the air, recirculating it back into her sleeve, the Impelling Arm. In the midst of her mad sprint, Zel made full use of the Butcher as an anchor, stabbing it into the cracked ground and spinning around it before launching herself at her foe, spinning about mid-air to deliver kicks so forceful they could crush a Dragon Knight’s armor and go clean through multiple grown men. In her maddened tantrum, Red had not lost a speck of tactical intelligence, knowing well enough to prioritize defending herself before harming Zelsys, and so the mutant raised pillars in the way of Zel’s airborne assault and forced her to leap off of them lest she lose her balance, once again creating space between the two, if only for a moment.

Twice more she repeated this assault, feeling out Red’s defenses and collecting a slash across her back for her troubles on the second pass. She was certain that she could smash through one of Red’s pillars wholesale if she dumped her entire kinetic battery into a kick.

Another lungful burnt for Fulgur and sent into the Impelling Arm. And another. Soon enough the runes on her sleeve seethed with a terrible glow and arcs of lightning slithered about its plates, the light of dreadful recognition in Red’s eyes. Just as she got her bearings again, Zel raised her arm and invoked. “Thundercannon!”

A construct of lightning in the shape of a beastly head erupted from her arm-cannon, at its core a sphere of ball lightning with the actual lead projectile serving as its core. The technique’s flaw was that it, by necessity, had windup, and so Red had had enough time to raise a defensive barrier… But that was exactly what Zelsys had wanted. The impact left a weakness in the barrier, allowing her to leap in and deliver a divekick that would smash through both the barrier and hopefully Red as well. As she neared the apex of her jump, Zel burned yet more Fulgur and sent it to her right leg, giving purpose to the complex scaffold structure on the inside of her right boot by suffusing it with the essentia and forming a plow of manifested lightning around the boot’s wedge-shaped front. She depleted what kinetic energy was in her Retributive Battery to accelerate her own fall, and finally smashed right through the barrier… Only to find that Red wasn’t at the other side.

There was only a blackstone effigy of her, the Subcore embedded in its featureless face.