“One more thing,” Zel kept pushing. “The end of the message, when they panicked. You didn’t translate that part.”

Red chuckled, and a grin worked its way onto her face.

“The more authoritative man - the Commissar - instantly recognized your face. He screamed that the Arches Outpost had been lost to “The Heretic’s Daughter” before cutting the line. I suspect that the soldier who failed to recognize you is being beaten as we speak.”

That noun: The Heretic. It was among the derisive words used by Pateirian loyalists to refer to the Sage of Fog, that enigmatic man who had united Ikesia, orchestrated her ascendance into technological supremacy, and led the war before his untimely disappearance… That disappearance which had so conspicuously coincided with the Blackwall’s rising. Surprised at the epithet, Zel asked: “They think of me as the Sage’s daughter?”

“The Heretic’s Daughter, the Manufactured Paragon, the Living Heresy Against the Heavens, the Walking Tribulation, you have all sorts of epithets, yes… As do I. And her-” she pointed to Zefaris. The mantis’ grin became ugly. Bitter. For some reason she didn’t like having to recall these epithets, perhaps due to the epithets Red had heard used in reference to herself. “They call her the Reaper’s Bride. Trench Ghost. Evil Eye. As I said, we Pateirians have a habit of assigning epithets to significant figures.”

Making sure to commit every epithet Red mentioned to memory and taking great pride in each and every one of them, Zel returned some information: “After all of that, I owe you some forewarning, at least: A couple rats got away through a Fog Gate dialed to the gate in Von Wickten’s family mansion. The gate is in a library in the basement. I suggest you fumigate the place… And clean up the Dragon Knights as a whole while you’re at it.”

“I do not control the-” Red began, but Zel wasn’t having it.

“Do you not? Really? Come on. It’s obvious to anyone familiar with the mental acuity of these inbred nobles,” the beast-slayer smugged back. “You wouldn’t go by “the good Lady Karmesin” otherwise.”

The good Lady Karmesin deigned not to respond, instead commanding her firefly to float into the air in preparation for departure. Before she could leave, however, Zelsys stopped her.

“I wasn’t finished. In the coming weeks, a messenger from Willowdale will arrive with a very generous offer. You would do well to set any grudges aside and consider it on its own merits.”

For a few moments, the mantis was silent. She had, after all, staked her life on a plot that would have led to Willowdale’s destruction, had it come to fruition. The stifling of that very plot had caused her to become what she was now, with all the horrific suffering that metamorphosis had involved. Despite this, she calmly replied: “I shall rebalance the budget to prepare for an industrial expansion. I expect that we will be supplied with appropriate equipment including Third-model geoframes.”

Not waiting for a response, the Lady in Red departed.

Zel stood aghast, not sure what to think. She wagered that Red had agents in Rigport and Willowdale, but she hoped that these agents were not in positions of power, even if she would soon become a trade partner for the Free Cities Alliance. Moreover, the term “geoframe” was only ever used in reference to non-military siblings to tank suits, such as the very test unit whose up-armored form the Red Locust Bandits had been transporting. The production of mining-spec geoframes had not been made public, meaning Red had either guessed, or she knew more than she rightly should… Or she was just bluffing.

Not being in the mood to rack her brains over matters of intel security at the moment, Zel filed the concern away for later. She would send word back to Willowdale and inform the bureau, and that would be that.

Thus, the four of them departed, returning to Arches to set things right. An atmosphere of tension hung over the town, despite the daily goings-on remaining undisturbed. The gate guards just waved them on through before they even said a word, one of them uttering something about how cultivators shouldn’t just be allowed to do whatever they want “just because”. The streets were notably lacking in Dragon Knights, with militiamen stationed in common street-corner guard spots; what few Dragon Knights they did come across not only didn’t seem antagonistic, but shrunk away from them, visibly hurrying away as they passed. Zelsys overheard a knight with rather light mutations and plain armor arguing with his noticeably larger superior, clearly hearing him say: “I’m not getting fried in my armor just ‘cause a bunch of degens took the dragon thing too literally. No, I told you a thousand times that this is a job for me, I won’t kill myself to pay for the knight-captain’s drug habits!”

While Jorfr took Victor back to his home to work things out with the landlord, Zel and Zef made their way to the Von Wickten estate first and foremost, in the hopes of catching or drawing out the rats who had escaped, to no avail. They had agreed to meet up at the Duma School, and so they did, but not before visiting the bathhouse.

The staff of said bathhouse didn’t seem at all perturbed at their presence, though its public nature meant that the duo didn’t feel comfortable going through with their usual after-hunt carnal ritual. Despite their public and often shameless displays of mutual affection, they weren’t exhibitionists. After swiftly cleansing themselves of as much filth as possible, they made their way to the Duma School.

Jorfr and Victor arrived at the Duma School well before the other two. The place was deserted save for Duma himself, one of the instructors, and three students, all of them busy cleaning the place up; among these was Reiner as well, putting his prodigious strength to good use. Resved instantaneously noticed their arrival, placing down a heavy piece of furniture as if it were a chair before he turned to meet the two men. His eyes initially drifted to the norseman’s imposing frame, but quickly shifted to Victor, noticing the broken spear tucked behind his belt.

“I am relieved to see you are well, and you retrieved my spear as well… Broken as it is. You needn’t tell me of what transpired since we last spoke - in fact, I would prefer that you do not… I’ve heard the short of it already from the Lady in Red, even if she didn’t mention your involvement. Come, let’s go inside,” the Old Man said to Victor, already leading him and Jorfr into the burned-out building. It didn’t appear nearly as burned out as it had last Vic had seen it, the greater structure and much of the furniture seemingly unharmed beyond surface-level charring. Victor wondered if the old man had anticipated arson and proofed his property against it, or if this resistance to mundane fire was merely a side effect of its long-lasting construction.

“Your aura, it has changed. A life… Nay, several lives have been extinguished by your hand. I shan’t question your reasons, for there is only question that truly matters now: Do you, after all, intend to leave Arches?”

Vic nodded. A sorrowful smile grew on Duma’s face.

“Come. Let us have tea, at least.”

And so they did, right in the midst of the burned-out school building. Unsurprisingly, a blaze fuelled by mundane gunpowder and lamp oil hadn’t done much to damage ancient, two-millennia-old pottery from the Ankhezian Empire. The old man commented on these pieces: “I have had these for the better part of a century, and I still find them marvelous. The kettle heats itself, and both it and the cups keep the tea at perfect drinking temperature.”

His enthusiasm for mundane applications of arkatek didn’t do much to mask his sorrow at Victor’s impending departure. At one point, Duma asked to see the spear, questioning as he examined it: “I presume you intend to have it repaired. Does Lady Newman possess a fitting stock of material for such a repair? I think I had some ironwood somewhere around here…”

“It won’t be an issue,” came Zel’s voice in response from just outside line-of-sight, and a moment later, she entered with Zefaris in tow, who was busy leafing through newly-taken photographs as she walked.

The old master looked up at the beast-slayer with a degree of respect that Victor had never seen in the man. His presence seemed to recede without shrinking, as if he was going out of his way to spiritually make room for her naturally dominating presence. She briefly pulled out her Tablet on the way over to the table, setting down a jar of golden paste as she sat down. Atop the jar were two lengths of bloodwood, both far too short to make up a spear OR staff shaft.

Duma glanced over, murmuring: “Azoth-auric Amalgam, and that much of it… I dare not ask how long it took you to gather the Azoth Stones to make this, or what creatures these stones came from.”

“This…” Zel flicked the side of the jar. “...Was willed into being by a Dungeon Core. The Willowdale Locust Queen had been forcing it to produce arcane treasures and clothing in an attempt to make it sink through exhaustion. I mean to join the spearhead together with a staff which we retrieved from the Red Locust Queen’s possession, but I will need three supporting-pillars to carry out the joining.”

Resved nodded without hesitation.

“We can go through with it right away, if you so wish.”

“Tea first. My tongue feels like a dead snake. Do you mind if I eat here?”

“No, no, please go ahead! I can sense the exhaustion in you, and you stink of ozone besides. Considering that you are in any state to speak with me, I take it that my advice regarding internal balance helped stabilize your transformation.”

“So it did, so it did. Incorporating lesser muscle groups to use them as Fulgur ballasts helped soften the essentia fluctuations, and using my own body heat as a secondary source of Ignis eased the Pneumatic load for Fulgur generation. To think it was there all along…”

“The human form is among the most complex constructs of essentia there is, one needs to but know where in the body to find them and what state of being generates them. Why, the Victory Wash elixir is a perfect example of these principles, merely applied via external alchemy.”

Vic felt himself zoning out as the two masters debated jargon that sounded like a blend of technical specifications and high-minded philosophy, their discussion fading into background noise. He looked around and saw that Zefaris had set her camera into its carrying-case and began meticulously cleaning her revolver, while Jorfr just… Sat there, eyes closed. The norseman muttered something under his breath in Borean, his body tangibly growing colder by the second to the point where Victor felt it from nearly a meter away. Some sort of meditation, perhaps.

So it went on for a while, the better part of an hour. At some point Zelsys pulled a package out of Fog Storage, some sort of metal container covered in green-blue seals. The calligraphy was utterly perfect, each sigil simultaneously no larger than it needed to be while still being beautiful. He could scarcely imagine what treasure was within, until she cracked it open and the scent hit him.

It was food; three, perhaps four full meals worth of strange bluish meat slathered in a translucent lilac sauce, accompanied by chopped, steamed leaves that, for once, he recognized: Culca leaves. It was a rare, arcane plant with nearly universal applications in alchemy and magic, and as such it only made sense that someone of Zelsys’ stature would use it to recover after such a terrible battle. To his bewilderment, it was letting off fragrant steam as if the meal had been sealed up only minutes ago. However, a question roiled in Vic’s head. It was obvious that this meal had been cooked by none other than the Newman Sect’s culinarian-alchemist, one of the few members grandfathered into the new sect from its Black Horse predecessor: Ozmir. From the pulps, the descriptions of Ozmir’s cooking had stuck in Vic’s mind most vividly.

“Do you keep those in storage ready to go just in case?” he asked.

In the midst of chewing a fist-sized chunk of the meat, Zelsys nodded.

It was at this point that Vic noticed something about her right arm: It was still bronze. The green oxide scales had been removed somehow, probably through a bath considering that both her and Zefaris were clean, but that metallic bronze sheen still persisted. It could just barely be made out against the hue of her skin if the light hit her arm at the right angle. She noticed him observing, commenting on it after she swallowed a mouthful.

“Oh, my arm? It’ll go back to normal in a couple hours, don’t worry about it,” Zel said. She had automatically assumed that, having read the pulps, he might be concerned with the issues of metallizing an entire limb like that, as the process of writing about her own struggle to refine this aspect of Storm-conqueror’s Mantle had taken up a great deal of her thought during the final two months before the pulps were published. Only after she had already reassured Victor did she realize that she’d edited that very struggle out of the books, as it in reality occurred well after the timeframe they covered and the discrepancy couldn’t be reconciled in her mind, regardless of how much the publisher’s editors pestered her to add more true-to-life parts to make the story more believable. It wasn’t as if there was a shortage of day-to-day occurrences to detail, it was just that her day-to-day was so far removed from normalcy that it wasn’t really believable. The Hanging Feudalist Printing Company had taken a real demonstration of her daily routine before they would believe that “On Tuesday, in the second week of September, I spent twelve hours punching still-life images into a giant block of cold-iron” was in no way an embellishment.

She picked up a second piece of meat. Though it wasn’t audible, she could feel her joints creaking. This part was the worst - the half-hour or so after the imbuement began deteriorating, but before her body could fully metabolize and disperse the leftover Metallum. A small mercy was that oxide chips had never formed inside her joints, as she’d read that such things could happen if the technique was performed incorrectly or even if the user happened to have a damaged liver. A wave of concern suddenly washed over her when she noticed how closely the redhead was paying attention to her food, as it sparked another realization in her: “He must be starving…”

After all, not only had he likely not been fed by his kidnappers, Red’s reconstructive magic demanded so much of the subject that it had made even Zelsys hungry, and she rarely got truly, gut-wrenchingly hungry. By comparison, forcing Victor’s body to regrow layers of skin and form the hardened exoskeleton to replace the topmost dermal layers must’ve left him starving, even if he had absorbed thrice the bone mass of his new gauntlet to make up the Ossum.

Zel stopped eating for a moment, and pulled out a second, smaller seal-box out of Fog Storage - portioned out to be her breakfast, and as such more than sufficient as a full meal for someone with dietary requirements closer to a normal human. They were designed to trap heat and amplify the time-dilation properties of any Fog Storage they were placed in, allowing the food they contained to remain nearly fresh for weeks at a time. The problem was that once they were taken out of storage, the seals would destabilize and time would rapidly begin catching up. As such…

“Eat quickly. It’ll start rotting in two hours.”

She had no concern for her compatriots; they had their own tablets and their own stored rations, but there was no such assurance with him. After somewhat cautiously sampling the food, Victor proceeded to surgically and meticulously dismantle his meal with a combined speed and precision the likes of which Zelsys had never seen, for she had never dealt with nobility. He then proceeded to slump in his seat, half-closing his eyes as the nutrient bomb hit him and his body diverted every resource available into digestion - this being much to Duma’s amusement. The Old Man chuckled at the scene, remarking: “Ah, the cultivator’s food coma… Reminds me of my younger days.”

Over the next roughly twenty minutes, Zelsys finished her meal and the four senior cultivators carried on drinking Duma’s tea, until inevitably conversation turned to Zel’s plan to repair the spear by joining it to a staff. Since Victor had taken the staff and stored it away inside his Black Marble Tablet, attention turned to him, snapping him out of his food-induced daze. He retrieved the staff, its jade rings jangling as he put it on the table. Duma’s eyes were frozen on it from the moment it came into view, and it was clear he recognized it, but he kept his words to himself for the time being, instead asking: “May I examine it closer?”

Zel nodded, and he took it in hand, drawing in a shallow breath through his teeth. His lips moved voicelessly as he mouthed an incantation, infinitesimally tiny wisps of Fog emerging from not his mouth or nostrils, but his tear ducts, forming a translucent film over his eyes. His pupils narrowed down to pinpricks before spiraling outward until they consumed his irises, the colour of his eyes shifting to an iridescent purple.

Light flowed down the silver conduits along the staff’s shaft, its jade rings also taking on a glow and beginning to float weightlessly. Then, it all abruptly stopped. The rings fell back down with a jangling sound and Duma exhaled, returning to normal.

“Now, what I am about to say requires some… Explanation. The design of this staff, that of a large core ring with four or more smaller ones, is known as a khakkhara, after the original use of it as a noisemaker. It originated with and was widely used by the priests of the Kingdom of Itria, this being the nation which Xiān Dì sacked and ousted from what would later become the heartland of Pateiria. I shan’t go into details regarding Itrian religion, as theirs is one of the few faiths that attempts to comprehensively envelop all the eight million - that is to say, innumerable - dead gods which make up our world’s foundations.”

He grasped the broken staff and held it aloft. The jangle of its rings seemed… More important, somehow.

“This… This is one of the Eight Onbashira, so named after wooden pillars the Itrians used and still use to form defensive barriers; an Ikesian adaptation of the name would be Eight Obelisks, or Eight Guardian Pillars…”

The old man, as Zel knew that those with a particular passion for history are wont to do, began trailing off. She knocked on the table, trying to get his attention: “The staff. What is special about it?”

“Ah, my apologies, I just… Did not expect to come across a thing like this. These ancient sacred tools were once used by Itrian shrine maidens, so-called demon exterminators for their role as… Well, the name speaks for itself. They were tasked with leading the defense forces of the kingdom’s eight most significant shrines and the towns which supported those shrines. Five of the Onbashira are known to have been stolen during Xiān Dì’s war against the Itrians, so I suppose one of them is now recovered.”

“Do you know of any special properties that we should look out for? Any enchantments?”

“The Eight Onbashira were said to be capable of turning the power of demons against them, though I cannot say whether this refers to their capacity as high-grade casting mediums or some separate, unique function. My knowledge regarding these artifacts ends with this: The Onbashira were created specifically so that their full capabilities could not be accessed by anyone other than their long-term wielders, and to primarily magnify the wielder’s existing capabilities rather than granting them new ones as typical Pateirian artifacts tend to do.”

Victor piped up for once, his voice still low-energy as he spoke: “So then… They would have been considered to be lesser than other plunder due to differences in design philosophy, and the Emperor’s efforts of history erasure would have made them no more than good staves as far as their Pateirian owners were concerned.”

Pride in his face, the old man nodded: “Precisely, yes.”

“...Which explains how this one ended up with someone as relatively low in status as a Locust Quee-” the redhead continued, only stopping himself when it was already too late. Zelsys was only glad that what he revealed was such an unsurprising piece of information, rather than the knight-captain’s involvement in the affair or the theft of the potentially most significant magical object in the region.

“Alright, history lesson’s over,” Zel broke the silence. ”Let’s get this thing fixed before the Butcher’s temporary seals start deteriorating.”

And so they did. The most challenging aspect of the procedure wasn’t working with Azoth-auric Amalgam, but rather determining the appropriate length for the end product based on the pieces of bloodwood available. In the end, the broken section still attached to the spear-point was used alongside one of the intact shafts taken from the Red Locust Queen’s hoard. The resultant shaft length was somewhat longer than those of the shortspears which Victor was accustomed to.

As for the process itself, it was not perilous or risky - merely tricky to perform on one’s own, even with a supernatural grasp of the metallic as Zelsys did. The necessary quantity of amalgam was measured out, which Zelsys swallowed and manipulated inside her second stomach, activating it using a tremendous quantity of Metallum-coded Pneuma since her Core of Earthly Iron was still depleted. Jorfr and Duma’s skill with ritualism played a role in spiritually joining the two unique objects into one, this part being relatively easy thanks to the fact neither the spear nor the khakkhara had a fully developed weapon spirit.

They cleared space for the ritual, shuttering the doors and windows alike. Duma, font of knowledge that he was, cooperated with Zefaris in drawing the rather complex glyph on the floor and charging it with Pneuma. Meanwhile, Jorfr memorized one of Duma’s joining-mantras and the two men recited it while Zelsys regurgitated the now-prepped amalgam and used it to join the two halves, it hardening into a sort of gold composite in a single instant when she snapped her fingers. The entire process took nearly three hours. Zefaris documented the whole thing with gusto, taking nearly half a dozen photographs as things progressed.

When all was complete, the staff-spear was left floating a meter and a half off the floor, as suspending it thusly was part of the glyph’s function.

Zelsys looked to Victor, tacitly beckoning him to take what was his. In a manner of speaking, this, too, was part of the ritual - his acceptance of his new path, this weapon which represented his actions in what would come to be known as the Fifth Eye Incident as well as his remaining connection to Resved.

Standing here, in the midst of a sprawling, shining glyph which was the only thing to illuminate the darkened room, surrounded by these four larger-than-life, almost mythical figures… With every centimeter closer to grasping the staff-spear, Victor felt his anchor to the mundane world fraying more and more. The rope was on its last strand, and grasping the staff-spear would sever it for good. Being a martial artist, a traveling mercenary, those were one thing, but the traveling disciple of Zelsys Newman, a person in stark and overt opposition to the Divine Emperor… That was an order of magnitude different.

As anticipation - or rather, anxiety - set in, he couldn’t help but notice something incongruent about the spear side.

“The blade looks… Pateirian, I think,” he remarked, running his fingers near it, but not touching it. He looked up to Duma, “Post-Royalist.”

“Ankhezian. It’s an officer’s weapon from the Post-Civil War period, likely the first or second century after the empire went tits up. The Emperor might have had his smiths copy one of his own weapons during his journey to the west, or something of the sort…” the old man began, only to catch himself. “But we do not have time for another history lesson. Grasp your weapon and give it a name, before the levitation glyphs run out.”

“A name…”

Drifting into thought, Victor found himself grasping the staff-spear without even thinking. A brightly-burning thrum shot straight up his arm, and in that flash of brilliant ache, the name came to him.