The four senior cultivators witnessed the young man mouth something, but they heard nothing, and by some trickery of the manner in which the staff-spear moved across his face as he spun it in his hand, neither could any of them read his lips beyond one or two syllables - excepting Zefaris, that is. She, however, didn’t care to reveal the name, just as she hadn’t really bothered revealing the name of Tempesta.

Afterwards, there was not much time to waste - they had to leave town in order to find the nearest leyline crossing so that the Butcher’s seals could be reapplied properly. Thus, they departed, with Zelsys beckoning the others to go ahead and fire up the Sturmgandrs, saying: “I won’t be long, I just have a question for Duma.”

Once they had left, the question came out.

“The Eight Onbashira, the shrines, the divine connection - was that all true?” she asked.

The old man nodded.

“I genuinely do think that staff to be one of the Eight,” he said.

Furrowing her brow, Zel voiced her concern: “Then… Is it possible that the eight shrines housed Ankhezian God Tombs? That the priestesses of these shrines drew power from the gods interred within, with the staff acting as a medium?”

Duma gave a second, solemn nod.

“Whether this staff maintains a connection to its god, and whether the god is in any way able or willing to interact with its wielder, is a whole other question. To assuage your concerns, I know for a fact that the deity which Pateirian God’s Blood Elixir is based on, that foul mutagen, was not interred in one of the eight shrines; Itrian mythology speaks of a wrathful mantis-demon who could turn into a centipede that could wrap around Mt. Rauja seven times, and for his hubris, he was imprisoned beneath that mountain in times long before Itria was Itria, pinned in place by Black Rods.”

“The rods again…” she sighed.

“They just keep showing up, don’t they?” the old man laughed. “At least we can guess the time of that myth’s origin, as the rods were considered artifacts of prehistory even in the earliest records of their existence. Tell me, do you plan to take the long road to the north?”

Zel shook her head, “The long road is beset by blizzards and beasts that would slow our journey too much. Jorfr intends to guide us through Agartha.”

“Ah… Then you shall get to see one of the Black Rods for yourself, if the path hasn’t changed too much since I passed-” Duma began, only to stop himself. “I mean, since I last read about it. I shan’t delay you any longer, then, but I do have one last question: How is Kanbu?”

“Good. He's stopped pretending to be just a retired beast-slayer,” the beast-slayer replied.

A cackle came out of the old man.

"Of course, it's not as if waking the Guardian Statues is something a retired beast-slayer can do. He would be a fool to keep up the charade. Tell me, how many fallen did he rouse to re-enact their battle against Ubul? Forty thousand? A Reignition of that scale is not a genie that will go back in the bottle of its own accord, that battlefield will be haunted for a year or two at the least," he said, before he caught himself again and shooed Zelsys towards the exit.

"Ah, I won't keep you. Go before I spill more secret history."

With that, she left the old master to rebuild his school. Upon returning to her companions, Zel noticed that Victor was already wearing the staff-spear on his back. A leather harness hanged out from under his jacket, affixing the spear in a secure position on his back.

As it turned out, after his first significant payday from working as a militia hunter, he’d spent a significant sum on having a custom, Fog-infused spear harness made. The reason was, as he himself described it: “Because the militia-issue harnesses stunk like horsepiss and chafed like sandpaper. They weren’t designed for Boarkiller Spears either, so the balance was completely fucked with the shotgun attached.”

As Zelsys had planned, the group immediately went on to search for a site where the Broken Butcher might be re-sealed properly. Before they could begin the search for a site of high magical potency where the ritual might be fastest to perform, Victor suggested the Broken Obelisk where he had finalized his Devil’s Teeth technique. Having dealt with such edifices in the past, Zel agreed to investigate the site, as the presence of an arcane monument was a good start.

Not wanting to draw too much attention by ripping through the forest and potentially smashing a tree or two, they left their Sturmgandrs some distance from the footpath that the redhead had pointed out.

A little while into the trek, the subject of Von Wickten’s fate came up, partly because Zefaris felt the need to show Zelsys one of the photographs she’d taken. Between the angle and the expression on Von Wickten’s face as impurity-tar had begun coming out of his ears, the macabre image elicited a raucous laugh from Zelsys. She, in turn, felt the need to show it to Victor. Though it did make him blurt out a brief bout of laughter, the youth didn’t find it quite as humorous due to not being quite as desensitized as his seniors. Instead, it made him curious, because one of the things the pulps didn’t cover were the specific contents of the Willowdale Locust Queen’s hoard or the final rewards the party obtained from the Dungeon Core itself – it was merely described as a hoard of great treasures and trash alike.

“Those pills. Do they really just make you expel spiritual impurities?” Victor asked.

“Well… Yes, but it’s a side effect of their real purpose, forcing the ascendance from First to Second Circle,” Zel answered. “They crack your Azoth Stone and force your body to expel the impurities making up the shell while absorbing the Azothic Mercury inside.”

“So you’ve taken one?”

Shrugging, she shook her head: “No point. I don’t have an Azoth Stone. The pill would just come out the other end undigested. It likely formed and broke down at some point before I even came out of the tank.”

A look of remembrance came over the young man; this fit in with what he’d read in the pulps. It was written as having been called out by “the Sister”, an alchemist who had worked on the homunculus project before betraying Ikesia at some point. “If those lines on your skin mean anything, you’ve already surpassed the Azoth Stone,” she had supposedly said. Victor didn’t know nearly enough about the spiritual or philosophical aspects of cultivation to make deeper inferences, and didn’t bother trying to do so; he just deferred to Zelsys’ knowledge on the subject.

For much of the rest of the trek to the site, Victor continued to be uneasy, and no wonder. It seemed that Red’s magic still had some residual effect on him, as plates of bone rapidly grew over his neck, spreading from the point where Burgghusen had stung him. By Zel’s count, he retrieved from storage and absorbed enough bone matter to form a whole leg… And correspondingly, the growth accelerated with each bone.

“It won’t fucking stop, by the Dead Ones…” he complained under his breath, until, eventually, the growth reached his jaw, and both his complaints and new bone growth abruptly stopped.

A rite of monadic communion performed by Jorfr revealed to the norseman that it was indeed a place of great magical potency, but due to a confluence of factors.

When Jorfr initially performed his ritual, he uttered one word: “Irminsul…”

“Er… It is a great pillar, yes, but what does that have to do with its function?” Zef raised an eyebrow, being the only one other than Jorfr to understand the definition of what he had just said. In her pursuit of glyphic magic, she had dived deeper into the Borean tongue than Zelsys, who had only bothered to learn it to a conversational degree.

Upon questioning, he explained himself: “There are others like this in Borea. Sacred trees and obelisks: Man-made or at least man-managed leyline wells. This one seems to run several hundred meters into the ground, acting as a stable crossing for the local leyline network. Ubul’s death and the leyline shifts it caused seem to have overstrained it somewhat, but it clearly still functions.”

“Wonder why the temple to Koschei wasn’t a more suitable place.”

“I suspect that in the process of defacing it, the Emperor went out of his way to destroy its function as a leyline well. These minor sites escaped such a fate by virtue of relative insignificance.”

“Very good, then let’s get this done,” Zel nodded, pulling out her Tablet. It was a multi-hour ritual even with favorable circumstances such as these, after all. She joined with Jorfr at the base of the obelisk, the both of them mixing their blood into a herbal concoction of which hey both drank in preparation for the ritual.

Afterwards, the proper talismans would have to be prepared, special fabric woven from the stalks of arcane Culca plants being cut into the correct lengths and shapes. This took another twenty or so minutes.

The next step - drawing the ritual circle in both participants’ blood - would take the next half-hour… And so it did. On and on the steps went, with the final step - actually enchanting the talismans - being the most strenuous and time-consuming. Zelsys and Jorfr both entered into a ritualistic trance, leveraging their own souls against the flow of the leylines below to draw power from them.

It was then, just as she had taken a photo of the scene for posterity, that Zefaris noticed something was off. The distant sound of heavy boots. Alerting Victor, she set down her camera and pulled Pentacle from its holster, retrieving a handful of coins with her other hand.

Dragon Knights - eight of them.

“The ones that got away…” the blonde uttered before she breathed on her coins. As the parasitized knights maneuvered between the trees in an effort to close the distance, Zefaris just threw all four coins high into the air in sequence.

Four earth-shaking clangs resounded.

Four cold-iron-tipped lances of flame and smoke erupted from the muzzle of her gun.

Each struck true, ripping through wood and steel and flesh alike.

Six survived the first shot. One of these six continued stumbling on even as half his head hung from his neck and as his brains spilled out. She opened her left eye. As it rapidly spun back and forth in its socket, the pinpoint of light that was its pupil shot back and forth. In moments, she’d mentally mapped out the positions and most likely bearings of all the surviving assailants as well as Victor, based on their current velocity, head position, and posture. Based on this information, she decided to leave the two knights nearest to Victor to him, while she herself would eliminate the remaining four.

Zef holstered her revolver, pulling Tempesta from her hip as she walked at one of the survivors and unloaded shot after shot directly into the split-head knight’s brain before pulling her bayonet. In a smooth motion while walking towards the second survivor, she slotted it to the shotgun’s muzzle, swatting away her target’s sword and stabbing him through his chest plate before she fired her remaining shells into him. It wasn’t necessary - in fact, it was overkill, a waste of ammo even, but she didn’t care. This was for her.

The third survivor fell to her when he thought to employ ambush tactics, as she simply drew in a full-chested breath and burned it for Gelum. In a flash, a beam from her eye carved a glyph onto his chestplate, while she reloaded Tempesta. The glyph had cost perhaps one-fifth of the essentia available to her - the remaining fourth-fifths went into Tempesta, its brass receiver frosting over and the belladonna flower in its stock taking on an ominous glow before a frost-wreathed slug erupted from its muzzle. The moment it contacted its target - the glyph on the Dragon Knight’s chest-plate - the man was frozen solid inside his armor. A second shot shattered him into half-frozen fragments, leaving only the fourth survivor, who appeared to be the ranged specialist of the group going by his wide stance and his throat, bulged-out like that of a frog, lit up by inner flame.

Zefaris holstered Tempesta, and pulled out a coin. On this coin, she had previously carved a glyph by hand, in order to eventually test the applicability of using her Ricoshot technique on enemy projectiles. Theoretically, it had no reason not to work, but the hard part was getting it just right so that it would properly embed in her spiritual muscle memory, allowing her to replicate the technique consistently with far greater ease. She waited until the spitter-knight did his thing - she needed to see the projectile at least once, and sure enough, it ripped through the air and she just about dodged it by taking cover behind a tree.

While the knight approached and charged another shot, Zefaris, too, prepared, invoking an entirely other technique to ensure her timing would be perfect.

“Headpiercer Arts: Flicker Step…”

For her, it looked like the world stopped for a split-second when the technique went off.

For everyone else, it was as if she - and her coin - had stuttered forward by that same split-second.

In the end, the result was the same: The coin sailed through the air, flashing just as it met the knight’s firebolt. The blast of flame suddenly changed direction - not merely going back whence it came, as its originator had since repositioned, but re-aiming itself directly at the Dragon Knight’s head. He wasn’t fast enough to dodge his own projectile on reaction, and the blast took off his face and his lower jaw. Zefaris finished the job with a headshot from Pentacle, already having decided on a name for the new technique.

Headpiercer Arts: Chargeback

Meanwhile, Victor spun his staff-spear from his back, having already prepared in advance just as Zefaris had. The rings about his staff’s head took on a green glow as wisps of Bonefire sprung into being around its head. He taunted the last survivor with a gesture, running over to the knight who had fallen after a single shot, standing over him. With his free hand he reached out, grasping the man’s ribcage and ripping out its constituent Ossum through the back in the form of bone spikes. Each one came off in turn, floating around his right hand as he reshaped them, into Devil’s Teeth in seconds. The Bonefire which he’d conjured served to enchant them, and with the staff he launched them at his assailant. The fact that it took him several shots to down one of these crooks where Zefaris could do so in one or two didn’t make a difference to him; Victor was still proud that he was even able to kill a single Dragon Knight.

A second approached him from behind thinking to ambush him, but he’d been through this song-and-dance before. A bit of focus, some Aer drawn from the air and Ignis pulled from the earth. Staff or no staff, it was unsettling how much easier it had become now that he had the full intent to kill. He felt a grin forcing its way onto his face. Why was he excited? His gut resolutely insisted that this was a life or death, but some cackling, mad thing deep in the recesses of his brain told him it was fun. It came from the same place whence the blazing, murderous fury had originated when he first witnessed Von Wickten’s true wretchedness.

The dragon knight was at hand. He retreated, meeting the man’s wild sword-swings with the sword-spear end of his spear. It was terribly convenient, this staff, but Victor still wasn’t used to it, and so resorted to incanting out loud. He’d always used arcane mathematics to help himself get into the headspace, but finding that they just didn’t work anymore even if he tried, he instead made up an incantation based on something that elicited the correct feeling to perform pyromancy. Sturmblitz Kunst 0 explicitly recommended taking inspiration from art or myth, and so, his mind defaulted to a song lyric - a song which a band in the Kargarian Caravan had performed both times they had passed through Arches.

First, however, he needed a blast of Aer to knock his opponent off-balance. After that, it was just a matter of aiming the spell, knowing the lazy, sluggish spray of dirty flame it would produce. He instinctively held out the staff with his left hand and aligned the magic circle on his right hand with its largest ring, for no real reason beyond the fact it felt right.

“Unleash, fire and flames alight…”

A stream of flame flowed forth from his hand, fingers stiff in an igneic gesture, coalescing into a bead in the ring’s center. The four smaller, jade rings realigned into even spacings around the main ring.

“Full force, strike…”

The jade rings began spinning in place, their green colour briefly changing to white and sparks flying from them. Even now, the bead continued to grow, the black-white stream of Ignis gradually replaced by a translucent, barely-perceptible shade of Fog. Unknowingly, or perhaps carelessly, Victor had blended Aer into the mixture.

"C'mon Oculus, don't betray me now..." a thought went through his mind, but the only answer he got was the reassuring thrum of a stable arcane connection between wielder and artifact. This was the name which had come to him - Oculus, the Ninth Onbashira. Doubts assuaged, he chanted final part of the incantation: “Fight the Night!”

The gesture, the mental pattern, the essentia involved - this had previously produced a gout of dirty, sticky flame, sluggish and slow-moving. This time, though, the first time he’d used it since meeting with Zelsys, it was something entirely different. It felt as though, for a split-second, time froze. He could see the bead of flame compressing and deforming, nearly forming a ring with a hollow center. A loud crack erupted from his staff as a sudden blaze ripped forth all at once, its pure-white corona leading in harsh streaks and causing a blinding flash of light while its pitch-black core followed, shielding Victor from being blinded by his own magic. The recoil of it sent him reeling, stumbling backwards, the heat washing over him in a sudden wave. Before he could get his bearings, time resumed.

When it cleared, the Dragon Knight was left burned and blinded, his eyes seared out of their sockets and the skin of his face bubbling, even the edges of his armor had taken on a cherry-red glow.

Vic stood stunned at what he had just done, for but a moment, before he lunged forward and cut the knight’s throat out.

“Did you just… Did you just turn a lyric from a Knights of Rebellion song into an incantation?” came an amused question from Zefaris, interrupted by a brief chuckle in the middle. It was accented by the subtle click-clacking of her revolver’s dungeon-tech holster as its arcane mechanisms reloaded the empty chambers.

She had already slain all the other knights, and had merely been watching what Victor would do with this last one.

“Y-yeah, I… The pamphlet said-” Vic blurted out, but before he could muster up a response she walked over, and to his immense confusion, put her hand ontop of his head, a faint smile on her face. She was perhaps half a head taller than him, a fact that hadn’t truly dawned on him until now for one simple reason: Though Zefaris was tall, she was still shorter than Zelsys and Jorfr. As this realization sunk in and he fruitlessly grasped for words to form into a sentence, she finally said something.

“Good choice! They told us to use lyrics in training camp, too,” she praised him, lightly patting him on the head as she did so before she just turned around as if nothing had happened, walking towards the obelisk. She sat down and pulled out her Tablet. The manner in which the blonde had just beamed with warmth completely caught him off-guard, considering how harshly it contrasted to her usually cool, professional aura. Still processing what had just happened, Victor slowly put his staff on his back and pulled out his own Tablet, also making his way into the broken obelisk’s general vicinity as he browsed through the device. Unknowingly, his reason for doing so was the same as Zef’s - taking a look at the newly-registered technique and officiating its name in the device’s records.

It took some finagling to get the device to pull up the list, since he hadn’t used this function very many times at all. Most of his techniques fell under Lesser Glyphic Magic, with everything that involved devilbone and/or didn’t involve glyphs being categorized under Devilbone Arts. To his surprise, there wasn’t one new unnamed technique, but three.

LESSER GLYPHIC MAGIC Air Gust Mud Slick Flame Weapon Flame Trick Strength of Earth Bramble Growth DEVILBONE ARTS (UNIQUE) Devil’s Teeth Boneyard Armor Unnamed Technique Unnamed Technique Unnamed Technique

He put it down for a moment, squatting down next to Zefaris as he turned his attention towards Zel and Jorfr. They sat inside the ritual circle in a silent trance, seemingly ignorant of the outside world. The blonde put her Tablet away, her left eye cracking open so that she could see him.

“Unsettling…” a thought shot through his head. The matte blackness, the swirling, spiral-shaped pupil, the way it moved in the socket, freely spinning.

“Say, Lady Zefaris-” he began.

She interrupted: “...Just Zefaris is fine. Go on.”

“Why did you put your hand on my head like that?”

“Oho…” came a non-response. Then, out of nowhere, she did that exact thing again, turning her head to look at him head-on. A startlingly lackadaisical grin on her face and tone in her voice, she answered: ”You just remind me of a soldier I used to know is all. I can stop, if it makes you uncomfortable.”

That wasn’t it. Victor just hadn’t expected anything of the sort - maybe a pat on the back at the end of a training session.

“N-no, it doesn’t…” he trailed off, allowing it to go on for a short while before speaking up again. “Alright, you can stop now, I’m not a cat.”

As her hand pulled away he sat down, taking his Tablet back in hand. This time, Zefaris glanced over.

“Aer, Terra, Ignis, Aqua, Viriditas… And Ossum. The full wizard kit. At your age it’s a bit sad how much time you must’ve spent just to learn the basics of all those,” she remarked.

Vic let out a sigh, agreeing: “Ossum and Ignis come naturally, at least, but you’re not wrong. It is what it is, I’d rather not think back on it.”

He willed the Tablet to close the listing for glyphic magic, and started going through the details of his three unnamed techniques. One by one, they revealed themselves and he named them.

DEVILBONE ARTS (UNIQUE) Devil’s Teeth Boneyard Armor Volcanic Fist Fight the Night Bone-eating Hand

After that point, nothing much of note occurred. They waited out the remainder of the ritual. Victor asked how much longer it was likely to take, to which Zefaris answered: “Two hours or so.”

With that much time to spare, Victor decided to go around and rob their assailants for everything they had and burn the corpses, not to dispose of evidence, but to dispose of the inevitable smell.

“You think plate armor will sell?” he asked at the beginning of this time-killing endeavor.

The answer he got was equally pragmatic: “The parts that are easy to refit, maybe!”

It made sense. The Dragon Knights’ bodies were considerably more sizable than those of normal people. And so, taking his time, Victor set each of the bodies alight with Bonefire one by one, burning them out of their armors, sitting down for a little while while they burned before moving on to looting them. As he did this, Zefaris took some time to clean her gun, as had become a habit for her. What money they each carried added up to a good sum, even if a considerable portion was in Huén. As for their weapons, most were good-quality, but mundane swords - two of them had carried guns, the same rolling-block pistols as Victor already had. Still, he took them.

Zefaris took quite a bit of interest in these pistols, asking for one to examine and commenting on its construction: “That’s a clever way of handling a breech, looks like a proper scratch-built gun instead of a refitted sparklock. Looks to be chambered for standard paper musketball cartridges, good bit of kick there… I’ll have to send word of this innovation back to Willowdale, if only so that Collier develops a better mass-production pistol than those jam-happy volcanics.”

“Won’t that put Collier in direct opposition to whichever Gunsmiths’ Guild the manufacturer is registered with? There’s all sorts of vested interests to keep in mind…” Victor raised an eyebrow in question, tilting his head to the side.

“I don’t think she cares much, given the fact she’s using secret military knowledge as the basis for much of her current work. Hell, see this?” she said, pulling Tempesta out of its holster. It sat folded in half, only to snap together through the motion of unholstering alone. This being the first time Victor had seen the gun unholstered up-close, he couldn’t help but blurt out: “Ooh… Can I see that again?”

As if she’d been waiting for that exact reaction, Zefaris released the latch holding the gun together at the top, folding it in half in her hands. Then, with a flick of the wrist, she unfolded it into its complete state. She rested it in her lap, remarking: “Oof, it’s too easy to get used to it feeling nearly weightless with that bayonet…”

The Stone-blessed Bayonet, that inconspicuous blade which had soaked up Ubul’s earthen might while it was stuck in his back during his years-long self-petrification. As the books described it, the blade’s latent power was unlocked by a Dungeon Core as one of the trial rewards, causing it to impart a strength boost to its attuned wielder significant enough to bump up a D+ Force rating up to C+, a full letter grade. For some reason it had slipped Victor’s mind despite being mentioned in the books, perhaps because it was so utterly overshadowed by Zef’s use of firearms.

“Anyhow, where was I… Right, Tempesta here - it’s actually a scaled-down version of the intended armament for First-model Tank Suits, the Macroshotgun. The same thing goes for the self-contained cartridges, it’s just a downscaled, simplified version of cannon shells.”