“Wonder why they didn’t just start with smaller cartridges and scale them up, sounds like it would’ve been easier to make scale prototypes…” Victor pondered, picking up the pistol and fiddling with its mechanism.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” she shrugged, folding her shotgun back in its holster. “Maybe it was easier to get cannons to production because artillery didn’t fall under the purview of gunsmithing guilds. Maybe it was that the existing machine-tools were better suited to making big ol’ shells. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Sage had just considered upgrading our artillery more important than infantry weapons, considering how effective our use of it was during the war - it was artillery, after all, that forced Ubul to self-petrify. Still, those are just guesses. Could be any of a thousand reasons.”

Silence fell over them as they observed the ritual. It proceeded without incident, and after a while, the broken obelisk came alive. Both its base and the broken-off section alighted with rows and rows of glyphs, the latter section soundlessly levitating into the air and seating itself back into place. The obelisk’s glow suddenly dissipated, bursting out of the edifice as pale-blue, glowing Fog, which was abruptly sucked into the ritual circle. The circle itself took on this glow, which seemed to flow into the new seals, granting that same glow to the sealing glyphs upon them. Still in a trance, Zelsys picked up the Broken Butcher and unwrapped its temporary sealing wrap, beginning the process of affixing the new, proper seals to it.

Once every last seal was in place, Zel and Jorfr snapped out of their trance, both stretching as they stood up. She spun the blade in her hand, briefly causing it to levitate before stowing it away, satisfied.

“Alright, that’s done,” she uttered, stretching again. Her eyes turned to Victor. “Anything left to do here, or are we good to go?”

Victor had anticipated this question. He’d already said his goodbyes to the few people he thought might truly care that he’s gone, and so there was nothing anchoring him to Arches.

“Ready,” he said.

And so they left, selling off the bulkiest of their loot at the first trading post that wouldn’t ask questions - one that happened to be just outside the duchy’s borders. Between the Dragon Knights’ armor and weapons, a good profit was made.

Twin steel beasts screamed northward along an ancient and unmarred road.

It was a road that had cut through this land since millennia past, anchored deep and suffused with ancient magic so that it might repair itself and never crumble. Upon these twin beasts, four people rode, making their way towards a subterranean passage to the remote nation of Borea. A conqueror of storms, a woman who walked as one with the grave, a norseman able to summon the might of his forebears. Last among them was the vain, red-headed child of a minor noble house, perhaps best described as a wizard of sorts; not a proper, robe and pointed hat wizard, but still a competent spellcaster by current standards, standards which had been driven six feet into the ground by the very war which had caused this whole mess.

Through the wartorn landscape of Ikesia they rode, stopping or slowing down only if their path became treacherous, covering hundreds of kilometers every single day. The country, being little more than a recently-unified amalgam of many smaller duchies and fiefdoms, sprawled across the continent, its vast territories standing unrepentant in the face of foreign occupation. It had been this sheer scale combined with lightning-fast industrialization that had caused the outbreak of war in the first place, initially intended to be little more than the older powers taking some territory and with it factories, so they might reverse-engineer Ikesian technology for themselves. The Grekurian Statehood to the east, the Divine Empire of Pateiria to the west, and what had once been a swath of buffer-states inbetween, left desolate by the ascendance of the Divine Emperor himself.

They rode within eyeshot of both surreal and horrific remnants of the war; tremendous scars in the landscape, sections of road barricaded by burned-out tanks, with only a path wide enough for carriages opened up. Swathes of forests had been burned down, fields and rivers left barren by hateful magic. Cliffs and hills were riddled by thousands of craters, arrows, and discarded weapons.

In the first day of travel, they passed not one, not two, but three battlefields. One was far too new for the battle to have taken place during the war, but it was the oldest one that left the biggest impression. A lake of blood took up its center, with smaller ponds filling craters, and a great number of truly terrible-looking beasts lingered around the blood-lake’s edge. As they drew near, the true nature of this place became obvious, for all four of them had heard, read, or otherwise learned of places like these. A battle so savage and intense had taken place here that all of the blood which the combatants had shed was transmuted into a liquid rich in Rubedo, too dense to be washed away by the rain. Rubedo was the very essence of the cycle of survival, of pure, raw instinct, a vital component in the metabolism of any true animal and even some plants. Just a whiff of its fumes could induce a bevy of primeval effects, varied both by dosage and subject.

Scarlet fumes hung over the battlefield, the beasts which drunk from its lakes stuck in a rabid cycle of violence and copulation, replenishing the lake. They were twice, thrice the natural size one might expect from them, covered in shallow wounds and misshapen in all sorts of ways, from disproportionately enlarged musculature and genitals to horns and antlers growing from bare skin. Some of them were obviously just animals, wolves, bears, deer and wildcats, but… A good number among the beasts looked a bit too flat-faced, their quadrupedal gaits didn’t quite look right, and they had no tails. Perhaps most unsettling was the presence of an elevated walkway over the mess, leading a ways into the lake, roped buckets at its furthest edge. Someone had been collecting the Rubedo. A bucket floated atop the fluid, and a snapped rope hanged from the pier’s edge.

They had gas masks, but Zelsys wasn’t willing to take this risk. Who knew what might be dwelling in the lake of blood.

“We have to go around,” Zelsys said. She knew better than to distrust a gut feeling.

And so, they drove on further.

However, sooner rather than later, Zelsys felt her focus slipping. As the Nth burned-out outpost and wrecked tank passed them by, she finally decided to address it. That incessant feeling that wasn’t quite pain, or an itch, or a tickle. It was inside her jaw, like the roots of her teeth were abuzz somehow.

During one of the necessary stops to check the map she’d surrendered controls of the motorbike to Zefaris, excusing that she needed a moment to think so that she could go into a meditative trance and commune directly with her Primordial Self. The purpose was singular: To make that feeling go away. Her teeth had changed once before, after escaping from the Dungeon. The Dungeon had purified the Azoth Stone of a Maneater of Retribution for her - an accursed, cannibalistic being born from a vengeance curse. Alongside her Dualism and Retributive Battery traits, even the purified elixir the Dungeon Core had made from the Azoth Stone inflicted mutations as it was fully processed, causing her tongue to become a long, prehensive muscle, suited for licking marrow out of broken bones, while her third and fourth teeth from the center had sharpened and grown longer. But that change was long over, three-quarters of a year in the past, so what whence did this sensation originate?

Unable to pin it down as she was, she had decided to retreat into the Dream-Desert, the mental landscape where she had ritualistically fought a manifested memory of all her previous foes to establish a direct line of communication between her own Thinking and Primordial selves, the Ego and the Id. Since the connection had been established here, this imagined place was where she returned when she needed to speak with the Primordial Self directly.

They sat atop a dune - the Thinking Self and the Primordial Self. Words needn’t be exchanged for the latter to know why the former had called this meeting.

“It cannot be done,” the bestial mirror image of herself answered. A vague frustration was audible in its voice, too. “That feeling. It is not pain… Let me cla-ri-fy.”

The Primordial Self held up its hand. A bolt of lightning descended from the clouded sky, striking the sand, kicking up a geyser of molten glass that hardened into a rod perfectly within the Primodial Self’s hand. Where the Thinking Self had enjoyed perfect awareness of and control over bodily functions previously reserved to the Primordial Self’s domain, so too had the Primordial Self learned of things such as imagination and foreplanning, and it put these to use. It still struggled to pronounce certain words or form long sentences, however. With the staff of fulgurite, the Primordial Self commanded sand up from the dune to form a perfect diagram of Zel’s body. It shifted, thinning out until it showed the nervous system wound around her skeleton. Not only had nerves moved, but all her bones had thickened slightly, with the design of the right wrist having changed to involve fewer separate parts so it could better withstand the strain of repeatedly using the Thunderclap Sting technique.

The sand-effigy further changed, closing in on the upper third of the body, the brain’s intestine-like tangle now dominating the image. Its layout differed slightly from a normal brain, the most noticeable part being the much deeper, numerous creases in its surface. If the Thinking Self squinted, it could picture the creases which were hidden from view. The whole thing was further enveloped in an elastic membrane that was absent inside a normal skull, one which anchored it and protected from impacts that would cause serious brain damage to anyone else.

The Primordial Self gestured to a spot in the brain. Sparks from the fulgurite lit up a few grains of sand to highlight it.

“Pain.”

Then, it gestured to a slightly different spot.

“Not pain. Different signals. A new mutation is needed - to shut the feeling out.”

It wasn’t the most succinct explanation, but the Thinking Self understood. Since the sensation driving her crazy wasn’t transmitted or processed the same way as pain, it would require an entirely new mutation for her to regulate it the way she could do with pain.

“What is its source, then?”

A wave of the fulgurite again. Most of the sand fell away, leaving only enough to mock up a diagram of her grinning mouth. The four front teeth shifted, with all of the teeth becoming pointier until they meshed perfectly with the canines in an interlocking bear trap. Even the molars took on slightly more jagged silhouettes, even though they remained mostly flat.

“New front teeth. Current layout… Soon to be crooked. Drifting out of place. Need to adjust for mutation. Maneater teeth not… Not built for the long-term.”

Two memories came to the surface. The first was an image of the aforementioned Maneater of Retribution; its twisted, semi-human visage, a curtain of mottled brown hair hanging down over his face and parted by twisted antlers erupting from his skull. He had torn his own cheeks in half from opening his mouth so wide, and his teeth were as crooked as they were pointy. By contrast, Zel’s own teeth were straight and symmetrical, making her four mutated, Maneater-like teeth an ill fit. The second memory was nothing more than a thought: “We did agree to that, though I’d hoped it wouldn’t take long enough for me to forget about it…”

The connection now beginning to fade as the sounds of the real world flooded in, the Primordial Self talked back to her for once, even going so far as to form longer sentences: “Replacing childhood teeth takes years. Two seasons to reshape existing teeth is fast.”

The Primordial Self’s imposing figure blew away as no more than sand, and the next time Zelsys blinked, she found herself back atop the Sturmgandr, leaning up against Zef’s back, her arms wrapped securely around the blonde’s waist.

She thought to question why this hadn’t been a problem the last time her teeth had changed, when the Maneater’s Azoth had first taken physiological effect and sharpened her canines alongside lengthening her tongue… But it was answered by the spark of another memory: That mutation had taken place while she was unconscious.

Without further incident for the time being, the journey north continued. The closer to the Northern Capital the party came, the more dismal the conditions seemed to become. Soon they would reach the last towns before a vast swath of swamps and bayous that took up much of Ikesia’s north, a region which gave to the country as much as it took. The so-called Gaullam Labyrinth changed with each passing season, never staying the same and driving those who lived there to become superstitious folk with an uncanny connection to the place. They would need to traverse the newly-flooding region, pass within the immediate vicinity of the occupied Northern Capital, and then cross the Ikes mountains to reach the deterrence fields of Titan’s Bane. However, traversing the Gaullam and reaching the passage to Titan’s Bane was still at least two days’ travel off.

One particular incident came about when the group made camp for the evening some distance from one of the planned stopping points, with Zelsys being recognized at a trading outpost. It was more or less a shanty-town, built around the ruins of a bombed-out fort and named for the number painted on the side of a burned-out First-model Tank Suit that took up the central square: Fort 57. Not wanting to draw too much attention, but still too curious to stay behind, Zelsys was the only one to visit the place, leaving Zefaris and Jorfr to deal with the campsite, maintain the Sturmgandrs, and put Victor to task in training. They wouldn’t have the time or equipment for any truly serious training before they reached Borea, but Zel had something in mind to help sharpen the boy before then.

The proprietor of Fort 57’s ramshackle tent-bar requested her aid in slaying a beast which she’d neither heard nor read about: A mollusk.

“...Like a snail?”

“A snail, yes. A rather fast snail the size of a small house, a snail that spits acid and can’t be harmed by any mundane weapon short of a siege engine or CP-T laced explosives. That’s not the worst part, the big cunts are normally useful livestock, the problem is that this one got parasitized. The parasite makes it go apeshit to try and spread its eggs as far as possible, carried in the snail’s acid spit, and perhaps the worst part is that due to its sheer size it can control humans just fine as an intermediary stage. Goes in through any hole it can find and- Well you get the picture. One weakness besides fire or lightning or what have you, is sight. The parasite shoves itself up in the snail’s eyestalks, stretches ‘em out and uses ‘em like flails, but the snail goes blind. Now, don’t assume that it’s deaf - most snails are deaf, these fuckers hear better than most humans.”

“The contract, show me,” Zel held out a hand. The contract board was just behind the busted-down piece of fort wall that had been repurposed as a counter through the placement of a horizontal board. Skimming the paper, she saw that it only had the absolute bare minimum of information - a sketch of the beast, a few pointers of intel, a somewhat underwhelming payout given how threatening the beast sounded, and a hazard rating. Infuriatingly, the hazard rating was in gemstone rather than anything reasonable like a letter grade or a numbered class: Emerald.

“Emerald hazard rating? How high is that?” she asked, trying to be civil to the man. He confusedly tilted his head at her, emitting a vaguely questioning noise.

Zel slammed the contract down on the counter, knife-handing at the barman to punctuate her words: “E, D, C, B, A, S, what fucking letter grade does Emerald correspond to?!”

He shrunk back in deathly fear, and the eyes of the relatively few patrons affixed themselves to her, but the attention quickly dispersed. It was not a new display, as the barman, too, understood what she was demanding, sighing relief as he dragged himself back to his feet: “Ah, my apologies, you must be from the south; Emerald is equivalent to D+ to C+. Normally I’d recommend you to bring a party and some heavier weapons, maybe drag a cannon or two off of the nearest battlefield, but… Something tells me you can handle a giant snail. Just a hunch.”

“Why the weird rating system?” she raised an eyebrow.

Another sigh. He had clearly had to explain this any times before.

“The viscount of this territory is rather fond of the rank systems which were in place during his youth so he forces everyone to use them, or at least claims that to be the case. Though it uh… Doesn’t really match up with any Pateirian rating systems, and he doesn’t exactly look like any Pateirian I’ve ever seen. That, and he’s… Surprisingly reasonable in matters other than this one. Dyed-in-the-wool transmigrator if you ask me, but don’t go saying I told you so.”

“D+. That was the estimated rating for the infested dungeon, barring the queen and all the other unforeseen hazards…” she thought, considering if it might be a good idea to take Victor along. “But I’d rather not risk it.”

“And I… Don’t look like a transmigrator, then?” she tilted her head, trying everything in her power to make that question non-threatening. The barman flinched back nevertheless.

“No no, of course you don’t! It’s this… Weird look in his eyes, the way he talks, what he talks about. Plenty of people out there just look strange, but there’s an otherworldliness about transmigrators that you can’t mistake, like… I can tell that someone is from far away when they come in, right? I got that impression when the viscount stopped by, but a hundredfold.”

Zel nodded understandingly at the man stumbling over his own words as he tried to explain what she presumed to be a nascent sense for the spiritual. It was called the Second Sight, as she recalled, common enough among normals that a village could be expected to have someone with some degree of it.

“That’s a skill you should develop, reading people must be useful for someone in your profession. As far as the rating goes, which end of that D-C range would you say the big ol’ snail falls towards?”

“C+, easy. The only reason this isn’t a high-priority contract is that we can’t afford the extra fees most slayers would levy; in fact, we’re sort-of at the end of our rope here, shit outta luck. We’d ignored the big bastard for a while, but the snail’s running on dry and the parasite’s getting desperate, so it’s been wandering closer and closer to our walls. We’ve already had to burn a couple parasite-ridden corpses, unless someone gets rid of it we’ll have to abandon this place. Better that than to get melted or eaten from the inside, y’know.”

“Definitely not a good teaching opportunity.”

Still, she was curious, she wanted the money, and plainly just felt like killing a giant snail.

“Alright, where was it last seen? Any known stomping grounds, lair, et cetera?” she sighed resignedly, taking the contract and stuffing it into her pocket.

“Yes, of course. Do you have a map of the area?”

The act of that man marking things out on her map felt familiar, somehow. All too familiar. Like it was some deeply-rooted ritual that superseded her or anyone who had come before her.

“One more thing: Any notable loot to look out for? Parts I might want to avoid damaging? Does it have an Azoth Stone?”

“No on all of the above. They’re completely natural animals, I’m afraid - their acid is a valuable alchemical solvent and many of their organs are similarly valuable, but this particular parasite taints the whole animal. The cost and hazard of cleaning it would far outstrip any value.”

“Bump the reward by ten percent, then. Twenty if I kill the thing today.”

The barman clearly considered haggling, but the prospect of being rid of the beast before the end of the day was something he couldn’t refuse. After staring Zelsys down for a few moments and inevitably folding under the sheer aura of self-assured smugness that radiated from the woman, he conceded: “Fine. Bring in the beak as proof, you’ll know it when you see it.”

She returned to camp, informing the others that she would be back before nightfall and departing on her personal Sturmgandr. With no passengers, there was no reason not to push the steel beast’s Thundercharger as far as it could go, ripping a trail through the already decimated landscape.

Zefaris had half a mind to ask the reason for Zel’s apparent urgency when she returned seemingly in a rush, but the beast-slayer made it obvious enough. So, the blonde’s only question before her lover left was: “What monster is it?”

“Big ol’ snail that spits acid!” said the beast-slayer as she leapt atop the Sturmgandr. With a deep breath, she brought it to life and rode off.

Though Zef thought nothing of it, Victor seemed alarmed. He turned his attention from his target shooting exercise, allowing a Devil’s Tooth to veer off-course and strike the edge of a target log, concern evident in his face. His alarm faded almost instantly and a mutter came out of him: “...It should be fine.”

Raising an eyebrow to him, Jorfr rumbled a question as he tended to the stew currently bubbling over the campfire: “Y’think there’s reason for concern?”

“N-not truly, it’s just that… If this is, indeed, the beast I think it is, the only way it could become violent enough for a bounty to be placed on it is Black Rope. It would be a cause for concern if this wasn’t Zelsys.”

“Black Rope?” Zefaris questioned.

“You ever see those nastly black string parasites that sometimes infest mantises and the like? It’s like that, only big enough to control humans and giant snails. I… Think it’s a feral form of some ancient Ankhezian living weapon, used to destroy livestock of those exact snails due to their production of valuable alchemical solvents.”

The norseman’s face betrayed a consideration of coming after her just in case she needed help.

“The Black Rope shouldn’t be an issue, though the snails’ shells are nearly impervious to magical attack, and that’s where all their organs are… No, I’m sure it’ll be fine. It’s a nearly-blind animal, at worst it’ll take her a little while to whittle it down.”

“Alright, back to practice,” Zefaris ordered, clapping her hands to grab Vic’s attention. “Go gather your ammo and try again, this time form the biggest projectile you can. Fire it at that boulder over there.”

As Victor laboured to pull his constructs free and re-absorb them, Zelsys had just entered the nearby woods…

It was a somewhat dense forest, but a quite mundane one, with a dirt road cleared amidst the trees. Her quarry’s trail was the only standout feature, with charred, blackened greenery littering the roadside, the road becoming increasingly muddier as she went on; it was a slick, sticky, stringy mud with a pungent smell, doubtlessly the result of the beast’s slime-trail.

A deserted homestead came into view, the road running through the middle of it. Bare fields to either side, with a large house and some smaller buildings taking up spots next to the road. No snail; only traces of its presence, leading to the largest building: A barn on the far end of the property. Zel got off her motorbike, drawing closer to investigate the site. Something felt off. Dark storm clouds swirled above. The place was deserted, but the atmosphere here wasn’t… Hollow, so to speak. She could imagine people working here yesterday, then just getting up and leaving, whereas both the barman and the contract had made it seem as though the snail had been a known problem for weeks if not months. Making her way towards the main house, she found it to be unlocked. Room after room turned out to be empty and deserted, until she made her way to the bedroom and discovered a tangled mess of limbs and flesh, laying on the bed. It looked almost like a ball of undefinable meat at a glance, wrapped in thick, black tendrils.

“An egg sac of some sort?” she thought, considering how she might best burn it. CP-T was the obvious answer, but a phial of the precious substance felt like a waste for something like this. Its skin was a myriad shades of flesh, from bruised blue, to green, to jaundiced yellow and infected red - it was every colour other than the right ones. It looked stringy and rotten, the parasites clearly not caring how long their secondary vessels lasted. The mass stirred in place, black tentacles erupting from within as the combined gurgling cries of an entire family sounded from it. Five mismatched legs extended from its base. Standing up, it turned to face her, revealing four faces as its many tendrils whipped about and tried to reach for her. She just cut them down and stomped them to the ground, cries of pain issuing from the abomination’s two childlike faces. The third, vaguely female-looking face, was inanimate, while, most disturbingly, the male face appeared lucid. His eyes were bloodshot and his expression that of utmost torment, but he spoke. This scrap of humanity was the only plausible explanation for why it hadn’t attacked her yet.

He looked up at her and spoke, and the voices of the entire family came together to form a terrible voice. There was no tangible emotion in it, the humanity was nearly gone - just the broken scraps of a being that had once been human, now relieved by the promise of death.

“At last. There is alkahest in the basement. Melt us, or burn us. It is the only way. Hurry. I inured myself to the parasite, but I am only one body out of four.”

In the time it took the amalgamated family to say that, Zelsys had cut down at least seven Black Rope tendrils that had tried to reach for her. A small pile of clippings laid in the doorway, in a pool of juices and twitching, nascent parasites the length and thickness of horse hairs.

“And the snail?” she questioned, if only to confirm her suspicions.

“In the barn. Four more people. Grandparents. The-”

Suddenly, the Wife’s face came alive and the Husband fell silent as she wheeze-yelled: “FEED US OR KILL US, MORSEL. DO NOT WASTE TIME WITH TALK.”

It was at that moment that several tendrils spiraled together and lashed out at her, smashing part of the doorframe after she’d stepped out of the way. She baited another strike, only to grab the composite tendril with her left hand and cut it off as closely to the main mass as possible. The Wife’s cries of pain resounded in Zel’s ears as she left the room to check the basement.