The shop was set up in a repurposed jail, with four cells in total. It was a place of organized chaos, with tables, barrels, and crates all stacked high with weapons of all qualities. Crates of bullets, lead stock, bullet molds were at the back next to shelves similarly stacked with various firearms, while gunpowder was securely locked inside a cell that had been repurposed as storage. Two other cells were also filled with displays of presumably high-quality merchandise, while the fourth had been repurposed as the counter, with a section of bars cut away to make a window.

“A-ah, greetings! Welcome to my establishment, can I help you find-” the middle-aged, somewhat greasy merchant began when he saw her, but stumbled over his own words the moment she looked at him.

“Can I help you-” he began again, but she interrupted him, part out of annoyance and part to end his own misery.

“It’s fine, I can find what I want,” she said. The incident still stuck in her mind, and she hoped to banish the mental image of that woman with commerce.

He deflated where he stood in relief, uttering: “Alright, good...”

She walked through the jail-turned-store until she saw a barrel full of robust-looking swords, clearly intended for chopping and advertised as high-carbon spring steel. Taking one from the barrel, she gave it a cursory look. It was a thick, strongly built chopper, with a wicked point that would make it good for use with Fulgarrow.

Weighing the chunky blade in her hand, Zelsys spun it around a few times. Something about the center of mass felt off, as did its magnetic properties - Zel couldn’t pin it down just by feel, but it certainly didn’t feel like a spring steel blade.

“How’s the metal composition on this, do you know? Forging? Crystal structure?” she offhandedly asked the merchant, not expecting an answer. It was, more than anything, a justification for what she did next: She stuck out her tongue, and then stuck it out some more. And more. And more, until what at first seemed like a particularly long tongue was revealed to be a thirty-centimeter tentacle more than anything else. With sparks dancing across her tongue’s surface, she licked the blade along its entire length as if to taste it, and her tongue shot back into her mouth in a blink.

Her brow furrowed.

“This is pig iron,” she uttered, turning a gaze to the merchant. “Did you know it was pig iron?”

To her satisfaction, the merchant appeared aghast at the revelation, his eyes going wide. He opened the cell door and walked out, standing next to the barrel with his hands crossed.

“I-I’ve received more complaints than usual in recent months, but I thought it was just that the quality of product was overall lower ‘cause all the good stuff got bought up for the war! Ah, what will I do now… How am I supposed to know which of my blades are trash, now?” he ranted, throwing up his hands in dismay.

A grin grew on the beast-slayer’s face, and she squatted down before the merchant. Even now, she barely had to crane her head to meet his gaze.

“I know a few tricks. I’ll teach you how to test your blades and you give me the pick of your stock, how’s that? You lose some good blades, and gain the ability to never get swindled by an Ea-Nasir again.”

“Some? I-I would need to know how many blades that entails to make such a choice...”

Of course. He assumed she’d drive him into bankruptcy, as a normal person reasonably would when dealing with an unknown cultivator.

“Two-dozen,” she offered.

“Without more concrete immediate payment, I can not shoulder that sort of loss. The ability to ascertain the quality of goods is invaluable, do not mistake me, but… I do not have the sort of financial cushion to be able to gamble on a long-term investment.”

She shrugged, “Fine. A two-thirds discount, with the number of swords I’ll take off your hands you’ll be set for two, three months easily.”

“I’ll do fourth-fifths off, on the condition that you teach me the metal-testing secret…” he said, then smacked the side of the barrel. “And take these lemons off my hands. They ought to be of some use to you; I can’t sell this shit with a clean conscience, besides.”

She held out a hand. The merchant met it, reaching down. A slight squeeze was enough to make him wince. Zel grinned, letting go: “Deal.”

She went on to scour the merchant’s entire stock top to bottom, left to right, sorting through his numerous blades and picking out nearly thirty specimens in total - of these, thirteen were truly good quality blades. Of these thirteen, most were some variant of a double-edged straight sword, well suited to throwing, but two were massive cleavers which the merchant agreed to hand over for free. His reasoning was such: “People keep coming in asking if they’re Captain’s Cleavers. They never come back when I tell them no.”

“This one’ll fly nicely…” she murmured as she weighed a particularly long, slender sword in her hand.

“Wait, you mean to throw them? In that case why not just use javelins, or even sharpened steel rods?” the merchant questioned.

“Maybe in a pinch, but I’d rather be able to properly use my weapons in melee when someone wises up and closes the distance… And I don’t know jack about using pure thrusting weapons,” Zel conceded, shrugging.

“Ah, no point questioning a cultivator about her own fighting style I guess… Alright, let me ring you up,” he sighed, gesturing for her to hand over the blade. Even with the merchant’s inhuman proficiency in the use of a mechanical cash register, it took several minutes to tally everything up.

“Do you only take gelt? I’ve got some muddled Huén from the Kargarians, if those would work,” she offered. “Muddled” Pateirian Huén were an ideal currency for under-the-table dealings, as they still had arcane safeguards to ensure authenticity and value without being traceable by scrying like normal Huén. The merchant looked around to ensure nobody else was around, and gave an eager nod, hissing: “You should’ve said so earlier, I wouldn’t have haggled as much. Some of my suppliers charge hand over fist if I use any currency other than muddled Huén.”

Once the monetary transaction had been completed and she'd stowed all of the swords away, the time came to uphold the rest of Zel's side of the deal. To her relief, the merchant had good handwriting and as such it wasn't too much of a pain to teach him the very simple talisman patterns necessary to produce ones which would identify metals. She wrote down several patterns for different alloys she thought he might want to test for.

"Now, this is important," she said, holding up one of the example talismans she'd made. "One of these will only go off if the object you affix it to fits the metallurgic criteria inscribed in the talisman. Even if they seem arbitrary and unscientific, it will work, as long as the criteria are sensical. When you use one of these you're making a deal with the local Metallum spirits in exchange for a bit of your own spiritual energy, so if you use these a too many times a day, you'll get a splitting headache, think of it like a spiritual version of muscle exhaustion. You can eventually develop a stronger affinity for Metallum and even raise your Aether rating from using and making these frequently."

"R-right, thanks again," the merchant uttered, enamored with the slight glow of a talisman he'd made and affixed to a steel saber.

Zel left the man to his talismans, relieved that it had worked. Talismanic magic was an art related to glyphic magic, ritualism, and shamanism. A talisman could work for anyone, but making new ones required certain affinities. In this case, the talismans were so fundamental that a normal blacksmith could be expected to have the Metallum affinity from metalworking. That the merchant had the necessary affinity proved he wasn't just selling weapons because it was profitable.

Meanwhile, back at camp…

Sitting by the fireside, Victor looked to Zefaris with a question: “Lady Zefaris, I uh… I had a question on my mind, since that time at the obelisk. The… Spell I used. Fight the Night. I did it more or less the same way I usually do, just with an unintentional addition of Aer into the mixture, but it came out completely differently. Adding Aer into the flamethrower usually just made it go further… And it had never registered as a unique technique until that point, for that matter. What do you think caused the sudden change?”

Briefly considering whether she should reveal the more esoteric knowledge that the Newman Sect had unveiled in the past few months, Zefaris decided to just come out with the simplest and clearest answer she could think of. Opening her left eye, she funneled a marginal amount of Pneuma into it, and projected a weak kinetic beam to carve a pictogram into the soil. It was a simplistic humanoid between pictograms of the sun and moon, foregoing the more esoteric glyphs for the Solar and Lunar principles.

“Pyromancy responds strongly to the Solar, or Driving Principle. The sudden upsurge of Solar Principle in your soul could have influenced all of your pyromancy.”

The young man squinted, and furrowed his brow, before realizing aloud: “...Is that really it? My spiritual disposition influencing my-”

He stopped. A groan of annoyance came from him, annoyance at himself.

“Dead Ones, I’m such a moron, I remember reading about this when I was eleven. I… Apologize for wasting your time,” he said.

Zefaris shrugged, “It could also be the staff, or the use of incantations rather than arcane mathematics to focus your mental state.”

A sudden spark lit up in Victor’s eyes. He got back up while leaving his staff by the fireside, walking over to the makeshift target range that they’d set up. Holding out his hands in those stiff gestures, he began a steady breathing exercise. Not a word came out of him as a bead of black flame formed before his outstretched left hand. Then, a gust of sticky flame blasted out, splattering across the log and quickly consuming it in flames that didn’t spread beyond their intended scope.

“...That was still much stronger than usual, even using arcane equations,” he sighed, looking at his hands.

“Then it must not be just one influence, can’t say I’m surprised,” she said, picking up a mess tin half-filled with soup and beckoning him with it. “Come on, the soup will get cold.”

“Well I won’t complain about having more firepower, I’ll need all I can get if I hope to ever match up to Lady Zelsys’ expectations,” the young man laughed, sitting back down before he took the mess tin.

As if summoned by the mere mention of her name, the sound of Zel’s motorbike carried on the wind as she approached.

Zelsys returned to camp to the pleasant smell of a rich stew, sharing the events which had transpired with her comrades, with one exception: The assassin. She decided to only share the incident with Zefaris for now, and even then, she would do so in privacy. With the sun soon to set, they ate their fill and Zelsys rested, downing half a bottle of Liquid Vigor elixir. Zel took some time to fiddle with her tablet and browse her new stock of swords, before moving on to traits and techniques.

One thing that particularly irritated her was how the logic automaton categorized techniques that were pure expressions of certain traits under their own categories, as this got out of control rather quickly when half of her martial arsenal didn’t necessarily fit under Beast-butchering Arts or Formless Butchery, the former being pure weapon techniques designed to handle beasts, while Formless Butchery contained more esoteric arts or ones not intended for use against beasts, such as the anti-materiel All-severing Scream. As such, she created a separate category for techniques that fit neither of these first two categories: Geheimnis, meaning “secret” or “mystery” in Old Ikesian. This name choice was based purely on the fact it felt good to say.

NAME ZELSYS NEWMAN SEX FEMALE SPECIES TRUE HOMUNCULUS FORCE A+ PRECISION A+ HARDNESS A- AETHER B+ TRAITS>

A swipe to the right. The projection flickered and changed.

SKILL TRAITS Greater Primal Magic Inhuman Physiomechanics Greater Fog-breathing Greater Great-cleaver Expertise (Saw-cleaver Spec.) Advanced Martial Artist (Sturmblitz Kunst Spec.) Advanced Gunmanship (Arm-cannon Spec.) Armament Intuition (Blades) SPECIAL TRAITS Slayer’s Instinct Osmotic Essentia Absorption Metabolic Alkahest Eternal Beast Essentia Crucible Core of Earthly Iron Engine of Retribution Despot of Self Storm Reactor ARTS Beast Butchering Arts Formless Butchery Geheimnis

Fulgarrow fell under Beast Butchering Arts, logically enough. Already, a potential improvement to the technique had come to mind, and she retrieved a leatherbound notebook and one of her predecessor’s special bottomless pens to note it down. It was true that she could just record her thoughts in her Tablet as a mnemonic record, she found that writing things down helped work through the thought process.

The idea for the tentative new technique was a re-application of things she already knew: Binding a disposable blade to the Broken Butcher through Fulgurkinesis. It would be an iteration upon the same principles that allowed her to create a semi-tangible connection to the Butcher with a Fulguric arc. The technique fell under Geheimnis, the Arcline. She'd only developed the technique a short time before leaving Willowdale, barely having had time to explore alternate applications until now. If applied correctly, she could use it to extend the Butcher’s reach with “burner blades”, or lengthen the arcline for a whip-like effect which would enable long-range melee combat or the use of a whip motion to launch the blade at immense velocities; this would rely upon the pre-existing skills she had developed to facilitate her Thunderclap Sting technique.

She could feel a grin creeping onto her face and Victor glancing at her with curiosity. Then, the flow stopped. She was done, and she had filled up nearly four full pages with notes and conceptual diagrams of how the technique could theoretically function and fit together with Fulgarrow to form a ranged specialization. Stowing the notebook and pen away, she got up and picked up everyone’s now-empty mess tins, uttering, “I’ll go wash these, I think the map said there was a stream nearby. Might catch something while I’m at it.”

As she walked out of the fire’s light, she glanced back at Zefaris and gave a nod. The blonde got up and followed in her stead without another word.

Vic looked up from staring into the fireplace, questioning Jorfr: “It’s been three hours. Do you think something might’ve gone wrong?”

“Mrrhmm…” the norseman grumbled without opening his eyes. “Nah. They’re probably screwing.”

“Eh? How do you know?”

“I made the mistake of going looking the first time twenty minutes turned into two hours.”

Jorfr’s assumption proved to be correct. The two lovebirds had followed the nearby stream to a jutting-out rock formation, and atop this outlook they would release their stress upon one another. Atop the cliff was a small lookout post, a modest lean-to shelter surrounded by an equally modest barrier against wildlife: A circle of iron shavings mixed with salt, the subtle magic at play evidenced only by the absence of rust. Carved pieces of rose quartz were littered about; rudimentary lightgems that would glow when ambient light dimmed too much. At first they merely sat at the edge of the cliff, watching the sunset and leaning upon one another. Zefaris quietly pulled a bottle out of her Tablet, one with a narrow stem and round bottom, containing a pinkish, slightly syrupy liquid; Winter Peach Brandy, specially made by the Newman Sect’s culinarian so that it could affect cultivators.

She popped the cork without a word and took a swig. By the time she put it down, the cloyingly sweet scent had already filled the air, and she couldn’t help but utter: “Dead Ones, that’s good. Want some?”

As she held up a hand in offer, Zel reached out and plugged the bottle with her thumb, leaning in. A kiss became shoving her tongue down her lover’s throat, albeit only briefly. She suddenly pulled back, taking a swig of the brandy, only to find herself knocked over back into the lean-to; Zefaris set upon her with a rabid urgency that completely annihilated any possibility of steady escalation. From one moment to the next, Zelsys went from having control over the situation to utterly relinquishing it under the sensory assault of inhumanly precise hands guided by eyes that saw the weak points of any living thing and commanded by an all-consuming, animalistic need.

They became as an ouroboros of moaning flesh, surrounded by serpents of exhaled Fog and wreathed in an aura of electricity that magnified every sensation to the point of mere touch sending waves of ecstasy through both their bodies.

True peace was to be found in only the scarcest of places for either of them, and this was one.

Three and a half hours had passed, and the two lovers slinked out of the lean-to, traversing the dark to the stream and washing themselves there, both still addled by the afterglow and neither of them entirely stable on their feet, contributed to by the brandy. It hadn’t been enough to get either woman properly drunk, however, let alone both of them. While Zefaris washed out one of the canteens and used it to dunk water onto herself, Zel just submerged herself entirely in the ice-cold stream, her face and breasts just barely above the water’s surface while her braids swayed in the flow like river snakes.

Hot or cold, she found submersion in water of any extreme temperature after extended physical exertion to help immensely with recovery, and what had transpired mere minutes earlier had been more draining than facing down the Alkasnail, in more ways than one. She let out a relaxed sigh, looking up at the night sky amidst the trees, the waning moon shining down and illuminating Zef’s statue-like form, just at the edge of her field of view.

“An assassin came after me at Fort 57. Sleeper agent, I think. Xiān Dì spoke through her, then she killed herself with some sort of claw talismans,” she deadpanned, wanting to just get it out.

“Of course that commotion was you, I could see it all the way from camp…” the blonde sighed, unsurprised, but relieved. “Did she turn into a jade statue?”

“Uh-huh. Do you know what that was?”

“Jade Serpent Fangs, they’re high-grade assassination tool used against enemy cultivators. Had she gotten you with them… I don’t think they’d work as intended, but we might have another ticking clock on our hands. But we don’t, thank the Dead Ones. What did that wax-sculpture emperor say?”

Zel repeated the Emperor’s speech word-for-word; the acknowledgment of her and the Newman Sect as a legitimate threat, the mention of the Blackwall’s gates supposedly growing more lenient, the statement that he would no longer suppress cultivation in Pateiria in order to counteract her efforts in Ikesia.

She also included the assassin’s own last words: “Let the new era of cultivation begin.”

“Wonder if they’ll ever figure out that posturing and ominous displays don’t work on us,” the blonde said with a wry laugh, having begun dressing herself by this point. Zel got out of the stream, using her body’s natural Fulgur to dry herself, sparks arcing all over her body for a few moments until the water evaporated.

“Something tells me they know and hope it’ll have an effect on the people around us,” she said.

The duo returned to camp having washed the mess tins as promised, finding Jorfr sound asleep and Victor sitting at the fireside, a journal in one hand and a pencil in the other. He was drawing, but shut the journal and stowed it in his Tablet the moment he realized Zel and Zef had returned.

A breath of change passed, and three were woken by the fourth after six hours’ sleep; Zelsys had only slept four.

With each stop on their journey to the north-east, especially stops wherein they dealt with other people, Zefaris couldn’t help but notice the rapid spread of new firearms. Before her squad had deserted to hide in the Exclusion Zone, muzzle-loading sparklocks had been dominant among the soldiery, with only well-to-do mercenaries and officers being able to afford more advanced pieces like revolvers or even the rare box-fed bolt-action. Now, though, this new “rolling-block” design was growing more and more prevalent, with pepperboxes and revolvers to be seen among perhaps one in five gun-carriers.

Familiar designs from down south - those of a certain genius by the name of Collier, mostly - were also to be seen, most predominantly her break-actions, with a few independent hunters seen bearing Tempesta’s smaller slide-action siblings. They were much smaller for a very simple reason: Tempesta was a one-of-a-kind weapon, built for high-pressure loads of cartridges in the larger diameter of Collier’s break-action shotguns - it was designed to match up with the supernatural and to be future proof against even hotter ammunition loads. Meanwhile, the mass-production version of the design was chiefly intended for use by baseline humans against animals and other baseline humans. The break-actions, lovingly named “Hydras”, fired shells that were considerably longer and slightly wider, with solid slugs being 20mm in diameter. Meanwhile, Tempesta’s smaller sibling, named the “Tyrant Muncher”, was chambered for a more compact, shorter shell whose solid slugs were only some 18mm across.

She was happy to see such rapid spread of firearms, and even happier when the group found themselves in the general vicinity of a skirmish between occupationist mercenaries and a farmer militia armed with these new weapons as well as sabres scavenged from battlefields. Intervention on their part was politically inappropriate given the fact they’d been given permission to pass through the Northern Capital’s territory at the leveraging of Willowdale’s governor, Crovacus Estoras, but none of them particularly cared for the political ramifications of engaging a band of mercenaries who had clearly taken aggressive actions against innocent farmers.

They split up, with Zelsys and Jorfr approaching head-on, while Zefaris and Victor circled around in a pincer manoeuvre.

Jorfr controlled the battle by playing the part of an immovable pillar, cladding himself in armor of glacierglass, exhaling blasts of freezing air as he smashed up the foe with his hammer. They fell before him like so much chaff before a scythe.

Meanwhile, Zelsys played the combine harvester. She didn’t smash into the enemy, but rather slipped between their ranks and picked them apart from within, making heavy use of Graze Pulse to cause any strikes to slip off her. She played to the Broken Butcher’s short range, using her braids to deliver precise and lethal strikes to the necks of those her hands could not reach.

Flanking from the side, Victor made good use of his staff in forming a tremendous Devil’s Tooth before its eye, sending the arm-sized drill-rocket careening straight through the enemy and putting lethal holes into ten men in one fell swoop. A dozen more were mowed down by Zef's shotgun, the gunwoman leisurely flicking coins into the air and skeet-shooting to rain death down from above. Soon, it was all over. Glorified bandits such as these weren’t true opponents as much as they were rabid animals; a number of them even seemed to have lost their sanity to the point of acting like beasts.

Then, following the commotion, a group of Pateirian soldiers arrived onto the scene with two lumbering, stone-skinned humanoids in tow. Golems, cutting-edge weapons of war from a previous age. They were lumbering and slow, but monstrously strong and all but invulnerable to anything short of the larger field cannons… At least, that was by the standards of mundane soldiers, the crushing of which these golems were purpose-built for. As a result, their ability in fighting cultivators or armored vehicles with high-powered armor-piercing cannons had not been considered in design. Ominous bolts of lilac light erupted from their cores in an apparent upgrade over the base model, but they were too telegraphed and too sluggish to hit any of the four. Jorfr easily smashed apart one’s legs and froze the other’s, while Zelsys climbed ontop and fired a Thundercannon into one’s pulsating core. The second one was disabled without its core being destroyed, leaving it exposed for the world to see.

A baked clay exterior reinforced by riveted steel bands, from within which leaked a conspicuously blood-like goop. Upon breaking it open, they were met with the real core. It was a lump of flesh, pulsating with a lilac glow, vaguely human-adjacent cries issuing from within the mass as the open air and sunlight fell upon it.

“...Five people. Those are five people in there,” Zefaris uttered in disgust, her left eye wide-open. Zel gestured in the norseman’s direction, prompting him to swing his hammer above his head before bringing it back down, pulverizing the abomination to mush inside its clay tomb.

They left the battle behind, moving on before it could attract attention, Victor glancing back at the grisly scene in disgust.

They traveled a high road which had eyeshot to a small logging village far down a steep, thinly forested hill, a few remaining stumps scattered between the young trees planted to replace them, while a narrow dirt road snaked down the hill to the village.

Zel stopped the motorbike, excusing: “I think there might be something stuck in the rear wheel, just a second…”

She got off and squatted down next to the wheel, fiddling with a nonexistent obstruction for a good two minutes before she threw a nearby twig behind her back and stood up to find Zefaris looking down through the trees, as she’d hoped.

A river split the village down the middle, spinning a sawmill’s waterwheel. Upon the village’s basic walls were mounted cannons, and in the central square, there was a wooden sculpture made of wood which included one of these same cannons. It was of a diminutive figure lifting the cannon’s muzzle up to point at a monstrous, antlered humanoid with a beard of moss and red lightgems for eyes: A leshy.

Instead of looking down upon the village and the people working the mill, however, Zelsys looked at Zefaris, waiting for the moment of recognition. The blonde slowly opened her left eye, the pupils of her right dilating to their full extent. Zel could see tears welling up in the gunwoman’s right eye, but she blinked them away, turning to Zelsys.

“I knew you deviated from the plotted path a few hours ago, but to think…” she uttered, choking on her own words.

Zelsys had half a mind to ask if she wanted to go down there, but she also knew it would be rejected. As such, she cocked her head to the side, offering: “We can visit on the way back. Let’s move on before someone sees us.”

And so they did, soon reaching the next of their major stops along the northward journey.