The sun dawned upon the Town of Arches, its rays filtering down through the eponymous cage of ancient, supermassive ribs that it had been built within, its walls little more than plugs in the gaps between each rib.

A young man dragged himself into the world of the waking, groggily sitting up in his bed as the pains of the previous day’s hunt shot through him, the gash across his back having crusted his bandages to his body like some vile turtle-shell. His eyes drifted towards one of the two windows of his accommodations, this one pointed southward. In the stead of a southern gate there were the remains of the dead titan’s pelvis, and atop a hill in the north-west, a manor stood, its regal walls of stone contrasted by a giant black skull with windows in the eyes and a great door in the mouth. A nice view, all in all, though among the few redeeming qualities of his living space.

This podunk little town in the middle of bumblefuck nowhere was his life raft and his prison at the same time. Heir of a pathetically minor noble family that he was, his parents had pulled what strings their meagre standing in noble circles had allowed, sending him off to play at a martial disciple so that he might dodge the draft, his inheritance an aquamarine necklace, a couple hundred gelt, fundamental glyph circles tattooed onto the palms of his hands with magic-conductive ink that wouldn’t fade, and a Black Marble Tablet that had been commissioned for his brother, as a return gift after the war… But that was before anyone had known the scale and devastation it would all spiral into, before they had received an aetherwave telegram that his brother had been turned into paste by a Grekurian nobleman of high pedigree. Ikesia and her mechanized forces, fuelled by bleeding-edge industry, pitted against the Pateirian Empire’s and Grekurian Statehood’s vast numbers and mighty cultivators. It had been a massacre for both sides, ending with most known cultivators wiped out, Ikesia occupied, and her unifier - the Sage of Fog - gone to the winds. Some said he had sacrificed himself to erect the Blackwall, that aptly-named monument which could not be bypassed by any means, and whose great gates arbitrarily chose who to let in or out.

The world was all fucked, by Victor’s reckoning. The fact that the nobleman who had killed his brother was also known to have been killed by a Tankman nicknamed “Steel Comet” mere days later only eased the pain a little.

Picking up the slate of black stone from the floor by his bed, he clung onto the pinprick thrumming of its interfacing with his soul, using it to wake up fully, blinking bleary-eyed at the time and weather readout hovering in the top-left corner, right above his attribute listing.

NAME VICTOR KHESTUN SEX MALE SPECIES HUMAN (IKESIAN) FORCE D PRECISION D HARDNESS D+ AETHER D+

Still the same-old: Above-average Aether, denoting his affinity for magic in extremely generalized terms, and Hardness, relating to how difficult he was to injure.

Victor groggily scratched the underside of his neck as he made his way to the glorified water closet that passed for his bathroom, little flakes of bone peeling off his skin and clattering to the ground, much to the young man’s groaning annoyance. This was his inheritance; a shitty mutation, born from a flash-in-the-pan spurt of popularity that had allowed one of his ancestors access to the degenerate cultivation arts of the high nobility. Said ancestor had gotten the genial idea to, instead of just getting a nice suit of armor made like any sane person would do, spend the better part of his remaining lifespan hunting down every gods-damned bonewolf in the region, to steal their measly Azoth Stones, grind them down, and make crude pills from them - at least, so the story went. Victor didn’t particularly care for the story or the truth behind it, because this was his truth - his genetic inheritance was a replacement for facial hair that wouldn’t start to look good for years, or if he was unlucky, decades, a marginally easier time hardening his body for martial arts, and an affinity for a niche type of magic.

It was a small mercy that the surface-level bone plates had no nerve endings.

As he brushed his teeth and stinging menthol foam ran down into the burns on the back of his palm, memories of the previous day flashed through his head...

Hours of trekking through the forest, stuffed into a dead man’s gambeson that fit just barely well enough and armed with a boarkiller spear, searching for the duke’s escaped pet; supposedly one of the last surviving dragons in the region.

What the hunting party eventually came upon was, however, a hunched-over, deformed thing, simultaneously bloated and emaciated, dull reddish scales flaking off its skin, its tail severed above the halfway point, its feet mutilated and clawless. The stench of burned meat and spilled viscera filled the air as it ripped at a deer’s carcass. Victor had, at first, thought its wings had been cut off too, but when it raised its head to sniff the air in suspicion, he saw that there were neither stumps nor scars where wings would have grown. Its head shape was wrong, too, the stumps of what had been horns in the wrong places, its eyes not a dragon’s. The eyes of dragons and their descendants were well-known to shine with humanlike intelligence and to possess no visible pupil, but rather a cornerless triangle formation within a homogenously-coloured iris - a trait passed down to those who consumed the blood of dragons, and their children from then on.

This thing was no dragon. It was an animal; an arcane animal, one capable of breathing fire and mercilessly lethal even in its sorry state, but not a dragon. A False Drake, a mutagenicist’s crude imitation of the ancient living weapons that dragons were. One moment it had been sniffing the air, and in the next it had sprung into motion with a quickness entirely unbefitting its haggard state, zipping about and breathing fire, encircling the hunters in a ring of magickal flame before they even knew what was going on. Had it not been for the Captain, they would’ve been wiped out in a moment, and even then, for all his strength, for all the power of that giant cleaver the Captain lugged around, the False Drake still seemed to shrug off its blade, its decayed scales still plenty tough enough to rob the singsong-resonating weapon of most of its cutting power. Victor had seen it cut halfway through a grown boar and sever its spine, but even the one full swing the Captain got on the False Drake was barely enough to make it limp…

Well, limp more than it already had been.

His weapon was terribly front-heavy to the point of awkwardness, for just below its spearhead it had a blunderbuss, the trigger placed halfway down the haft - it was this that lent it the name Boarkiller. As he readied his spear and fought through his fear to look for an opening, he took note of the deformed manacles on the beast’s legs, errant chainlinks still hanging from them. It had a brass ring embedded in its flank, a trail of dried blue blood running down from it. Victor recalled wondering if the duke had been bleeding this thing, albeit only for a moment, as in the next, the beast broke past the Captain’s guard, knocking him to the ground, threatening to rip his throat out, only slowed by the great mass of cold-iron currently prying its jaws open.

Panic gripped his heart, but Victor kept control of himself… More or less. Pointing the spear, he pulled its trigger and felt it push back against him, rather than attempting to rip itself from his grip as Boarkillers usually did. He had wisely loaded his Boarkiller not with shot and regular powder, but with a kind of powder that would create a burst of blinding, stinging smoke, alongside a great deal of fire - fire that Victor could capture and make use of to fuel his magic.

Resting the shaft of his weapon in the pit of his elbow, Victor desperately drew a series of simplistic fire glyphs with the burning tip of the spear, winding threads of errant Ignis around the spearpoint like a spider’s web. At the same time he feverishly formed earth magic sigils with his free hand, desperately drawing upon the strength of earth to strengthen his muscles for just a few moments, the familiar splitting headache of spiritual exertion making itself known. As he felt a surge of surety flow up through his legs, the young man summoned up every bit of strength in his body to heft his spear with both hands and throw it at the beast, its tip becoming enwreathed in smoldering, billowing white-black flame as it flew through the air.

As good a throw as it was, and despite the fact the spear stuck into the beast’s side and knocked it off the Captain, it sprung up a moment later and lunged blindly in Victor’s general direction, the Captain leaping to his feet and barking orders at the other hunters. In its blinded lunge the creature spewed and sputtered flame without rhyme or reason, as if it were coughing, the other hunters finally snapping back to their senses, firing their boarkillers from a short distance rather than charge it and fire them point-blank as intended. Even so, despite the False Drake’s scales and tough flesh, being shot with four blunderbusses at once still shook it and did some - albeit surface-level - damage, opening up just wide enough a window for Victor to… Turn and run.

He told himself he had to create space to do anything since there was no way in hell he could subdue that thing with his bare hands, martial arts or not, and thus his only hope at usefulness was magic. The Captain came after the beast from behind, only to be completely outpaced when it broke into a sprint, running after the young man and catching him across the back, the teeth of its top jaw cutting through his gambeson and scoring his back as its maw snapped shut behind him, ripping flesh out of his back as the beast abruptly moved backwards and to the side.

One moment he was running, and the next, he had fallen over heels-first, tripped by an errant root. He rolled over himself, sliding across the freeze-rotten leaves that covered the ground until he smashed arm-first into a tree. All the noise and confusion couldn’t drown out the sharp report of the gunshot that had made his ears ring immediately after the drake was knocked away from him - it had not been the whooshing, dull thump of a sparklock, but the sort of CRACK only produced by a special, cartridge-using sort of firearm - had the duke’s elite hunters arrived?

When at last he got his bearings and regained some measure of clear sight, the young man saw a cloud of milky-white smoke enveloping the drake as it confusedly snapped at nothing in particular, thrashing about for a few moments in confusion. An high-pitched screech could be heard as a bright-white beam cut from somewhere off to the right, carving strange, glowing glyph circles on three trees in the vicinity. A moment later, as Victor checked that his shoulder wasn’t dislocated, three more gunshots rang out, three glass stakes each in turn striking a circle and causing it to go out, bouncing off somehow at exactly the right angle to impale one of the drake’s legs, leaving only its left foreleg free.

For a moment, he wasn’t sure if he was hallucinating in pain - a scene straight from one of his pulps now unfolded before him, as the beast spewed flame onto itself and melted one stake while freeing itself of another by brute strength, while the third froze its right hind leg solid to the ground. Victor heard what, at first, he thought to be a Tankman, the inhuman speed of those steel armors causing an unmistakable noise, but… It was a woman. A flesh-and-blood, damn near half-naked woman with giant brass-coloured boots and, well, giant everything else. She went ripping through the forest at a speed to put motorized vehicles to shame, six red braids tipped with glinting metal whipping behind her, her left arm encased in metal, in her right some short bladed weapon that Victor didn’t get a good look at. The moment she came within a stone’s throw of the False Drake it was already lunging at her, having anticipated her approach, only for the woman to leap diagonally sideways right past the drake with such force she left a small crater. She struck a nearby tree and bounced off it right onto the drake’s back, so forcefully she cracked its trunk down the middle.

Mid-flight she somehow dug her fingers into the creature’s flesh, flipping it over and slamming it back-first onto the ground. She wrestled with it and tried to stab it using what at a glance looked like a tonfa with a two-pronged, jagged blade on the front, terrible snapping noise and flashes of light issuing from the gap between the prongs.

The way she moved was almost unnatural, flashes of light under her skin not unlike the flashes of lightning within a storm cloud preceding snappy movements too fast for his eyes to see, her muscles writhing under her skin like a bag of serpents in the brief moments of stillness. Both sides of her chest expanded and contracted independently faster than even his heart was pounding at this very moment, and her heartbeat was so rapid it was more like the pounding of an engine’s pistons that a human heart - in fact, it outright looked like she had an engine in her chest in the stead of flesh and blood. Even the silvery wisps indicative of a breathing technique that issued from her nostrils did so in the sputtering, rhythmic manner of an engine’s exhaust.

The urge to save himself finally took hold, driving the young man to run as quickly as his feet would carry him, his eyes turned to the ground so that he wouldn’t trip again… But he couldn't help it. In his panic, he had run out of breath after only a short distance, hyperventilating as he doubled-over, his gaze yet again drawn to the source of that terrible noise, the roaring and growling, the repeated thunderclap noise of gunshots.

The False Drake had somehow gotten itself upright, its legs braced against a tree as it tried to envelop the woman’s head in its maw, her armored left hand somehow keeping it open as fire washed over the metal, her right hand empty - the weapon had been knocked out of her grasp. She reached out, exhaling a stream of Fog, and by some magic, one of her braids came alive. As though a serpent it shot out, wrapping itself around the tonfa and whipping it straight into her hand. That terrible electric arcing started up again for just a moment before she sunk the shiv into the drake’s throat, the muscles of its neck and forelegs undulating under its skin uncontrollably from the current. Simple electrocution was something that just… Didn’t work on arcane beasts, by Victor’s reckoning - it was like trying to cook someone alive by forcing a flood of Ignis into their body, or forcefully turning someone into stone, a feat that only worked if one’s own magic could overwhelm or otherwise unravel that which suffused another.

Either she could just create enough Fulgur within her own body to supersede a False Drake’s breath of fire by an order of magnitude, or her control over the element was so refined she could use it as to disrupt the complex bio-arcane organ that generated a False Drake’s fire breath. To entirely subvert the meticulous work of genius mutagenicist, or to overpower it - regardless of what combination of these things she possessed, Victor couldn’t quite believe it was real. People like this were so far removed from his reality that even his memory of the events felt unreal, almost dreamlike in nature.

Three copper coins arced into the air in the distance, a woman in a black dress following in their stead, holding up a giant revolver, firing off three shots in impossibly quick succession, their report like the smashing of a sledgehammer upon an anvil.

CLANG

CLANG

CLANG

Each flaming spear of lead and smoke bounced off a thrown coin, careening down into and through the False Drake’s back, the three projectiles landing safely between the tan woman’s legs. The beast’s hind legs went limp as its blood spurted out onto the ground. He’d caught his breath and then some, but… He couldn’t help himself. It was like watching a trainwreck.

The taller woman left her weapon stuck inside the drake’s neck, grasping both its jaws with her bare hands, the hand of her right arm taking on a metallic sheen as she pried its jaws open wide and wider. Despite her monstrous strength, the beast’s skull wouldn’t budge, until… With a deep, sharp inhalation, arcs of lightning flashed over her arms, and with a mighty roar she ripped the drake’s head clean off the neck in two pieces.

It was this feat that had shocked Victor out of his fascinated stupor, reminding him that these people could very well just decide to kill the other hunters as well, and him with them, so it was safer to just get the hell out of there. The drake was dealt with, job done, paycheck on the table.

Indeed, paycheck on the table: A measly sixty gelt sat in a half-empty pouch on his table, cut down from the agreed-upon three hundred because someone couldn’t keep their mouth shut about “those two cultivators that slaughtered the drake like it was straight out of Sturmblitz Kunst”. It was accompanied by groceries he hadn’t bothered to put in the icebox and two stacks of pulps - one a messy pile of nigh on three-dozen books he’d already read, and a considerably smaller, neat tower of five pulps yet to be read.

As he walked out of the bathroom and back into reality, his legs stiff from having sat down on the toilet and staying there stone-still while he mentally replayed the events of yesterday, Victor picked up two of the books off the “new” pile to reveal the third from the top. It was nearly twice as thick as the others, the mark of the Hanging Feudalist Printing Company on its cover - enough to get him a talking-to about “Ikesio-chauvinist extremism” if the wrong people saw him with it. The fact it offended such occupationists was a mark of quality in his eyes, and so the young man picked this book to be his sole amusement for the day’s doubtlessly lengthy stretches of mindless training. For all the amusement he derived from his instructor’s lectures, it was balanced by the nothingness of beating - often literally - his own body into improvement.

He started reading the pulp on his way to the gymnasium, finding a suspicious similarity in the physical description of the protagonist. Two-meters tall, bronze skin, split-tone hair with a long ginger portion and a short, silvery-white top, pointed ears like an Ankhezian, pupil-less silver eyes like a dragon-descendant monk noble… Surely, just a coincidence. The violent foreigner bearing the traits of many ethnicities at once and possessing implausible ability was a common enough trope, an archetypical figure representing the people’s united hatred of tyranny.

Still… Not only two cultivators, but ones that exactly lived up to literary depictions of their kind, here? In the actual middle of bumblefuck nowhere, a dukedom so insignificant that its entirety had managed to go mostly unscathed by the war by the virtue of sheer obscurity?

Victor just couldn’t quite convince himself it was real.

Not yet.

On his way to the training grounds, Victor stopped by an apothecary to replenish one of the several creams he used for his face. He found himself delayed further by a Kargarian peddler’s stand - one of many traveling merchants who had broken off from the Great Caravan to independently travel Ikesia. Victor had learned to ignore these peddlers, but this one, he just couldn’t ignore, because he sold something the young man hadn’t been able to get his hands on since he’d arrived to this dump: Makeup.

Rather, not any old makeup, but makeup of good quality, makeup that wouldn’t make him look like some wannabe crossdresser, makeup of the sort used by men and women of all walks in the Kargarian steppe. Subtle colours that would hold once in place even through a scouring sandstorm, quality ingredients, usable application tools to go with it all. For all his anger toward that idiot who’d gotten everyone’s payout cut, Victor gladly parted with over half of all the money he had left for what he knew to be good quality, and the peddler clearly knew it too, considering the fact they didn’t make the slightest attempt to… Well, peddle. They saw him approach and knew that they had a good customer, and that was that.

From an outside perspective, Victor’s time at the training grounds passed uneventfully. The Instructor - a tall, blonde Ikesian man with a moustache - went on and on about theory, the history of martial arts, and various semi-related tangents while occasionally asking questions and ordering the students to perform various exercises for wrong answers, or simply not raising their hand even if the answer was correct. He wasn’t malicious; rather, this was a way of placating both the occupationists and the duke’s watchmen that wrongly thought they blended in by sitting outside the cafe across the street every day, exactly at the same hours, wearing the same vaguely civilian outfits.

A great deal of this time, Victor spent with his nose buried in Sturmblitz Kunst, burning through page after page; from the short summary of the main character’s numerous journeys through many foreign lands, to her unfortunate arrival in the Exclusion Zone and initial encounter with the Three Soldiers, their protracted struggle in escaping and later hunting a terrifying, deathless creature called a Necrobeast. When called on for a question he intentionally didn’t think about his answer, the Instructor faking an exasperated sigh, putting his hands on his hips, before gesturing towards one of the log dummies.

“Alright, you know how it goes,” said the older man. As he alongside the rest of the class watched Victor get up and walk to the dummy without bothering to pry himself away from his book, the Instructor added: “One of these days that aloofness of yours will get you run over in the street.”

That remark clearly wasn’t part of the charade, even if Victor didn’t feel he was particularly aloof. He began delivering one kick after the other to the dummy, feeling the shock reverberate up his leg and stifling the nagging pain in his shin. It was tolerable, now - a few months ago he thought he’d broken his leg after just one full-strength kick into this damn thing, but now, his shins and the tops of his feet were covered in bone plates thick enough to actually make his kicks do real damage. The same could be said for his fists, elbows, and to a much lesser degree, forearms, but as far as manifestations of his genetic inheritance went, the plates were thickest on his chest, and certainly not because of some natural predisposition.

No, the fact he had a layer of armor that couldn’t be stripped from him was his work and his alone.

“Whole lotta good it did me when I’ve got jack shit on my back…” he thought to himself when, after a mere few dozen kicks, he felt blood oozing out of his wound, soaking through the back of his shirt. Despite the pain, Victor was able to distance himself from it through engrossing himself in the world of his book, in reading about Zelsys the Lightning Butcher fulfilling her namesake against hordes of locust-men, in so brazenly calling out the Imperials and spitting in the face of their Emperor - it was so far removed from his reality that, in diving into the book’s world, he was able to remove himself from the reality of his aching body, if only partially. Victor just continued kicking, but he knew the Instructor would force him to stop, and indeed, his prediction came true only three kicks later.

When the man half mindedly looked over to check Victor’s form, he double-took, raising his hand and snapping his fingers as he called out: “Ey, Khestun, that’s enough! Go clean yourself up, you should’ve told me you had a fresh wound, can’t have you causing yourself permanent damage ‘cause you think yourself a hardcore martial artist.”

“It’s just a ripped scab, I’m sure of it,” lied the young man, finally lowering the pulp from his face, but keeping his finger between its pages so as to not lose his spot. The Instructor clearly didn’t buy it, pointing at the modest building that the martial arts school called a home, reiterating his point: “Tell it to Old Man Duma.”

“Old Man, right…” a thought shot through Victor’s head as a chuckle escaped him. Resved Duma wouldn’t let anyone call him any variant of “Master” or “Elder” in an effort to soften the open secret of his past - a ruthless killer, a man born and made what he was now by the savage “World of Martial Arts”. Some thought it to be a literal place, an obscure region far away, while others considered it an reference to the lawless underworld that coexisted with law-abiding society, with public-facing martial arts schools and sects being bridges between the two. Victor leaned towards the latter, and though he thought himself above buying into mysticism, he couldn’t help staring at all the scrolls and weird-looking seals in Duma’s sanctum, not to mention what secrets doubtlessly hid behind those big brass doors.

The Old Man’s personal quarters, perhaps, but even then, what did he have in there?