“Ah… Feels like head’s splitting open…” he grumbled, rubbing his temple before turning to Zel again. “Seems I conveyed my message, then. Whatever those creepy fuckers want from you, I’m uninvolved, y’understand? My debt’s paid.”

“Got it,” she said as she prepared to leave, only to spin back around and draw the poor man’s attention again, grinning ear to ear as she questioned him. “Say, how’d one get Von Wickten’s attention? I would see for myself if he deserves his spot at the top.”

“Uh…” he stared off to the side, unsurprised by the apparent insanity of one such as Zelsys, yet still taken aback by it. “Well there’s a free slot, so… If you somehow rip your way through the whole roster tonight or even just put on enough of a show, you’re bound to draw sufficient attention to elicit his envy. We’ve got a phonograph and a mnemonic playback machine at the bar, both hooked into the announcer repros, so if you’ve got any entrance music just tell the bartender.”

She couldn’t help but chuckle, knowing full well where such things must’ve come from.

“Let me guess, Von Wickten bought brand new from the Kargarians after their caravan put on a live combat show and made him jealous?” she asked.

“Spot on. Those merchants of menace really know the sorts of new technology Ikesians go for,” the bookie agreed.

“Well, what are you waiting for? You should’ve already told me when and in which pit my first fight is,” she prodded yet again, drawing amusement from the man’s nervosity for no particular reason. He was handling it remarkably well, considering how easily normal people tended to become nervous when she put any pressure on them.

“Uh-huh… Pit three at nine, so in around twenty minutes. Just uh, need a name and an epithet,” he said.

“Zelsys Newman…” she began, and though she had half a mind to just add “Slayer of Divine Generals”, she figured it’d be a bit much for this circumstance. Thus, she added: “...Conqueror of Storms.”

Zel turned on a heel and finally left the bookie to his devices, heading to the bar.

“Hey, you’ve got a mnemonic playback machine here, right?" she asked. "I’ve got something I want you to play when I enter the ring against the Adalbert guy.”

“I’m impressed that you know what an MPM is, but I’m afraid that-” the barkeep began with a condescending tone, cutting himself off when he turned far enough to see whom he was talking to. At her raising of an eyebrow he finished his sentence, much more politely this time: “-that uh, I’ll have to have a listen myself before I can play it. Mnemonic records are only as good as the original imprint, and not many folks have the combination of good hearing and auditory memory to make playback-grade mnemonic records, let alone the… The hardware to properly store them.”

“Here, just take a listen,” Zelsys pushed her White Marble Tablet across the counter, already projecting the name of the mnemonic record in question. Being that such a Tablet had no audio projection hardware of its own, the barkeep had no choice but to place his hand atop the device, grimacing at the pain of first-time interface with the device. The grimace gave way to a flabbergasted expression as the Tablet inserted a perfect recording of the performance straight into his mind. His hand twitched away from the device, as if he feared he would fall into the memory.

“I uh- Yeah, we can play it. Just, if you don’t mind me asking… How’d you get this?”

It was obvious that he was doing his best not to offend, yet couldn’t control his own curiosity. Zel grinned, explaining: “A couple very clever engineers and alchemists back in Willowdale devised a method for splicing together mnemonic records and cleaning them up to create “perfect” recordings.”

She seemingly just willed her Tablet to go to its inventory list and eject a business card alongside a narrow, brass rectangle covered in glyphs, both falling onto the counter.

“Here. A recording of the song and contact information for the company. We also produce mundane wax cylinders.”

Meanwhile, the business card read “H.F. & Newman”, prompting the bartender to ask: “Your company?”

By the time he looked up from the card she had already walked away, only briefly turning around to answer: “Nope, just a relative.”

A core piece of the puzzle that would be her means of drawing Adalbert’s envy finally put in place, she made her way to the stands, easily spotting Zef’s unmistakable silhouette and heading over to their table. She shared what she’d learned from their Bureau contact, remarking that she hadn’t expected the man to be rigged with a memory-erasure geas.

This investigation had been a pain, but it was still important work. The Counter-propaganda Bureau, one of the last remaining arms of the Ikesian government still actually loyal to the nation, had contacted the Willowdale Slayer’s Guild to contract its Prime Slayer for a high-priority assignment. Being that Zelsys was the Prime Slayer, and the Bureau had explicitly gone out of its way to make it clear that this assignment was intended to not divert her from the actual path of her northward journey, she had accepted. There was also the factor that, on a personal level, she couldn’t bring herself to refuse - the task was to track down and exterminate a newly-risen cell of slave traders supposedly using Pateirian Control Parasites to build their network at an unprecedented pace.

Regardless of the slavers’ possible affiliation with the Pateirian government and her own vendetta against the aforementioned, Zelsys considered herself a beast-slayer, and her definition of that title was quite clear: “One who seeks out the wretched beasts of this world and butchers them as the beasts they are, regardless of how many legs they walk on, what honeyed words they speak, what false titles they claim, what stolen power they boast…”

And so it was that she had found herself here, having learned that the primary reason behind the assignment was securing an alliance with Von Hoedorff, and the extermination of the slaver-cell was just the means to that end. Nevertheless, the beast-slayer’s thirst for a real fight against someone or something that could actually put up a fight had gone unsated for a while now, and her inner beast was all but slavering at the opportunity to pit Sturmblitz Kunst against whatever the knight-captain called a fighting style…

…But that time wouldn’t come for a little while. A good four, five hours, if she were to guess. Zel found herself drifting into thought, further reminiscing on her predicament: What she had inwardly come to call the Journey to the North, after the title of a pulp novel she’d read in her months-long recovery from battling one of the Divine Generals: Ubul, the Beast Reborn in Stone.

The “Journey to the North”, that pursuit of Borea’s skymetal and aid from that far land’s smiths, both in service to saving the pseudo-life of a weapon. Indeed, all this was for a weapon, and the absurdity of it to any normal person wasn’t lost on her - she knew well that making one of the most dangerous journeys one could take just to repair a weapon was exactly the type of thing normal people expected cultivators to do, but the Lightning Butcher wasn’t just a weapon anymore. Certainly, her weapon of choice being a great-cleaver would’ve made just procuring another Captain’s Cleaver or other cold-iron great-cleaver a much easier solution. Captain’s Cleavers were, after all, mass-produced weapons, and she knew for a fact that she could make someone else’s Captain’s Cleaver change to a shape almost identical to hers, but… The Lightning Butcher, or what was left of it, wasn’t a Captain’s Cleaver anymore.

Even in its broken state, the Butcher made a “factory-new” Captain’s Cleaver seem like a glorified can opener by comparison. Even the semi-stable fragments of the Butcher that she’d tied to the ends of her braids were several grades of quality above any baseline Captain’s Cleaver, as far as cold-iron quality went. After all, the Butcher would’ve grown back to its original state, had it only been broken - the reason it required repair, and repair with such supreme material as skymetal, was the fact that the blade’s soul had outgrown the capacity of its physical form to contain. Even wrapped with stabilizing seals, the inexorable elemental might contained within the blade drove the cruel hands of a clock ticking down towards its annihilation.

So it was that Zelsys and Zefaris had, with Jorfr’s aid, set out on a journey to Borea, knowing the time window they had to make the passage was narrow and evershifting. Now, by the whims of chance and shifting weather, they were stuck, playing the waiting game. The so-called Great Blizzard swallowed up one of the few relatively safe roads north for weeks at a time all throughout the year, and only when this raw expression of nature’s fury moved on would the passage to Borea become traversable. Despite possessing a mode of transport fast enough to let them traverse Ikesia in a fraction of the usual time, continuing their journey to the far north was out of the question at the moment.

Zel was suddenly yanked out of reminiscence by the arrival of two men to their table - one familiar, one new.

The new one was quite pale, even paler than most Ikesians, his hair blonde, eyes blue, and jaw thick - and yet, he was but a boy. A very muscular, tall boy, but a boy nonetheless. She could see it in his face, the way he held himself, the way he stared right at her chest with that absolutely braindead look on his face. No thoughts, head empty, only titties - it amused her greatly. Standing side by side with her good friend, Jorfr, the kid looked like a much smaller, more Ikesian version of the northman. Where the kid was just pale and impressively muscular considering his likely age, Jorfr was just one big walking bundle of muscle. His skin was nearly translucent in spots, exposed veins and muscle showing through, and as ever, the front of the Borean’s skull was less akin to a face than it was a bulldozer, his brow overhanging his eyes by a good few centimeters, and his jaw shaped such that Zelsys was confident he could split wood with his chin.

Jorfr smacked the young man on the back, pushing him forward so that he sat down before taking a seat himself.

She silently nodded at him in recognition, before nodding towards the young man: “You didn’t say you’d bring a plus-one.”

A wide grin sprouted on the Borean’s face as he wrapped his arm around the youngster’s shoulders, remarking: “It is tradition for the young warriors of a tribe to behold their elders in holmgang! This is as close to that as Reiner’s grandparents will let me take him.”

Despite the situation he was in, Reiner looked calm. Apathetic, even.

“What is he to you anyway, a distant nephew? Doesn’t look like your kid,” Zefaris questioned, looking Reiner over with her Homunculus Eye, and even briefly opening her left. There was no brass ornament in the socket, as Nestor had expected - instead, it was filled a matte-black sphere with a pinhole-sized dot of white light. The eye jumped around erratically for a moment, briefly locking onto Reiner’s face before Zefaris closed it. That had been enough to shake the young man.

Smacking him on the back again, Jorfr laughed: “Come now, don’t torment him. He hasn’t seen a real warrior yet.”

“Knight-captain Adalbert-” Reiner began, but Jorfr cut him off.

“-Cares more about wasting your taxes on parades, drugs, and nubile slave boys for him to violate than he does about fulfilling his duties. Give it a couple minutes and you’ll see how a real martial artist does it - if you’re lucky you’ll even see her crumple that hedonistic manchild like a rusted canister.”

Reiner went quiet, staring off vaguely in the direction of the fighting pits. He didn’t seem particularly torn up or upset about the rather grave accusations Jorfr had just leveled at the knight-captain - Zelsys was willing to wager that Reiner had heard such things said about not just Von Wickten, but all of the town’s nobility. It wasn’t prevalent in public, but even Old Man Duma had derided the Dragon Knights for being “parade-obsessed asshats” during their conversation with him. The three actual cultivators at the table went on to exchange information regarding their time apart in town, these being mostly observations on the state of Arches as a municipality, from the ever present, easily spotted Pateiria-affiliated Occupationist agents, to the uneasy cooperation between the between the Dragon Knights and the aforementioned subversive foreigners.

A few minutes passed, and the ruckus started up. The bookie’s voice blasted out of reproductors mounted inside cages atop the betting counter: “The second half of tonight’s quarter-finals is about to begin, and we have at last filled our final slot! No further entrants will be accepted! All combatants, please make your way down to your respective pit and remove all weapons or armor!”

Zelsys had already removed her boots before the bookie had gotten to that last part, seemingly having intended to do so from the very start. She also removed her armored sleeve and the leather half-sheath on her back, leaving them in Zef’s care as she stood up, holding out her arm towards the pit she was to fight in, with one eye closed and her thumb extended. Looks of amused expectation came over her companions, while Reiner looked on in confusion. She drew in a deep breath, a strange, metallic smell filling the air around her before she leapt from the stands, soaring dozens of meters overhead only to land exactly in the middle of the pit. Great commotion gripped the onlookers with many questioning whether someone had just killed themselves, only for the ruckus to grow yet further when the dust cleared and they saw Zelsys casually sitting at the edge of the pit.

None dared to approach her from behind as she sat there with her legs crossed, a tranquil smile on her face as her predatory gaze scanned the spectators.

The other combatants gathered from all corners of the amphitheater, most of them inconspicuously walking to their respective pits. Her opponent was to be a brick shithouse of an Ikesian man, bald-headed with a well-trimmed black beard and equally well-trimmed, yet immensely bushy eyebrows. He wore a workman’s overalls with the top hanging down like an apron to showcase his hairy, protruding gut. Despite the tremendous amount of fat on his frame, his limbs were like tree trunks, his hands more thickly calloused than those of many martial artists. And his fingers… They were the colour of solid stone, completely grey down to the knuckles.

He stared her down with a calm look in his eyes, curtly stating: “If y’kill me in the pit, know that neither my family nor my guild will care about the law when it comes to extracting a blood price… Though someone of your ken probably cares more about the fact killing yer opponent is a loss by disqualification here - we use Sanger Family Rules here.”

“Sanger Family Rules, huh…” she thought with distaste. The ruleset was overly formalized in her opinion, giving the referees far too much wiggle-room in determining who won after the fact. Nevertheless, Zel understood his hostility, considering her appearance and mannerisms, and so she truthfully told the man: “I don’t feel the need to go all-out on a random civilian, I’ll pull my punches. Say, what’s your attribute line?”

A slow blink from the stonemason. A deep breath in, followed by the exhalation of Fog, tinged orange from a surfeit of Terra.

“C in Force, D Plus in Precision, C Minus in Hardness, D in Aether,” he answered.

“How ‘bout yours?”

“I’ll take care to restrain myself to that level,” she sidestepped the question.

The reproductors hissed to life, the bookie’s voice blasting over the crowd again. A rhythmic drumbeat began, the wordless cries of men accompanying it as the first fighters were called out.

“In Pit One stands a well-known regular, Benedict Sailer, the Brass-eyed Pirate, versus…” the bookie began, the music changing about twenty seconds in… Into a slow, steady drumbeat. “The fourth of our top contenders, Jacob Hillerin, Ever Unyielding!”

Zel could make out the sounds of both men dropping into the pit, and just as the sounds of their fists clashing began, the bookie moved on. A vaguely classical-sounding tune picked up. Strings, woodwinds, an opera singer. It was strangely familiar, but she couldn’t place it. She guessed that a library of popular songs must’ve come with the mnemonic playback machine.

“Next, in Pit Two we have the ever-feuding pair of Iron-Legged Isidora Kluck, versus…”

Another song. A quick, folksy tune, dominated by a woodwind and light drums… Then, out of nowhere, the thunderous growl of Ezaryl Krishorn’s lightning-enchanted, double-necked shamisen. “...Sabina Haspel, the Killing Grace!”

The music cut out. The angry screaming of two women who legitimately hated one another preceded the sound of a side kick against ribs.

“Of course, she would’ve had a hand in making songs for that machine’s library…” Zel thought, her eyes still fixed on her opponent.

Another song. Whistling. Humming. Stamping of feet. No singing.

“And in Pit Three, the Strongest Human of our top five…”

Masonson himself started belting as he cracked his fingers.

“In our own towns we are foreigners now, our names are spat and cursed!” he began.

A dozen or so onlookers joined in. Their voices were undercut by the jeers of people clearly not fond of Ikesian populism - Occupationists most likely, by Zel’s reckoning. More people started joining in, an expectant smile growing on Masonson’s face as the man noticed the spark of like-mindedness behind Zel’s eyes.

“The headlines smack of another attack, not the last, and not the worst!”

She knew the lyrics. Even having heard the song only twice or thrice before, the sorrow and anger it was sung with had carved its words into her brain. She joined in, not caring that this was her opponent’s theme.

“Oh my fathers they look down on me, I wonder how they feel, to see their noble sons driven down, beneath a coward’s heel!”

Masonson jumped down into the pit, his arms spread wide as he basked in the attention of the onlookers and laughed - laughed at those who had the mind to jeer him for the gall to cry out in defiance against foreign occupiers.

“...against- Wait a moment, it seems we have a problem-”

The bookie cut out. White noise flooded the amphitheater for a short while, before the bookie returned, audibly catching his breath. The music she had given him started up, this copy being only a thirty-two second snippet specifically edited down to be used as entrance music - one of the lyrics had even been substituted in from another song to better fit Zelsys. As the violent rhythm and boastful vocals of the Krishorn Clan heiress kicked in, the bookie began shouting his throat out between the lyrics, but the way he worded and pronounced things was… Like that time before, not his true self.

“Second Coming with the eyes of a stranger, resurrected to fire and flames, no mercy!”

“...a stranger from far down south, all the way from Willowdale!” the bookie howled, mirroring the lyrics of the song.

“Another Bureau Geas? This has to be Strolvath’s doing…” she thought. Only he had both the foreknowledge of her musical preferences and the influence to have something like this done. “That old cunt.”

“Unleashed dominator, arise! Glimmer of hope, stand up for all you believe! The righteous path, die on your feet, don't live on your knees!”

The lyrics trailed off into an aggressive blend of drums and some sort of distorted strumming instrument whose name Zelsys couldn’t recall. The bookie somehow rattled off the rest of his introduction in the space of this brief solo.

“Founder of the Newman Sect, creator of Sturmblitz Kunst, Prime Slayer of the Willowdale Slayer’s Guild! Folks, if there’s anyone here tonight that’ll give Lord Von Wickten trouble, it’s her! Zelsys Newman, the Conqueror of Storms!”

“Awaken, Conquering One, the Wanderer, Unchained!”

She hadn’t told the bookie any of that. It absolutely had to have been Strolvath’s doing.

“Oh well, it can’t be helped,” she thought, smiling as she dropped into the pit.

Zel took a deep breath, filling her lungs as full as they could go, exhaling a dense cloud of milky-white Fog that crackled with blue sparks of Fulgur as it sank to the ground. It was a pointless gesture to casual spectators, but anyone who knew anything about breathing techniques could distinguish that her method was orders of magnitude better-developed than her opponent’s.

He stomped his feet into the sand, taking up a wide, defensive stance. Zel came at him with a few probing jabs and kicks, determining a general impression of the mason’s combat style off of only this one brief exchange. He was faster and more precise than a normal human of his size had any right to be, but it was clear that stonemasonry had informed his approach to combat. Masonson made use of a relatively limited repertoire of specific moves, all of them near-perfect. Consistent. Predictable. In order to put on a show, Zelsys restrained herself and cautiously measured her own strength to match the force of the mason’s strikes, exchanging blows with him for a short while before she started mixing him up with feints and attacks from otherwise impractical angles. She even let herself get hit so that she could make a display of allowing the force to bend her over backwards, only to right herself without her back having ever touched the sand.

Over the next several minutes Zelsys gradually began to hold back less and less, pushing the mason harder and harder. His stone-like fists struck only empty air or her elbows, eventually bruising even their hardened flesh while she remained seemingly untouched. She could easily read him even as she was. She unconsciously predicted the vectors of his strikes, and where a normal human’s cognition accelerated in the midst of an adrenaline rush to the point of effectively affording them an extra half-second to make decisions for every real-time secon, Zelsys using only the Shifting Winds of Eternal Spring foundational breathing technique operated at a rate of combat cognition that equated to a full additional subjective second for every second that passed in reality. Between her superior cognition, physicality, and overall understanding of how the human body moved, reading the stonemason’s moves was easy.

Running up onto the walls of the pit, Zelsys leapt at him feet-first and threw him to the ground with a headscissor takedown, rolling off of him forwards, hand springing back to her feet, jumping back up to the edge of the pit, and elbow-dropping him. It looked great, but between the weight disparity and the fact she intentionally took most of the impact, it barely bruised his massive gut. She even made a show of lifting the man’s tremendous bulk seemingly effortlessly and powerbombing him into the sand, though she had faked it - the actual move would’ve killed him, while the way she did it only knocked the breath out of him and perhaps broke a rib. Or, at least, she would’ve broken a few of his ribs, were his bones not inhumanly tough even beyond what his Hardness suggested.

When he actually got up and made it clear that nothing was broken by the way he moved and distinct lack of pain in his expression, Zelsys decided to end it with one strike. An indisputable knockout that the referee would have no reason to undermine, as none of the three referees had any reasonable way to know that she intended to challenge Von Wickten.

“Tap out now, else I’ll have to knock you out,” she warned. The stonemason just shook his head, spat a glob of bloody spit into the sand, and grumbled: “I don’t tap out. Ever.”

The fat Ikesian grinned, his teeth bloody, but all there.

“Surrender ain’t in my blood,” he said. “Besides… I’ve been knocked out dozens o’ times. Even Baldwin couldn’t keep me down for the ten-count, Von Wickten had to have me DQ’ed so I wouldn’t embarrass his butt buddy. My skull’s just too thick for anything to stick for long, always has been.”

“Very well.”