One moment Makhus saw her standing there, and the next she had already stepped forward, her cleaver embedded in the dummy, and a forceful gust of wind blew back his hair. There was not a thunderclap, but the forceful reverberation of cold iron, the growl of a beast as it bit into its target.

Indeed, no thunderclap… But Makhus was certain there was a delay between when he saw the impact and when he heard it.

Zel let go of her cleaver, allowing the dummy to tumble to the ground as she caught her breath and complained about how she couldn’t get it quite right, how she needed to work out the exact motion she needed to get the maximum impact at the fastest possible speed with minimum telegraphing.

Very nearly bisecting a dummy made of treated hardwood of toughness comparable to solid rock, and faster than Makhus could see at that, it seemed, was a failure in her eyes. How entirely like her.

Perhaps his own experiment, too, could be considered a failure by this standard; he would have to perfect both the serum and himself until the limiting factor to his usage of the technique was how many doses of the serum he had, not the strain it put on him.

The frustration of a breakthrough nearly within reach was maddening. Zelsys knew she had it, she had the power generation, the velocity, the raw intuition to just do it, it was just…

“...Just gotta dial it in until it’s just right,” she sighed in frustration. “Until the impact hits with enough explosive force to put down a charging necrobeast in one shot, quickly enough that a Kargarian swordsman can’t block it. But moving one dial moves half-a dozen godsdamned others. I’ll work on this fuckin’ thing without so much as a wink of sleep if that’s what it takes, but come next week, I need something to match whatever passed-down-through-the-generations bullshit she’s bound to pull out. She’ll have to do as a litmus test to see if I’m remotely prepared to put Ubul down.”

A distraction to pull her mind from the frustrating muck of a plateau. The sound of Zef’s voice from the left: “Hey, strike a pose! Give me a good angle on the gauntlet.”

Without thinking she did as asked, the frustration fading from her mind in favor of pure in-the-moment indulgence. The fotoapparat’s mechanical noise combined with the strange poses Zefaris herself made to get good shots with the little wonder of essentech made Zel gladly lean into it, striking pose after pose for a good three or four minutes.

A few more minutes later still, they sat in the nook at the back of the yard browsing these photos and speaking on matters from techniques to the actual new features of the Impelling Arm.

While most of the shots were good, one photograph stood out among them.

It was a quite standard head-on angle, with Zelsys standing in as swaggering a manner as could be expected of her, feet planted apart and body arched slightly back. Her right hand raised, running its fingers through her own hair whilst her left arm remained by her side, fingers splayed and the gauntlet’s fingertips provoked into talons. As ever, an effortless smug grin was plastered across her face.

Out of the slightly less than two-dozen photos Zef had taken, all three of them agreed that this one best encapsulated the beast-slayer. One might even say it was as accurate a representation of her as could be - a living glamour shot, effortlessly violent and charismatic in equal measure.

As nice as indulging her own ego was, however, Zelsys wasn’t in a particular mood for killing the hours and days. In truth, none of them were, and each of the four both consciously and unconsciously understood times of levity such as these to be merely a means of breaking up the constant chase of success in training or business. Levity out of necessity.

The tangible, yet uncertain countdown to the next blue moon, to Ubul’s waking, served as a constant and continuously increasing pressure to prepare and become stronger. A bullrush to become as close to prepared as possible, even if they knew they likely wouldn’t be fully prepared even given another month.

The rest of the week leading up to the scheduled fight against Arnys was spent with preparation.

Night and day, every free moment, Zelsys trained, pushing herself as far as she could reasonably go in all quarters. From before dawn to after dusk, Zefaris always there, keeping an eye on her, always reminding her to not overdo it as if she didn’t know, serving as one of her sparring partners, even shooting at her when Zel wished to test her own reactions against something akin in speed to the Evil-cleaving Slash.

When it came to sparring, it didn’t take long to realize that the Three Soldiers wouldn’t always suffice, and more importantly, they couldn’t always be there, and certainly couldn’t be expected to participate in her training to the extent that she did.

So, Zel decided to tap into the numbers of those who wished to join the sect, using some of her time off training to find and recruit a good dozen would-be disciples as sparring partners, based purely off of first impressions and gut feeling.

Among them were Ikesians, Kargarians, Grekurians, one single self-described “Royalist” Pateirian which she wagered to be from the same island as Honest Ping by the similarity of their features and skin tone, and last but not least, one of the strange folk who possessed feathers and scales in place of hair, and whose feet were alike those of predatory birds. A man, in this case, of curious build that was both extremely slim and muscular.

After a brief exchange, it turned out the man’s kind originated from a far-eastern land across the sea, calling themselves some utterly unpronounceable name that ended with the suffix -ca, and supposedly translated to “Those Who Walk in the Six-winged Eagle’s Shadow”.

“Eagle-men, got it,” Zel shortened in her mind.