Southern Ikesia

The Free City-state of Willowdale

Newman Family Sect Grounds

Awoken by the pounding staccato of a fist upon her chamber doors. Worldly sensation flooded in - the cold spring air, the softness of the sheets alongside the snow-skinned blonde whose limbs were wrapped around her. The blonde, Zefaris, was still asleep. With a slow, deep breath, the mists of sleep were banished, her lungs filling not with air, but with the most fundamental of arcane essence - Pneuma, the “Breath of Divinity” known to others as Aether, Orgone, or Qi. Wisps of milky-white fog escaped her lips as she fully awoke, her eyes drifting to a circle of white gems on the wall’s dark marble surface. A pale-white projection flickered into being in response to her attention, displaying the time.

Three in the morning. Barely an hour’s sleep. The pounding intensified, now accompanied by a voice calling her name… A gravelly, old voice which she recognized and trusted.

“...Elder Zelsys? Elder Zelsys!...”

With a sigh, she slipped free of her lover’s embrace, her bare feet pattering across the stone floor of the sect elder’s chambers. She saw herself reflected in the polished stone; a towering figure of living bronze topped by a mane of two-tone hair, the very top being silver with a cloak of rusty-red falling down to her calves. Stark-naked as she was, Zelsys crossed the front office in a few strides, shifting the longer portion of her hair over her shoulders as a token of some modesty before she opened the door, knowing full well that the source of the voice couldn’t conceivably care less about seeing her naked. She also knew that he was the only living thing at the other side of that door, instinctively feeling his and his presence alone.

The purplish, raisin-like face of the sect’s immortal groundskeeper was what met her, his eyes shining an unsettling purple in the dark. She’d already guessed why it was him - since he didn’t sleep, he had agreed to keep an eye on the sect’s aetherwave receiver at night. Her assumption was soon proven correct. He didn’t bother with pleasantries, cutting straight to the chase: “The governor called.”

“Yeah, I figured that part. Why?” she questioned.

A smirk formed upon the groundskeeper’s shriveled face.

“It was an urgent call for reinforcements… From a high-priority trade convoy guarded by the entirety of the Sanger Family’s Arkaley Branch,” he explained with a giddy, schadenfreude undertone to his voice. Considering he was one of the two sect members grandfathered in from the compound’s previous owners, the Black Horse Family, it was no surprise that the rivalry between them and the Sangers had left a mark. He continued: “They’re surrounded by a horde of Deep Dwellers, in the Poltragow border region. The governor has offered a high-priority rescue and extermination contract, rated B-. It includes coverage for damages and extra payouts for saving as much cargo and as many Arkaley Branch members as possible, in that order.”

“That could be anywhere from a hundred-fifty to two-hundred fifty kilometers…”

Her train of thought was derailed by the old man reaching behind his waistband and pulling out a tome bound in brown leather. “I ah… I took the liberty of bringing a bestiary which I know to contain information on all things subterranean. Be careful with it, please; its pages are human parchment.”

Zel smiled at him, taking the book, “You’re a lifesaver, Nesgon. Call Estoras, quote him double for the rush order and let him know that we’ll need at least three Hellhound Outrider squads, the heavier tankmen won’t be able to keep up.”

“...Shall I wake the others?” he asked.

“Just Mata, Vaceran, Fendas, Jorfr… And Joseph, why not? I’d rather not rouse the whole sect for something like this.”

She glanced back, considering whether her counterpart would want to come along - only briefly, as she knew that the ex-soldier would be far more upset about being left out of the upcoming slaughter than losing out on some sleep. She added: “Zefaris will come along as well.”

“So just two-thirds of the sect’s strongest, then…” the living mummy smugged back as he walked away, his steps all too brisk for his apparent decrepitude.

“Hey, one more thing,” she called out to him. He just kept walking, waving his hand: “Yes yes, I know, tell Ozmir to prepare battle recovery dishes for your return.”

Closing the door with her foot, Zel walked across the chamber towards the door of her bedroom, cracking open the tome and leafing through its pages as she went. There wasn’t just a page on Deep Dwellers, but an entire chapter; written in archaic manuscript, but readable. An illustration took up the entire left-hand page, depicting a stumpy, vaguely humanoid mole creature with iron teeth and iron claws, grasping a stone spear. Next to it was a giant trap-jaw ant with a rough saddle, its cog-jointed jaws seemingly dipped in iron. She skimmed the page as she entered the bedchamber, half-mindedly reaching out a hand for the wall panel right below the clock. As she read, a larger projection listing numerous articles of clothing popped up, a vortex of white Fog into nothingness swirling below. Piece by piece, she began to retrieve and don her clothes while reading.

The Deep Dwellers were described as having superb low-light vision, near-total blindness in daylight. Stronger than a normal adult man, but sluggish. Capable of tool use, but non-sapient; the manuscript speculated them to be ruled by an aristocracy of craftsman-cultivators who gained limited sapience through cultivation and never left the Deep Dwellers’ subterranean homes. Further detail was their tendency to emerge after geological disturbances and raid surface settlements for processed metal due to their own inability to produce it in significant quantities, alongside a warning that trying to exterminate them at the source was as hopeless as trying to drink the ocean, recommending instead to just collapse any known entrances to the “Deep Places”.

Before a cursory read could turn into a thorough one, and before she could get her chest-straps in place, there came Zef’s half-asleep voice from behind: “Zeeel… Come back to bed…”

“Why don’t you get up instead? We’ve got an emergency contract, B- rating.”

“Fuck you, it’s three in the morning,” Zefaris grumbled.

Zel chuckled, “Fuck me yourself.”

A repeat of the exchange they’d had that first time in the tavern. It brought back memories; memories of all the sweat and raw instinct that followed, and of the blindsiding muscle fatigue the next morning.

Turning, Zel stepped over to the bedside, placing the book down on the nightstand as she leaned in to plant a ginger kiss upon the green-eyed woman’s lips. Her left eye remained shut, while the right possessed an at-first unsettling twin pupil; a homunculus eye, the original eye having been mutated into this form to compensate for the other’s loss long ago.

“Yeah yeah, I’m up…” came a sleepy utterance from the blonde as she stood up and stretched, her marble-white complexion and toned figure briefly giving the illusion of a living statue under the rays of moonlight that came in through the window. Zelsys shamelessly watched Zef stretch as she dressed herself. First came black-and-gold undergarments to match her chest-straps, trousers made with the multicoloured skin of world-serpents and a snakeskin belt to match. Over them went knee-high, brass-plated boots with climbing claws and a conductive scaffold in the right boot to support arcane kicking techniques, the knee adorned with an eagle’s head and the front plate etched with a Lichtenberg figure.

Lastly, she retrieved and donned the Impelling Arm, a full-arm plate armor harness on whose gauntlet was mounted a bolt-action arm-cannon, alongside a belt to carry six of its massive shells. Zel truly loved this piece of armor, and honestly regretted not having paid more for it. Its straps and underglove tightened around her hand, clinging so closely to it that the underglove became a second skin. With its shrinking, rune-etched plates locked into place. The iron hand of a wrathful god. The gun’s trigger lever extended forward from the breech and sat reassuringly beneath her palm.

Each article of clothing shrunk around her to fit as best as it conceivably could, self-adjustment being the most basic and prolific of garment enchantments right next to self-mending. Her chest straps, minimalistic as they were, clung to her skin and refused to budge unless she willed them to let go; they formed a criss-crossed pattern in the front, tied together at the back with a thick cold-iron ring. While Zefaris dressed herself, Zel moved onto arranging her hair into six braids; the most basic of preparations, all done in the span of a few minutes. The one-eyed woman donned an armored corset and a red-black dress, its top half designed to resemble a military officer’s uniform, as well as an officer’s cap and a skull-faced respirator around her neck; a breathing technique assistant device, amplifying one’s ability to gather various arcane essences depending on the canister. Her footwear of choice were simple, knee-height military boots.

“So what’s the contract?” came a question from Zefaris while she walked across the room, picking up her own personal assistant tablet and retrieving from its Fog Storage a heavy-duty holster belt, which she strapped on over her dress, alongside two holsters. It had a wide holster on the left side, and a cylindrical, blackstone holster of sorts on the right. The tablet itself was a solid slab of black marble about the height and width of a novel, some four centimeters thick, one side inlaid in silver with an incomprehensibly complex, composite glyph, so fine the naked eye could not make out its components, its surface-level purpose being to project readouts. This mesmerizing pattern ran all the way through the stone, creating a commensurately complex “logic automaton”, so named for its illusory intelligence.

“Eh, a bunch of Sangers can’t handle some ant-riding molemen, so it’s on us to save their sorry hides. The convoy must be shipping some valuable cargo if Estoras is willing to pay our fee instead of just telling them to leave the goods and run,” Zel said. As she did so, Zefaris took up a shotgun and a huge revolver from the bedside, folding the former in half and placing it into the left-hand holster and sliding the latter into the cylinder. As the revolver slid in, its cylinder turned five times, once for each chamber, as the blackstone artifact checked to see if it needed reloading. Both guns were bleeding-edge customs made using cold-iron, living things in their own right; the revolver Pentacle, and the shotgun Tempesta. The end of a shotgun speedloader tube protruded from the black cylinder’s side, its total length contained within the artifact’s vast ammunition storage space.

“Mole-men… You mean Deep Dwellers? “ Zef asked.

“Hundreds of them, supposedly,” Zel nodded. “How did you know?”

“They’re a common boogieman. I guess it makes sense that you wouldn’t be familiar with them… Alright, good to go, you?”

“Yeah just about ready, just need to grab a butchering implement,” said Zelsys, briefly glancing to Zefaris before she walked over to the wall-width window. This up close, one could discern the fact it was an elaborate projection of a view of the outside several floors up, with the breeze brought in through narrow, winding, heavily warded vents, while the bedchamber remained solidly walled in; all for the security of the sect elder’s chambers. A small pile of short blades was arranged in the window alcove, numbering one short of a dozen, each having the handle of a much larger weapon and a jagged, two-pronged dagger blade. They were all broken, and all in the exact same way. An intact specimen was laid out right next to its broken brethren, a huge rectangular cleaver as long as Zel’s arm, around thirty centimeters wide and a good three centimeters thick.

“Don’t try to be the Butcher…” she thought as she wrapped her hands around the cleaver, knowing it to be a futile request, for this blade was just an object.

All of its predecessors had shared the same fate; with metallic creaking and ringing the cleaver desperately struggled to twist itself into a shape fitting for her, inevitably creating an imperfect facsimile of her real weapon’s intact form. A long, front-heavy cleaver with a shape akin to a beaked axe near the tip, its back edge covered in wicked sawteeth. It was never quite right, but that wasn’t the issue. Once the transformation took hold, the blade was doomed to fall apart in the span of a couple days, which became hours if she actually made use of it. Inevitably, every Captain’s Cleaver that Zelsys used would meet the same fate as the Butcher, but unlike it, they would then become inert steel - dead metal.

This wasn’t her weapon; none of these blades was her weapon. None of them were the Butcher. They were its siblings, produced in the same factory, now long burned down. No, her weapon was sealed deep beneath the sect, broken, waiting to be mended, waiting for her to journey to the far north so it might be reborn. Until that journey began, she had to use blades that were doomed to shatter the moment she put her full strength behind them. With the cleaver in hand, she strode towards the bedchamber’s door, planting a peck on Zef’s cheek as she walked past, the blonde gunslinger following in her stead.

Zel picked the book up on her way out, flipping the page; the next one detailed the Ankylodragon. As she skimmed it, Zefaris caught up, leaning in.

“Mind if I-” she began, but Zel had already handed it over before she could finish.

“Be my guest,” she uttered, reaching to her back and pulling out her own White Marble Tablet. She reflexively checked her own attribute ratings and traits, not expecting any changes.

NAME ZELSYS NEWMAN SEX FEMALE SPECIES TRUE HOMUNCULUS FORCE A+ PRECISION

A+ HARDNESS A- AETHER B+ TRAITS>

A part of the reason why she did so was posterity, but another, quite a bit larger part, was ego. A+. Two orders of magnitude, or seven increments, above the pinnacle of normal humans. It was a rating that would have been considered well above average even before the War of Fog wiped out most Ikesian cultivators; perhaps not sect elder material, but there wasn’t anyone strong enough to challenge her for the title… Not to mention the fact it just didn’t work that way under Willowdale law. A spark of will was all it took to make the projection shift, smoothly like the turning of a book page.

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

The list had been easy to make sense of when she had first seen it, since back then it only contained a couple traits; not so much anymore. Zel willed the device to show the sources of her special traits, ignoring those which listed a source as "Innate".

SPECIAL TRAITS TRAIT NAME Eternal Beast TRAIT SOURCE Necrobeast Azoth Extract TRAIT NAME Essentia Crucible TRAIT SOURCE Necrobeast Azoth Extract (Mutation) TRAIT NAME Core of Earthly Iron TRAIT SOURCE Ironheart Cultivation Method (Metallum Monad Symbiosis) TRAIT NAME Engine of Retribution TRAIT SOURCE Vengeance Demon Azoth Extract TRAIT NAME Despot of Self TRAIT SOURCE Despot of Self Cultivation Method TRAIT NAME Storm Reactor TRAIT SOURCE Storm-soul Cultivation Method (Fulgur Daemon Symbiosis)

It was obvious that the White Marble Tablet had never been designed to handle the complex interactions between the many different traits of an even slightly advanced cultivator. There had been a time when it would chime in with significant trait interactions, but the logic automaton had given up on that long ago. Other Tablets didn’t fare much better and neither did attribute reader cabinets, since they mimicked a real Tablet’s logic automaton, just much bulkier and cheaper.

She put the Tablet away for now.

As the duo walked into the sect’s great hall, they found the others already waiting for them.

Mata Gano, a Scorchlander. With skin black as coal streaked through by glowing veins, not a single hair upon her form, a crossed-out slave brand on her left shoulder. A living Ignis reactor, formed by a savage hyper-volcanic homeland. While she wore practical, unarmored clothing, her hands were encased in heavy, fullmetal gauntlets up to the forearms, their edges blued from being heated and cooled hundreds of times.

Vaceran, a Kargarian. Perhaps one of the few people Zelsys would describe as edgy. His arms had been severed at the shoulders, the stumps petrified so that prosthetics couldn’t be fitted; in order to cope, he had learned an esoteric art that allowed him to manifest portions of his own soul in the same way one would manifest a weapon spirit.

Fendas Pohlem, an Ikesian. A military veteran who still insisted on wearing military-style attire. A gunman, and a fervent disciple of Zefaris’ nascent KGF, or “Knife and Gun Fighting” style. Zel hadn’t interacted with him much, but as Zefaris told it, the man came across like a proper combat officer who saw membership of their sect as a pathway towards ending the occupation of his homeland, and his skill matched up to that outlook. He was currently inhaling several thousand calories of River Dozer noodles out of a surplus mess tin, these being a type of easy-to-digest food made from the meat of monstrous crustaceans; perfect to sate one’s hunger before an operation such as this. A standard-issue sabre sat on his hip, matched by a decisively non-standard shotgun on his back. It was a four-tube monstrosity from the city’s own gunsmith, a “Hydra” double-barrel with two spring loaded magazine tubes, or “Type-84 Devices”, actuated by the shotgun’s break-action for a total of eight shots. He also carried several four-shot revolvers and two bayonets on his person.

Joseph, a middle-aged mercenary of inscrutable ethnicity and background. He wore mismatched armor, carried a handmade breechloading rifle alongside all sorts of special ammunition, and used a bulbous wooden club as a melee weapon. His wide variety of skills and knowledge implied a long and storied past, all the more impressive by his apparent avoidance of cultivation up until the decision to join the Newman Sect.

Jorfr Hulson, a Borean. Bald and with a thick brown beard. His eyes were deeply set, his jaw and brow both built for breaking boulders. Between his assistance in progressing her own cultivation and his pivotal part in the Blue Moon War, he was among the people Zelsys trusted with her life. The immovable monster of a man had been one of the few to keep up with her in training. He, too, was inhaling River Dozer noodles, though he at least had the courtesy to use half of one of the sect’s portable meal containers, which in truth were just rather fancy lunch boxes designed to be sealed and stored in time-dilated Fog Storage. His combat style and practice of druidic magic demanded him to never wear anything on his top half, requiring large swathes of bare skin. The Borean’s skin was not just pale, but nearly translucent in places, muscle and veins visible up close.

Alongside these trusted, innermost disciples, there was also a young woman carrying a metal Tablet in hand - a modern, mass-production version of the artifact; she was an inner disciple who had recently been given the duty of assisting Nesgon. Zel recalled that her name was Anastasia. She looked up from the device at Zel and Zef’s approach: “On schedule as always, Elder Zelsys. The governor has agreed to your terms without reservation; the Hellhound Outrider contingent you’ve requested will await you at the western gate. Your transportation will be ready in a few moments, the other groundskeepers are currently warming up the gandrs’ engines.”

Zel sighed. She still hadn’t gotten used to being called elder, but she also knew that Anastasia wouldn’t relent on the point of using honorifics, so she asked: “If you must use a title, at least call me Founder instead of Elder. Let the others know of my preference as well.”

“As you wish, Founder,” Anastasia conceded, glancing down at her Tablet. “For the time being, I will let you know once your gandrs are ready.”

“Very well,” she nodded, walking over to Jorfr and sitting down next to him while Zefaris stood up against a wall, resting her eye with her cap pulled down. The northman, his mouth still full, gave a friendly nod of acknowledgment at her approach.She rested her cleaver tip-first against the floor, its blade ringing and vibrating at the slightest movement. It was struggling to hold itself together, a half-step from shattering already.

Were circumstances any different, she would’ve gotten up and walked to the mess hall to pester Ozmir, the sect culinarian, for breakfast. She wasn’t hungry, though; it had only been some four hours since dinner for her, itself enough to feed several men for a full day. So, they waited. Questions regarding the assignment from Fendas and Joseph inevitably came up, though they mostly related to her personal opinions of the contract rather than objective facts; Nesgon or one of his assistants had already clued them in on what was known. Joseph in particular obviously didn’t care for a real answer, but was just prodding her to assuage the boredom which seemed to eternally plague him: “Say, you think they’ve got any mole women down in Poltragow?”

“I didn’t know you had such poor fortune with women as to resort to beastiality,” Zel replied.

And so a few minutes passed. Anastasia glanced down at her Tablet again, having received a message. She said to them: “Expeditionary Squad One, you may move out at your leisure; your gandrs are fully charged and warmed up.”

Just a glance from Zelsys was enough to make the group stir into motion, making their way out through the sect’s truly massive front doors. A two-pronged stairway led down to ground level, an offering shrine with its large pedestal sitting empty in the middle; the previous sect’s Guardian Golem still had yet to be replaced. One could make out a bubble of arcane force separating the sect grounds from the outside world; a multi-layered barrier.

Gandr. A word shared between the Old Ikesian, Borean, and Kargarian tongues, meaning a monstrous or predatory beast. An appropriate name for the vehicles in question; monstrously powerful motorcycles run on powerful Fulgur-Igneic engines that bordered on miniature reactors in output. Out in the courtyard stood a row of these monstrous motorbikes, with two much larger vehicles next to several noticeably smaller ones. The larger two were Sturmgandrs, the imported originals designed for long voyages and extreme environments, while the smaller units were Blitzgandrs, the locally-produced, much cheaper version. The former could easily carry two or three people, while the latter were one-seaters.

Zel and Zef seated themselves atop the leading Sturmgandr, with Jorfr taking the second one for himself, while all the others each took a Blitzgandr. They rode out through the sect’s front gate, it being closed behind them. A wave of warm static washed over Zelsys as she passed through the barrier. White-cobbled streets stretched out all around and blue-shingled roofs topped buildings which had stood for five hundred years with minimal changes. As they rode towards the city’s eastern gate, signs of change arose to the surface. Formerly deserted buildings now shone with night-time lighting, empty storefronts were once again filled. The city was rapidly becoming a lynchpin of trade and industry in the region, and its defensive measures were growing just as quickly.

Besides tankmen, cultivators, and plain old militiamen, there were automatons disguised as classical statues, some indistinguishable to the naked eye and others half-finished, cogs and cables poking through gaps in milk-white geopolymer shells. They were replacements for the original guardian golems, much of which had been destroyed in the Blue Moon War. Soon they reached the gate, awaited by fifteen armored figures on Blitzgandrs. One could make out Hydra shotguns, revolvers, and thick sabres on the sides of their steel steeds.

As for the Outriders’ armor, the UOT-214-05 Hellhound was an ominous thing by design. Its shoulder, knee, and chest armor segments were noticeably larger than those of other variants, but it was its helmet that made it the chosen face of Willowdale’s shock troops; it was designed to resemble the visage of a typical Ikesian soldier in a pot helm and gas mask, with two separate eye lenses that glowed red when the suit’s power output was raised to combat levels.

Their mechanized, dark-painted suits bore the crest of Willowdale on the left shoulder and that of their division on the right. The Outriders were a professional lot, joining up with the cultivator party without question. In a brief timespan, the newly-formed task force had formed into a convoy and rode out through the city gate, the road stretching out before them. For thousands and thousands of kilometers, these ancient roads wound all throughout Ikesia and beyond, and over their enchanted cobbles Zelsys rode, leading the task force. Wind and the landscape both whipped past them as their steel steeds roared onward at over two-hundred kilometers an hour. Reaching the target destination was of little issue, for the simple reason that the convoy had also been following the road, and they had set up camp by the roadside. There was no desperate search to be had, they could see the encirclement from the moment it crested the horizon, rapidly approaching.

An undulating swarm of bodies surrounded the armored encirclement, the cries of men, gunshots, and flashes of swordlight carrying from the battleground. Armored quadrupeds the size of tractors broke up the sea of mole-men, the amber-hued glow of their magic flaring up into beacons that lit up the night whenever they raised boulders from the earth and fired them at the Arkaley Branch defenders.

Zelsys felt a rising tension in the air as she clutched her cleaver, steering with one hand. She slowed to a more manageable eighty kilometers per hour on the approach with the rest of the task force following suit, with Zefaris shifting in her seat behind her. Though she couldn’t see what the blonde was doing, she could hear it. The hiss of the respirator sealing against Zef’s face. “Ready to take over,” came the blonde’s voice. They’d done this dozens of times, switching places moments before contact with the enemy, and it went the same this time, too.

As Zefaris took over the steering, Zelsys stood upright on the motorbike’s back half, drawing in a deep breath. She flipped a mental switch, and with a spark, her breathing shifted; one lung inhaled, the other exhaled, both her breathing and heartbeat rapidly speeding up as Pneuma and air was drawn in.,

“Breath becomes lightning, lightning shatters mountains…” she uttered in her mind.

Strength flooded her being and electric sparks danced across her skin. Nerve impulses amplified, the limitations of the human nervous system utterly disregarded. Zelsys poured Fulgur into her cleaver, its edge heating to an orange glow and the sawteeth on its back edge beginning to vibrate until they became a screaming blur, both induced through rapidly-oscillating electromagnetic fields within the weapon. The others, too, were clearly preparing. Mata’s body now shone like a stoked ember, Joseph had loaded a crystal-tipped bullet into his gun while somehow steering with one foot, and Jorfr was trailing sparks as he dragged his weapon of choice, a giant hammer, along the road.

T-Minus to contact: Ten seconds.