A forward lunge, a twist of the torso, a whipping thrust motion of the arm, every single muscle involved having been meticulously prepped for full Thundercharger enhancement. The thunderclap resounded. Scales shattered, flesh tore, bones broke. A downward stroke, severing both the left arm and leg before smashing into the ground, ripping a channel through the stone on the return.

A STRIKE TO HUMBLE THE GENERALS OF DIVINITY

FORMLESS BUTCHERY: GESTALT THUNDERCLAP STING

Von Wickten lurched backwards, falling against the wall, his good leg splayed out to the side. He looked down to the stump, the glossy, compound surface of his eyes shuddering; blinking, he reached for the stump with his right hand. The Gu darted out from his forehead, turning to face him as it had done once before. It writhed in place, miming words that only he could hear.

A rumbling utterance came, strained and gurgling: “ACC… ACCEPT.”

In the blink of an eye, it was as if the battle-trance melted from him. Indeed, his resolve was not the only thing melting away - the scalebound hide of his form began sloughing off in a rancid deluge of decoherent flesh, turning to dust around him and blowing away in nonexistent wind. The entomodragon melted away in moments, leaving a mutilated Von Wickten sitting there, his actual left arm and leg both severed just above the middle joint. His left eye was still missing, and his jaw was dislocated, which he gruesomely popped back into place with a grunt of pain.

She turned her head to look in her compatriots’ direction, Victor having joined Jorfr’s side at some point. The look of mixed fear and awe in his face evidenced that he had witnessed the final clash, but there was a third emotion there - an anticipation of further brutality.

“Of course… He was there when we spoke of punishment,” a thought shot through her head.

“Victor,” she said, simultaneously willing her Tablet to send Zef’s device a locational ping. Down and to the west.

“Likely still dealing with the ground-level backrooms of the operation,” she thought.

The young man perked up, “Er- Yes?”

“Fetch Zefaris from the ground floor.”

He obliged without question, running off. There was no ulterior motive, and she had no real reason to send him as a messenger rather than just use short-range aetherwave comms. She just wanted to foster further discomfort for Von Wickten through the implication of something she might not want Victor to see. Jorfr rose from his seat on the ground, slowly drawing closer while Red continued watching from afar, hammer still in hand and rested upon his shoulder.

Zel tapped the Butcher against the ground. A violent discharge of lightning arced between the metal and the stone, the blade’s sawteeth falling silent as the charge departed it .The myriad pieces making up its built-up frame fell away, crumbling to dust before they even hit the ground, leaving only the jagged tuning fork of its true form. A moment later, Zelsys exhaled… And her braids fell limply to her back. With a second breath, the metallic sheen departed from her skin. A third breath, and the horns and skull both crumbled away from the top of her head. So it went until the seventh breath, when at last she shrunk back to her normal frame, exhaustion evident in her eyes and posture alike. She sat down, slumping against a broken pillar as she pulled out her Tablet. With the Butcher’s seals having been burned away, it was growing unstable by the second; electricity was already arcing between its prongs, and an ominous, brightly-shining lichtenberg figure was spreading across its surface.

“I cannot deny that you have beaten me…” croaked Adalbert, his breaths wheeze-filled and bubbling with yellow blood. Though he remained motionless, his voice was full of barely-suppressed fear and trepidation. “Before you execute me, or whatever it is you intend to do with me… Why is it that you so severely disagree with my righteous point of view? You, of all people, seem the most likely to understand things as I do.”

From Fog Storage, she retrieved a spool of specially-treated sealing paper, setting it down on the side as she listened to Von Wickten. She had already made it abundantly obvious, what it was about his beliefs that she took exception with, and so felt no need to elucidate again.

“I’ve already made myself clear. Reflect on my words; I am not a phonograph,” she said, casually looking herself over and opening up one of her shallower wounds, allowing a handful of blood to pour out into her palm before she simply willed it to congeal shut. With this blood she took to drawing out a small ritual circle on the ground, a method by which seal-wrappings might be consecrated quickly in a time-sensitive context such as this one.

Von Wickten observed for a while before piping up again, his voice just as devoid of understanding as before: “What is it, then, that makes you superior to me on the field of battle? I was more willing to sacrifice, I drew upon the might of a creature that had in life shaped the landscape with its strides, and yet you emerged victorious with that hodge-podge of discordant disciplines you call a…”

A bitter laugh resounded from him, the sticky, yellowish hemolyph of his lifeblood running down his chin as it devolved into a cough.

“...Cultivation method.”

Sighing in frustration, Zelsys repeated words which she had once said to another fool who could not understand their defeat at her hands: ”I’m just better than you. That’s really all there is to it: You used raw power as a crutch, when you should’ve treated it as a foundation. That’s not to mention that mentally, you are utterly pathetic; your outlook on combat is utterly malformed. Violence - that is to say, one’s ability to exert force and engage in direct combat - is only one pillar of true power. Because your personal ideology revolves around exerting your power over others, the moment you meet someone who surpasses you in this realm you fall apart, resorting to desperate, dead-end measures like… Gu parasites.”

As she spoke, she unwound a length of wrapping from the spool and piled it up in the ritual circle, once more draining out some of her blood afterwards. This time it was enough to fill her cupped hand twice over, which she poured over sealing wrap. There were no incantations to be chanted, only the pinpoint-precise focus of her intent to contain the Butcher’s wildly unstable weapon-spirit. She felt strength leaving her and her head pounding with spiritual exertion as the circle took on a weak glow, the blood she’d used seeping into and proliferating through the entire, nearly three-meter length of fabric she had used.

The knight-captain’s face washed over with a lingering fear as he looked upon the ritual and a misguided assumption took root in his mind.

“...You do not intend to place a- a blood-curse on me, d-do you?” he questioned with a begging tone. Zel couldn’t help but laugh, her amusement shared by Red, who had from her seat afar seen the ritual being carried out. There was nothing about it beyond the involvement of blood that someone with even surface-level knowledge of the arcane could construe as a cursing rite.

The blood which soaked into the paper soon took on the form of rough glyphs, signaling the success of the small ritual, at which point she took one end of the wrap and began winding it around the Broken Butcher’s handle, still chuckling to herself.

“No, no, of course not. Even if I were able to do something of the sort, I wouldn’t waste a blood curse on you,” she said. “This is just a temporary seal to keep the blade-spirit of Butcher over here from breaking down its physical vessel and evaporating all of us alongside this temple in a deluge of primordial lightning.”

He fell silent at that, as if terrified that any interruption could cause the tuning fork to go off like a powderkeg. Zel got most of the way done with wrapping the handle and guard by the time Zefaris and Victor finally returned.

“An egomaniac who has been faced with one undeniably superior to themselves…” came Zef’s voice from the doorway. “Truly there is no creature more pitiable in this world.”

Turning to look, Zel saw that both of them were splattered with droplets of blood; Zef’s boots and face bore the marks, while Victor’s stomach had been spattered by a spray of blue. Zefaris approached, disdainfully glaring at the knight-captain. A question came from her disgust-crooked lips: “How many slaves did those False Drakes buy you, hm? How many beasts of war did it take to buy an innocent life for you to ruin?”

“I-I do not recall,” he stuttered. “They… They changed the prices on a case by case basis. I often had to bid against people who later turned out to be associated with the slaves’ original owners, once I paid six drakes and a thousand Gelt for this one Pateirian… Didn’t even end up getting my money’s worth, little shit slipped away and stole from me to boot…”

He fell into a despondent silence once his monologue trailed off and he once more realized his own situation. Zel took her time finishing the re-sealing process, wrapping up the Butcher end to end until it was entirely covered, as unlike the greater talismans it had borne previously, this sealing-tape could barely keep it stable even like this. Moreover, it would only last a few days before it would need to be replaced.

As the time went on, the others slowly gathered within the same ten-meter-square area. Victor had picked up the Locust Queen’s broken staff at some point, its smaller jade rings quietly jingling against the larger one as he walked. Over the course of the minutes which it took Zelsys to re-wrap her weapon, the dread in Von Wickten’s face grew and became truly immediate; his own imagination, painted by the very things he had done to others, was a more effective source of horror than any spoken threats. Once she was done, Zel stood up.

This alone was enough to make the knight-captain’s panic boil over.

“Please… I- I am sorry, truly I am!” he pleaded.

All present sneered at the display. Jorfr spat in his face.

“Victor, do you think he truly is sorry?” she turned to the very redhead who had once been Adalbert’s next would-be victim.

Staring down at the broken dragon, Vic only found disgust for the man’s overplayed prostrations. He heard the knight-captain pleading with him, too, but the words didn’t truly reach his ears.

“Yeah, I do,” he said. A brief look of relief flashed over Von Wickten’s face, soon to be replaced by rage and horror. “Sorry that he got caught and beaten. Not for anything he’s done.”

“Consider yourself fortunate; you may find redemption yet,” Zelsys said grimly, retrieving an oblong white pill. “This pill…”

She squatted down, holding it out in front of his face.

“...Will cause you to expel the impurities which stain your soul. Execution, or repentance. Do you think there will be anything left of you after the filth is gone? Do you feel that lucky?”

Not a spark of consideration went through his eyes; the knight captain saw what he thought to be a chance to avoid execution, and desperately nodded agreement at the chance to survive. Zelsys pushed the pill into his mouth, shoving it down into the back of his throat with her fingers.

As she rose up and wiped her hand off on her pants, she said to Von Wickten: “A piece of advice: Find a river.”

Von Wickten tried to question, but he found his voice silenced by a hacking cough. The five of them remained there for a short while, watching the pill take effect. He convulsed in place, tears of black, rancid-smelling pitch trailing down his face as he fought for every wheezing breath.

The horrid stench emitted by the congealed impurity being ejected from the knight-captain’s body superseded anything any of them had ever been exposed to, making the pungency of rotting bugmen seem tolerable by comparison… Well, except for Red.

While Zel had been exposed to spiritual impurity before - both her own and Zef’s during the blonde’s breakthrough that had been assisted by one of these very pills - that stench was nothing compared to this. It had been comparable to vomit or a tonsil-stone, whereas this was… Transcendent, in its own way. Noon Dust’s artificial lemon-scent alongside burned flesh, insect hemolymph, and half-dried semen somehow broke through the battering ram of pure putrescence, forming an exquisite perfume of mankind at its most degenerate.

Zefaris retrieved her camera from storage and took several photographs, while Zelsys made her way to the back of the chamber, attempting to open the door at the sanctum’s back to inspect what was behind it. From a distance, plugging his nose and covering his mouth with the hem of his shirt, Victor watched the knight-captain struggle. Zef noticed a macabre curiosity in his eyes, and his righteous satisfaction at the scene was obvious.

“Jorfr, help me over here!” she called the norseman, and after some struggle, they managed to force the stone edifice open. While the two struggled, Red drifted across the room towards them. Behind the door was a small room, long stripped of any identifying markers beyond a bed and some shelves that had been carved out of solid stone, while any space that had once been filled by furniture was now taken up with a small hoard of currency, some trinkets which included several shafts of bloodwood, and… A large cabinet, encased in brass and silver. It had several levers and dials, as well as a keyboard with Pateirian symbols. A small key jutted out of a slot on the machine’s front end, an activation switch next to it. An oval, black mirror jutted out from the cabinet.

“A Black Mirror Array. This model was in the prototyping stages last I’d heard. It’s supposed to be immune to the aetherwave spying methods most commonly used on the old models... Why is it here?” Red remarked. Her voice was tense and nervous at the implications of this machine’s presence - if such a prototype was here, it meant the Red Locust Bandits had contacts in the high branches of Pateirian government.

Wondering who had been called on it last, Zel turned the key and brought the machine to life. Rather than try to stop the beast-slayer, the Lady in Red stepped back so that she would be out of its field of view, but still able to listen in. She, too, was curious, but she wasn’t willing to risk her own reputation.

The Black Mirror alighted to the greasy, yellowish visage of a Pateirian soldier. He was looking off to the side, speaking hurriedly in that foreign tongue, but Zelsys caught one unmistakable name: Cao Hu. The soldier looked up to meet Zel’s gaze, and his face washed over with confused uncertainty. He stepped away from the mirror, revealing the rest of the room, an unassuming small office through whose door one could see a larger office with numerous Pateirians huddled around several tables. A few seconds later, the soldier returned with another, more important-looking and markedly less greasy man in tow, who upon seeing Zelsys exploded in hysterics for a few seconds before he leaned over the machine on his side and ripped something out, at which point the transmission suddenly flickered out.

Zel turned to Red, and saw the look of dread in her face.

“...What did they say?”

After a few moments of thought as she translated it in her head, Red deadpanned the Ikesian translation: “We’ve received the Dragon Eye intact. The plan proceeds apace; Cao Hu stands ready for his interment in the Walking-Machine. Furthermore, we expect to be finished with the high-priority excavation in two months.”

When the inevitable raised eyebrow came. “I will clarify outside. Meet me where you’ve stashed your machines.”

With that, she left, and soon enough, so did the four beast-slayers.

As they made their way through the massacre-stained halls, they looted the corpses of those who had come here to purchase slaves, and even went into the back rooms to do the same to the now-ruined establishment. Beyond the currency the establishment needed to do its business - this being a considerable amount of both Gelt and Pateirian Huén in coinage - there was not much loot to be had, since the Meat Market’s goods had primarily been living things. Zefaris insisted that they go all the way into the back, showing her compatriots to a now-inactive Fog Gate, its mechanical, brass frame set inside the empty archway of an old, traditional gate whose silver frame had long been removed.

Zefaris commented: “I didn’t want to bring it up in Von Wickten’s presence so as to not give him hope of being rescued, but… A few of the scumbags managed to get out through here. I spotted one of the bugmen grabbing storage tablets on the way out, with several Dragon Knights following in his stead.”

As Zelsys looked down on the console, something stood out, dredging up a memory. The dial on the Fog Gate’s control console was set to glyphs which she’d seen before, in the amphitheater. Upon closer examination, they reminded her of the glyphs seen on the backplates of traditional, silver-framed Fog Gates. A tattered fragment of knowledge dislodged from the recesses mind, joining with what she already knew.

“The address glyphs,” she said, tapping the dial. “It’s the gate in Von Wickten’s manor.”

She pulled the activation lever, and though the console whirred to life and the gate lit up, the passageway did not manifest, to no surprise. It was only logical that those who had fled through the gate would disable the receiving gate to avoid pursuit.

In another chamber of the bottom floor, they discovered a far more chilling sight. The gnawed, half-eaten bodies of many people and animals, all piled up at the bottom of a caved-in dungeontech elevator shaft. The pile contained the battered, claw-scraped chestplates and Boarkiller Spears emblematic of Arches’ militia hunters. One of the few recognizable corpses in the pile was Victor’s Instructor, much to the young man’s dismay.

“We’ll get them, Mr. Groessin... Every single one of the bastards,” the redhead uttered under his breath. Even now, after all this, the killing aura which flared from him in moments like these reaffirmed Zel’s belief in the correctness of her choice of him as a disciple. The battle was done for the time being, Victor had been kidnapped and had gambled with death again and again, and still, that flame which sought to burn out the wretched things of this world still blazed within him. Zel put her hand on his shoulder, looking down at him.

“Let’s give them a proper burial, at least,” she said to him. “Arcane flame burns flesh as easily as wood, does it not?”

He gave a tentative nod, adding, “Without a puff of smoke if formulated correctly, yes. Do… Do you mind if I use the staff?”

“You damn near lost an arm finishing off the Queen and there’s no way in hell I’m giving the staff to Karmesin, so it’s yours as far as I’m concerned. We can join it to the spear after this is all done, make it something you can call your own.”

And so, raising the broken staff aloft, Victor murmured incantations under his breath as serpents of Fog swirled from his mouth, the staff’s jade rings alighting to magic as a bead of white-black flame grew within its central ring. It built and built over the next minute, until Victor finally released it. The white-black sphere floated forth, slowly drifting down the pit as truly bone-chilling sounds of pain and struggle continued to echo from the temple’s upper floors.

Soon the makeshift burial pit erupted in black-white flame, its glow playing across the ceiling in an eerily aquatic pattern. Vic uneasily itched his right hand, closing and opening its fingers. They waited until the blaze had consumed the remains of all those who had been thrown into the pit and until its heat had become barely-bearable, and only then did they leave. On their way out of the temple, they witnessed black tar running out of the two windows which had once been the great statue’s eyeholes.

So it was that they at last left the ruined temple, making their way out onto the road as the screams of the disgraced knight-captain resounded from within the temple’s innermost sanctum. As they walked, Victor retrieved several small rib-bones from his Tablet and, to Zel’s confusion, crushed them in his hand as they walked, sighing in relief when he did. Upon her questioning looks, he answered, holding up his newly-armored hand: “I ah… Growing this thing was expensive. I had to replace what it leeched out of my bones.”

Just as they neared the place where they had stowed their Sturmgandrs, they were met with the cloaked figure of Lady Karmesin, once more masked and astride her hovering blackstone firefly.

“A warning,” she proclaimed. “I intend to inform the duke of the knight-captain’s vile actions and the battle which transpired here, but cannot guarantee that the duke will accept the truth graciously - not initially, that’s for certain.”

Her gaze shifted towards Victor as she continued: “I suggest you put your matters in order and leave the duchy as quickly as you can… And do not return until a season has passed at the least.”

Finally, she stared Zelsys dead in the eyes: “...And as for you, Zelsys Newman, you Manufactured Paragon, one day I will strike you down. Else my name is not Zhumei Karmesin.”

“...So be it. And the translation? What did that mean?”

Red knew what the message’s contents meant. She hadn’t known before she’d heard it, only possessing fragmentary information from her associates across Ikesia and the empire, but this brief exchange had put everything into context. Sighing, she leaned forward atop her stone steed, explaining: “There are only a few places in Ikesia where the Empire is performing excavations, and even fewer places where such an operation could have to do with Cao Hu… It’s either a dungeon, or an Ankhezian “God Tomb”; a place where the remains of a god or multiple gods were gathered by the ancient Ankhezians in an effort to reconstruct the entity’s powers for their own use. They used - and still use - God Tombs to power many of their greatest creations, and several of them are known to have been located in Ikesia.

“And you know what those are because-”

Spreading her arms, Red gestured to herself.

“The God’s Blood elixir,” she said. “It’s made with liquid extracted from one of those sarcophagi, somewhere far south of the Imperial capital. What little I know of its location, I know because I was once assigned to transporting a tank of the substance. The place was simultaneously the best-hidden and most heavily guarded I’ve ever seen, short of the Three Great Sects and the Imperial Palace.”

“And the rest of the message?”

“Walking-Machine refers to one of your ultracompact tanks. Likely one of the fancy first-models, possibly even the rabid prototype that has been rampaging across the country, as one of my contacts reported that so-called machine-hunters had been dispatched after it was sighted ravaging a village near the western border. I believe its name was V1.”

Raising an eyebrow, Zefaris butted in: “But what’s the purpose of all this? Do you think these are independent efforts, or all working to a single goal? And isn’t Cao Hu crippled after what Alcerys did to him?”

“Chimerization of artifacts and living things alike is among the Emperor’s favored tactics, so I would not be surprised if he intended to somehow unite all of them to create a new, greater Divine General to surpass even Ubul. Whether Cao Hu is to be the subject of such empowerment or if he is merely a pawn is another question… A lieutenant for the new Divine General, perhaps? A sacrifice for whoever is found within the God Tomb? I certainly hope his Divinity does not intend to build up that madman after all his failures. I will try to pull what strings I can to learn more and sabotage the plan, but I would prepare for another calamity if I were you.”