“A-affirmative,” the Captain nodded, slipping into the guard post, dragging the younger soldier along as he did. Zef heard him protesting that he couldn’t conscionably go against explicit orders, even arguing that the Doppelsoldat badge didn’t mean anything anymore if they were the Sage of Fog’s agents, due to the Sage’s disappearance and subsequent condemnation for innumerable supposed and ridiculous war crimes. The kid was desperately inundated in post-war anti-Ikesian propaganda, as Zefaris saw it; she could scarcely imagine the self-loathing he must be struggling with for the perceived crime of being Ikesian. There was a smoldering flame behind his eyes; she decided to err on the side of caution.

After sternly observing for a few seconds, she turned on her boot-heel and began marching back to the others. She raised a silver coin to her face and used the Philosopher’s Eye to carve a glyph into its surface, turning her head slightly to the left so she could keep an eye on those two without it being apparent.

The younger soldier managed to slip past his superior when he was preoccupied with the security procedure to raise the barricade, pulling his rolling-block pistol as he sprinted out the door.

His aim was good - the best of his class, even; he could hit a human head at thrice this distance. Raise the gun, cock the hammer, take aim, fire.

One moment his target was walking away looking off into the treeline, and the next, she was facing him, as if she had skipped forward in time by a second or two. There was the flicker of a glowing, thrown coin, superimposed into the path of his bullet, right above it the skull-faced gaze of that woman. A sudden force smashed into his chest plate and he was thrown to the ground. He would’ve been fine, had he not hit his head.

The last thing he heard before his consciousness faded was this: “Count yourself lucky that Ikesian armor is proofed against Ikesian firearms.”

When next he drifted back to the land of the living, it was the doppelsoldat’s voice that welcomed him. She was speaking to the Captain, as he could surmise: “...won’t be any need for such drastic punishment. Just make him do marksmanship drills in the rain or somesuch. It’s more important that you get that occupationist propaganda out of his head. Take him to visit Fort 57 down south if you can, see some of the burned-out farmsteads on the way…”

Before anyone could notice that he was awake, he faded out again.

The crossing into the Gaullam Labyrinth; a town on stilts, stretching out into the foggy wetness. A lesser trade hub by virtue of its presence upon a chokepoint as well as the local fishing industry. Nevertheless, there were not many towns between here and the Northern Capital, and this was by far not the most common path between the Capital and the rest of Ikesia. These were the reasons why they had chosen this path rather than a more direct one, alongside the need to pass through Arches.

Considering the relative business of the town and that they would need to pass through certain areas immediately adjacent to the Northern Capital, the quartet chose, for once, to don inconspicuous guises - roughspun, oiled cloaks. Not out of a true desire to go unnoticed, since such cloaks were so stereotypical that they looped back to being conspicuous, but as a tacit warning: “We do not wish to be stopped. Do so at your own peril.”

When they stopped a ways beyond the checkpoint to don their guises, Victor sounded a concern regarding the border guards: “That soldier. If his conviction in his orders is strong enough to pull a gun on you, he may very well share the information of our passage before he sees reason.”

“It is of little consequence; there was no aetherwave transceiver in the guard post, probably because the town has one, so the Captain will be able to keep an eye on that fool, hopefully long enough to get the occupationist brain rot out of him. Even if he manages to send such a message, we’ll be long gone before any task force that would slow us can be mustered.”

“True…” the young man murmured. “Wait, so you only used the badge because you didn’t want to fight other Ikesians.”

“I wished to ascertain whether they were hostile before escalating to violence. Most folks are against the occupation, but you can’t be truly certain with the remnants of the Ikesian military. They tried awfully hard to purge anyone who showed signs of opposition, from what I’ve heard.”

“You weren’t there?”

“No. I deserted - or rather, was ordered to desert from on high - just as our inevitable defeat was becoming evident. You know the time, shortages of everything, corrupt agents in the Econ Bureau purposely causing hyperinflation of the Ikesian Mark, et cetera. They assigned me and one other Doppelsoldat to a supply convoy in the far south and basically told us to just hide until the shitshow blew over and, if the war ended unfavorably, to continue fighting through clandestine means.”

“...That other doppelsoldat was your Captain, right?” Zel cut in with a question.

“Who else, Makhus or Sigmund?” the blonde laughed. “No, of course it was our Captain. She's dead, 'course, but that's... That's just how it is."

They moved on through the town-upon-stilts without incident, plunging into the Gaullam’s morass in full. The better part of a day riding on an uncharacteristically twisty Ankhezian road led them to a fishing village where they stopped for the moment, though didn’t make camp; that was still some hours off. Zel was once more the only one to go to town, just like at Fort 57, meaning to buy some fresh rations and go right back.

After making her way to the town’s humble market, Zel did her shopping, taking the first opportunity she could to bad-mouth the occupation of Ikesia and to not-at-all-subtly insinuate her violent intentions towards occupationists and their sympathizers. Opportunities aplenty presented themselves; merchants used the occupation as a topic of small talk or elsewise a means of excusing hiked-up prices. On her side, finding bad things to say of the occupiers wasn’t a difficult task in the least; she just pulled on her own experiences with such forces and on the things she’d heard others speak of them.

When it came to the Grekurian side of the occupation, her derisive remarks were aimed mainly at the fact their corrupt government allowed the merchant guilds and families to push them into involving themselves in spite of Grekuria’s historically amicable relationship with the Ikesian city-states. Their part in the war had been mostly motivated by the greed of insular clans that had subverted the government and installed their own relatives in positions of power. From what she’d heard, Grekurian occupation was largely a purely legal affair and often put in place to keep Pateirian occupiers from swooping in - as had been done in Rigport after Cao Hu was ousted from that city.

Pateiria, however… Her mind was awash with such pure vitriol that she had to but dip into it to pen a verbal masterwork of pure hate towards the empire and its constituents. As she did so, she observed a heavy-set woman directing attention towards her. It was a tan-skinned, brown-haired Grekurian woman of prodigious size, only perhaps four centimeters shorter than her, though unlike Zelsys, this one’s frame was heavy-set, muscle concealed by kilos and kilos of fat. In her hand was a hooked, utilitarian polearm, and a distinct shotgun was folded up in a wide holster by her side. Zel recognized the gun, it was hard no to; it was a Tyrant Muncher, the production version of Tempesta.

Unfortunately, it seemed that this one didn’t resonate with the gun’s etymology. The first half of the prominent “TYRANT MUNCHER” label which was stamped into the right-hand barrels of these firearms had been meticulously filed away and modified to instead read “REBEL MUNCHER”.

“A bounty-hunter of some sort? A beast-slayer? Likely a bit of both…” she thought as she continued peppering anti-occupationist remarks between polite exchanges with mortified merchants. Well, most of them were. Out of the nine merchants to whom she gave patronage of one sort or another, two expressed enthusiastic approval of her statements. One gave her a grim look of recognition, leaning in as he gave her her change to quietly utter: “You have violence about you, stranger. The fat one. You saw her. Hired dog. An enthusiastic one at that.”

A slight nod from Zelsys was all it took to place an equally grim smile on his face. He pushed all her money back into her hand, and she knew better than to refuse the gesture.

Once she was satisfied with what she had bought and the mixture of tangible fear, awe, and indignance caused by her display of blatant pro-Ikesian sentiment in an occupied territory, Zel departed. She didn’t hurry, and walked through a back alley, trying to lessen her own presence in the hopes that some overly eager moron would give her an excuse for violence.

Zel’s heart jumped in her chest and a grin wormed its way onto her face when she felt a malicious presence tailing her some twenty meters back. She wasn’t so bloodthirsty as to instigate violence for no good reason; provoking the enemy faction into a confrontation they couldn’t win, however, was not below her by a longshot. It was a sound tactical choice, and a very enjoyable one at that.

She stopped a good ways into one of the town’s narrow alleys. Old women and children both looked on, trying to remain unseen.

“I am neither deaf nor blind, “Rebel Muncher”,” she called out.

Heavy footfalls preceded the voice of a chain smoker: “But you are a big-mouthed Ikesiochauvinistic moron, Newman.”

Chuckling at the inefficacy of her disguise, Zel turned around to face her assailant.

“Big word for a dog to say,” she grinned back. “And you followed the trail of scraps right to where I want you, at that. What did you expect to happen in this alley, if you know who I am? Perhaps you subconsciously want some sense beaten into you, is that it?”

“I am one of the few lawkeepers in this remote place. I was willing to let you pass, but you just had to go and be an inciter, so I have no-”

“-choice?! Really?!” Zel burst out in indignant laughter. She couldn’t take the bounty hunter’s excuse seriously. “Oh, what’s next? You don’t make the abusive laws, you just eagerly enforce them? Why don’t you go choke to death on that boot you love licking so much, make my job easier?”

Anger twisted Rebel Muncher’s featured as she reached for her shotgun, barking: “The law is-”

Zel couldn’t hear the words, only the cadence, as she fully focused her mind on a single action and drowned out unnecessary stimuli. She pivoted her left arm under her cloak such that it didn’t disturb the fabric.

Click. Click.

A ball of lead ripped a perfectly circular hole through the cloak, smashing right into the bounty-hunter’s hand. Fingers, wood, and the gun’s mechanism all shattered under the force.

“That gun is not for one such as you, dog. It was wrought for the hands of those that stand against your masters.”

She retrieved one of the looted rolling-block pistols, and tossed it at Rebel Muncher’s head, splitting open the skin of her forehead with the back of the hammer.

“This one is more appropriate.”

Rebel Muncher struggled to her feet, bracing against her polearm. She stared at Zelsys with a burning resolve. Something about that woman… Reminded her of that checkpoint. She didn’t come across as a mindless tool of the occupation, not truly.

“What, do you not feel like killing me anymore?!” the Grekurian howled, charging at Zelsys with the polearm in one hand, braced under her arm. Fast for her size, but still easy to predict. A side-step and an upwards kick was enough to break the shaft. She grappled Rebel Muncher from behind, leaning in to say: “No, not really. Consider the true consequences of your actions, the true intentions of the occupation, why they want me dead or captured so badly when my most significant acts were purely in defense of Willowdale and her people. Come after me if you still wish to do so afterwards; I will be glad to kill you then.”

She choked the woman out and left her there in the muddy street, leaving before she could awake. Rebel Muncher’s angered, confused scream of awakening could be heard around the town only moments after Zelsys left its walls.