The Order of the Dragon would be cleansed of those loyal to Adalbert, the Betrayer, and their reliance upon mutagens replaced with a focus on tank suit piloting. It would soon thereafter be renamed to the Order of the Iron Dragon, with appropriate cosmetic customization being carried out on their suits.

Meanwhile, far to the south, within the walled city of Willowdale, the progenitors of this new order trained. Knights of a new sort, common men and women who would soon ascend to prominence and wealth by the grace of machinery. Each and every one of them, chosen not for potential as soldiers or cultivators, but as the beating hearts of these equalizers, these walking tanks. The stomping brutality of the First-models, the mass-producible sleek agility of the Second-models, and the gestalt elegance of the Third-models, bleeding-edge union of technologies that they were.

Valorous defenders they were, their machines painted in the city’s livery while rare owner-operator irregulars bedecked their armours with bright, arguably garish colours and modifications of the same style. Many of these tankmen wielded weapons as tall as themselves, swords forged from lengths of railway stock.

The landsknechts of the new era.

An enigmatic shape shot across the sky of occupied Ikesia, a giant firefly whose wings left behind glimmering trails that revealed the leylines upon which it rode. Red only needed to rest briefly, but like mundane vehicles were restricted by the roads, so too was her dragonfly restricted by the leylines and their crossings. The leylines in the Gaullam Labyrinth being an ever-shifting tangled mess with swaths of near-zero aerial leyline activity, she found herself more impeded in her effort to follow the Newman party than they had ever been in the course of traversing the Gaullam.

She wasn’t warned away from the Northern Passage, and as far as she knew, and was not deterred by the smaller-scale storm systems or the marauding beasts. The murderous cold and buffeting winds had little effect upon her, and she could simply evade the monsters.

They had made camp in a hidden cave over an hour’s trek off the beaten path. Jorfr insisted upon hunting something, despite the fact they had provisions aplenty, but the norseman simply stated that it wasn’t for food. When he departed, so too did Zelsys leave alongside him, promising to return within a half-hour’s time.

Victor felt a disconcerting consideration float through his mind, hearkening back to what Jorfr had said the last time they’d made camp, but he banished the thought. He passed the time by finishing what he’d started, retrieving a notebook and drawing supplies from his Tablet. The notebook was filled with thick, strong paper designed for drawing, and his tools were of good make as well, albeit somewhat basic; wartime shortages hadn’t hit art supplies particularly hard. Like reading, this pastime had been one he picked up during his education, albeit a little less eagerly than devouring literature. The artwork was a stylized, somewhat abstract portrait of Zelsys, based upon an image which had inextricably burned itself into his head: That moment in the fight with Burgghusen’s convoy when she’d pulled him back up to his feet.

Since he lacked the colours or the skill to make a true-to-life rendering, he had settled for this. Having remembered his reaction last time, Zefaris didn’t try to peek at what he was drawing, though he didn’t make it difficult to see, as her right eye’s field of view was well beyond that of a human. She could make out everything within its field of view clearly, at least to the standards of normal sight.

He was suddenly pulled from the timeless immersion of total focus by the stomping of two pairs of feet, along with the smell of blood and an intensely gamey animal stench. The reason for such a seemingly pointless excursion became clear soon enough, when Jorfr hung the bear which they’d caught from the branch of a tree near the cave entrance. He dug a pit in the ground with his bare hands and cut its throat with a knife that looked to be made of glass, draining the beast’s blood into the pit.

While this went on, Zelsys had completely bypassed his notice; he only became aware of her presence when he felt a huge hand atop his head and heard her voice from behind: “Hey, that’s pretty good.”

________________________________________________________________________________________

Barely had she even said anything, and already Victor had jumped from his seat, as if he hadn’t noticed her walking right past him.

“What, were you looking at the bear so intently you didn’t see me?” she laughed, squatting down beside the sitting redhead to get a more level look at the art, his hand stiffly held out as if frozen.

“Yeah, I- Uh- thank you,” he replied, the tension of getting startled melting from him in seconds.

“Hm… Can’t afford to have you getting startled and freezing. We’ll have to work on that.”

“Really? When? I’ve been itching to actually train with you the past few days,” he perked up, any anxiety suddenly washed away, a slight tone of sarcastic over-eagerness evident in his reaction. It was obvious that he’d expected training to begin right away, and here she was, dragging him along on a possibly multiple-week journey with few if any stops for training along the way.

Zel glanced outside at Jorfr, the norseman’s figure hunched over the pool of bear’s blood, filling a bowl with it.

“Well, his ritual will take a couple hours and for once we don’t need to immediately get on the road come sunrise, so I think we can afford a couple rounds of sparring…” she uttered, a grin already worming its way onto hers and Victor’s faces both. Glancing down at the redhead, she promised: “I’ll go easy on you, don’t you worry.”

Zefaris grimaced at that, knowing that it was both true and false at once. She knew that Zel fully meant what she said, but she also knew that “going easy” by the woman’s standards was anything but easy for someone who wasn’t 100% completely fucking insane like her.