To call the following chain of events “fighting” would have been overly generous; it was better described as Victor valiantly struggling to put a dent or even land a hit on a mountain with the mobility of a featherweight, while Zelsys complimented and picked apart his technique in the same breath. This went on for nearly an hour and a half with breaks between bouts, the youth impressing not only Zefaris but Zelsys as well with his sheer tenacity; in this timespan, Jorfr had painted most of his upper body in elaborate patterns using a paint made of bear’s blood and various herbs, and was at this point chanting in a shamanistic trance while he skinned the bear with that same glass knife. Zel and Victor went from mere unarmed sparring, to Zelsys putting him in various holds and instructing him on how to escape them, all the way to her simply telling him to pick up his staff and come at her with anything short of Bonefire, as she genuinely didn’t want to risk getting hit by that.

When he understandably hesitated, she convinced him by performing the rather expensive feat of reinforcing her entire upper body against physical and magical attacks with the Skin of Bronze technique. It was, then, much to her ecstatic surprise when the redhead not only did as had been asked of him, but went straight to Fight the Night as his first option, perhaps because he assumed that even it wouldn’t do anything. He forewarned: “It has a flash-grenade sort of effect, so you may want to close your eyes…”

“Unleash, fire and flames alight…”

A bead of Ignis accumulated in the central ring, the outer rings spinning at equidistant intervals and drawing out the cone’s beginning in sparks.

“Full force, strike!”

Aer was introduced into the mixture. A runaway reaction began. Jorfr’s throaty chanting filled his ears and helped him center himself.

“Fight the Night!”

Vic’s sight of that grinning, expectant face was washed away by the blackness of the spell’s back end, its recoil pushing him back. In the next moment, he heard an overjoyed proclamation: “Fuck me, that burns! That was really good!”

The flame cleared, and there she was, flexing, her skin like bronze, except in the spots where it wasn’t; surface-level burns were evident in places, and a few stray hairs had visibly burnt up, but there was no pain in her face, only satisfaction, as if this was what she’d hoped for the whole time.

“I’ll be honest, I just wanted to see that with my own eyes since the last time you did it I was in a trance. That right there and those Devil’s Teeth, killer stuff…” she went on, leisurely sitting down by the fire as he could see burned skin turn the green shade of bronze patina and flake away, revealing a pristine bronze sheen underneath. She retrieved a bottle of Viriditas and Rubedo alongside a small brass cup, and began mixing what Vic now recognized to be a Vitae elixir. As she did so, she looked up at him, still standing there, and she kicked back the elixir.

“How’s about next time, I start on teaching you how to punch through someone’s fuckin’ head, huh?” she offered.

“I’ve… Kind of done that, already. I don’t think it was in the sense you mean it, though…” the young man remarked, also sitting back down.

“Really? You should’ve said so! Come on, show me. It couldn’t have just been a normal punch, no way in hell do you have the raw striking power for that.”

“I used the same thruster constructs as I do for my Devil’s Teeth, but on the back of my elbow. In retrospect it would be better to place them on the rear third of my forearm so the force is easier to direct…”

“Do it.”

“What?”

“Right now, make the construct and hit me in the stomach with it. I’ll stop it with Siphoning Pulse so nobody gets hurt.”

His hesitation was noticeably lesser, this time, though he took a little while to go through with the spellcast nevertheless, altering it to incorporate Oculus as well as a vocal incantation. Last time, it had taken minutes to cast, but this time, it would be less than half a minute.

“Mons Ominosus, o mount of blazing fires, inhabit my fist and erupt to strike my enemies…” he incanted, pouring Ossum into his staff, passing his right arm through its central ring. In moments, reinforcing plates and thruster-nozzles were formed around his forearm. Next came the Ignis-Aer mixture fuel, and the hair-thin plugs to forestall ignition.

In the time it took him to do this, Zel had once more risen to her feet and taken up a braced stance, her abs becoming visibly more metallic as she further reinforced the flesh just in case.

Vic’s punching technique was copied wholesale from Sturmblitz Kunst 0; he leaned into the punch, pivoting his entire body on the heel of his left foot, and this time, unlike the last, he wasn’t dragged along like a hapless victim by his own technique. It was, perhaps, because he now knew how much fuel was too much, and he had applied it such that it all burned in a brief moment of blazing glory. For a moment he genuinely feared that he might hurt Zelsys, so forceful was his strike, but the moment it would’ve hit, his fist just stopped. In fact, his entire body stopped and he lost his balance, falling forward into her waiting arms. She looked down at him with a grin on her face and a ghostly antler over her left eye.

“Now that is one hell of a way to compensate for a low Force rating. It’d be a terrible shame to just let all this force dissipate, no?” she asked, glancing up at the phantom antler before putting him back down on his feet.

Zel turned right around and stretched out her hand, putting her fist barely a centimeter short of the cave wall.

“Release.”

There was a sudden THUD, and her fist imprinted itself in the rock, cracks spidering out from it to form a shallow, dinnerplate-sized crater. Several stalactites fell from the ceiling.

“And for comparison…”

She shifted backwards a bit, and threw a full-bodied punch. No Thundercharger, no visible Fog exhaust. It still left a bigger crater, noticeably so. However, an aura of satisfaction emanated from Zelsys as she turned around.

“If you can get good enough to make every punch land like that…” she pointed at the mark left by the energy of Victor’s punch. “You’ll be better than a good number of my inner disciples back in Willowdale. Just don’t let it go to your head.”

Despite the warning, it still etched itself into his mind and stayed with him well into the next morning.