“See?! Even a fucking foreigner can tell what a failure you are!” he barked, slamming the pulp open-faced on his desk. The book’s spine broke. “Generations of meticulous breeding and the first one of our clan to reap the fruits in full can’t even use them properly, pathetic. At least your insufferable mongrel of a cousin can use his half-baked gifts to their full extent.”

“What happened at the Spirit Grove wasn’t my fault, and you agreed to stop bringing it up! Don’t think that I won’t mention this when mother returns. Remember what she did to you last time, you senile old bastard,” the woman seethed.

“When she returns?! Don’t make me laugh, that leashless bitch has probably gone feral somewhere in the jungle by now,” he cackled. Continuing, he lied: ”Put your wasted gifts to some use and get rid of that homunculus freak, then I’ll stop bringing it up, how’s that?!”

“If Svend is so much better than me why don’t you have that dumb fuck go after the homunculus instead? I’m sure the delusional brat would have no problem blowing up any tiny thing into a grave insult that demands holmgang,” she seethed.

“Because, dear Rikke, you’re still our strongest duelist,” Asgeir admitted begrudgingly. In the same breath, he returned to trying to break her down: “You’re just completely useless in anything involving allies, so we have to rely on Svend instead.”

Just as Jorfr had predicted, he did indeed end up wheezing after the thirteenth kilometer of their tour through the great city, though he didn’t seem out of breath. Rather, his airways just started making that noise at some point and he kept coughing and smacking himself in the chest in the hopes of dislodging whatever was causing it, to no avail.

Oasis City’s architecture was more or less homogenous throughout the entire city, featuring largely wooden structures built on stone foundations and a massive amount of water-carrying and heating infrastructure everywhere. Most imposingly, huge metal towers appeared to be the beating hearts of the city’s several districts, blasting jets of steam and flame into the sky at intermittent intervals. Many pipes converged at these towers, further lending credence to Zel’s internal comparison of the towers to hearts.

They were also one of the few structures to be openly and heavily guarded by state-affiliated enforcers, as their body paint apparently made screamingly clear - though it took for Jorfr to mention this before anyone other than Victor actually got the message. Their purpose elucidated the reason - they were part water routing stations, part gigantic boilers that turned the Boiling Lake’s water to ultra-high-temperature steam for applications that demanded it.

Overall, the city seemed semi-normal on the surface, but vast and numerous differences from any Ikesian city swiftly reared their heads. The sheer number of gymnasiums and openly-advertised combat venues of all sizes notwithstanding, the city’s reliance on resources extracted from the jungle was hidden relatively well due to the fact all of the infrastructure for processing and extracting these resources was either tucked away out of eyeshot and noseshot, or simply placed all the way on the outskirts. Jorfr made sure to take them to one such place - a vast subterranean complex whose many faceted and eyewatering stench was apparently funneled into the nearby Steam Tower’s furnace as part of the ventilation system. Jorfr’s contact offered to give them a tour with the same tone one would offer particularly acrid alcohol to someone who had never drunk before, giving a half-disappointed half-amused grin when they politely rejected his offer.

As for the entertainment options - besides mutual violence and the spectation thereof - the people in Borea seemed just as fond of theatre as anywhere else, though with a fair bit less focus on music or traditionally theatrical narrative and a great deal more bombastic, pseudo-real violence. Staged “fights” that were, in truth, cooperative and meticulously rehearsed performances, carried out by individuals in eclectic and oft animal-themed costumes, many of which at least partially obscured their faces. Her trained eyes easily saw that the combatants put a great deal of effort into making the fight look good and inflicting injuries that looked gruesome but weren’t at all serious, while not actually doing most of the things that one would do in a real fight. Moves were heavily telegraphed, every punch was over-swung, when one of the men took a hit he sent himself flying and flipped head-over-heels as he skidded through the dirt as if he weighed as much as a child rather than a hundred kilos. The audience raucously went along with the performance, cheering the hero and booing the villain. Meanwhile, Zel couldn’t help but notice that the display of hyperviolence had all but caused Victor’s face to light up like the sun itself. The redhead was outright enthralled.

She couldn’t say she was surprised. Even she was genuinely impressed by the sight of two men cutting each other to shit with dual-wielded swords and painting the ring red, because she clearly saw that they only inflicted such surface-level injuries that not a muscle had been nicked in their fight. At the end they simultaneously ran each other through with sprays of blood issuing forth, but Zel took note of the thick scar tissue where they stabbed and she knew that no vital organs were located in those places.

At the end, still carrying eachother’s swords within their bodies, the two men shook hands and gave theatrical speeches of begrudging respect before walking out of the ring, trailing blood the whole way. Zel could scarcely hear her own thoughts over the raucous cheering.

“...Was I unknowingly emulating this stuff the whole time?” she thought aloud.

Her companions’ eyes magnetized to her all at once, tacitly questioning. Jorfr spoke: “I thought you knew. That is why I took you here, I thought you would be interested.”

“I am, but I had no idea show-fighting was such an institution, and in Borea of all places. I was just doing it because I like to put on a show.”

“Those two we just watched are among our most famous show-fighters, Thomas and Lars Andersen. They are brothers in reality, so they play estranged brothers in the ring. The Andersen Clan climbed up all the way to Primary just by focusing entirely on show-fights, since their hereditary traits are so much better for this. They’re good people, the lot of them. Good to drink with. Except Old Hoge. A legend once the mask is on, but he’s a politicking nidingr behind the scenes from what I’ve heard. Don’t tell him I said that.”

“Nidingr?” Zel asked.

Jorfr shrugged, explaining: “Bastard, cunt, and coward, all rolled into one word. The most severe one-word insult we have. Imagine “honorless cur”, but a few orders of magnitude more severe.”