“Ah… Feels like head’s splitting open…” he grumbled, rubbing his temple before turning to Zel again. “Seems I conveyed my message, then. Whatever those creepy fuckers want from you, I’m uninvolved, y’understand? My debt’s paid.”

“Got it,” she said as she prepared to leave, only to spin back around and draw the poor man’s attention again, grinning ear to ear as she questioned him. “Say, how’d one get Von Wickten’s attention? I would see for myself if he deserves his spot at the top.”

“Uh…” he stared off to the side, unsurprised by the apparent insanity of one such as Zelsys, yet still taken aback by it. “Well there’s a free slot, so… If you somehow rip your way through the whole roster tonight or even just put on enough of a show, you’re bound to draw sufficient attention to elicit his envy. We’ve got a phonograph and a mnemonic playback machine at the bar, both hooked into the announcer repros, so if you’ve got any entrance music just tell the bartender.”

She couldn’t help but chuckle, knowing full well where such things must’ve come from.

“Let me guess, Von Wickten bought brand new from the Kargarians after their caravan put on a live combat show and made him jealous?” she asked.

“Spot on. Those merchants of menace really know the sorts of new technology Ikesians go for,” the bookie agreed.

“Well, what are you waiting for? You should’ve already told me when and in which pit my first fight is,” she prodded yet again, drawing amusement from the man’s nervosity for no particular reason. He was handling it remarkably well, considering how easily normal people tended to become nervous when she put any pressure on them.

“Uh-huh… Pit three at nine, so in around twenty minutes. Just uh, need a name and an epithet,” he said.

“Zelsys Newman…” she began, and though she had half a mind to just add “Slayer of Divine Generals”, she figured it’d be a bit much for this circumstance. Thus, she added: “...Conqueror of Storms.”

Zel turned on a heel and finally left the bookie to his devices, heading to the bar.

“Hey, you’ve got a mnemonic playback machine here, right?" she asked. "I’ve got something I want you to play when I enter the ring against the Adalbert guy.”

“I’m impressed that you know what an MPM is, but I’m afraid that-” the barkeep began with a condescending tone, cutting himself off when he turned far enough to see whom he was talking to. At her raising of an eyebrow he finished his sentence, much more politely this time: “-that uh, I’ll have to have a listen myself before I can play it. Mnemonic records are only as good as the original imprint, and not many folks have the combination of good hearing and auditory memory to make playback-grade mnemonic records, let alone the… The hardware to properly store them.”

“Here, just take a listen,” Zelsys pushed her White Marble Tablet across the counter, already projecting the name of the mnemonic record in question. Being that such a Tablet had no audio projection hardware of its own, the barkeep had no choice but to place his hand atop the device, grimacing at the pain of first-time interface with the device. The grimace gave way to a flabbergasted expression as the Tablet inserted a perfect recording of the performance straight into his mind. His hand twitched away from the device, as if he feared he would fall into the memory.

“I uh- Yeah, we can play it. Just, if you don’t mind me asking… How’d you get this?”

It was obvious that he was doing his best not to offend, yet couldn’t control his own curiosity. Zel grinned, explaining: “A couple very clever engineers and alchemists back in Willowdale devised a method for splicing together mnemonic records and cleaning them up to create “perfect” recordings.”

She seemingly just willed her Tablet to go to its inventory list and eject a business card alongside a narrow, brass rectangle covered in glyphs, both falling onto the counter.

“Here. A recording of the song and contact information for the company. We also produce mundane wax cylinders.”

Meanwhile, the business card read “H.F. & Newman”, prompting the bartender to ask: “Your company?”

By the time he looked up from the card she had already walked away, only briefly turning around to answer: “Nope, just a relative.”

A core piece of the puzzle that would be her means of drawing Adalbert’s envy finally put in place, she made her way to the stands, easily spotting Zef’s unmistakable silhouette and heading over to their table. She shared what she’d learned from their Bureau contact, remarking that she hadn’t expected the man to be rigged with a memory-erasure geas.

This investigation had been a pain, but it was still important work. The Counter-propaganda Bureau, one of the last remaining arms of the Ikesian government still actually loyal to the nation, had contacted the Willowdale Slayer’s Guild to contract its Prime Slayer for a high-priority assignment. Being that Zelsys was the Prime Slayer, and the Bureau had explicitly gone out of its way to make it clear that this assignment was intended to not divert her from the actual path of her northward journey, she had accepted. There was also the factor that, on a personal level, she couldn’t bring herself to refuse - the task was to track down and exterminate a newly-risen cell of slave traders supposedly using Pateirian Control Parasites to build their network at an unprecedented pace.

Regardless of the slavers’ possible affiliation with the Pateirian government and her own vendetta against the aforementioned, Zelsys considered herself a beast-slayer, and her definition of that title was quite clear: “One who seeks out the wretched beasts of this world and butchers them as the beasts they are, regardless of how many legs they walk on, what honeyed words they speak, what false titles they claim, what stolen power they boast…”

And so it was that she had found herself here, having learned that the primary reason behind the assignment was securing an alliance with Von Hoedorff, and the extermination of the slaver-cell was just the means to that end. Nevertheless, the beast-slayer’s thirst for a real fight against someone or something that could actually put up a fight had gone unsated for a while now, and her inner beast was all but slavering at the opportunity to pit Sturmblitz Kunst against whatever the knight-captain called a fighting style…

…But that time wouldn’t come for a little while. A good four, five hours, if she were to guess. Zel found herself drifting into thought, further reminiscing on her predicament: What she had inwardly come to call the Journey to the North, after the title of a pulp novel she’d read in her months-long recovery from battling one of the Divine Generals: Ubul, the Beast Reborn in Stone.

The “Journey to the North”, that pursuit of Borea’s skymetal and aid from that far land’s smiths, both in service to saving the pseudo-life of a weapon. Indeed, all this was for a weapon, and the absurdity of it to any normal person wasn’t lost on her - she knew well that making one of the most dangerous journeys one could take just to repair a weapon was exactly the type of thing normal people expected cultivators to do, but the Lightning Butcher wasn’t just a weapon anymore. Certainly, her weapon of choice being a great-cleaver would’ve made just procuring another Captain’s Cleaver or other cold-iron great-cleaver a much easier solution. Captain’s Cleavers were, after all, mass-produced weapons, and she knew for a fact that she could make someone else’s Captain’s Cleaver change to a shape almost identical to hers, but… The Lightning Butcher, or what was left of it, wasn’t a Captain’s Cleaver anymore.

Even in its broken state, the Butcher made a “factory-new” Captain’s Cleaver seem like a glorified can opener by comparison. Even the semi-stable fragments of the Butcher that she’d tied to the ends of her braids were several grades of quality above any baseline Captain’s Cleaver, as far as cold-iron quality went. After all, the Butcher would’ve grown back to its original state, had it only been broken - the reason it required repair, and repair with such supreme material as skymetal, was the fact that the blade’s soul had outgrown the capacity of its physical form to contain. Even wrapped with stabilizing seals, the inexorable elemental might contained within the blade drove the cruel hands of a clock ticking down towards its annihilation.

So it was that Zelsys and Zefaris had, with Jorfr’s aid, set out on a journey to Borea, knowing the time window they had to make the passage was narrow and evershifting. Now, by the whims of chance and shifting weather, they were stuck, playing the waiting game. The so-called Great Blizzard swallowed up one of the few relatively safe roads north for weeks at a time all throughout the year, and only when this raw expression of nature’s fury moved on would the passage to Borea become traversable. Despite possessing a mode of transport fast enough to let them traverse Ikesia in a fraction of the usual time, continuing their journey to the far north was out of the question at the moment.

Zel was suddenly yanked out of reminiscence by the arrival of two men to their table - one familiar, one new.

The new one was quite pale, even paler than most Ikesians, his hair blonde, eyes blue, and jaw thick - and yet, he was but a boy. A very muscular, tall boy, but a boy nonetheless. She could see it in his face, the way he held himself, the way he stared right at her chest with that absolutely braindead look on his face. No thoughts, head empty, only titties - it amused her greatly. Standing side by side with her good friend, Jorfr, the kid looked like a much smaller, more Ikesian version of the northman. Where the kid was just pale and impressively muscular considering his likely age, Jorfr was just one big walking bundle of muscle. His skin was nearly translucent in spots, exposed veins and muscle showing through, and as ever, the front of the Borean’s skull was less akin to a face than it was a bulldozer, his brow overhanging his eyes by a good few centimeters, and his jaw shaped such that Zelsys was confident he could split wood with his chin.

Jorfr smacked the young man on the back, pushing him forward so that he sat down before taking a seat himself.

She silently nodded at him in recognition, before nodding towards the young man: “You didn’t say you’d bring a plus-one.”

A wide grin sprouted on the Borean’s face as he wrapped his arm around the youngster’s shoulders, remarking: “It is tradition for the young warriors of a tribe to behold their elders in holmgang! This is as close to that as Reiner’s grandparents will let me take him.”

Despite the situation he was in, Reiner looked calm. Apathetic, even.

“What is he to you anyway, a distant nephew? Doesn’t look like your kid,” Zefaris questioned, looking Reiner over with her Homunculus Eye, and even briefly opening her left. There was no brass ornament in the socket, as Nestor had expected - instead, it was filled a matte-black sphere with a pinhole-sized dot of white light. The eye jumped around erratically for a moment, briefly locking onto Reiner’s face before Zefaris closed it. That had been enough to shake the young man.

Smacking him on the back again, Jorfr laughed: “Come now, don’t torment him. He hasn’t seen a real warrior yet.”

“Knight-captain Adalbert-” Reiner began, but Jorfr cut him off.

“-Cares more about wasting your taxes on parades, drugs, and nubile slave boys for him to violate than he does about fulfilling his duties. Give it a couple minutes and you’ll see how a real martial artist does it - if you’re lucky you’ll even see her crumple that hedonistic manchild like a rusted canister.”