Most of the clothes with which he’d come to Arches were now long gone - he’d sold them to keep himself fed when the shortages were particularly bad.

So it was that he dressed himself in his normal clothes, heading to the markets, spending a chunk of the money Zel had given him to buy fresh fish, yoghurt, cheese, a rack of ribs, and a good amount of animal bones on their own. Victor’s distaste for the very idea of eating bones had not magically vanished or even decreased overnight, but he was certain that if that woman continued to be consistent with her portrayal in the pulps, she would give him no choice but to get over the aversion. Moreover, there was a macabre hunger for bones in his core, almost like the same thing that had screamed out in rancor at the sight of Von Wickten’s crimes also now hungered for the self-same bones that Victor’s thinking self disliked.

He heard the terrible noise of the parade starting up as he made his way back from the markets. A part of him was relieved that the duke imposed a day of rest onto the populace in hopes of driving attendance for the Dragon Knights’ parade, but another part itched for the same exertion through which he had rotely and mechanically drudged before. There was also the fact that, considering the not-quite-friendly relationship between the Dragon Knights and the Duma School, plus yesternight’s events… Victor knew better than to take the risk of showing his face at the parade, or anywhere it would pass through, meaning the main artery that connected the town’s North and South gates. Later that same day, he learned that the knight captain led the procession exactly as had been planned, but that he was obviously injured and wore one of his horn-covering helmets, which he had refused to remove for any reason.

Given the state of affairs, he took some time later in the day to go running in the forest, making his way through a portion with no paths, following a small stream and the shape of the terrain. He eventually came upon a broken blackstone obelisk, one of the more-or-less surviving edifices of the Three Kings Era. His lungs and muscles both burned equally by now and his wound threatened to open up again, so Victor returned to town.

Days melted away more than they passed, and the flame in Victor’s chest showed no signs of going out. Rather, it spread out, permeating every fiber of his being. Each day he felt the itch to train and push harder, following the same running path and continuing to train at the broken obelisk. At its fore was the desire to murder the knight captain and those who enabled his degeneracy, but that had, in truth, merely been the ember, the spark that had set ablaze something which could no longer be put out. Victor’s inner barriers had been washed away in the deluge, and they wouldn’t return unless he allowed himself to sink into schizoid escapism all over again.

On the second day the spring sun smashed down with an intensity otherwise reserved for the summer, driving Victor to make practical use of his new top, which dominated his outfit due to the blandness of his other clothing. He derived great amusement from leaning into his classmates’ strange looks and remarks, making fun of himself and playing up his own egoism to a cartoonish degree by claiming he had bought it because he wanted to show off his physique without losing the convenience of a hood. By the end of the training day it was no longer just a joke. Something had changed; the training day had gone by even faster than usual, despite the fact Victor only spent a fraction of the usual time with his nose in a pulp. Despite the fact he could again immerse himself in the book’s world, he no longer lost awareness of his surroundings the way he had done before, noticing a suspicious increase in how many Dragon Knights he saw on his way home.

After spending two hours to eat a light meal, shower, and rest, Victor went out for a run once again. He followed the same path out of town and into the forest. Though he paid it no mind, a seemingly random Dragon Knight on the street corner took note of him. Vain as he was, he wrote it off as the inherently eye-grabbing nature of how he was dressed, briefly considering just how much attention he would attract once he actually took time to put together a congruent outfit.

Victor had barely noticed four days flying by, only keeping track of time by cycles of self-inflicted pain and its fading, his daily consumption of Ossum-rich foods, and notable events. Some of the aforementioned foods, like dairy products, were just fine, pleasant even, but they were not sufficient, only supplying his body with the components to produce its own Ossum. He had been taught that direct consumption of bones was the only way to efficiently fuel Ossomancy, but… Crunching down on hard bones was far from palatable, or even plausible in some cases, and bones that had been softened by boiling were even more disgusting. At best, he could scrape the marrow out of larger pieces, or perhaps crush bones up into powder and mix them into other foods. As he sat there, fiddling with a pig’s rib that he’d just stripped of meat, he thought to ask a question that his mother’s overbearing authority had previously smothered.

“If Ossomancy allows one to control bone, then what law of magic is there to stop me from using Ossomancy to break down dead bones and just usurp them for my own use?”

The answer to such questioning of his family’s methods had ever been shouting, non-answers, and circular logic. “It is so because my grandfather’s books say it is so,” and so on. But… Why couldn’t he just test it for himself? His logical mind had led him to experimentation, as his education in the arcane arts conflicted with his parents’ claims by necessity, as otherwise he would have never grasped the arcane equations that he did know, which he used extensively in concert with glyphic magic to cast in his own way. The few times he’d tried to experiment with Ossomancy beyond what he had been explicitly allowed to do when he was younger, his parents had quickly nipped it in the bud with what was, in retrospect, a suspicious degree of zeal.

He pulled out a paring knife and took to scraping glyphs into the bone, drawing on his limited repertoires of elemental and Ossomantic glyphs to create a primitive sign that by his reckoning should have enabled him to easily break the bone down under his own strength. After settling the rib squarely in the middle of his palm and the magic circle tattooed upon it, he attempted to center his mind as he drew in a deep breath to generate Pneuma as fuel for the spell… But nothing happened. The glyphs didn’t even glow. Undeterred, he cleaned up and spent the entirety of his night toiling away at different possible glyph designs, working backwards from his own existing knowledge to arrive at the same method by which he leeched Ossum out of his own skeleton to fuel his Ossomancy.

As he worked Victor’s mind latched onto the idea that they must’ve been trying to keep him in check, keep him dependent on them. All those times his mother had so callously forced him to eat bones in disgusting forms had to have been some ridiculous way of dissuading him away from using his ancestral right, the magic which his hack fraud of a father had so pathetically failed to grasp.

Victor connected the dots in his mind, filled in gaps, made sense of the trauma-filled shitshow that were his childhood memories. The actual truth of his upbringing didn’t matter, and Victor couldn’t hope to grasp it even if he did possess an objective viewpoint of his own memories; they were fragmented and bleached by depression.

What he had truly needed was a reason, a way to give himself permission to burn the last remnants of his connection to his surname by flagrantly disobeying all that had been drilled into him in regards to his genetic inheritance, to treat Ossomancy as no more than another elemental aspect for him to pick apart and experiment with.

This was his truth.

And it was enough.

The bone broke apart and sunk into his palm.

The relief that washed over him also washed away the last threads of defiant will that were keeping him awake.

The fifth day came. Despite having slept only a little over four hours, Victor awoke without issue and compensated for any loss of sleep by breaking open his small reserve of Liquid Vigor. It was a light restorative elixir based on Viriditas and alcohol with herbal tea making up the rest of its volume, so common and widespread that near enough every village wisewoman had her own version. The aforementioned reserve totaled around 1.4l across two seal-bottles, now reduced to less than a liter.

__________________________________________________________________________________

One of the Duma School’s teachers paced before a class of students, lecturing and asking questions. The Instructor still had not returned. A pair of Dragon Knights across the street were just openly staring in through the gate.

“Dahnengi, Woengari, Ippok, Grekurian Hestogah, the Song of Spring - what do these arts have in common?” the Teacher asked. A hand was raised. “Yes, Joseph.”

“...They’re all mystical, venerated arts?” the student answered uncertainly.

The Teacher nodded, continuing with more questions: “Yes, and what else? Anyone? No-one?”

An apathetic voice came from the back: “They’re all overspecialized and useless in a real fight without a proper foundation.”

“Very good Reiner, but raise your hand next time. Go use the shin-rollers until I tell you to stop,” the Teacher reprimanded, not even bothering to gesture for the bloodstained metal rods. They were immaculately clean in reality, but they had been used for the same grisly purpose for so long that it had permanently seeped into them. The apathetic-looking young man stood up without a word of backtalk, pulling up his trouser leg up to the knee and grabbing a rod with his free hand, pressing it against the base of his shin. With a quick upward motion, he dragged the rod across his shin, a sickening popping sound audible as it raked across his already-bruised skin. He gritted his teeth in pain, but he neither complained nor slowed down.

Meanwhile, the Teacher continued: “As Reiner so succinctly elucidated, these mystical arts are extremely specialized. They were created for a specific purpose, as tools, but that identity has, in many cases, been lost - many grew to treat the art itself as a universal martial toolkit due to the supreme mastery of a scant few edge cases, the egoism of said masters not helping the issue. In truth, such arts will not do you any good on their own. You require a solid foundation first - can anyone think of such foundational, basic arts?”

A raised hand. A second, a third. The Teacher pointed, the student answered.

“Tesava Kickboxing?” asked the blonde, blue-eyed Ikesian.

“Very good, yes. Victor, can you think of one?” nodded the Teacher towards an androgynous young man with fluffy, red hair. A bizarre piece of clothing adorned his top half, a high-quality hooded top in a Kargarian style, yet missing the entire front section such that it exposed the young man’s chest for all to see, thick plates of bone covering its upper half. A brilliant-blue gemstone hung from his neck, clattering against the bone.

“Baritsu?” Victor smirked, much to the teacher’s own amusement.

“Perhaps, if you already carry a cane on a daily basis,” the teacher chuckled at the very idea of that eclectic martial art. “How about a real answer?”

The smirk on Victor’s face turned to a full grin, and the Teacher already knew his answer.

“Sturmblitz Kunst.”

“That’s… Correct, yes,” the Teacher admitted with feigned hesitation, as without the pamphlet which Duma had had him slip into Victor’s pulp, he would’ve had no way to know of such a recent development, let alone one from so far down south. “Where did you learn of it?”

Victor reached into his bag and pulled out the fateful pamphlet, holding it out as the Teacher approached.

“I printed it myself. Someone had loaded a mnemonic copy onto the public terminal in the town library,” he said, twisting the truth to cover himself, just in case. There was indeed a public terminal, and the local printing-house did offer their services for small orders, but Victor lacked the technical know-how to operate the former, and not only could Victor not hope to foot the bill for two-dozen of these things, the printing-house didn’t have the necessary hardware to begin with.

In reality, two-dozen Sturmblitz Kunst 0 pamphlets had arrived at his doorstep alongside a package that contained the last piece of his outfit and a note with a date. The date was the same as that which had been written upon Zel’s “Ticket to the Meat Market”, as she had referred to it, though Victor had no way of knowing this. Being in the state of mind he was in, Victor had taken this as an instruction to distribute the pamphlets before that date.