He went running again later, same as the previous days, taking along a few of the ribs from his dinner in Fog Storage. The idea of carrying bones openly on his person was repellant to him; plus, the act of breaking down and absorbing them was time-consuming enough that he didn’t even consider doing it in the middle of a fight to be an option. Vic spent some more time than usual at the broken obelisk, forming variations of the same projectiles he’d come up with yesterday, shooting them at the nearby trees and re-absorbing them. Again, and again, and again. By the end of the hour, he’d done it over a hundred times, gradually getting a better grasp of the process, and thus becoming faster at it. He came to form them around his own fingers, using his own claws as the starting points, and thus, at first, thought of them as fingers.

“Devil’s Fingers?” he considered as he fired one off at a tree, the projectile tumbling and bouncing flying far past the tree, which had been stripped of bark by repeated impacts. Trees near the one he focused on bore impact marks as well, his bone-rockets tending to completely veer off-course. Drawing power from the environment felt easier here, somehow. Vic wondered if the obelisk itself had some sort of magic-amplifying effect, or if it had been just a marker placed over a natural leyline crossing. From a simple hollow, pointy cone, he slightly altered the design on the inside such that the propellant would burn in a twin-tailed, spiral shape, causing the projectile to spin in flight. He also added three spiraling grooves to the outside, running the entire length of the cone, as this was much easier to form than creating distinct stabilizing fins.

Eventually, after some trial and error, he came upon an iteration of the design that actually worked how he’d envisioned; most of the struggle had been figuring out a glyph that would be both simple to form from bone, and could guide the propellant as needed. He filled the internal cavity of a projectile with as much Ignis and Aer as he thought practical for use in combat, aimed, and set it loose. It ripped through the air not with a trail of sparks, but with a twin-tailed, focused jet of monochromatic flame, smashing into the tree and chewing through it as the remainder of its fuel caused it to drill into the wood.

A few more iterations to add more grooves and make the ridges between them sharp, and Victor had both a mostly-final design, and a name, one appropriate to how these little monsters seemed to chew into targets.

“Devil’s Teeth.”

Victor knew he still didn’t have a complete grasp of the would-be technique; if he did, he would’ve felt it, that moment when the world would seem to freeze as the exact moment was captured in spiritual memory. When one truly grasped a technique it was unmistakable, an attribute reader would list it clear as day. He was certain that this one was only a matter of time.

Moving on from working on the Devil Teeth for the time being, Victor turned to Bonefire, and Pyromancy in general. He’d always had good control, having been able to mold and shape flames since he’d learned basic Pyromancy, and it was the element with which he was most proficient. The problem had always been generating power for him, somehow Victor had always struggled to power his spells, despite on paper having the affinity and lung capacity. He placed his hands together, drawing in a deep breath, filling his lungs, running through arcane mathematics equations in his head, but… The equations didn’t seem to have the usual mental effect. He couldn’t even finish most of them, they just sort of trailed off and vanished.

And yet, even without the meditative effects that he’d been taught were necessary, through feeling alone he was able to guide Pneuma down his arms. Glyphs took form within and Silver Fog escaped out of the octagrams on his palms, burning in black and white. Something didn’t feel right about this. Victor continued breathing, burning evermore Pneuma and adjusting the flow of it through his arms and out of his hands, until, without even realizing, he changed the glyphs. Wispy, controlled flame erupted into a blaze that filled his palms.

Was it just the leyline crossing amplifying his magic? No, that wasn’t right.

These glyphs were not what he had been taught. They were violent, jagged, and boisterous, instead of the elegant and controlled glyphwork that had been drilled into him. And all this flame, where was it coming from? He found himself breathing in a faster, yet still controlled manner, exhaling forcefully but steadily instead of the slow exhalation he’d been taught.

This… This felt better.

He’d always wanted to use Pyromancy for its classical, purely offensive purpose, but not knowing how to do anything better than just congeal the flame and throw it, he thought to use his limited knowledge of Aeromancy instead. Containing the flame with one hand and using a blast of air from the other to propel it turned out to be as effective as it was simple. Compressing and congealing the mote of fire as much as he could, he set loose a blast of air, aiming it at a tree. The globby, greasy flame splattered against a tree and erupted in a shotgun-spray that enveloped the grass behind it, the flame catching well enough that he felt the need to put it out rather than risk it spreading out of control.

As he did so, he found himself further altering his normal Fog-breathing along the guidelines he’d read in Sturmblitz Kunst 0, effectively changing the steady, continuous breathing method he’d been taught for the more precise, explosive style of Sturmblitz Kunst’s own: The Shifting Winds of Eternal Spring, or more simply Spring Breathing.

Victor didn’t know whether he had simply not clicked with the methods of his forebears, or if he’d been taught wrong on purpose to keep him under control, but his mind latched onto the latter option… And he decided to completely defy the legacy of his family’s arcane method from then on. Instead, he decided to apply the teachings of Sturmblitz Kunst to not just martial arts, but magic as well, inspired in no small part by the pulp descriptions of Zelsys spending long stretches of time devising techniques from nothing, based purely on observed behaviors and interactions of her own abilities rather than manuals.

“To hell with arcane mathematics. This feels right.”

He returned home, and the next day came without further incident. Despite this, Victor struggled to fall asleep. Something was wrong, he could feel it. A foreboding tension in the air.

The next morning, when he arrived at the Duma School, his suspicions were confirmed. Students and civilians alike swarmed the place, Dragon Knights keeping the crowd under control. Victor stood aghast at the sight; the main building had been burned down.

“It’s… It’s gone,” he uttered. Duma noticed him, breaking off a conversation with three other students to come talk to him, smugly shaking his head as he approached.

“What is gone? The building? It was just old wood,” he said. “Did you think I had not foreseen this possibility? I have copies of all my manuals, safely in Fog Storage, right on my person. Then again… Those bastards did try to kill me, so perhaps they knew.”

“Who? The Dr-” Vic snapped, biting his tongue before he could blurt out the rest. The Old Man got the message nevertheless, smiling at him.

“No, I do not think so,” he shook his head, looking around. “Come, let us take a look. I’ve already excused the others, seeing as today was to be a rest day to begin with.”

Duma led him into the building, through the burned-out structure, the stench of burned wood and paper still lingering. There, in the midst of it, the master made the student cross the threshold to his inner sanctum. Victor felt the glass of that cabinet creak beneath his boots as he looked around. Everything was haphazardly pulled apart, smashed up, and burned, but…

“...It doesn’t look like they were actually looking for anything. More like they were just destroying thi-”

He cut himself off before he could finish when his eyes fell upon the charred stand down the left side of the room. That spear. It was gone. Duma had followed his gaze, and let out a deep sigh, walking over to it.

“Yes, I am certain they were after my spear. I had… Offered to sell it to a man I had met in Scarlet Silk Road. I’d made the mistake of mentioning that I was also considering passing it onto one of you, and that slant-eyed bastard must’ve decided to just take it by force. What a fool I am. A senile, trusting fool.”

Duma put his hand on Victor’s shoulder, staring right into his eyes. That strange look flared up in the old man’s gaze again.

“It matters not. Go home for the day, you’ll need to be rested when the red sun rises.”

Had the old man spoken with Zelsys since then? He must have. Without any desire to deny Duma’s suggestion, Vic thought to leave and just go home for now, to enjoy what he expected to be the last time he’d have a boring routine for a long while.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said, re-summoning his mask of haughty self-assuredness.

As he walked out of the burned-out building, he heard Duma speak again: “One more thing. I suspect my spear may end up in the Meat Market, or elsewise in the hands of the Red Locust Bandits. Should you find it… Keep it. Perhaps it will come to like you more than it did me.”

Victor decided to visit the broken obelisk again, this time choosing to take it easy and just spend some more time polishing the Devil’s Teeth. It was a little earlier in the day this time, just after he’d left the Duma School, because it was not quite as warm out.

Unfortunately for Victor, an unassuming bystander saw the glamorous young man making his way out of town, confirming his higher-ups’ prediction that he would take the same path as the preceding days. The bystander alongside one other man quietly followed in his path, taking meticulous care to go unnoticed until they thought he was vulnerable.

Unfortunately for the two pursuers, however, Victor had already been on edge before the break-in, and learning of the Duma Spear’s theft had only made him more cautious. In fact, noticing that he was being followed elicited a strange sort of relief: Relief that he’d been right to gut his stove for its fuel gem, which he now clutched in his palm.

He jogged through the forest at a relatively leisurely pace, using Spring Breathing in short bursts to stop himself from becoming even slightly winded. At this pace, he could keep going more or less indefinitely, or rather until more serious exhaustion set in. Were they just normals? Mutants, maybe? Locust-men? They couldn’t be drones, they were visibly human. What kind of person would those who supply Von Wickten with slaves send to capture a known martial artist and magic user? As he neared the broken obelisk and gradually gained distance from his pursuers, Vic made himself breathe with increasing intensity and intentionally ran more sloppily to fake exhaustion. Those two were fast, all too fast to be normals, considering how quickly they caught up to him while he was sitting atop the obelisk’s toppled upper half. He caught glimpses of the would-be kidnappers circling around, trying to get into his blind spots. In fact, he had barely even seen them, only able to make out that they wore cloaks in a shade of green that blended in quite well. It was their wake that had betrayed their presence and path, the disturbance of foliage and forest critters.

Vic got his answer when he caught a whiff of the unmistakable scent of Viriditas: For Victor, it was cinnamon.