It was lumbering towards her in some lopsided approximation of a charge, fangs bared and black foam bubbling from the corners of its mouth. The absence of its left foreleg made the creature’s gait skewed to the right as it tried to compensate, exposing its neck.

Zelsys inhaled sharply through a toothy grin, her face as much a snarl as the beast’s, her eyes shining in silver just as the beast’s did in yellow. She tossed its tongue aside and gripped the cleaver with both hands, resolute in her decision to end the beast with a single decisive strike.

“Come on! Come at me!” she mocked, walking towards the creature, staring it down. “So I may put you out of your misery.”

It lurched forward with the last remnants of its strength, teeth flashing and tongueless maw snapping. A step forward, and upward cleave, flesh and bone and congealed blood yielding to the cleaver’s barbarous power. Its dying roar, the brass. The blade’s resonant ring, the strings. Her own heart, the percussion. The ironclad kick that sent the bear’s head flying into a tree, the final note.

A song of battle, concluded.

Zelsys couldn’t help but sigh in relief as the beast’s body slumped to the ground, its fetid blood poisoning the ground. “Rest in pieces,” she said as she lowered the cleaver, more to herself than the bear. The unearthly glow faded from her eyes and small strings of silver Fog trailed from the corners of her mouth as she stepped around the corpse, slowly walking towards the firepit. Spliteye slipped out from behind her tree, questioning “Is it dead?” with her gun still up and pointed at the motionless beast’s rear end.

“Its brain is splattered against that tree over there, of course it’s dead,” Zelsys replied, making no attempt to hide the self-satisfaction in her tone, a beaming smile on her face.

The riflewoman let out a relieved sigh, tension visibly leaving her body. As she walked towards the firepit, she stowed the remaining cartridges into her pants pocket and stuck the ramrod back into its slot below the rifle’s barrel.

“How much longer do you think he’ll be out?” the towering bear-slayer mused, stabbing her newfound tool of slaughter into the ash-covered soil around the firepit before she sat down on the log next to her cyclopean compatriot.

“Long enough to get you the proper holster for that thing,” answered the blonde with a nod towards the cleaver. “Knowing him, he won’t try tangling with someone objectively stronger than him.”

“Objectively- Oh, because I can use the cleaver and he can’t.”

“Yeah. His Aether’s barely good enough to make it shift, and he isn’t even strong enough to swing it with both hands, even though he’s the strongest among us by a hair.”

“I assume the second strongest is-”

“Sigmund, yeah,” said Spliteye, turning her eye to the man. Motionless as he was, his eyes shifted to meet hers. “When he’s not seized up, at least. You good there buddy?”