Wild-eyed he stared at her, looking side to side as if trying to convey a shake of the head with his eyes.

Part confused, part terrified, the boy once more spoke to her, “I-I’ve seen that before, it’s a-a ge… Ge… Geeaz?

“A geas?” she asked.

“Yes, geaas. Th-they said those who took one to prove their loyalty would get extra rations… That it would make traitors end themselves...” he muttered.

Zel sighed and invoked the third phrase, reaching a finger to set loose the guiding bolt.

“Dance of the Fireflies!”

All else followed.

A thin bolt of white shot out from her hand, etching a charred dot in the jaundiced man’s forehead. Half a second later, twenty-something lightning marbles surged forward from her, zipping around wildly before they inevitably struck home, each blooming into a blinding-white flash and a miniature thunderclap, leaving behind a perfect crater twice or thrice its diameter.

The whole thing took a few seconds at most and those in direct line of sight were too blinded by the glare to get a good look, but squinting her eyes, Zelsys saw clearly what it did to him. It started at his head, carving it away in two detonations in rapid succession, then just moved downward, each marble slamming down from above. By the end of it, there wasn’t much of an upper body left.

In her peripheral vision she caught a guard, and seeing as the boy was just staring in a mix of terror and confusion at the corpse of his former comrade and would-be-killer, she decided that she couldn’t just leave him here. Not in that uniform, not in this context. He’d get smothered by the crowd.

“Guard! Hey, you there!” she barked, whipping her head around to stare right at him, pointing at the boy. “Take the kid somewhere safe.”

The guard gave a dutiful nod, already approaching the young man, reaching for the manacles on his belt.

“Listen, look at-” look at me!” Zelsys barked again, stopping the guard dead. “When I say somewhere safe, I mean it. I’m acting on the governor’s behalf, so you’ll fucking listen to what I say. He’s a civilian, do you understand? If I hear that you beat him or some fuckshit ‘cause he’s a zipperhead I’ll do to you what I did to this fratricidal sack of meat, capiche?”

“Do what she says,” the calm voice of Estoras sounded from behind, and the guard nodded slowly.

Spending not a single extra moment to dwell on this, she turned on a heel, and swaggering past the governor as she reached back to pull out her cleaver once more, she said:

“There’s a second wave coming. I’ll play the tidebreaker, root them out at the source. You make sure Zheng and Luo don’t leave the city limits.”

Not having heard back from the vanguard within the allotted time, Shang assumed the worst and decided to divert the rest of his force into ensuring the Governor and whoever he had in his office would meet their rightfully deserved ends.

If the People’s Independent Volunteer Militia couldn’t put this den of Snow Demons under the empire’s control single-handedly, they would at least cut out its central pillar so that lord Mu and lady Zemin could have a better chance at achieving their goals…

And it was upon Shang that the proud duty of leading the charge had been laid. Lessened from a lower noble to glorified cannon fodder, back to a position of relative import, he found great relief in the opportunity to prove himself worthy of service to the Divine Emperor… At least, that’s what he told himself. It was his own hard-to-control tendency to question things a little too often, and no matter how he tried, he couldn’t keep those inconvenient prodding questions in his mind at bay.

The sprawling, rotten bowels of this olden place supplied plentiful means of traversal without direct observation by its populace, even if a number of brave souls had already been lost to tunnel collapses, treacherous traps from days or yore, or whatever damned things lived in the furthest depths of these tunnels.

This very tunnel, fortunately, was a straight line, from a forgotten corner amidst a tangle of equally forgotten backalleys, directly to the town hall. An old escape route, no doubt, that in their great ingenuity and foresight lord Mu and lady Zhemin had discovered and covertly repaired specifically for this occasion. Fresh lightgems illuminated this place cleanly, demarking either end of the tunnel with a red one.

Equipment, too, had been procured through their wisdom - from the city’s own armories and the battlefields surrounding it, chiefly Ubul’s Tomb, including one of the few Pateirian field cannons to survive the battle. That site of grand desecration, so vile its aura that the artillery-piece had to be blessed thrice and shod with nine sacred seals before Shang could load it without fearing that it would go off at an inopportune moment.

Just the one cannon, for that was all that could be procured in time and under cover of night, and even then they had lost two men to the Living Storm. No matter, that one cannon would suffice to shatter the doors of that office, and hopefully the man sitting behind them, too.

Alongside that gun, thirty-four loyal men squeezed into the tunnel in rows of four, each capable in their own right and armed… Adequately. Unfortunately only a fifth of them had armor, and even those were chestplates salvaged from dead Snow Demons. Seven suffered with minor mutations, and one was fully metamorphosed and mentally unstable, constantly rambling about how “the mother” was dead and how “the homunculus” did it. Knowing whether his ramblings held water was beyond Shang’s post, he only knew that he had been told that the madman would accurately let them know if and when they came upon their secondary target.

But then, as they approached the other end of the tunnel, noise started to reverberate through the tunnel. The stomping of heavy boots, the throwing of furniture, and then the prying at the hatch, which the vanguard had shut behind themselves. It screamed open, and into the tunnel dropped a towering woman. Could it be… No, surely, it couldn’t be the homunculus.