Zefaris fell asleep a few minutes into the ride back to Willowdale, leaning up against Zel’s back with her arms wrapped around her waist as the two rode in the front of the convoy. They returned to Willowdale quietly as the sun began to rise over the horizon and the city slowly began to wake up, labourers now active on the giant statues outside the city walls, toiling away to fill great molds with alchemically melted stone. These great idols were to conceal the city’s most ambitious defense system, a barrier equal to legend, designed, built, and powered with a mixture of ancient and contemporary knowledge. Upon their return to the sect, Zefaris shambled off back to the elder’s chambers complaining of eye-ache and stating that she would be asleep until noon.

A great many things were on Zel’s mind as she watched the blonde tiredly walk up the sect stairs, but all of these were overridden by a single, leading concern. She was utterly splattered in moleman blood, and instead of crusting over like human blood wood, it had become sticky and resin-like. It would be easily solved with a quick soak in the sect’s subterranean baths; an idea shared by the entirety of Expeditionary Squad One, as Zel arrived at the baths to find the coed pool already occupied by Jorfr, Joseph, and Mata. Perhaps the only person to not get filthy was Zefaris.

Something came up in the course of her bath.

“Hey, Founder… What’s the difference between Aether and Pneuma again?” came a question from Mata, who floated right next to the bath’s inlet, the hottest spot. Two problems faced scorchlanders when bathing: Water had to be near scalding to feel hot to them, and their unique body makeup made them exceptionally buoyant.

“I… We have books on this, Mata,” Zel sighed, not eager to explain the convoluted and oft arbitrary definitions of the two terms. “Look, just use Pneuma in relation to the universal essentia as it relates to living things, including you, and use Aether in all other cases, especially when it comes to machinery. They’re more or less interchangeable, but that’s technically the proper use.”

“Still don’t get it…” the scorchlander uttered, sulking deeper into the water, only the top half of her hairless head poking out, eyes burning like coals above the water surface. She just wasn’t good with jargon, Zelsys found; and no wonder, given her background. The woman had taught herself to read while in captivity as a slave under Pateirian colonialism. Soon enough, the copious amount of moleman blood she’d been soaked with had been washed away, and she was out of the bath. Her braids had come undone in the process, leaving her with a cloak of hair yet again, at least after she used Fulgurkinesis to dry it and wrangle the static electricity out of it.

While she hadn’t been hungry before the assignment, that was no longer true, and while she could just drink some “Liquid Vigor” elixir to quell the pang of an empty stomach and banish exhaustion, she wanted to eat something. So, before making her way directly to the governor’s office to give the man a dressing-down and receive the payment in person, Zelsys went to the mess hall.

What awaited her was a small army of disciples all having their breakfasts, many of them greeting her, staring as she passed, or at bare minimum catching a sideways glimpse. They expected her to be soaked in blood and covered in fresh, already-healing injuries, as she tended to be after serious outings; this one hadn’t been serious enough to forestall a bath. An elven man whose face belied his half-millennium age met her in the kitchen window; it was Ozmir. He gestured to the side, prompting her to enter the eldritch, cyclopean space that was the front chamber of his kitchens; this sprawling complex of rooms took up one-fifth of the sect building above-ground, and who knew how much of the underground. The moment she entered he was there waiting for her. He looked her in the eye, and without waiting for an answer, he said: “No injuries, no serious exhaustion. You’re getting the pot roast, standard portion, like everyone else.”

Izmir disappeared into one of the adjoining rooms a moment later. She could hear him scale a ladder and grunt as he hefted a giant pot lid aside. The pot in question was a gigantic, hammered iron vessel at least five meters wide and around two-thirds as tall; Zel knew because Ozmir had forced her to help him haul the thing up from the subterranean storage chambers. It was too big to fit into Fog Storage mediums available to them.

She was perfectly happy with that, but still gave a half-hearted complaint: “C’mon, do you want me to starve when I go north?”

“You can’t bullshit me, I can sense your visceral fat! Gluttonous homunculus…” the culinarian snapped back, his words devoid of seriousness just as hers were. He brought back a metal platter piled high with blue meat, circles of purplish, meaty, onion-like vegetables, alongside thin strips of green, thick leaves. A number of other vegetables also played a part, alongside entirely mundane, normal potatoes, but nine-tenths of the meal was some arcane ingredient or another. Zel recognized most of them, as they were mainstays in Ozmir’s cooking in one form or another - Culca leaves, Eyakam Meat Onions, eye-wateringly spicy Puceo Root, a myriad spices both mundane and arcane, arrayed around the centerpiece that was the blue meat of a Stacesta, one of Ikesia’s megafauna species. It was an invasive creature brought to this land by the Ankhezian Empire to feed their colonists. Even a single additional individual could wreck a local ecosystem, and so their population numbers had been controlled for as long as they had existed.

Alongside her meal, Ozmir also handed over an empty two-liter pitcher containing a large, spun-brass cup. Zel took these things to her table in the mess hall, walking through one of the hall’s doors to the chamber next to it - the apothecary. Formerly run by and for the sect, the new incarnation of the place was a sister location to the apothecary of a close friend, a swordsman-alchemist called Makhus. The woman manning the counter gave her a sunny greeting and simply asked: “I heard of the emergency. I take it that you want the recovery special?”

“Nothing so serious, just the usual two liters of DDLV,” Zel smiled back.

“Of course, just a moment!” came a response, and the woman vanished for a moment, returning with four bottles full of blue liquid, plastered in stabilizing seals. With this as the drink, Zelsys had her breakfast, consuming a nutritional bomb sufficient to put a normal person into a food coma. Her drink of choice was a special formulation of a publicly-available, mid-tier recovery and energy elixir; it was an elaboration upon the fundamental Liquid Vigor formula, adding Daytime Dust, a benign arcane drug named for its energizing properties and yellow colour. Thus, the abbreviated name - DDLV. Its consumer-grade counterpart was branded as Tengri’s Tears, due to the final beverage’s blue colour and the role of a certain steppe-nomad merchant heiress in its distribution outside Willowdale.

As she ate and drank, her mind dwelt on the journey on which she would soon need to depart, as well as on the secondary effects she hoped it to have in further spreading the ideas of the Newman Sect. She could feel a few of the newest disciples trying to sneakily look at her from across the mess hall. She let them, it always passed after a day or two… But she couldn’t stop herself from having a bit of fun with them, turning to stare back at them, wearing the smug expression that her face tended to settle into. One of the new disciples turned his eyes aside that same second, while the other waved back at her.

Both within the sect and the public eye, there was an idea of a Zelsys Newman, an unimpeachable paragon of sorts. She was an abomination against the Divine Emperor’s will by the reckoning of those from the Pateirian Empire, while loyalist splinters of Ikesia’s now-occupied central government called her a “Tactical Supremacy Asset”.

The perspectives of others refracted what she was, who she was, but no matter how heavily refracted, her name was still spoken and her feats talked of. Who she truly was, however, went unknown to all but a small few… And she liked it that way. The achievement of her overarching goals hinged on not only the cultivation of her own self, but the cultivation of a personal legend, as she was, in the end, still just one person.

She left the sect a short while later to deal with the day’s errands, finding two familiar faces in the courtyard. A smiling Kargarian woman in parachute pants and a red-and-white loose-sleeve jacket sat atop one of the target blocks, plucking a double-necked abomination of an instrument, while a man in eldritch three-eyed machine-armor stood before that self-same block, grasping a curved, golden-edged blade in one hand with the other rested against the side of a chunky, mechanical box on his waist. He pressed a button on its side, and faster than even her eyes could see, swung his sword. The block was split diagonally down the middle a second later, sliding apart before it was stopped by the block next to it, much to the red-garbed woman’s amusement.

“Makhus, Ezaryl! What’re you two doing here this early, no business at Riverside?” Zel hollered as she walked across the courtyard. The man turned, working a lever on his belt. He was enveloped in a sudden eruption of Fog from the seams of his armor, and in the next moment, the whole suit was gone with the exception of the belt, leaving only a black-haired Ikesian with perpetual stubble and eldritch tattoos meticulously placed all across his body. Their purpose was mundane: Trackers for the Iron Rider System, that eldritch armor of his.

“I stayed the night nearby, long export negotiations over the new Snake Oil skin cream. And today is Sigmund’s turn to run the Riverside location, remember?” the swordsman answered.

“Sure, sure. Just keep an eye on your blood toxicity, you know what happened last time you overdosed on TB 10,” Zel said, giving him a look that was smug and knowing in equal measure, while Ezaryl looked down on the man with an even greater degree of smugness than Zelsys. There was only one location nearby where he would have realistically slept overnight, and it was the import store owned by the Krishorn Clan - that is to say, by Ezaryl. It had been the better part of a year since the heiress had set her sights on him, and despite the fact their relationship was an open secret, the alchemist still didn’t admit to the true purpose of their frequent “private business meetings”.

She left him be, retrieving her Sturmgandr and riding into town.

A knock on the door of the governor’s office. The voice of a guard from the other side: “Sir, Newman is here.”

“Send her in,” said Crovacus Estoras, governor of Willowdale.

She laxly glided across the room and just as laxly seated herself before him, waiting for the door to close, and then waiting some more, staring him down with a waiting smirk. Estoras opened the second drawer from the top, retrieved a cigar, and bit off the end, spitting it into the trash. He then flicked his thumb from inside a closed fist, using the pale-blue flame which sprung forth to light his cigar.

It was then, in the brief moment when he was silenced by smoke, that she spoke: “Those Arkaley Branch people - it’s no wonder they couldn’t hold up against a small raiding army of Deep Dwellers with a single Ankylodragon. As far as I could tell, only the Elder, his lieutenants, and around half a dozen inner disciples had arcane weapons, all the rest used great big mundane steel choppers. Moreover, neither I nor any of the others saw them use archetypal Sanger Family defensive techniques. No Ghost Sword Phalanx, no Iron Mountain Body, no Sword of Seven Winds; just some sensory enhancement and body reinforcement, some elemental shrouding in a few cases, and ah… Swordlight. A surprising focus on swordlight, not very Sanger-like at all. Do you know anything that would elucidate why a Sanger Family branch is so unlike their own roots?”

“Of course you noticed,” Estoras grumbled amusedly. “Do you want the short version, or the long and sordid one?”

She responded honestly: “I’d love to say that I have the time, but I’d love the short version even more.”

“I assume you’ve met the Arkaley Branch Elder, Gideon?” he raised an eyebrow before toking from his cigar while he waited for a response. When Zel gave a nod, he exhaled and continued: “Some twenty years back the man came into conflict with the Root Branch Elder over the sect’s exclusionary policies regarding their more advanced teachings, accusing him of blatant favoritism and politicking, an accusation which, if it stuck, could have very well lead to the Root Branch Elder being expelled altogether. Three years into the internal feud Gideon was suddenly given his own branch, far away from the Root Branch, a gesture which was thought to be the Root Elder telling him to piss off and do it his own way if it was so much better. The Arkaley Branch was conveniently not given any copies of the Sanger Family’s texts or even basic equipment, and the Root Branch has pretended they don’t exist for all seventeen years of the Arkaley Branch’s existence. Gideon has been more or less forced to start things from scratch using his own knowledge and resources, hence the apparent overfocus on swordlight, as he himself specializes in it. He’s got all the downsides of being independent with none of the advantages besides name recognition.”

“That was the short version?” Zel laughed, but her thoughts had strayed down the path of cooperation with the Arkaley Branch.

The governor clearly knew her well enough to discern what she would think of the situation, adding: “I’ll send you their aetherwave transmission frequency. I think Gideon may be interested in splitting off from the Sanger Family, if enticed with some of the martial knowledge in your libraries.”

She gave a toothy grin.

“You won’t convince me that you wasted a big ol’ pile of gelt on some roundabout scheme to get me in contact with Gideon, but I appreciate the advice all the same. Now… You know why I’m really here. Had I just wanted to pick up my payment, I would’ve had one of your people deliver it to the sect.”

“Well? What do you think of my offer?” the governor asked as he put the half-smoked cigar down, leaning back in his seat, hands clasped together. She kicked her feet up on the edge of his desk, leaning dangerously far back in her seat.

“The money alone would make it worthwhile, and I’d certainly love to plant another knife in the Emperor’s back by destroying one of his cartels. Hell, even if it’s an independent operation, I wouldn’t turn down getting paid to root out slavers, but…”

She trailed off, waiting for the governor to prompt her continuation: “But?”

“Come on, Estoras. Arches is a minor polity in the middle of bumblefuck nowhere, surely you have a serious reason for wanting brownie points with them. You want to leverage my service to get them to join your Free Cities Alliance, but why?”

A rumbling belly laugh erupted from the governor.

“I thought you hated politics,” he said, not waiting for a response to continue. “But yes, I have my reasons. Arches has claim over Ikesia’s largest sources of certain minerals that we need to process Damasite into Sovereign-grade cold-iron, yes, the same grade that fifty-gelt coins are named after, though haven’t been made from it for a long time. The place is a treasure trove of other unexploited resources, and besides… They’ve got one of the biggest Lands of Lingering Smoke in the country. If we get a foothold in Arches we gain access to Pateiria’s dissidents and black marketeers, and you know how much the Bureau would love more ethnic-Pateirian agents to subvert the occupation with.”

“I’m certain they would…” she trailed off, expecting that the governor still had more to say, and he did.

“There is one more thing that may sway your decision. As you said, Arches is a nowhere-place, which is one of the reasons it has remained independent. A small martial arts school exists within the duchy, and due to an old decree, its students were exempted from military service. This included the Ikesian state draft, so the Duma School has a disproportionate number of exceedingly promising disciples from places all over Ikesia. Furthermore, the school founder, Resved Duma, happens to be an acquaintance of a friend of yours - Kanbu, the Dragon-Eater. I am sure he would appreciate it if you rid his home of slavers, perhaps enough to hand over an artifact or secret knowledge.”

That put a grin on her face, and indeed, swayed her decision. If the school’s founder was one of Kanbu’s friends, she didn’t have a choice to begin with. She had to take the job, even on the possibility of what it might bring.

“Fuck you, you strung me along,” she chuckled at the governor. “I’ll do it.”

“Then you will need this,” he said, picking up a hefty twin-spooled scroll from the mess of his desk. “A Black Contract. You will need to extract intel from the duchy’s Knight Captain, one Adalbert von Wickten. This will be insurance that he can’t renege on the deal when you goad him into a pit fight for the intel. Von Wickten has been assigned to investigate the slave trafficking trade for months now, and he’s been using his Dragonheart Cultivation to dominate the local pit fighting scene instead. He’s known for being an extreme narcissist, you’ll have an easy time provoking him.”

Zelsys had to admit that the governor’s ability to predict her own line of thought was a little unsettling at times, but she liked that his line of thought ran so close to hers. She took the contract, storing it away.

“Now, regarding payment; I trust that the Arkaley people have called in regarding casualties and lost cargo already, yes?”

The governor nodded.

“Minimal losses, excellent as always…”

And so the Newman Sect Founder extracted every last gelt she was owed, ferrying it all back to the sect safely stored in her Tablet, labeled under its own category in the inventory so it wouldn’t mix with personal funds. She stopped by Kanbu’s business on the way back. The humble dumpling shop had been transformed since the man had revealed and shared his immense arcane might in the Blue Moon War. Its otherwise unassuming entrance now boasted a flamboyant placard of a skeletal dragon’s head exhaling green flame which held the new name of the establishment.

DRAGONSLAYER DUMPLINGS

(Also Pierogi)

The half-millennium old man now incorporated flashy, green flame techniques into his cooking, and openly displayed a number of the artifacts in his possession behind the counter, lending it an eclectic, cluttered appearance. The dumplings were outstanding, even if she wasn’t hungry, and Kanbu corroborated Estoras’ claims, which was the real reason she had stopped by here.

Her return to the sect was uneventful. Things proceeded as normal for some time, until around five days before the planned day of departure, Ozmir called her into his kitchen and foisted upon her a hoard of sealed-up meal kits. He insisted that they only be used if other food wasn’t available, as they would keep for long periods of time after being put in storage, but once they were retrieved, their preservation seals would lose efficacy, and once they were opened, they would rapidly begin decaying if not eaten.

“You will need them on the Borean Trail,” he said. Zel wagered that he was right.

A breath of change passed, and the fateful day came.

Three people descended into the depths of the sect, through multiple concealed walls and protective illusions, down an ancient, high-speed lift, deep into ancient ruins far below Willowdale. They emerged to a chamber with a meadow containing a great tree in its center, a false sky visible overhead, its falsity only discernible by the subtle lines between individual projection panels.

This was Willowdale’s Leyline Well, the fount of power at the heart of the city-state’s supernaturally fertile farmland, and one of the most potent ritual sites on the continent.

Upon the great tree’s trunk were plastered hundreds of seals, a protuberance from the center of the mass the only thing to hint at what it contained. Six particularly distinct seals were placed at equidistant intervals from the sealed object.

As the trio approached Zel’s braids jangled together, teardrop-shaped blades of cold-iron affixed to their tips; they were surviving fragments of her blade. Jorfr and Zefaris trailed behind her, both staying a distance behind while she came right up to the tree.

A deep breath drawn in, and a braid alighted with a ghostly, monstrous head wrought of lightning, lashing out towards one of the auxiliary core seals, the beast biting through the seal while the blade stuck into the tree.

Another breath, another braid. Each embodied the manifestation of a Thundergod which dwelt in her soul, each stretched out to destroy one seal. It had been designed specifically so that only she could undo it.

Three. Four. Five. Six. One after the other the auxiliary core seals were undone, and only the final seal remained. One breath after the next, Zelsys saturated every inch of her being with Pneuma and filled her second stomach, knowing the immense power it had taken the few times she had previously had to break such seals.

She reached out and grasped the handle of the blade which had accompanied her since her first day in this world, which had grown alongside her, and without which she would have never gotten as far as she had gotten - at least she thought so.

“Wake up, Butcher. It’s time to go.”

A thrumming sensation surged up her arm, hundreds of seals burning away in an instant, leaving behind only those which had been affixed to the weapon itself during the preparation of this long-term storage solution. Arcs of electricity leapt between the Broken Butcher’s twin prongs, their snapping as though the growl of a barely-tame beast greeting its master.

“The Sevenfold Seal is undone; the clock resumes. It won't be long before the vessel fails and the Blade Spirit rips itself apart under its own strength,” she said, turning to her comrades.

“We must leave. Borea awaits.”