Jorfr’s assumption proved to be correct. The two lovebirds had followed the nearby stream to a jutting-out rock formation, and atop this outlook they would release their stress upon one another. Atop the cliff was a small lookout post, a modest lean-to shelter surrounded by an equally modest barrier against wildlife: A circle of iron shavings mixed with salt, the subtle magic at play evidenced only by the absence of rust. Carved pieces of rose quartz were littered about; rudimentary lightgems that would glow when ambient light dimmed too much. At first they merely sat at the edge of the cliff, watching the sunset and leaning upon one another. Zefaris quietly pulled a bottle out of her Tablet, one with a narrow stem and round bottom, containing a pinkish, slightly syrupy liquid; Winter Peach Brandy, specially made by the Newman Sect’s culinarian so that it could affect cultivators.

She popped the cork without a word and took a swig. By the time she put it down, the cloyingly sweet scent had already filled the air, and she couldn’t help but utter: “Dead Ones, that’s good. Want some?”

As she held up a hand in offer, Zel reached out and plugged the bottle with her thumb, leaning in. A kiss became shoving her tongue down her lover’s throat, albeit only briefly. She suddenly pulled back, taking a swig of the brandy, only to find herself knocked over back into the lean-to; Zefaris set upon her with a rabid urgency that completely annihilated any possibility of steady escalation. From one moment to the next, Zelsys went from having control over the situation to utterly relinquishing it under the sensory assault of inhumanly precise hands guided by eyes that saw the weak points of any living thing and commanded by an all-consuming, animalistic need.

They became as an ouroboros of moaning flesh, surrounded by serpents of exhaled Fog and wreathed in an aura of electricity that magnified every sensation to the point of mere touch sending waves of ecstasy through both their bodies.

True peace was to be found in only the scarcest of places for either of them, and this was one.

Three and a half hours had passed, and the two lovers slinked out of the lean-to, traversing the dark to the stream and washing themselves there, both still addled by the afterglow and neither of them entirely stable on their feet, contributed to by the brandy. It hadn’t been enough to get either woman properly drunk, however, let alone both of them. While Zefaris washed out one of the canteens and used it to dunk water onto herself, Zel just submerged herself entirely in the ice-cold stream, her face and breasts just barely above the water’s surface while her braids swayed in the flow like river snakes.

Hot or cold, she found submersion in water of any extreme temperature after extended physical exertion to help immensely with recovery, and what had transpired mere minutes earlier had been more draining than facing down the Alkasnail, in more ways than one. She let out a relaxed sigh, looking up at the night sky amidst the trees, the waning moon shining down and illuminating Zef’s statue-like form, just at the edge of her field of view.

“An assassin came after me at Fort 57. Sleeper agent, I think. Xiān Dì spoke through her, then she killed herself with some sort of claw talismans,” she deadpanned, wanting to just get it out.

“Of course that commotion was you, I could see it all the way from camp…” the blonde sighed, unsurprised, but relieved. “Did she turn into a jade statue?”

“Uh-huh. Do you know what that was?”

“Jade Serpent Fangs, they’re high-grade assassination tool used against enemy cultivators. Had she gotten you with them… I don’t think they’d work as intended, but we might have another ticking clock on our hands. But we don’t, thank the Dead Ones. What did that wax-sculpture emperor say?”

Zel repeated the Emperor’s speech word-for-word; the acknowledgment of her and the Newman Sect as a legitimate threat, the mention of the Blackwall’s gates supposedly growing more lenient, the statement that he would no longer suppress cultivation in Pateiria in order to counteract her efforts in Ikesia.

She also included the assassin’s own last words: “Let the new era of cultivation begin.”

“Wonder if they’ll ever figure out that posturing and ominous displays don’t work on us,” the blonde said with a wry laugh, having begun dressing herself by this point. Zel got out of the stream, using her body’s natural Fulgur to dry herself, sparks arcing all over her body for a few moments until the water evaporated.

“Something tells me they know and hope it’ll have an effect on the people around us,” she said.

The duo returned to camp having washed the mess tins as promised, finding Jorfr sound asleep and Victor sitting at the fireside, a journal in one hand and a pencil in the other. He was drawing, but shut the journal and stowed it in his Tablet the moment he realized Zel and Zef had returned.

A breath of change passed, and three were woken by the fourth after six hours’ sleep; Zelsys had only slept four.

With each stop on their journey to the north-east, especially stops wherein they dealt with other people, Zefaris couldn’t help but notice the rapid spread of new firearms. Before her squad had deserted to hide in the Exclusion Zone, muzzle-loading sparklocks had been dominant among the soldiery, with only well-to-do mercenaries and officers being able to afford more advanced pieces like revolvers or even the rare box-fed bolt-action. Now, though, this new “rolling-block” design was growing more and more prevalent, with pepperboxes and revolvers to be seen among perhaps one in five gun-carriers.

Familiar designs from down south - those of a certain genius by the name of Collier, mostly - were also to be seen, most predominantly her break-actions, with a few independent hunters seen bearing Tempesta’s smaller slide-action siblings. They were much smaller for a very simple reason: Tempesta was a one-of-a-kind weapon, built for high-pressure loads of cartridges in the larger diameter of Collier’s break-action shotguns - it was designed to match up with the supernatural and to be future proof against even hotter ammunition loads. Meanwhile, the mass-production version of the design was chiefly intended for use by baseline humans against animals and other baseline humans. The break-actions, lovingly named “Hydras”, fired shells that were considerably longer and slightly wider, with solid slugs being 20mm in diameter. Meanwhile, Tempesta’s smaller sibling, named the “Tyrant Muncher”, was chambered for a more compact, shorter shell whose solid slugs were only some 18mm across.

She was happy to see such rapid spread of firearms, and even happier when the group found themselves in the general vicinity of a skirmish between occupationist mercenaries and a farmer militia armed with these new weapons as well as sabres scavenged from battlefields. Intervention on their part was politically inappropriate given the fact they’d been given permission to pass through the Northern Capital’s territory at the leveraging of Willowdale’s governor, Crovacus Estoras, but none of them particularly cared for the political ramifications of engaging a band of mercenaries who had clearly taken aggressive actions against innocent farmers.

They split up, with Zelsys and Jorfr approaching head-on, while Zefaris and Victor circled around in a pincer manoeuvre.

Jorfr controlled the battle by playing the part of an immovable pillar, cladding himself in armor of glacierglass, exhaling blasts of freezing air as he smashed up the foe with his hammer. They fell before him like so much chaff before a scythe.

Meanwhile, Zelsys played the combine harvester. She didn’t smash into the enemy, but rather slipped between their ranks and picked them apart from within, making heavy use of Graze Pulse to cause any strikes to slip off her. She played to the Broken Butcher’s short range, using her braids to deliver precise and lethal strikes to the necks of those her hands could not reach.

Flanking from the side, Victor made good use of his staff in forming a tremendous Devil’s Tooth before its eye, sending the arm-sized drill-rocket careening straight through the enemy and putting lethal holes into ten men in one fell swoop. A dozen more were mowed down by Zef's shotgun, the gunwoman leisurely flicking coins into the air and skeet-shooting to rain death down from above. Soon, it was all over. Glorified bandits such as these weren’t true opponents as much as they were rabid animals; a number of them even seemed to have lost their sanity to the point of acting like beasts.

Then, following the commotion, a group of Pateirian soldiers arrived onto the scene with two lumbering, stone-skinned humanoids in tow. Golems, cutting-edge weapons of war from a previous age. They were lumbering and slow, but monstrously strong and all but invulnerable to anything short of the larger field cannons… At least, that was by the standards of mundane soldiers, the crushing of which these golems were purpose-built for. As a result, their ability in fighting cultivators or armored vehicles with high-powered armor-piercing cannons had not been considered in design. Ominous bolts of lilac light erupted from their cores in an apparent upgrade over the base model, but they were too telegraphed and too sluggish to hit any of the four. Jorfr easily smashed apart one’s legs and froze the other’s, while Zelsys climbed ontop and fired a Thundercannon into one’s pulsating core. The second one was disabled without its core being destroyed, leaving it exposed for the world to see.

A baked clay exterior reinforced by riveted steel bands, from within which leaked a conspicuously blood-like goop. Upon breaking it open, they were met with the real core. It was a lump of flesh, pulsating with a lilac glow, vaguely human-adjacent cries issuing from within the mass as the open air and sunlight fell upon it.

“...Five people. Those are five people in there,” Zefaris uttered in disgust, her left eye wide-open. Zel gestured in the norseman’s direction, prompting him to swing his hammer above his head before bringing it back down, pulverizing the abomination to mush inside its clay tomb.

They left the battle behind, moving on before it could attract attention, Victor glancing back at the grisly scene in disgust.

They traveled a high road which had eyeshot to a small logging village far down a steep, thinly forested hill, a few remaining stumps scattered between the young trees planted to replace them, while a narrow dirt road snaked down the hill to the village.

Zel stopped the motorbike, excusing: “I think there might be something stuck in the rear wheel, just a second…”

She got off and squatted down next to the wheel, fiddling with a nonexistent obstruction for a good two minutes before she threw a nearby twig behind her back and stood up to find Zefaris looking down through the trees, as she’d hoped.

A river split the village down the middle, spinning a sawmill’s waterwheel. Upon the village’s basic walls were mounted cannons, and in the central square, there was a wooden sculpture made of wood which included one of these same cannons. It was of a diminutive figure lifting the cannon’s muzzle up to point at a monstrous, antlered humanoid with a beard of moss and red lightgems for eyes: A leshy.

Instead of looking down upon the village and the people working the mill, however, Zelsys looked at Zefaris, waiting for the moment of recognition. The blonde slowly opened her left eye, the pupils of her right dilating to their full extent. Zel could see tears welling up in the gunwoman’s right eye, but she blinked them away, turning to Zelsys.

“I knew you deviated from the plotted path a few hours ago, but to think…” she uttered, choking on her own words.

Zelsys had half a mind to ask if she wanted to go down there, but she also knew it would be rejected. As such, she cocked her head to the side, offering: “We can visit on the way back. Let’s move on before someone sees us.”

And so they did, soon reaching the next of their major stops along the northward journey.