The Teacher opened it up with one hand, scanning the foreword. A moment later, the pamphlet emitted a wisp of Fog as its magickal text began to unravel beneath the Teacher’s gaze. Victor could see the gears turning behind his eyes for a moment, before the Teacher looked off to the side towards the main building, then back at Victor.

“...I think Duma will want to speak with you,” he said, returning the pamphlet. “Take this with you. Don’t worry about hurrying back, you’re excused.”

Victor did as told, putting on the mask of aloof self-assuredness as he walked across the courtyard, despite the fact he felt curious gazes on his back and heard gossiping whispers… At least until the Teacher quieted them by exaggeratedly clearing his throat.

A few knocks on the door, this time with no pattern, indicating no particular reason for the visit.

“Come in!” Resved’s voice echoed from beyond the door after a few seconds. The old man stepped out from behind the right-hand partition,

“Ah, Victor,” the old man said, briefly looking him up and down with a hint of amusement in his eyes. “Your fashion choices aren’t exactly sensible, but… I can’t say they surprise me either, all things considered. At least you look more comfortable in your own skin, but… I doubt new clothes alone would spark such a change. Ah, confound my rambling. Why are you here?”

Victor pulled out the pamphlet half-expecting the old man to give him a lecture about laying low and not provoking the occupationists with things like this, but instead, Duma’s eyes lit up and a slight smile upturned his lips.

“...That explains it. Did you happen to receive a package with two-dozen of these pamphlets?”

“Yes, how did you-” Victor blurted out, completely blindsided by the old man’s apparent clairvoyance.

Digging around in his robe for a moment, Duma pulled out his own copy of the pamphlet. “A certain Ms. Newman left me a copy when we met a short while ago, and since then, I have decided that this wonderful little booklet would be a fitting way to modernize our curriculum. She claimed that one of my own students would deliver the order, but I did not expect that it would be you. Did you happen to receive a brief message alongside the pamphlets, as well?”

“A calendar date, yes,” the younger man answered without pause. It was clear that Duma knew more than he did, especially given the old man’s satisfied nodding at the new knowledge.

“Hrm… That certainly explains the message she asked me to pass to the one who delivered the pamphlets: “Be ready on that day,” or so it went. Do you have the pamphlets with you?”

Victor shook his head. He’d left them at home, in the same box they’d arrived in.

“I suppose it is no issue. Bring them tomorrow, but do not be seen with them in public; I will have your instructor send you to me a little while after the free training period starts. You have an assistant tablet with Fog Storage, yes?”

Vic nodded again.

“Good,” the old man smiled. “How are your wounds? Healing well, I hope?”

Duma stared through Victor’s chest again as he asked those two questions, not even waiting for a verbal answer before he answered himself: “Looks like it. The surface scar tissue is already calcified, fascinating. Oh! Speaking of, I did manage to procure those bone growth supplements that… Oswald mentioned…”

A grim melancholy came over the old man, as if he already knew the Instructor to be dead. It went as quickly as it had come - or rather, Duma dispelled it that quickly - and the old man soon darted towards the door at the back. “Just a moment!” he yelled in the moment between him opening the door, slipping through, and shutting it. Victor, curious as he was, angled himself such that the next time the door opened, he would get at least a glimpse through. A short while passed, and he heard Duma’s footsteps at the other side. It opened slowly, and Victor felt something strange, as if his perception of time stretching the same way it very rarely had done before. He felt every extraneous sensation fading out of focus, every fiber of his being arrayed to the purpose of seeing what was at the other side of that door.

Through the gap, he could see a cabinet, and nothing more… But in its glass panes was the reflection of something further into the room. A spear upon an altar. He could just about make out that it nearly looked like a shortsword on a very long rod, possessing a crossguard and a double-edged head, affixed to a rod of dark, lacquered wood. The next heartbeat, the door had shut and Victor felt everything fade back in as Duma approached him with a small, metal box and metal bottle in one hand, and a bottle full of milky-white powder in the other. The bottle’s label extolled the virtues of crushed boar bones and their positive effects on sexual health. Snake oil, but useful to him. The box just had the word “BONEMELD” in stark military lettering. The metal bottle’s label was obscured by the old man’s fingers.

“There you are, took it out of your tuition. Only use the Bonemeld if you need to, it’ll constipate you like nothing else,” he said, moving the metal bottle such that its label became visible. Garish greens and reds popped out at him from the sheet metal. “And this uh… It should make cooking with actual bones more palatable. I’ll be honest, I just bought this because it looked interesting.”

The label of this one stated that it could make the unpalatable taste good, rehydrate dried meat, and make bad meat safe to eat. It was named “Wonder-Sauce”, an appropriately kitschy name given the kitschy container.

“Er, about the tuition-” Vic began as he took the supplements, holding both between his right hand’s fingers as he reached under his armpit with his left to get his Tablet out of its carrying holster. Duma cut him off again, flatly stating: “We will see how things turn out. If you stay, you stay. If you leave, you leave. I do not intend to try keeping you here over a couple dozen gelt. Don’t bother asking why I think you will leave. I can read people… And I saw you and Reiner at Scarlet Silk Road with those three, besides. Go on now, I have work to do, for once.”

Victor did as was asked of him, mentally re-centering himself before he returned to the light of day, cockily striding into the midst of his classmates and making it obvious that Duma had not chastised him in the slightest. He did, however, twist the truth by making it seem that he had learned the old man had expressed interest in Sturmblitz Kunst, and Vic’s possession of the pamphlet happened to coincide with Duma wanting to check that his injury was healing properly. The rest of the training day passed uneventfully, and he returned home immediately afterwards. He had half a mind to visit the town bathhouse, but a gut feeling told him it would be a bad idea, so he dealt with the annoyance of using lukewarm water to wash the day’s sweat off instead. His legs and forearms both thumped with dull pain from a day spent on conditioning, and his hair had gotten to the point where it demanded a proper wash.

His mind dwelt on that date. It was only a few days out: Friday.

There was still time. He put these thoughts aside for the time being and cracked open the box from yesterday. Victor’s vanity made him prioritize making the most of this opportunity to stand out, and if he were to truly make this outrageous getup his own, he would have to actually wear it and get used to it beforehand. The absurdity of his own actions wasn’t lost on him, but he considered it no different from a knight having his armor polished before battle. In the end, Victor found a small bit of similarity between himself and Von Wickten, and it only intensified his desire to murder the man.

“At least I have actual tastes in fashion beyond gold, kitschy dragon imagery, and dozens of face-moulding surgeries to hide the inbred jaw,” he thought to himself, projecting his resentment of the high nobility that had looked down on his family onto Von Wickten.

Inside the box he found not just the drakeskin shorts, but also a snakeskin belt of nearly identical make to Zel’s, the buckle being more rectangular, but in the same general style. The drake’s leather made up a stronger, outer layer, with large scales taken from the beast’s back making up armored sections on the sides, while the inside was lined with a different, much more supple material. It tried to stick to his fingers when he touched it, a light thrum of pins-and-needles spreading through his skin at the point of contact, with the inner lining only letting go a moment after he pulled away. These were soaked with magic through and through, there was no doubt in his mind; he wagered the enchantment to make the garment shape itself to the wearer would be a tad more aggressive than usual to help compensate for the toughness of drake hide. Victor couldn’t stop himself from investigating the piece of clothing just as thoroughly as he had done to his new top, taking in the barely-noticeable smell of arcanely processed leather, running his fingers through the soft Sturmgrandr fur lining at the top, looking over the stitching and prying at the scales on the sides, until he realized that something wasn’t quite right.

They were bigger on the inside, specifically in the groin.

His first thought was that, maybe, that old man had taken his request literally when he said he wanted the garment to be like Zel’s trousers, in the sense of outward appearance. However, Victor was quite certain that it was the alternative: The old man must’ve been familiar with the fashions of city-dwelling nobility, and he must’ve decided to pull a small prank on Victor by incorporating a technique used by certain noblemen whose bodies had developed unsightly protuberances, or whose manhoods had swelled to superhuman proportions due to misuse of mutagens.

Victor wasn’t sure if it was supposed to be a joke about his androgynous appearance, the size of his manhood, or both.

Perhaps the most exasperating part of it all was that, when he put them on, he was made to consider whether it had been a purely practical choice. Familiar thrumming enveloped him as the enchanted garment interfaced with his being the same way any other arcane item would; the leather shrunk around him and contoured itself to his body with a zeal that left no doubt in his mind it would’ve been at best uncomfortable had the allowance not been made for the family jewels. Still… The discrepancy made it strange, even if he knew he’d get used to this. Everything was just sort-of smoothed out from the outside, with the feeling of padding between the outer layer and his own flesh. After moving around a bit, he came to the conclusion that it wasn’t quite padding. He curiously picked up a book and lightly hit himself between the legs, only to find the force dispersed across his entire pelvis. A vague memory in the back of his mind came to the fore: This was the same sort of kinetic dispersal magic that made Zel’s arm harness function, allowing it to disperse any force imparted to her left arm across her entire body. Clearly, this had to be a lesser form of that magic.

The boots were, for a welcome change, unremarkable as enchanted footwear went. They subtly molded themselves to better fit his feet and legs, and the belts at the top were vestigial in functionality due to the boots’ enchanted nature, but they were in the end just very nice boots.

Victor donned each new clothing-piece in turn, strapping on his Black Marble Tablet’s holster just under his hooded jacket so that it blended in. It was difficult to describe the feeling of wearing exclusively Fog-imbued clothing, compared to mundane garments; Victor thought best to describe it as not having new clothes, but as having new skin.

He had chosen to wear no underlayer, as he had enough understanding of Fog-infused clothing to know that there was no real point. Certain baseline enchantments were universal even on mass-produced Fog-infused clothing, such as those which were supplied to Ikesian soldiers whose superhuman attribute ratings and high-level training qualified them for the rank of Captain. Among these were the garment’s ability to clean and mend itself by feeding off of both ambient and the wearer’s own Pneuma, as well as to actively repel what the user would consider filthy and wick away sweat and other such bodily filth to then expel it as it would external filth. Victor had read about how Grekurian Inquisitors would wear their armor for days on end, only ever doffing even a single piece to relieve themselves, and even then, they could supposedly urinate through the armor without it becoming soiled, if circumstances arose that demanded them to remain in full armor for that long.

Victor swept the disgusting consideration from his mind, refocusing on what mattered in the moment: The finishing touches. His vanity drove the young man to open up the expensive makeup kit he’d bought from that Kargarian peddler, and after a few attempts to shake the rust off, he got the eye highlights right, using a bright shade of red that he thought would best fit in with everything else. His hair was still wet, so he couldn’t quite finish the job, but an invigorating confidence already washed over him. As self-absorbed as he knew it to be, he couldn’t stop himself from grinning at himself in the mirror.

“Damn I look good.”

He decided to go for a run on the same path as the previous days, dressed as he was, considering that just running dressed like this would be the least of his concerns. Thus, he wished to make absolutely sure everything was fitted properly before he got into an actually dangerous situation in this getup. However, before he left, something crossed his mind: he no longer felt entirely safe going out without some sort of weapon on his person, within hand’s reach. As such he opened up his Tablet’s Fog Storage and retrieved a hand-axe that he’d bought as a sidearm after the third time he’d found himself disarmed of his assigned Boarkiller on a hunting assignment, not only as a backup, but out of a desire for a weapon that was his own… And because he couldn’t afford a sword at the time. The axe and its accompanying leather holster were well-made, but plain - so plain that the weapon’s presence blended into the rest of his outfit as little more than an accessory.

As far as Victor was concerned, the rest of his day went uneventfully. His hair had dried in the course of his outing, and after he returned home, he took some time to braid some of it on the right side in shameless imitation of Zelsys. In the evening, as he warmed up yesterday’s leftovers, his mind turned towards Ossomancy again… And just as yesterday, he stayed awake into the night attempting to recreate what he’d already done once. Having achieved the feat before and having recorded the glyphs allowed him to re-enact it after not too many failed attempts, confirming that it had not been a sleep deprivation induced delusion. Knowing that he didn’t actually need to crunch down bones like some fucking animal was certainly nice, but it only spawned further questions, it scratched one itch only to spawn another, even worse one. This bit of knowledge alone, combined with what he already knew, opened up a whole new realm of possibility.

He willed two fundamental glyphs to appear in the palm of his right hand, and with a breath, he funneled a mixture of Pneuma and Ossum into it, flicking his thumb out from within a closed fist. A pure white spark issued from the tip of his thumbnail, and it burst into monochromatic flame, the bottom being black and the tip white.

It was the most basic of Ignis magicks, so minor that the inefficiency and thus increased effort of substituting Ignis with Pneuma was barely noticeable. Ossum, however, tainted the flame, changing how it burned. Victor brought his thumb to a scrap of meat. It sizzled for a few moments, and then turned pale, stiffening as it burned. Black and white; this was how all his fire magicks looked, more or less; inherently tinged by the Ossum constantly coursing throughout his body and soul. But actively adding more Ossum into the flame produced something different. Something that could hurt even a False Drake, turn its mighty hide brittle and make it vulnerable; something that could eat away at even the toughest of armors the same way Zelsys’ ball lightning did.

Bonefire, as his younger self had so uncreatively named it when he had inadvertently produced the phenomenon, calcified whatever it burned. In his experience, it could eat away at near enough everything, the only problem was the fact he needed to actively input Ossum into the reaction to make it have a noticeable effect, and the amount wasn’t at all trivial, thus significantly limiting Victor’s ability to use it… Until now.

Another breath. A bit more Ossum. A snap of his fingers. A scrap of cartilage went up in flames and became a plaster-white husk of itself. Victor crushed it into dust in his hand and reabsorbed its constituent Ossum. He wasn’t a living essentia meter, but what he’d just gotten out of that felt like more than he had put in.

“If it feels like cheating, but it works, it’s not cheating…” he muttered to himself, smiling. He knew it wouldn’t be nearly this easy with living, resisting foes, but that made no difference. As long as he was careful, he could replenish his Ossum reserves from the bones and calcified flesh of his enemies once they had breathed their last. He put the flame out, and took a look at his Tablet.

He hadn’t bothered to check his own Traits list in months, as it never changed, but a piece of advice in Sturmblitz Kunst 0 had spurred him on to do it now:

“If you have access to a personal assistant tablet or a similar device with attribute/trait reading features, be sure to check them regularly to monitor attribute/trait changes you may have otherwise not noticed. This is especially important after any personally significant events, even those seemingly unrelated to cultivation. While bothersome, it is a good habit to have.”

“It is equally as important, however, to keep in mind that any such assistant device is limited by its logic automaton. No matter how complex, a logic automaton is no more than an arcane machine attempting to interpret the complexities of a human being and codify them into text form; such devices often fail to account for subtleties and may even outright ignore non-combat traits. As such, it would be foolish to rely on such a device to guide your path.”

SKILL TRAITS Spear Wielding Martial Artist Arcane Mathematics Lesser Glyphic Magic Fog-breathing SPECIAL TRAITS Legacy of Bone: Ossomancy Affinity Legacy of Bone: Metabolic Ossum Legacy of Bone: Superior Body Hardening Superior Body Hardening: Osseous Callusing Superior Body Hardening: Osseous Exoskeleton Legacy of Bone: Instinctive Skeletal Understanding Octagram Conductive Glyph Tattoos (Palms) Second King’s Arts (Unique)

Second King’s Arts. What a self-absorbed name. It’d been foisted upon him in his studies; anything to do with the Khestun family’s offshoot of arcane study was incessantly associated with the Second King in reference to the fact they were his direct descendants. It meant little. The Second King, less commonly known as Koschei, the King of That Which Lives, was known to have sired so many children that if a random mage claimed to be his descendant, there was a good chance that claim was true. The Khestun family had the dubious honor of possessing records that proved their relation to him, nothing more.

Victor didn’t particularly care for such a legacy, considering that as far as he knew, his family’s bone magic came from a much more recent ancestor’s foolish escapades. He willed his Tablet to change the listing. But what to change it to?

Considering he was unmistakably Ikesian and the fact his bone plates were as white as plaster, he predicted that he’d get called a Snow Devil quite a bit… It clicked into place.

The projection flickered and shifted in front of him.

Devilbone Arts (Unique)

Devilbone… It would double as a good way to differentiate his temporary constructs from real bones. Vic spent the rest of is evening fiddling with Ossomancy, going over what he already knew, creating small, oval constructs that he imbued with bonefire. Launching them would incur an additional cost of Aer, and it would be altogether energetically quite expensive, but… An idea took root in his brain. He could make projectiles out of Devilbone, so why not barrels? Containing an Igneic charge and replicating the function of a firearm would allow him to achieve tremendous speed, but it would be wasteful to create disposable barrels. That wouldn’t do.

He spent a short while reading Sturmblitz Kunst to clear his mind, and came upon a mention of a different sort of firearm: Volcanics. Cutting-edge repeating guns that solved the problem of ammunition storage without the need for cartridges, instead using bullets with hollow bases that contained the propellant.

It was a perfect concept for making the most of Victor’s limited raw power, combined with his versatility as a caster.

He formed a tapered, finger-length dart that was hollow on the inside, condensing a small amount of Aer and Ignis inside the hollow as it took shape. It was plugged at the back by a separate piece of devilbone with an ignition glyph on the inside. Since the projectile was a construct of his own making, a quirky interaction of the arcane and the mundane permitted him a degree of telekinetic control over it even without use of kineticism, but launching it at that velocity under raw arcane power would’ve been at least twice as energy-intensive as this clever method.

The efficiency difference left no room for doubt; even in an environment with no easily-accessible Ignis, drawing from subterranean leylines or substituting Ignis-coded Pneuma in the propellant would be more efficient than brute-forcing it with his unrefined grasp of kineticism. It was a future-proof design, by his reckoning. Once he became skilled and/or strong enough to just launch arcane projectiles at high velocities under his own strength, he would have the advantage of his projectiles also self-propelling after being let go. Vic’s mind wandered into the realms of remote fantasy, imagining arm-sized bone stakes smashing into an enemy’s flying swords, or flying skeletal hands snatching them out of the air, their flight controlled by secondary output nozzles and complex, yet elegant internal burn control glyph networks.

What snapped him out of it was the realization that the construct was still floating in his hand, and it would probably begin degrading of its own volition quite soon. He pointed his finger at a nearby wall, the bone-dart aligning itself with the tip of it, floating a few centimeters in front of it. A spark of will, and it burst forward, monochromatic sparks spewing out the back and washing over his arm as it rocketed into the exposed brickwork. The small charge meant that it slammed into the brick with a hollow sound and bounced right back at Victor, slowly enough for him to catch. Letting out a relieved sigh, he willed the construct to crumble and reabsorbed it.

It was too late and he was too exhausted to be doing this.

The next day’s training went quite well.

Victor made his covert delivery to Duma without incident, and between rounds of sparring with Reiner, he devised a method of applying his idea from yesterday to enhance unarmed strikes.

He was ecstatic when it worked exactly as he’d hoped: He’d formed a bulked-up hollow construct around the spur of his right elbow, filling its cavity with a decent amount of the same Aer-Ignis mixture. It took him a bit of time, but Reiner’s slow-and-steady fighting style made it possible… And Vic was pretty sure the mountain of flesh intentionally let him do it to begin with, perhaps just to see what he was trying to do in the first place.

Punching his opponent with an arcane rocket strapped to the back of his elbow and sending him flying out of the ring was probably as painful for Victor as it was for Reiner, but more than his victory, Vic derived enjoyment out of Reiner’s widened eyes and breathless utterance of: “What in the nine hells…”

Victor also enjoyed the attention from the rest of the class nearly as much… But not enough to agree to pull that stunt again. He wasn’t tough enough to do something like that without hurting himself more than once. After the training day was done, he found himself invited to the town bathhouse, and though the attention-seeking part of his brain wanted to go, he forced himself to decline. Still, he couldn’t help himself saying it as such: “...Can’t go, sorry. Not safe.”

Looking back on it as he bathed at home, that cringe worthy attempt at being mysterious made him want to kill himself. He wouldn’t do that ever again.