It was a huge, gnarled cherry tree atop a hill in the middle of a forest, split down the middle by the scars of numerous lightning strikes, but standing defiant and seemingly in perpetual bloom, with its many leaves and blossoms displaying lightning-like vein patterns, as if the tree had learned to feed on lightning. One could feel the electric tension in the air around it.

Here they recharged their steeds’ fuel cells; they had backups, of course, but they were for emergencies. Zelsys did the work of setting the Fulgur Accumulators, as she was immune to the hazards of electrocution as well as the most familiar with the gandrs’ inner workings. Grey clouds swirled overhead, but not of the sort to bring rain or lightning.

The accumulators were set at the base of the tree, after which Zel scaled its height with long spools of cable in one hand. While this went on, Victor spoke up: “Lady Zefaris, I do not wish to intrude, but… What was with that logging hamlet we passed by? Was that-”

“-My hometown. Yeah,” she answered, continuing to play with a coin between her fingers. There was a sense of tense uncertainty in her voice, like she hadn’t expected what she saw down there. ”I don’t hold it against you that you asked, it’s just not something I’m comfortable sharing with strangers. Though…”

She sighed, flicking the coin in the air and catching it, but she didn’t bother to look. She could predict how it would land the moment she threw it; it was just a way of giving herself permission to talk about it.

“...It’d be better to just tell you so you don’t come to some out-there conclusion. That statue down there, it’s of me. A forest deity called a Leshy attacked the town when I was much younger, and in the commotion my first thought was to blow its head off with one of the four-pounder cannons on the walls. Some of the more influential folk saw me as a bad omen after that, so I took it as an excuse to leave. Joined the army. I figured I wouldn’t be welcome back and frankly didn’t want to know if my hometown had gotten burned down or worse, so I never returned of my own volition.”

A bitter chuckle issued from her.

“In retrospect, I was just a dumb teenager that took the words of drunkard loggers too close to heart. It seems like the other townsfolk didn’t share the drunkards’ opinion, going by the statue.”

Victor knew what a leshy was from his studies, and he knew the surface-level meaning of one’s presence; it was nature buckling against man’s expansion. Had that leshy not been killed, the logging town would’ve been reclaimed by the forest. Before he could voice his knowledge, however, Zelsys could be heard screaming a challenge from the top of the cherry tree. He glanced upward, seeing that the previously scattered clouds overhead had swirled together and coalesced into an ominous, dark grey mass. A split-second later, a blinding flash smashed down from the heavens and thunder rang in his ears.

Petrichor filled his nostrils and rain began to pour as the sound of Zelsys laughing carried down from the top of the cherry tree and the accumulators began buzzing with collected Fulgur. Arcs of blue flowed within the hollow of the tree and some of its blossoms turned to cherries in the span of moments, ripening and falling from the branches by the time Zelsys had returned to the ground. The Broken Butcher was in her hand, lightning arcing between its prongs and up her arm as the muscles beneath her right arm’s skin twitched.

“What did-” the young man began to stutter out, only to find a cherry the size of a small plum stuffed into his mouth. It burst with juice the colour of human blood which was so sweet it almost hurt to taste. To his bewilderment, Zefaris and Jorfr were more interested in the sudden influx of supernatural fruit than the feat Zelsys had just performed, and just as he realized why, she said it out loud: “I’m a Storm-soul Cultivator, lest you forget - feats such as these are part of my training regimen. The Stormbloom Tree was one of my stopping points; that we can use it to recharge quicker is just a secondary benefit.”

She put two of these huge cherries in her mouth, stems and all, sitting down at the base of the tree as the muscles of her right arm kept twitching, the effect slowly subsiding. A few seconds later, she spat them out tied into a gordian knot and picked another cherry off the ground.

“So it’s… A cultivator-tree that uses lightning to bear fruit…” he muttered, more to himself than anything else, as he bent down and took another cherry.

“Yeah,” Zel nodded, looking up into the tree’s boughs. “Puts you in your place when a tree can coerce the clouds into forming lightning. But then, I guess standing in one place for a millennium will get you that kind of clout with the local Monads and Daemons. This thing might as well be a local god.”

Soon enough, the Sturmgandrs were recharged and the four of them departed with a small bounty of Stormbloom Cherries, leaving most of what had fallen at the base of the tree for the locals. Riding through the rest of this region had them witness yet more war-wounds upon the country, from burned out hamlets with the residents’ bodies hanged from trees, to a field of abstract environmental art left behind as aftermath for a cultivator battle, the ground turned to beautiful swirls of glass and slag for hundreds of meters out. Innumerable derelicts of war littered the roadside, dragged off it to clear the way, the skeletons of tanks and trucks alongside rows of shallow graves for foreign soldiers while skeletons in Ikesian uniforms were left in ditches or the cabins of the trucks they drove. They slowed down momentarily as they rode by.

“There are barely one tenth as many Ikesian fallen as there are graves for Grekurian soldiers. True warriors, they must have been,” Jorfr muttered under his breath.

Victor, riding along the borean as he was, added: “Or the locals have been retrieving their fallen to bury them in secret… Or both, could be both.”

What few graves could be discerned as being for Ikesian soldiers had been defaced in various ways, some even dug up to expose the corpse to the elements. Evidence of just how bad the occupation was this far north.

Not much longer after this macabre sight, they reached the border of the Gaullam-Ikes Region. It was named as such for the fact that it contained the Gaullam Labyrinth and the Ikes Mountains, or at least the parts of them that didn’t belong to one of the mountain kingdoms, and it fell under the jurisdiction of the Northern Capital. The former beating heart of a unified Ikesia in the region’s north-east, built atop the derelict of an ancient Ankhezian fortress. It now stood ravaged and occupied by malicious foreign forces, the corpse of the greater government and armed forces puppeted around to facilitate the clandestine subversion of remaining holdouts, be it people or unoccupied municipalities.

“Hey, stop the bike,” Zefaris beckoned as the border crossing crested the horizon. Zel did as asked and the blonde leaned out past her, opening her left eye. The shining dot that was its pupil expanded out into a spiral for a few seconds as the veins surrounding the socket bulged out from under her skin and a burning thrum flooded her brain, while her right eye’s twin pupils dilated until only a thin green band was left of the iris. She reached out and beheld the checkpoint as if she were standing right there.

“Shit, checkpoint’s guarded. Guess the Bureau plan didn’t work out entirely,” she hissed, blinking a few times as her eyes reset before closing the left.

“So we go around?” came a question from Victor.

“No, we have to go through here,” Zefaris shook her head. “This is the only stable road through the Gaullam, and we’d just get stuck in the bayou if we tried to go around. At least it’s less guarded than usual, so our Bureau friends can’t have failed completely.”

Closing her right eye, the blonde sighed in frustration, or perhaps resignation.

“I’ll handle it, it’s fine,” she said, to the confusion of her companions and Zelsys especially, who was halfway through accumulating Fulgur in her second stomach with the intent to smash through the checkpoint. She retrieved a small badge from her Tablet, depicting two Zweihander greatswords with a ribbon beneath. It read:

DOPPELSOLDAT

Instead of a pin on the back, it had a complex glyph inlaid with her own blood; an advanced, two-pronged security measure that bound the badge to the wearer in a manner that couldn’t be falsified. The glyph took on a pale glow and the badge stuck to her chest when she put it there.

Never had she thought that she would wear this badge again. She hadn't wanted to, not after it had led her to the trench where she had lost her eye, but that trauma was behind her, and the facade of doppelsoldat was one she was once again willing to wear.

“Alright, bring me within thirty meters,” she instructed, and Zelsys did so, dumping her built-up charge into her Sturmgandr’s Thundercharger module. The beastly vehicle screamed down the road with Jorfr just about keeping up in her wake. As she approached, Zelsys could see people stirring at the checkpoint, leaping into action as they ran out of the guard post. She had skidded to a stop by the time they had emerged from the checkpoint,

She affixed her mask to her face and pulled her cap down so that only her eyes would be visible, rolled her shoulders, and summoned the stiff, arrogant swagger of a stereotypical doppelsoldat. The border-guards’ reaction would expose whether they were truly Ikesians, or just occupationist dogs skinwalking as Ikesian soldiers.

The Captain stared at That Woman as she approached, hands behind her back, one eye open. He glanced up at her cap, then at her shoulders, and only then down to her chest, finding no hard identifying marks beyond the doppelsoldat badge. Combined with a homunculus eye, custom clothing designed to evoke an Ikesian officer’s uniform, guns that screamed bleeding-edge, that mask, the way she held herself… There was not a fiber in his body that doubted the legitimacy of that badge.

“Doppelsoldat…” he uttered under his breath. One of his subordinates gave a questioning look, but the Captain jabbed him in the ribs and hissed: “At fucking attention, soldier.”

She looked at the captain with a cold gaze, uttering a pointed question: “Do you know what this badge on my chest means, soldier?”

A hesitant nod.

“Then you will let us through and tell your superiors that we never passed through this checkpoint. Is that clear?”

Before he could answer, his moronic subordinate blurted out: “But we have specific orders to apprehend people matching your description. You’re a fucking war criminal.”

Her gaze slowly shifted from him to the young fool and her left eye drifted open, within the socket a burning spiral pupil in the middle of an onyx sphere.

“Every brave soul that fought for Ikesia is a “war criminal” in the eyes of her occupiers. Now, do not speak unless spoken to.”

A blinding flash erupted from the dopplesoldat’s left eye. There was a loud thud, and when he blinked away the blinding light, the Captain saw that his subordinate had been smashed against the guard booth’s outer wall, the wind knocked out of him, but seemingly nothing more - to his relief.

“Captain, keep your subordinates in line,” she said, glancing at him, slowly closing her left eye. Just a brief moment of being looked at by that thing felt like he was pierced by a bullet. There was death in the woman’s eyes, like she could look at you and instantly know the easiest way to kill you. Yet, her voice carried neither anger nor killing intent. Just cold professionalism. The Captain yanked the young soldier to his feet as he caught his breath, hissing again: “At attention!”

“Wgh- What are you, some Bureau version of an Inquisitor?!” the younger soldier blurted out again, only for his superior to smack him upside the head. Defiant eyes still stared up at her even then.

“Nothing so pious. I was - am - just a soldier with objectives too important to be subject to the chain of command. I serve the country, and the country alone - not the hollowed out corpse you call a central government."

Her gaze turned to the Captain again.

"You. Raise the blockade and do not speak of this."