“Come on, I’ll carry you the rest of the way if your legs give out,” she added. It wasn’t as if she needed to convince him - Zel knew that there were very few things on which Victor wouldn’t defer to her when it came to his training, short of the blatantly unreasonable and harmful. No, this was solely to try and rile him up - and it worked, though his reaction made it clear that he knew she was just winding him up.

The route was such that she honestly didn’t expect him to run the whole way. She wanted to see him push himself, to see how just how much the breakthrough had really done.

Some time later…

“You actually kept up, I’m impressed!” Zel beamed at her protegé after they stopped in a side alley just short of the Bjorn Clan’s compound.

“I used… Magic… Though…” he choked out between strained breaths. Withered, crumbling vines snaked every which way around an equally crumbling devilbone exoskeleton that reinforced his lower body.

“And?” she asked, putting her hand atop his head as she squatted down to look him in the eye. “You figured out you wouldn’t be able to push all the way on your own early enough to put together that exoskeleton, animated it with Gamma, and then kept it powered for the last third of the run. Honestly, that’s even more impressive than if you would’ve just kept pace with me the whole way.”

“My legs are… Still rubber,” he grimaced. “And I screwed up… Screwed up the design, just look… At those bruises.”

“Alright, you asked for it,” Zel shrugged, effortlessly hoisting him onto her shoulders, using two of her braids to secure him in place. In that exact manner, she carried him all the way to one of the baths. In response to his protests when she started undressing, she waved one hand: “Oh shut up, I just won’t get naked. It’s not as if I don’t walk around with my tits on display to begin with, I couldn’t care less if you stare. I won’t risk you drowning.”

Her concern turned out to have been unfounded, especially since Victor would’ve had a two-digit count of minutes to get out of the water even if he had sunk, but Zel just hadn’t considered that fact.

Later that same day in the late evening, Zel visited the baths once more, this time with Jorfr. They bathed together, speaking on any and all matters to pass the time, partly because Zel couldn’t get into a half-conscious trance as she normally could. Her arm had slowly begun driving her mad, its ongoing metamorphosis expressed as itching throughout the entire forelimb up to her elbow. It was only alleviated by soaking the limb in the Primary Spring or by punching something hard enough for the recoil to temporarily numb her nerve endings. She was quite sure just shoving her arm into a fire would work at this point, but she wasn’t going to try it. Yet.

Jorfr’s chest-wound had healed by this point.

“I don’t scar heavily, but this water completely erased any trace of the hole,” he said.

“It’s more like bathing in elixir than water,” Zel agreed.

“Some clans do bottle and sell their spring water. It’s supposed to lose its potency if you take it out of the spring, but the Aase distill and stabilize it somehow, and one or two other clans have their own versions of the process… I think the Tandes and Kildahls. Stuff’s poison, though. It destroys your organs so it’s fallen out of popularity except with those who can withstand the strain or don’t care about dying.”

“Such as draugrs?” Zel asked.

Jorfr nodded: “Yes, draugrs are a good example. You could probably withstand it, but…”

“I don’t exactly need help getting what I need out of the water,” she laughed, gesturing to the small area around her where the pool’s amber hue thinned out, transitioning to perfect clarity right by her skin.

As the two of them walked through a side hallway in the Bjorn Clan’s longhouse on their way back, they passed by a fair number of people. Zel found it endlessly convenient that most clans shared a recognizable physical trait or even set of traits, not to mention their own specific fashion stylings, both of which helped her recognize who was part of what clan… Even if she couldn’t remember most of the clan names. A fair number of Aase Clan members milled through the longhouse, all of them muscular to a superhuman degree, and many of them so built up that there was no way they possessed full range of motion. The reason for their presence made itself abundantly clear through the noisy, violent spectacle outside - the Bjorns and Aase had organized wargames. Though the main event was already underway, one-on-one and two-on-two fights were also being held, open for anyone to join.

Zelsys, of course, joined, while Jorfr chose to abstain out of caution. She found most of her opponents to be, at worst, fun to fight, and even the weakest of them were undoubtedly stronger than Jorfr or she had been the first time they met at the fighting pits. Most of her opponents were lower-ranking members of the Aase clan, men and women alike; all of them used interesting techniques leveraging quirks of their own anatomy combined with decently well-developed martial arts… But at the end of the day, they weren’t exactly technical powerhouses. Some came across as arrogant, but she couldn’t blame them, looking at their physiques. It wasn’t as if she was any different, and they took their defeats with grace. One of them jokingly asked if she would show him how to perform the flying headscissor takedown she’d used to pin him, only to find himself gobsmacked when the weird, monstrously strong foreigner pulled out a pamphlet full of techniques from the most basic breathing exercises to advanced body mechanics.

Zel didn’t care that it would make the Aase Clan stronger, and she was almost certain that they had their own versions of everything in the pamphlet, buried somewhere in a library, probably being ignored by most of the clan’s members in favor of building more mass. She found that they all smelled strangely alchemical, their sweat giving off the same feeling as Makhus’ laboratory. Besides that, though, they didn’t antagonize her, which was nice - if anything, they were the most honest about staring at her, not with lust, but the admiration of one body cultivator for another.