The phantom sound of distant guns drowned out the noise of the street outside the window. The yelling of men, the foreboding crackle of a campfire and rustling of a bush. All these noises were familiar, to all these noises he fell asleep. In their absence his mind occasionally conjured phantoms, much like it was doing at this very moment. 

Another swig. 

Another. 

And another.

His mouth was numb, as was much of his left side after having seized up. He didn’t have the mental wherewithal to fight it, and at this point, he was too drunk to try.

Before he knew it Sigmund had drained the second bottle and fallen asleep at the writing desk. In a brief moment of lucidity he jolted upright, noticing that even the third one was two-thirds gone. The sun had long set by now, and everything was quiet. 

Sigmund took another swig, and allowed himself to drift off into the dreamless void of a drunkard’s sleep, unable to so much as move a muscle beyond his right arm and his head. He felt himself slipping, awareness, fading, and then…

Zel and Zef spent the remainder of their afternoon in the backyard, after they had discovered a nook nestled between the greenhouse and the walls of two other buildings. It contained half of a large barrel repurposed for use as a table, surrounded by three wooden chairs.

It was shielded from both rain and sun by an old copper awning, turned its characteristic bright green by corrosion. For a while they did nothing, merely sitting there, basking in each other's presence. By the time the sky began to turn the colours of dusk, Zelsys had briefly taken another look at the details of her traits. Fog-breathing had changed, ever so subtly - its advancement condition was different. 

Advancement: Advance a Unique Method

Zelsys wasn’t sure how she could improve her usual breathing method in a significant enough way for the device to consider it as having advanced, and at this very moment, she was all too exhausted to give it any further thought. She put the Tablet down and turned her attention to Zefaris.

That night no strange noises came out of their room, though they still spent the night in one another’s embrace.

The sleepiness was gone, just as he downed the contents of a bottle. It tasted like blood, and fire, and whiskey. It tasted like victory. 

He was surrounded by a dozen Grekurians with scatterguns, sleep gas grenades sprayed their contents all around him, yet at this very moment, he knew he was in the position of power. It was all like a bizarre dream - Sigmund knew what he was recalling was long in the past, he knew he was just a passenger in his own head, but he couldn’t feel more in control than right now.

The concoction which he had just drunk was his entire squad’s supply of highly experimental Victory Wash elixir, and it felt like he had just set himself ablaze from the inside out. His nostrils filled with the stench of his own blood and burning hair, his facial hair somehow spontaneously turning to embers without burning away.

“We have you surrounded, just surrender!” one of the soldiers yelled in barely-legible Ikesian. “If you lay down your arms, we can promise you and your squad fair treatment as prisoners of war!”

Immediately after, another soldier rebuked in Grekurian, “Just blast the filthy Ike and bag the rest! We don’t have the time to take prisoners!”

Sigmund had learned the Grekurian language before his conscription into the military. Despite the blazing fury rising from his gut, Sigmund maintained self-control. “I am afraid I can’t risk that,” he responded, reaching for his war-knife. A scattergun rang out, but it only blasted apart the campfire and sprayed embers into the air. Sigmund was long gone.

“Where the hell did he ghrk-” 

His hand on the soldier’s shoulder, his war-knife squarely through his spine. The fabric burned away beneath his fingers, but before any of the others could whip around at their comrade’s deathrattle, he was gone once again.

The Grekurian soldiers were spread out in their four-man squads. Sigmund didn’t have much time to take them all out, with every passing second and with every inhumanly-fast movement, he felt his body cooking itself from the inside out, yet he felt no pain nor fear for his life. He was the fire, Victory Wash was merely accelerant to kickstart his blazing will to live.

Though his perception of time remained unaltered, even a fraction of a second felt like enough time to ruminate on a plan of approach and plot out a course of action. A single step was enough to rip gashes in the ground underfoot, a moment enough time to move from one victim’s slumping form to the next and plunge his war-knife into their chest.

Sigmund wiped out five of them before he encountered any resistance. The vast bulk of his strength was already spent and he was beginning to slow down, but now than ever, his fiery transformation was most apparent. The top half of his uniform hung off him as no more than burning tatters, his snow-white skin was a canvas painted with the blackness of charred soot and the orange of blazing embers, tracing elaborate patterns along his veins. 

This sixth soldier, the first he crossed blades and locked stares with before he ended them, knew he was a dead man standing. He was the furthest from the rest, caught reloading his scattergun, only able to catch Sig’s war-knife with his weapon’s bayonet through sheer luck. The moment Sigmund’s bloodshot, blazing stare met that soldier’s trained gaze, the Grekurian knew his impending fate. Even still, he bequeathed, “You’re no Fog-breather. How do you plan to kill twelve of us?”

“You’re already dead,” Sigmund told the soldier, fully leaning into his confidence that he came out of this alive and victorious. “You just don’t know it yet.”

Before the soldier could respond, Sigmund had already kicked the soldier away and severed his head with a wide, sweeping slash. Two more soldiers fell without ever knowing he was there until his steel had already severed their lives and they could feel his searing body heat burning through their clothes.

The last four were the issue.