A/N: Next chapter needs more time to cook, probably no chapter tomorrow.

She kicked her feet up on the edge of his table and retrieved a long, ornamental pipe from her sleeve. She then whistled a brief tune, silvery-orange wisps of Fog issued from her lips, and the pipe sparked to life.

“So I’m told your little aether-spy got his head exploded,” she grinned, taking a drag of her pipe. The smell reminded him of incense.

“The aether skimmer machine imploded and a piece of shrapnel took his head off, yes,” he said. But I wouldn’t call you here for something that trivial.”

“Learned from last time eh?”

“I- Look, we really do not have much time. I need help founding a new slayer’s guild.”

“A slayer’s guild? But… Are there enough people left here with the ratings to legally found one? More importantly, where d’ya plan to find someone with the credentials to be Prime Slayer? Back in the day we could just contact the central slayer registry and get a dozen different applicants within a month, but nowadays… Say, aren’t you technically qualified to be Prime Slayer? It’s been a couple decades since they called you Rushing Dandy, but I hear you could’ve gone pro if you hadn’t gone into trade and politics.

Crovacus put on a wry grin. Of course she knew, her mother must’ve told her. How he desired to crumple up where he sat when he heard that stupid name. His only recourse was that he hadn’t picked it himself.

“That was then, and this is now. If I took up my old name I’d just be painting a target on my back. But...There is someone,” he said, picking a photo out of his desk’s top drawer and holding it up for the man to see.

“Less than a week after coming into town, she went from beating the daylights out of my son to being a pivotal asset in the extermination of a major locust-man terrorist cell that had somehow infested a dungeon.”

“Wait… That’s her? So the shit about her splitting a lightning bolt, using a literal arm-cannon, wiping out a hundred locust-men all on her own… That isn’t just a myth?”

“Honestly? I think it’s understated. We might very well have our hands on one of the first slayers that will hold up to pre-war standards.”

“That sure of her, huh?”

“By my trusted agent’s testimony, she took enough punishment to kill someone with A-rated Hardness and just kept on trucking, with a Hardness of B. If that isn’t our monster to hunt monsters, I don’t know where to look. Even the Third Renegade isn’t quite up to Prime Slayer snuff, and I doubt she’d take the position even for an emperor’s ransom.”

“So a foreigner it is, then. You know anything about her besides her credentials?”

Crovacus took a long toke of his cigar, and with a grin pulled a nearly paperthin black binder from the organized mess that littered his desk. His guest’s raised eyebrow and strange expression was just as satisfying as he’d hoped.

The binder contained over a dozen different pieces of bureaucratic documentation, but the one at the top was the most eye catching. A handwritten letter written with strange, yet immaculate handwriting that looked like a mashup of elven and monk-noble calligraphy with occasional splotches of utilitarian, simplistic shapes. It was like the writer knew how to write in three distinct styles, but hadn’t bothered to use them separately and allowed the muscle memory to just melt together over time.

Handwriting aside, the letter’s contents were vastly more intriguing, providing ample leverage for Crovacus to use in filling the Prime Slayer figurehead position. 

The letter requested, in this order: 

A meeting with the provisional governor in private for the purposes of discussing payment for services rendered and the hazards encountered during the rendering of said services.

A renting contract for a training field near the north-eastern wall that had been abandoned since the heroic family that owned it was wiped out in the war. 

The induction of an entirely new family name into the city-state records, the details of which would only be discussed as part of the previously requested meeting.

Arnys’s analytical gaze was quickly grabbed by the image that the letter had previously covered. Not a photo, but the next best thing - a nearly photorealistic charcoal rendering of the subject’s face. It was a little off in facial structure and lacked certain details, but as far as Crovacus was concerned it captured Zelsys accurately enough - especially the everpresent underlying haughtiness.

Beneath it was a far less detailed full-body rendering, though once again, Crovacus felt it captured the subject’s amazonian figure and devil-may-care disposition more than sufficiently.

“You really weren’t exaggerating when you said she looked like she walked right off a propaganda poster,” the merchant remarked after she blew a gust of smoke from her nostrils.

Conversation inevitably moved into the particulars of what made the governor decide that this person in particular was the only real fit for the Prime Slayer position. He didn’t even have to say anything beyond pointing out particular papers in the folder. 

First of all things, she was noted to be very heavily armed by the gate guards - a Captain’s Cleaver on her back and a strange gun strapped to her arm. ‘A big gun on her arm’ wasn’t concrete enough to use as a metric, but the Ikesian military’s Captain’s Cleaver was well known for its demanding nature. It was a massive weapon forged entirely from the arcane metal cold-iron, and demanded from its wielder both strength and affinity for the arcane that neared the limits of normal humans. 

For those who met these criteria, the blades would change their shape to fit the user and outpace many weapons of superior make with their bulldozing force and unnerving tendency to shift their own center of mass to better strike as the wielder intends.

On the same day she had entered Willowdale, Zelsys took a beast-slaying contract at Quincy’s Tavern for a beast described as a ‘maneater’. It was known to be a cannibalistic, bipedal thing, and suspected to be some sort of vengeance demon created in the wake of the war. It had up until then claimed the lives of several other beast-slayers.

On the next day around noon she was reported to be walking around town wounded and trailing blood, and Quincy listed the contract as completed a few hours after.