Zel picked the book up on her way out, flipping the page; the next one detailed the Ankylodragon. As she skimmed it, Zefaris caught up, leaning in. 

“Mind if I-” she began, but Zel had already handed it over before she could finish.

“Be my guest,” she uttered, reaching to her back and pulling out her own White Marble Tablet. She reflexively checked her own attribute ratings and traits, not expecting any changes.

A part of the reason why she did so was posterity, but another, quite a bit larger part, was ego. A+. Two orders of magnitude, or seven increments, above the pinnacle of normal humans. It was a rating that would have been considered well above average even before the War of Fog wiped out most Ikesian cultivators; perhaps not sect elder material, but there wasn’t anyone strong enough to challenge her for the title… Not to mention the fact it just didn’t work that way under Willowdale law. A spark of will was all it took to make the projection shift, smoothly like the turning of a book page.

The list had been easy to make sense of when she had first seen it, since back then it only contained a couple traits; not so much anymore. Zel willed the device to show the sources of her special traits, ignoring those which listed a source as "Innate".

It was obvious that the White Marble Tablet had never been designed to handle the complex interactions between the many different traits of an even slightly advanced cultivator. There had been a time when it would chime in with significant trait interactions, but the logic automaton had given up on that long ago. Other Tablets didn’t fare much better and neither did attribute reader cabinets, since they mimicked a real Tablet’s logic automaton, just much bulkier and cheaper. 

She put the Tablet away for now. 

As the duo walked into the sect’s great hall, they found the others already waiting for them. 

Mata Gano, a Scorchlander. With skin black as coal streaked through by glowing veins, not a single hair upon her form, a crossed-out slave brand on her left shoulder. A living Ignis reactor, formed by a savage hyper-volcanic homeland. While she wore practical, unarmored clothing, her hands were encased in heavy, fullmetal gauntlets up to the forearms, their edges blued from being heated and cooled hundreds of times.

Vaceran, a Kargarian. Perhaps one of the few people Zelsys would describe as edgy. His arms had been severed at the shoulders, the stumps petrified so that prosthetics couldn’t be fitted; in order to cope, he had learned an esoteric art that allowed him to manifest portions of his own soul in the same way one would manifest a weapon spirit. 

Fendas Pohlem, an Ikesian. A military veteran who still insisted on wearing military-style attire. A gunman, and a fervent disciple of Zefaris’ nascent KGF, or “Knife and Gun Fighting” style. Zel hadn’t interacted with him much, but as Zefaris told it, the man came across like a proper combat officer who saw membership of their sect as a pathway towards ending the occupation of his homeland, and his skill matched up to that outlook. He was currently inhaling several thousand calories of River Dozer noodles out of a surplus mess tin, these being a type of easy-to-digest food made from the meat of monstrous crustaceans; perfect to sate one’s hunger before an operation such as this. A standard-issue sabre sat on his hip, matched by a decisively non-standard shotgun on his back. It was a four-tube monstrosity from the city’s own gunsmith, a “Hydra” double-barrel with two spring loaded magazine tubes, or  “Type-84 Devices”, actuated by the shotgun’s break-action for a total of eight shots. He also carried several four-shot revolvers and two bayonets on his person.

Joseph, a middle-aged mercenary of inscrutable ethnicity and background. He wore mismatched armor, carried a handmade breechloading rifle alongside all sorts of special ammunition, and used a bulbous wooden club as a melee weapon. His wide variety of skills and knowledge implied a long and storied past, all the more impressive by his apparent avoidance of cultivation up until the decision to join the Newman Sect.

Jorfr Hulson, a Borean. Bald and with a thick brown beard. His eyes were deeply set, his jaw and brow both built for breaking boulders. Between his assistance in progressing her own cultivation and his pivotal part in the Blue Moon War, he was among the people Zelsys trusted with her life. The immovable monster of a man had been one of the few to keep up with her in training. He, too, was inhaling River Dozer noodles, though he at least had the courtesy to use half of one of the sect’s portable meal containers, which in truth were just rather fancy lunch boxes designed to be sealed and stored in time-dilated Fog Storage. His combat style and practice of druidic magic demanded him to never wear anything on his top half, requiring large swathes of bare skin. The Borean’s skin was not just pale, but nearly translucent in places, muscle and veins visible up close.

Alongside these trusted, innermost disciples, there was also a young woman carrying a metal Tablet in hand - a modern, mass-production version of the artifact; she was an inner disciple who had recently been given the duty of assisting Nesgon. Zel recalled that her name was Anastasia. She looked up from the device at Zel and Zef’s approach: “On schedule as always, Elder Zelsys. The governor has agreed to your terms without reservation; the Hellhound Outrider contingent you’ve requested will await you at the western gate. Your transportation will be ready in a few moments, the other groundskeepers are currently warming up the gandrs’ engines.”

Zel sighed. She still hadn’t gotten used to being called elder, but she also knew that Anastasia wouldn’t relent on the point of using honorifics, so she asked: “If you must use a title, at least call me Founder instead of Elder. Let the others know of my preference as well.”

“As you wish, Founder,” Anastasia conceded, glancing down at her Tablet. “For the time being, I will let you know once your gandrs are ready.”

“Very well,” she nodded, walking over to Jorfr and sitting down next to him while Zefaris stood up against a wall, resting her eye with her cap pulled down. The northman, his mouth still full, gave a friendly nod of acknowledgment at her approach.She rested her cleaver tip-first against the floor, its blade ringing and vibrating at the slightest movement. It was struggling to hold itself together, a half-step from shattering already. 

Were circumstances any different, she would’ve gotten up and walked to the mess hall to pester Ozmir, the sect culinarian, for breakfast. She wasn’t hungry, though; it had only been some four hours since dinner for her, itself enough to feed several men for a full day. So, they waited. Questions regarding the assignment from Fendas and Joseph inevitably came up, though they mostly related to her personal opinions of the contract rather than objective facts; Nesgon or one of his assistants had already clued them in on what was known. Joseph in particular obviously didn’t care for a real answer, but was just prodding her to assuage the boredom which seemed to eternally plague him: “Say, you think they’ve got any mole women down in Poltragow?”

“I didn’t know you had such poor fortune with women as to resort to beastiality,” Zel replied.

And so a few minutes passed. Anastasia glanced down at her Tablet again, having received a message. She said to them: “Expedition Squad One, you may move out at your leisure; your gandrs are fully charged and warmed up.”

Just a glance from Zelsys was enough to make the group stir into motion, making their way out through the sect’s truly massive front doors. A two-pronged stairway led down to ground level, an offering shrine with its large pedestal sitting empty in the middle; the previous sect’s Guardian Golem still had yet to be replaced. One could make out a bubble of arcane force separating the sect grounds from the outside world; a multi-layered barrier.

Gandr. A word shared between the Old Ikesian, Borean, and Kargarian tongues, meaning a monstrous or predatory beast. An appropriate name for the vehicles in question; monstrously powerful motorcycles run on powerful Fulgur-Igneic engines that bordered on miniature reactors in output. Out in the courtyard stood a row of these monstrous motorbikes, with two much larger vehicles next to several noticeably smaller ones. The larger two were Sturmgandrs, the imported originals designed for long voyages and extreme environments, while the smaller units were Blitzgandrs, the locally-produced, much cheaper version. The former could easily carry two or three people, while the latter were one-seaters.

Zel and Zef seated themselves atop the leading Sturmgandr, with Jorfr taking the second one for himself, while all the others each took a Blitzgandr. They rode out through the sect’s front gate, it being closed behind them. A wave of warm static washed over Zelsys as she passed through the barrier. White-cobbled streets stretched out all around and blue-shingled roofs topped buildings which had stood for five hundred years with minimal changes. As they rode towards the city’s eastern gate, signs of change arose to the surface. Formerly deserted buildings now shone with night-time lighting, empty storefronts were once again filled. The city was rapidly becoming a lynchpin of trade and industry in the region, and its defensive measures were growing just as quickly.

Besides tankmen, cultivators, and plain old militiamen, there were automatons disguised as classical statues, some indistinguishable to the naked eye and others half-finished, cogs and cables poking through gaps in milk-white geopolymer shells. They were replacements for the original guardian golems, much of which had been destroyed in the Blue Moon War. Soon they reached the gate, awaited by fifteen armored figures on Blitzgandrs. One could make out Hydra shotguns, revolvers, and thick sabres on the sides of their steel steeds.

As for the Outriders’ armor, the UOT-214-05 Hellhound was an ominous thing by design. Its shoulder, knee, and chest armor segments were noticeably larger than those of other variants, but it was its helmet that made it the chosen face of Willowdale’s shock troops; it was designed to resemble the visage of a typical Ikesian soldier in a pot helm and gas mask, with two separate eye lenses that glowed red when the suit’s power output was raised to combat levels. 

Their mechanized, dark-painted suits bore the crest of Willowdale on the left shoulder and that of their division on the right. The Outriders were a professional lot, joining up with the cultivator party without question. In a brief timespan, the newly-formed task force had formed into a convoy and rode out through the city gate, the road stretching out before them. For thousands and thousands of kilometers, these ancient roads wound all throughout Ikesia and beyond, and over their enchanted cobbles Zelsys rode, leading the task force. Wind and the landscape both whipped past them as their steel steeds roared onward at over two-hundred kilometers an hour. Reaching the target destination was of little issue, for the simple reason that the convoy had also been following the road, and they had set up camp by the roadside. There was no desperate search to be had, they could see the encirclement from the moment it crested the horizon, rapidly approaching.

An undulating swarm of bodies surrounded the armored encirclement, the cries of men, gunshots, and flashes of swordlight carrying from the battleground. Armored quadrupeds the size of tractors broke up the sea of mole-men, the amber-hued glow of their magic flaring up into beacons that lit up the night whenever they raised boulders from the earth and fired them at the Arkaley Branch defenders.

Zelsys felt a rising tension in the air as she clutched her cleaver, steering with one hand. She slowed to a more manageable eighty kilometers per hour on the approach with the rest of the task force following suit, with Zefaris shifting in her seat behind her. Though she couldn’t see what the blonde was doing, she could hear it. The hiss of the respirator sealing against Zef’s face. “Ready to take over,” came the blonde’s voice. They’d done this dozens of times, switching places moments before contact with the enemy, and it went the same this time, too. 

As Zefaris took over the steering, Zelsys stood upright on the motorbike’s back half, drawing in a deep breath. She flipped a mental switch, and with a spark, her breathing shifted; one lung inhaled, the other exhaled, both her breathing and heartbeat rapidly speeding up as Pneuma and air was drawn in., 

“Breath becomes lightning, lightning shatters mountains…” she uttered in her mind.

Strength flooded her being and electric sparks danced across her skin. Nerve impulses amplified, the limitations of the human nervous system utterly disregarded. Zelsys poured Fulgur into her cleaver, its edge heating to an orange glow and the sawteeth on its back edge beginning to vibrate until they became a screaming blur, both induced through rapidly-oscillating electromagnetic fields within the weapon.  The others, too, were clearly preparing. Mata’s body now shone like a stoked ember, Joseph had loaded a crystal-tipped bullet into his gun while somehow steering with one foot, and Jorfr was trailing sparks as he dragged his weapon of choice, a giant hammer, along the road.

T-Minus to contact: Ten seconds.

Akaso

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