The Charred Judge emerged from the field closely in tow, taking care to flip up the hood of her cloak. Even if they walked quickly and forcefully, their cloaks obscured them enough to make them look like able travelers in a hurry - doubtlessly a threat in the eyes of the sycophants that manned the checkpoint nonetheless.

“I am killing every uniformed bastard in that checkpoint and you can’t stop me,” Sodan’s voice echoed flatly from inside his helmet. It was cold. Numb. Empty. As if he were squirreling away all his anger for later.

She simply nodded, taking the cold-iron chain off her wrist and wrapping it around her hand, grasping the blue-orange fuel gem in her palm. Six extra limbs, or one. Pure Aether, or Ignis. In the end, it was not a new technique - just the building blocks of Heatshock and the Eight Stars Formation, arranged in a new configuration.

No longer possessing the supplementary ranged firepower formerly afforded by the Stars of Calamity, Alcerys had used a significant portion of her days in Willowdale on further putting together a new arsenal. She’d bought a new gun, that much was true, but she had also gone to the effort of assembling several new techniques that would more appropriately leverage her new tools. In this effort, she had found that neither the Eye nor the gemstone within Emberthorn’s crossguard acted as Ignis batteries, but rather as some high-efficiency converters and amplifiers.

Drawing still on her inquisitorial roots, she had chosen a piece of mythology to act as a spiritual reinforcing strut for the new technique, refocusing herself as she drew in breaths of Fog, performed gestures with her left hand, and uttered invocations. She thought of it as the same technical foundation as the extra appendages used in the Eight Stars Formation, but braided together into a single cohesive limb rather than eight vague tendrils, even if it had spontaneously evolved into something far beyond that basic concept.

At a distance, it looked like prayer - because it pretty much was.

When at last they came close enough for the checkpoint guardsmen to notice them and begin barking to stay back and wait, she spoke first before hostilities could ensue. First… And last.

“Repent ye, who art caught ‘neath the Charred One’s gaze…” she murmured, feeling the Eye seething as it drank deep of the Aether she fed it and transformed it into elemental Ignis.

“For by the First Arm of the Fierce Deity…” she continued, and a swarm of sparks emerged from the Eye, forming around her left arm up to the elbow into a flickering outline of the limb. It burned.

Then, at last, the first gunshots rang out from the guardsmen just as she completed the invocation.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

“My reach surpasses that of the law!”

Sparks became solid, transparent light, a fiery shell surrounding her arm, and it burned. It burned with the desire to reach out and pull into her reach those deserving who attempted to flee judgment… And that is exactly what she used it to do.

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Two figures strode through the checkpoint that day.

Two figures whose visages were eternally seared into the minds of that farmer’s family.

A man in dark mechanized armor, his helmet a soldier’s, his face a metal gas mask whose eyes burned red. He descended upon the checkpoint with a clarion howl, bearing an axe in one hand and a gun in the other.

Neither the guardsmen’s bullets, the captain’s geomancy, nor the commissar’s magicked spear and martial arts moved him. He charged headlong straight through a wall of solid stone, burying that axe in the commissar’s skull and battering him until he no longer moved, screaming of rebellion. Moments later there was a thunderous mechanical roar like that of an engine, and he was gone - barreling down the road like a comet, slamming into a fleeing guardsman with such force as to turn him into a smear.

The other, a woman in charred plate, bearing a thorned sword wreathed in blue fire in her right hand, and an otherworldly gemstone in her left, the limb encapsulated in a fiery shell of magic, the projection’s fingers being wicked claws.

She spoke of judgment, of justice.

When the captain broke to run, she reached out and the ghostly appendage shot out, grabbing him by the arm and ripping him towards her so forcefully that the limb came apart at the seams, dislocating and breaking seven times over.

“W-what do you want? Please ju-just don’t kill me!” wept the captain as he squirmed on the ground, his misbegotten authority meaningless in the face of those with the will and the means to shatter it.

She lifted him by that destroyed arm, his skin and flesh frying in her fiery grip, and with the spine of her sword she branded him.

“You live only because your just punishment is to witness the tyranny you so eagerly benefitted from being annihilated,” she spat, both figuratively and literally, before leaving the flesh-sack to writhe until the quills disintegrated hours later.

As quickly as they had appeared they were gone, disappearing into the treeline. The farmer’s family continued to hear the sounds of battle for hours to come, just as thankful as they were fearful, choosing to simply claim they came upon the massacre as it was.

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Zelsys didn’t know how long it ended up taking the merchants to gather all their lots and haul that odious-looking lottery drum all the way to the sect gate. She - and her comrades, for that matter - had spent that time mostly perusing the stalls immediately next to the gate, though most of them were still very much in the process of setting up.

When it came time to draw the lots, several burly men - led by that pretty bespectacled merchant - brought a folding table out in front of the sect gate, atop it the aforementioned lottery drum and a small metal Tablet.

It was a dull affair, overall. They had her go through the Tablet to ensure there was only one of each lot, and then she just dumped the storage out into the drum.