Watching that woman was as mesmerizing as it was unnerving, doubly so to anyone with actual martial arts experience.
One could discern the seeds of a unique fighting style quickening within hours and days whence it should reasonably take weeks and months at the very least, even with near-constant daily training.
Those who had seen her training in days prior also noticed a change, an unnerving spontaneity to her motions.
Everything she did looked like she’d done it a thousand times before.
How?
And what was that light?
Wait, had she struck the target block so hard that her fist got stuck?
Such questions were not just asked internally, but soon became bickering among those observing, for the sect’s barrier was still up, and at this distance muddled what it contained to a noticeable degree.
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Zef’s own progress was no lesser, for she swiftly grew to appreciate the newfound leeway in using her left eye; nearly as much as the overarching feeling of just being better.
It felt like everything was just a little easier, like her efforts were rewarded more readily, like a dam of debris had been dislodged from the flow of her being.
There was the obvious; polishing her gunmanship and improving Rico-shot and Concussion Impact. For the former, there wasn’t much to do… Besides the addition of extra coins.
Zef found that she could enchant and throw multiple coins, and as long as they were all from the same “batch”, their effects would trigger in a daisy-chain. For coppers, the bullet bounced off in sequence and grew progressively faster as the coins crumpled around and stuck to the leaden ball, its kinetic energy multiplying itself to the point of striking so forcefully as to rip a hole into a cold-iron targeting block wide enough to fit one’s arm into.
This was already a satisfying result, but testing it with a trio of silvers vastly improved Zef’s disposition towards the use of these more expensive coins in combat. It was a simple difference - instead of crumpling around the bullet, each time the bullet met a silver coin, the coin would rocket towards its intended target with the same velocity.
While this slightly decreased the kinetic amplification of the bullet’s own velocity, it effectively meant that when it did strike, it would strike an already softened-up target and cause much more damage.
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She’d also learned how to leverage the Stone-blessed Bayonet’s arcane properties in more and more flexible ways, finding that stimulating it with a surge of aether made it exhibit properties that confirmed the idea of its having steeped in and absorbed some of Ubul’s earth-aligned essence.
With such a surge, the bayonet would grow orders of magnitude heavier for but a split-second, the increase proportional to the amount of aether burned. While at first this was awkward to use, with Zel’s aid and advice the markswoman formed a simple technique for precisely triggering its mass amplification ability. It took some explaining, however, as when Zel tried using the dagger for herself to get a feel for it - despite the fact she was able to stab it into the target block - its arcane properties didn’t activate. In her hands, it was just a nigh-indestructible bayonet.
After this small hurdle was overcome however, Zefaris found that when correctly timed, the dagger’s impact force would be vastly amplified, feeding not only into direct offense, but also the fueling of kinetic techniques.
It would’ve been tricky to hit the correct timing consistently even with the Homunculus Eye, but with the Philosopher’s Eye, it was, well, trivial. No more difficult than performing the attack itself.
The day passed without any other notable events.
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Friday had come, with the to-be pickup date of Zel’s new boots and trousers being on Saturday. Even now, the streets were sometimes blocked by great big transport convoys, hauling who-knew-what through the city. More notably though, Estoras had had a courier contact her regarding the possibility of a basic martial arts training program for the main body of the city militia, which she didn’t necessarily refuse, as much as she told him that she would only consider it once the sect itself was stable.
Part of the reason for her deflection was the increasing frequency of seeing tankmen with Willowdale’s coat-of-arms painted on their shoulder-plates, as she’d learned when she asked Zef what the hell that symbol was. As it turned out, the Hanging Feudalist Printing Company had basically just chopped out one of the fields from the city’s coat of arms for their own logo, this being the top-left field which depicted a hanging figure with a distinct crown in black silhouette against a field of yellow, supposedly to represent wheat.
The bottom-right field used the same colour scheme, instead depicting a broad-bladed weapon reminiscent of her own cleaver’s original shape crossed with a polearm, somewhat resembling a giant brush hook. The other fields apparently varied depending on who was using the coat of arms, or even based on the occasion or historical period, being basically “fill in here”.
But that wasn’t what stumped Zelsys about the whole thing - it was the cleaver. As far as she knew, the Captain’s Cleaver was a relatively new invention, so then…
“Why would the coat of arms have something that looks so close to a Captain’s Cleaver?” she asked.
“Oh, they’re a mass-production replica of the weapons used by prominent anti-feudalist rebel leaders way back when,” Zef answered matter-of-factly. “Something to do with the rebels intentionally perverting feudalist traditions of successor selection or somesuch, I don’t know. Ask Sig for the details, he’s really into this shit.”
Zel filed it away in her mind, knowing full well that she probably wouldn’t get around to it unless things got well and truly boring.
Back to training it was for her, and for today, she had decided to focus on laying down more foundations for her martial arts style, making use of both her Tablet and a blank leather-bound notebook for this purpose.