“There should be no problem with you using the Aase’s refinement methods to develop your own. It’s mostly about the water,” Torhild shrugged. “We can’t very well keep our techniques secret, and if a foreigner manages to learn some of our techniques, then that speaks to their skill and worthiness, be it through reverse-engineering an enemy’s techniques or by befriending a Borean. The water, however, is a resource unique to Borea, you understand. It is akin to the vast reserves of jade which are found beneath Pateiria’s many mountain ranges.”
“I see no reason to refuse, then,” Zel said. She was more than glad to accept, as she had been curious what Makhus or Ozmir would make of everything she would bring back with her.
The festivities continued on for several days after this exchange. Never once during these days of revelry did Zelsys use Carnifex as a weapon. She only made use of its unique properties in conjunction with the Impelling Arm and her magic to create elaborate performance routines, dances of blade and lightning.
It was a matter of principle, and none dared to question or object; the Borean people understood exactly what she meant by it when she refused to use the blade in combat even against captured beasts from the Crescent Jungle.
She did, however, partake in gambling; though she disliked games of pure chance on principle, Borean gambling games involved a healthy balance of both luck and skill. It quickly became known that Zelsys Newman was as savage in gambling as she was in combat. Zel couldn’t help herself; planning around randomness and accounting for the hands of her opponents managed to entertain her in a way similar to combat without being actual combat. There was also the advantage that skilled gamblers were much easier to find than combatants who could give her a satisfying fight. She ended up coming away with a profit of four starmetal hrivns and some small trinkets, as she had won only perhaps one-tenth more often than she had lost, due to learning the games and playing for fun rather than to win. Several of her wins came from opponents backing out from sheer intimidation, a fact which Zefaris found terribly amusing.
“You were glancing at them like you might spit lightning any second, of course they pulled out!” the blonde laughed.
“I was just reading their body language to figure out if they had good hands!” Zel defended herself.
So the festivities went on.
As for Carnifex, the Butcher Reborn, the blade would see its first real battle against Zhumei Karmesin.
Incidentally, their duel couldn’t take place until the feast ended because Red spent the entire time locked in a cycle of drinking contests.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
Such a delay was the bare minimum for Zel to get reacquainted with her blade. It was in part simply shaking off the rust; she hadn’t used a great-cleaver with any significant frequency for the better part of a year, after all. That took only a short time, however. The real challenge came from dialing in the exact proper application for the techniques she’d developed in anticipation of its new form. While wielding Carnifex in its cleaver form was all but instinctual, properly controlling its segmented form posed a greater challenge than she’d anticipated. A visit to Ingvald right after her and Jorfr’s return, however, proved exceptionally helpful… And amusing to boot.
Ingvald all but fell to his knees and worshiped at the clawed feet of Fulguris when he bore witness to the spirit’s manifestation, only to catch himself and get back up as if he hadn’t just done what he did. Much to the spirit’s quiet confusion, the Forgehand looked upon her as if she were precious offspring, the dissonance only rendered more severe by the cartoonish disparity between their heights.
“May I see the cleaver form?” he requested.
Zel grabbed Fulguris’ tail, sitting down on the ground with the massive cleaver in her lap so that Ingvald could get a close look.
“Oh, oh this is even better than I could’ve hoped…” he gushed as he ran his fingers over the cleaver’s flat. Hidden runes shone through from beneath the black-crusted surface, tracing the natural pattern of a Lichtenberg figure.
Not even looking up from the blade, he spoke to Zelsys: “I do have a piece of advice to give you, and I truly hope that it will be useless because you already know, but I’ll tell it to you just in case: Take time to get reacquainted with your blade. I’m sure you were well aware when you conceived of the segmented design, but the fundamental nature of your weapon has changed. You cannot treat it as a mere great-cleaver, or even as its original saw-cleaver form which you used in the Blue Moon War. Why, I would go so far as to say you could develop a whole new martial art around this weapon, merging techniques for cleavers, saws, meteor hammers, rope darts…”
“That was my plan from the first,” Zel lied. She hadn’t planned it as much as she had gone with the flow, forging what she already had with the flame of inspiration. In retrospect, this was beneficial. Had the Butcher never broken, she would’ve never gone through all this and she would’ve never become stronger this quickly. In this way, she was thankful for hardship. The development of Arcline and Fulgarrow, her aggressive refinement of the Conqueror’s Mantle, her continued development of alternative Mantle variants such as the Eight-Armed Avatar of Destruction Formation… It all stemmed from the need to compensate for the crippling power loss from the Butcher’s breaking.
“Hold it like this, would you?” he asked, striking a pose with one of his mockups of the blade as a stand-in. “I wish to take charcoal sketches.”
Zel was more than happy to oblige. The Forgehand’s focus remained steadily fixed on the blade. He took several sketches of it both in one piece and separated, obsessively comparing how it had changed from the original segmented parts to the final blade.
“Alright, now the spirit, can you make it turn back to the spirit?”
He repeated the same exact process with Fulguris. It was notably more strange this go round, though Fulguris quickly got a feel for posing by simply following Zel’s example.