Chapter 4: 4 – Soldiers

She turned her gaze to the landscape that stretched out beneath her, a gloom-cast sky hanging overhead. The hill whose slope she stood atop was surrounded by dead plants, gnarled leafless trees shook in the wind.

With caution and curiosity Zelsys walked down the hill, looking to and fro to get a bearing on her surroundings. As quickly as she began walking she stopped, captivated by the sight at her back. Far off in the distance, a great wall of dark stone reached into the sky and past the clouds, its scope so grand that she couldn’t even estimate how far away it was, just that its base was past the horizon. It stretched off far into the horizon in both directions, a barely-noticeable concave bend to its shape. 

The wind picked up again, it's cold bite snapping her out of it. “Fuckin’ cold…” she muttered, holding the rough fabric of her makeshift cloak close as she made her way further down the hill and towards the dead forest. The trees were not just dead, they were twisted and deformed, gnarled and intertwined in a way that made it difficult to find a clear path. Even so, she pushed through the gnarled wood, the dead roots rough enough that slipping wasn’t a concern. Minutes turned to hours as she walked, and walked, and walked, until eventually she reached an intersection of trees too dense to walk between. 

Presented with the options to go back or go over she chose the latter, taking a breath and lowering herself in preparation to attempt a jump high enough to reach a branch. The silver markings on her legs briefly shone and let off silvery wisps before she jumped. A sharp exhalation, dry wood shattering underfoot and ropes of Fog trailing from the corners of her mouth as she ascended, reaching for a branch. As thick as the branch was it strained and creaked under her weight, a loud crack echoing and wood dust flying when she pulled herself up into the tree.

“Should’ve done that earlier,” she thought, looking out over the dead forest. There was a narrow but clearly visible footpath only a few dozen meters away, just about visible from where she was. She sat in the tree for a short time while she plotted a course towards it through the treetops. Inhale air. Exhale Fog. Jump. 

Branches shaking and creaking, the tree she landed on threatened to collapse under her weight, then shattered into kindling when she jumped to the next one. Inhale air, exhale Fog. Jump.

Another tree. Another breath. Zelsys left a trail of broken trees in her wake as she traversed towards her goal, the path. As she neared the path, the sound of people talking grabbed her attention. She finally jumped off onto the dry dirt path, only to feel something briefly yank on her waist as she fell, accompanied by the sound of a branch creaking - the bandage by which she had tied the Tablet got snagged, and by some obnoxious miracle the branch didn’t break, the Tablet hanging out of the tree, having partially slipped out of its wrapping.

She grumbled as she jumped and grabbed it by the exposed portion, and it slipped out of the bandage with little resistance. With a relieved sigh, she turned her gaze in the direction she had heard human voices from, which had now become quieter and were accompanied by three pairs of approaching footsteps. Assuming they had heard her, she walked towards them.

Past one of the many bends of the path she saw them, and they saw her. Two men and a woman. Zelsys immediately assigned them nicknames to better remember them by, based on the first of their features she noticed when she scanned them. 

Leading the trio, the man in front grasped a single-edged longblade in one hand and a large glass bottle in the other. It was partially covered in paper talismans and had a piece of cord tying it to his wrist, light-green liquid swirling in the bottom half. She could tell that under all the filth and stubble his skin was white as snow, his hair short and black as coal, his face angular and rough. The way he held himself and his sword made it look like it was just an extension of his arm. The Swordsman.

The two by his side clutched long guns with rust-speckled barrels - the second man’s gun even had a long crack spidering down its stock from the muzzle to the trigger-guard, meticulously-wrapped copper wire holding it together. He kept it trained at Zelsys’ center of mass, one eye twitching and lip trembling so strongly it was visible even through the wiry, dark brown bush of his beard, which was so imposing Zelsys couldn’t help but wonder if he was compensating for the utter lack of any hair on the top of his head. The Wire.

In contrast the woman’s demeanor was far more relaxed, as she didn’t even bother to shoulder her gun, instead just holding it at the ready. Platinum blonde hair, skin just as pale as the other two, and a green eye with two pupils as the centerpiece of her face, the left eye closed shut. From this angle, Zelsys could tell that her gun had no visible loading mechanism. “A muzzle-loader?” she wondered. A strange mask hung around the woman's neck, a tube running from it to some sort of canister on her belt. Spliteye.

The three of them wore identical, filthy uniforms, a lush green hidden under uncountable layers of dirt, and their feet bore armor-plated, knee-high boots, the soles worn down to almost nothing. Thick chest-plates shielded their torsos, the frontmost man’s one covered in dimples and trios of gashes while the other two’s were just dirty and battered in general. 

“Id-id-identif-if-ifuh cherself!” Wire barked through his beard, stuttering and slurring his words as if he was in a rush to finish speaking. His eyes jumped all over, from her face, to her left arm, to the Tablet in her hand, and still, he kept his gun aimed dead-straight at her center of mass.

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