Chapter 5: 5 – Viriditas

The Swordsman raised the bottle to his mouth, pulled the cork out with his teeth, and took a short swig of the greenish liquid, then put the cork back in. A couple drops of the liquid clung to the stubble of his chin, evaporating into barely-visible wisps of emerald-green Fog as he spoke - slowly, deliberately, calmly. Carefully.

“Now… I won’t ask who you were on the outside, ‘cause it’s frankly better if we don’t know,” he said, gesturing with his sword as punctuation. “I also won’t ask where all your gear is, or why you’ve come to this Exclusion Zone.”

“So you’re the leader, huh?” Zelsys asked, a cocky grin spreading over her face. Even without the context necessary to understand her situation, she couldn’t help but feel amused by the trio. 

The Swordsman gave a slow nod, raising the bottle again as he begrudgingly admitted “Only ‘cause I’m the only one with a good enough Aether to distill Viriditas,” swirling it around for punctuation. The inside of the glass fogged up as some of the liquid turned to green Fog and immediately condensed back to liquid, Wire’s right eye twitching towards the bottle as the Swordsman lowered it back down, while he grumbled into his beard. “Viriditas. So that’s what they call it,” she thought.

“That bein’ said, yer clearly in some deep shit if that’s what you’re wearing, look like one o’ the occupiers. So tell me. What can you offer up if we help you get outta here? And trust me, you’ll need our help to get outta here.”

Putting together the context clues as she went, she slowly raised the Tablet. The Swordsman narrowed his eyes as he tried to get a better look at it. He looked into Zelsys’ eyes, back at the tablet, then back at her, blinking a couple times, a mixture of disbelief and faint hope serving to soften his features, if only a bit.

Spliteye and Wire turned to look at him, both confused by the crack in his otherwise calm demeanor. Wire’s confusion was complete and genuine, whereas Spliteye clearly understood something about the situation that Zelsys didn’t, her eye and voice both shuddering as she whispered “This could be our ticket out of this shithole.”

A brief smile crossed the Swordsman’s face, he nodded, and turned to begin walking away, sheathing his sword as he used the bottle to gesture for Zelsys to follow, which she did gladly, albeit cautiously. Spliteye followed closely behind him and Wire just stood there, waiting for Zelsys to catch up, his gun still trained on her. He grew more and more twitchy the closer she got, the muzzle of his rifle noticeably trembling as she passed him. He stood there, waiting to follow until she had caught up with Spliteye. Far enough that he thought he could shoot her in the back faster than she could reach him, if it came to that.

Zelsys noticed Spliteye's gun shake slightly as she approached to walk beside her, the creak of leather gloves betraying an otherwise relaxed posture. A mischievous spark made her want to place the Tablet atop the blonde’s head and use it to measure just how much taller she was, but the mental image was sufficient. For a while the four of them walked down the trail in silence, the Swordsman giving the occasional backwards glances, whilst Spliteye downright stared when she thought Zelsys wasn’t looking. An hour, perhaps two - it wasn’t easy to tell in the monotonous quagmire of this place. The only measure of how far from the living forest’s edge they were was the size, shape, and density of the trees - the closer they got, the more the forest around them turned from a maze of dead wood to something actually reminiscent of a dead forest, though the treeline was still all too dense to see more than a few paces off the footpath.

At some point, Spliteye finally piped up.

“We’re not war criminals, if... That’s what you were thinking,” she said, audibly weighing each word as she spoke it. The foreign inner voice flashed in Zelsys’s head again in response. “Probably the survivors of some lost company,” it said.

“I don’t care,” she lied. “I just need to get out of here.”

Spliteye fell silent at that, seemingly content with such an answer. Once more, the four walked in cautious silence, with only the howling of the winds and the creaking of dead wood to keep them company. They eventually reached the living portion of the forest, the sound of rustling leaves overwhelming the creaking of dead wood. The living forest’s border was outlined by rune-etched marble stones half as tall as her spaced some twenty paces apart. Much like the forest, even the stones themselves were split down the middle - visibly decayed on the dead side of the forest, with the runes nearly worn away on those she could see, while the halves on the living side were overgrown with moss. 

They walked alongside the border until the path led them to a gap in it, a stone that had seemingly been shattered into pieces, or perhaps chipped away. The plants around the gap were either completely dead or visibly dying, as if the death of the other side was actively spilling through. They passed over the broken barrier-stone, following the footpath for a few more minutes into the forest as it began to get noticeably dark.

The smell of Viriditas and the sound of bubbling liquid echoed through the trees as the Swordsman disappeared past a sharp left turn, Spliteye walking ahead to join him. Zelsys emerged into a clearing amidst the trees, its centerpiece a large vehicle with two deflated front wheels and broken, rusted tracks, small shrubs growing through the gaps. The transport’s back door had been repurposed as a table stood atop some lumber next to the vehicle, a tarp stretched from between three trees to cover it. There was also a deep firepit with three rounds of lumber placed around it as seating, a makeshift metal grill placed atop the pit itself, on which there sat a large copper pot with some sort of soup bubbling within. However, something else drew Zelsys’ attention.

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