Chapter 87: 85 – Lighting the Inner Crucible

“One last thing, before you leave. What do you intend to call yourself? Renegade, or something else?” she questioned, not entirely sure of the reason herself. Somehow she just felt that there was a different name. The response which Alcerys gave suggested that it was perhaps because she had intended to tell her either way.

The Renegade turned, permitting a small smile to creep onto her face before she said: 

“I am the Charred Judge. A title fitting the path I’ve chosen to walk, thanks to you.”

How entirely fitting. Zel had a mind to just let her leave, but a memory popped into her head - something she had intended to do, but had forgotten. So, she got up to get Alcerys's attention, gesturing for her to wait while she browsed through the storage list. Yes, there they were. The Azoth-cracking Pills that the Dungeon Core had given her. She pulled the slim box out of storage, popped it open, and took out a pill, holding it out.

"What is it?" Alcerys questioned, observing the off-white oval-shaped pill with a guarded curiosity.

"The dungeon core gave me twenty-one of them. They're supposed to crack your Azoth Stone so that it merges with you properly as an alchemical nudge to "push you past the first bottleneck" as it said. It said that the process would be harrowing and that a great deal of impurities would come out through your skin. Leave it in storage or take it at some point, that's up to you," Zel explained.

Alcerys held out her tablet, a small vortex already forming, to which Zel dropped the pill in.

Without another word spoken, she left and that was that. 

Zel decided not to bother Makhus, trusting him to return after he finished whatever he said he was going to do. Instead she just sat down with Zef, resting her arm on the table. For a few minutes she sat idle, allowing her thoughts to freely roil about in her head, until Zef got up stating that she was going to go get her sparklock.

“Uh-huh…” murmured Zel absent-mindedly. “Mind bringing the leftover citronade while you’re upstairs?” 

Not even bothering to give a verbal response, Zef just gave a thumbs up as she walked out the door. A few minutes later she returned with her sparklock on a sling, toting a full pitcher of citronade in one hand and a pair of glasses in the other. 

With a near-full glass after a long sip, Zel said, “You didn’t have to make more.” 

“It’s the smallest thing,” she retorted, finagling with the sling to get the gun down on the ground looking around, then reaching for the Tablet and flicking through Fog Storage. She quickly found what she was looking for, and soon had a beaten-up varnished wood box floating out of the vortex. In this short time she looked back to Zel, adding, “I never did understand why someone would get into a relationship expecting everything to be some twisted power struggle, where every small thing has to be paid for in kind. It’s to be expected in arranged marriages, but people doing it voluntarily is just sad.”

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While she spoke, Zef hoisted her rifle up onto the table, opening the little box and taking out a long rod alongside a cotton ball, which she placed on its tip and began running it through the barrel.

“It sounds to me like you’re speaking from experience,” said Zel, prompting the gunwoman to look up at her with a sad smile.  

“...Yeah. Sometimes I wish I wasn’t.”

The expression vanished from her and she returned to cleaning her firearm, adding: “But I wouldn’t know what to avoid if I hadn’t experienced that, so it wasn’t all bad. All the better to make me appreciate things as they are through contrast.”

Feeling no need to pursue this line of conversation any further than she had to, Zelsys chose to just drink her citronade and enjoy the moment. Some time passed as Zefaris continued cleaning her old gun, and both of them slowly drank citronade. Ten, twenty, thirty, forty minutes, an hour - it didn’t really matter to either of them. At some point Zef had finished with her gun, leaving it propped up against the wall while the two of them just lounged around slowly drinking the last third of the pitcher. 

Between the herbal warmth of Viriditas and the energetic tartness of both the lemon juice and Daytime Dust, it roused an idea. 

“Hold on, if there’s Viriditas in this…” the thought crossed Zel’s mind. When she focused on it she could feel that the so-called Essentia Crucible was a separate structure rather than just her own actual stomach. Out of curiosity she tried to swallow a gulp of liquid into it rather than into her stomach, and… It worked, as strange as it felt. The physical coldness of the liquid just vanished as it passed into the space of the second stomach, and instead of feeling the liquid she felt a general sense of its constituent essentia, or at least some of them. She tried to will her body into separating out the Viriditas and then just expelling the rest of the liquid so it could flow down to her stomach, and after a few seconds she felt a strange convulsion from the second stomach followed by cold liquid flowing into her stomach.

The presence of pure Viriditas in the Essentia Crucible was felt not physically, but as an ephemeral awareness - not something that Zel sensed, but that she just knew, in the same way she just knew when someone was looking at her. From there, she took in a breath of Fog and tried pushing the resultant Aether into flowing into the crucible, hoping that she wouldn’t have to literally swallow the silvery gas. To her relief, it worked just fine. She sort of just sat there, focusing on the nascent ball of essentia and thinking of some appropriate manifestation - yes, that technique Zefaris had used against the Necrobeast would be appropriate. In fact, it almost felt like whatever was left of the beast in her mind pushed the idea to the forefront.

So it was that she gathered a ball of spit in her mouth and tried pushing the resultant mass of Aether-enriched Viriditas out of the crucible, feeling it rise almost like a violent burp before it reached her mouth and she whipped it at the nearby wooden dummy with her tongue. The world slowed to a crawl for a moment as she felt briars already forming from the spittle-ball as it left her mouth, and it arced through the air quickly forming a green tangle. When it struck the wood there was a small flash and briars began to rapidly grow across the wood, snaking around and squeezing it, scraping gashes into it… Only to stop seconds later, having produced a small patch of briars.

It was an altogether unimpressive display, but one of fitting magnitude for how little essentia Zelsys had put into it. She was left with Zefaris looking at her, an amused look on her face. 

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