Chapter 2: 2 – Straight From a Pulp

Mid-flight she somehow dug her fingers into the creature’s flesh, flipping it over and slamming it back-first onto the ground. She wrestled with it and tried to stab it using what at a glance looked like a tonfa with a two-pronged, jagged blade on the front, terrible snapping noise and flashes of light issuing from the gap between the prongs.

The way she moved was almost unnatural, flashes of light under her skin not unlike the flashes of lightning within a storm cloud preceding snappy movements too fast for his eyes to see, her muscles writhing under her skin like a bag of serpents in the brief moments of stillness. Both sides of her chest expanded and contracted independently faster than even his heart was pounding at this very moment, and her heartbeat was so rapid it was more like the pounding of an engine’s pistons that a human heart - in fact, it outright looked like she had an engine in her chest in the stead of flesh and blood. Even the silvery wisps indicative of a breathing technique that issued from her nostrils did so in the sputtering, rhythmic manner of an engine’s exhaust.

The urge to save himself finally took hold, driving the young man to run as quickly as his feet would carry him, his eyes turned to the ground so that he wouldn’t trip again… But he couldn't help it. In his panic, he had run out of breath after only a short distance, hyperventilating as he doubled-over, his gaze yet again drawn to the source of that terrible noise, the roaring and growling, the repeated thunderclap noise of gunshots.

The False Drake had somehow gotten itself upright, its legs braced against a tree as it tried to envelop the woman’s head in its maw, her armored left hand somehow keeping it open as fire washed over the metal, her right hand empty - the weapon had been knocked out of her grasp. She reached out, exhaling a stream of Fog, and by some magic, one of her braids came alive. As though a serpent it shot out, wrapping itself around the tonfa and whipping it straight into her hand. That terrible electric arcing started up again for just a moment before she sunk the shiv into the drake’s throat, the muscles of its neck and forelegs undulating under its skin uncontrollably from the current. Simple electrocution was something that just… Didn’t work on arcane beasts, by Victor’s reckoning - it was like trying to cook someone alive by forcing a flood of Ignis into their body, or forcefully turning someone into stone, a feat that only worked if one’s own magic could overwhelm or otherwise unravel that which suffused another.

Either she could just create enough Fulgur within her own body to supersede a False Drake’s breath of fire by an order of magnitude, or her control over the element was so refined she could use it as to disrupt the complex bio-arcane organ that generated a False Drake’s fire breath. To entirely subvert the meticulous work of genius mutagenicist, or to overpower it - regardless of what combination of these things she possessed, Victor couldn’t quite believe it was real. People like this were so far removed from his reality that even his memory of the events felt unreal, almost dreamlike in nature.

Three copper coins arced into the air in the distance, a woman in a black dress following in their stead, holding up a giant revolver, firing off three shots in impossibly quick succession, their report like the smashing of a sledgehammer upon an anvil.

CLANG

CLANG

CLANG

Each flaming spear of lead and smoke bounced off a thrown coin, careening down into and through the False Drake’s back, the three projectiles landing safely between the tan woman’s legs. The beast’s hind legs went limp as its blood spurted out onto the ground. He’d caught his breath and then some, but… He couldn’t help himself. It was like watching a trainwreck

The taller woman left her weapon stuck inside the drake’s neck, grasping both its jaws with her bare hands, the hand of her right arm taking on a metallic sheen as she pried its jaws open wide and wider. Despite her monstrous strength, the beast’s skull wouldn’t budge, until… With a deep, sharp inhalation, arcs of lightning flashed over her arms, and with a mighty roar she ripped the drake’s head clean off the neck in two pieces.

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It was this feat that had shocked Victor out of his fascinated stupor, reminding him that these people could very well just decide to kill the other hunters as well, and him with them, so it was safer to just get the hell out of there. The drake was dealt with, job done, paycheck on the table.

---

Indeed, paycheck on the table: A measly sixty gelt sat in a half-empty pouch on his table, cut down from the agreed-upon three hundred because someone couldn’t keep their mouth shut about “those two cultivators that slaughtered the drake like it was straight out of Sturmblitz Kunst”. It was accompanied by groceries he hadn’t bothered to put in the icebox and two stacks of pulps - one a messy pile of nigh on three-dozen books he’d already read, and a considerably smaller, neat tower of five pulps yet to be read.

As he walked out of the bathroom and back into reality, his legs stiff from having sat down on the toilet and staying there stone-still while he mentally replayed the events of yesterday, Victor picked up two of the books off the “new” pile to reveal the third from the top. It was nearly twice as thick as the others, the mark of the Hanging Feudalist Printing Company on its cover - enough to get him a talking-to about “Ikesio-chauvinist extremism” if the wrong people saw him with it. The fact it offended such occupationists was a mark of quality in his eyes, and so the young man picked this book to be his sole amusement for the day’s doubtlessly lengthy stretches of mindless training. For all the amusement he derived from his instructor’s lectures, it was balanced by the nothingness of beating - often literally - his own body into improvement.

He started reading the pulp on his way to the gymnasium, finding a suspicious similarity in the physical description of the protagonist. Two-meters tall, bronze skin, split-tone hair with a long ginger portion and a short, silvery-white top, pointed ears like an Ankhezian, pupil-less silver eyes like a dragon-descendant monk noble… Surely, just a coincidence. The violent foreigner bearing the traits of many ethnicities at once and possessing implausible ability was a common enough trope, an archetypical figure representing the people’s united hatred of tyranny.

Still… Not only two cultivators, but ones that exactly lived up to literary depictions of their kind, here? In the actual middle of bumblefuck nowhere, a dukedom so insignificant that its entirety had managed to go mostly unscathed by the war by the virtue of sheer obscurity?

Victor just couldn’t quite convince himself it was real.

Not yet.

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