33/34/35/36 - Morning After/Shriveled Heart/Through the Forest/The Border

She stretched out on the hard mattress, her feet hanging out of the bunk, head resting on her hands. All it took was a couple deep breaths, and she slipped into the realm of sleep.

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A mixture of smells and sounds assaulted the senses. Zelsys instinctively grabbed to the right, grabbing the cleaver before she even opened her eyes. The pale morning sun shone through the doorway. The smell that filled her nostrils was a pungent mixture of Viriditas and Nigredo, the former countering the latter and creating a smell that could only be described as aggressively fungal, a smell that one would follow if they wanted to find mushrooms after rain. The other smells were sweat, and menthol, and vanilla, noticeably wafting in from nearby. 

“Morning already?” she thought, looking around. The bunk across was empty, but there she was - Zefaris stood over the sink, brushing her teeth. She placed a cup underneath the faucet and turned the valve, the crystal on the wall glowing a faint blue as crystal-clear water poured into the waiting cup. She poured the water down the drain, then opened the faucet again and washed her hands, then her face.

Shaking her head, Zelsys sluggishly rolled out of the bunk into a sitting position, stretching and rolling her shoulders, blinking and yawning as she shook off the cobwebs of sleep. “Talk about a deep sleeper. Hey Snow White, catch,” said the blonde, throwing something thin and wooden into Zelsys’s waiting hand. It was a flat piece of wood with bristles on one end - a mass-produced toothbrush, the type that one would find in a ration pack’s accessory tin. It was pristine, and smelled strongly of menthol.

“We got mis-assigned a shitload of accessory tins instead of regular rations. Had to start hunting early on, but at least we got all the toothbrushes and Aqua crystals we could need,” Zefaris answered both of the questions she was going to ask, walking out onto the clearing soon after.

Zelsys stood up, walked to the sink, wetted the toothbrush, and just… Brushed her teeth, unable to shake the strange feeling. A toothbrush and running water. Such mundane, basic amenities felt out of place in a place like this. Her mouth filled with foam and bitter menthol, washed away by the water to who knew where. An arcane reservoir like Makhus’s Rubedo bottle? An alchemic recycler that would condense the pure Aqua into a new crystal? A regular old tank somewhere in the transport’s guts? Who knew. 

She rinsed her mouth, splashed some water on her face, put on her boots and strapped the cleaver in its holster to her back. Next came the arm harness, and in her hand, the Tablet. The rays of the morning sun fell upon her face as she stepped out of the transport, and there they were, the three so-called war criminals. 

Zefaris and Sigmund were around the now-dead fire-pit, busy packing things into three huge backpacks and a variety of smaller pouches, while Makhus was crouched at the still, sticking seals to one bottle with his right hand and holding another to the outlet with his left. The rot-bear’s heart had shriveled to less than the size of a fist, and still it beat inside the flask, pumping black Fog into the apparatus even with the burners off. 

As Zelsys approached them, she felt Makhus’s eye upon the Tablet, and she almost pal ably felt the realization dawning on him before he asked what she thought he would. “Hey, this might be a lil’ much to ask,” he began, but Zelsys cut him off before he could finish by simply walking up and sitting down on one of the logs, placing the Tablet on the ground and activating the PUT INTO STORAGE function.

She sat there, legs crossed and hands on her knees, staring at him as the Fog vortex formed. “It won’t stay open for long, and the moment it closes that’s it,” she smugged at him. “Hurry up soldier boy.”

A hearty laugh issued forth from her when she saw his eyes go wide as he reached for one of the larger seal-bottles with lightning speed, cautiously placing it onto the vortex, which was too small for the bottle to fit. It expanded to swallow the bottle, and an expression of visible relief settled into Makhus’s face as he reached for the next one, dropping it into the vortex with far less caution.

She knew that the vortex would stay open for as long as they kept adding things, but they didn’t, and the resulting momentary panic manifested itself as a mindblowing feat of sheer coordination. In less than five minutes, the three soldiers managed to store most of the seal-bottles and the vast majority of the heaviest goods they would be carrying, even including their chest-plates and weapons, with the exception of Makhus’s sword and Zefaris’s rifle.

“Last one,” the blonde said as she rushed toward the vortex. In her hands, there was a small flask bearing seals in blue ink, half-filled with ash and coals, a fist-sized gemstone the colour of dying embers sitting atop them. The vortex swallowed it the same way it did everything else, and the three soldiers breathed a collective sigh of relief. Zelsys gave them all a look, grinning ear to ear. She could tell by the rising annoyance in her face that Zefaris had already realized what she was about to say.

“Y’know, I would’ve let you store your things even if you let the vortex close,” she admitted, “but watching you go was entertaining.”

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They departed perhaps half an hour later, leaving behind most of the camp - Zelsys couldn’t clearly tell how much the sun had moved through the tree canopy, and more importantly, she couldn’t read its movements that accurately. Makhus didn’t bother even attempting to dismantle the alchemic still, instead just smashing it up with a rock before they left. 

A harmless prank aside, the three soldiers were thankful for not having to carry the bulkiest of their possessions. Their backpacks were still heavy enough to slow them down, which was only compounded by the density of the forest. So narrow were the footpaths that they had no choice but to walk in single file, with Makhus in the front, Zelsys just behind him, Zefaris behind her and Sigmund at the very back. 

It only took a few dozen steps down the path before Makhus unsheathed his blade and began hacking away at the vegetation that stood in their way, carving a path through the greenery with inhumanly fast, precise cuts.

Five of the smaller and one of the larger seal-bottles dangled off the swordsman’s backpack, jingling against one another as the liquid within sloshed about from the motion of his swings.

“Why not store all the bottles?” she questioned, as much to get an answer as she did to break the silence.

“We’ll drink at least two of these during the hike, the cocksuckers at the checkpoint will confiscate the rest,” he answered resentfully, visibly channeling his anger into the next cleave, in which he caused a large branch to thunk to the ground. It was clear he had certain expectations of how the border crossing would go, ones rooted deeply in some sort of negative past experience. What that could be, Zelsys didn’t know - perhaps mere corruption among the border guards, or some petty discrimination based on superficial traits.

They walked as such for some time, the only sounds to keep them company being those of their footfalls, those of the trees, and those of Makhus’s impeccable bladesmanship being used to carve through weeds and saplings. Over the course of the trek, Zelsys felt her instinct going off every once in a while - each time the feeling came, she began to pay more attention to her surroundings, and each time without fail, she caught a double-pupiled eye staring from behind. 

Each time, she did nothing to make it clear she had noticed - it didn’t bother her, if anything Zefaris’s gaze was a welcome distraction from the mind-numbing tedium of trekking through the woods. This phenomenon drew her attention to something far more concerning - despite the forest’s lushness and supernaturally fast growth, there were no birds. Not a sparrow, or an owl, or a woodpecker to be found anywhere. 

Minutes turned to hours as they walked, a couple kilometers turned to tens, and the sun rose high into the sky as they made their way through the forest. Her appreciation of Makhus’s skill with a sword only grew every time he carved a path through a particularly nasty bramble. Wherever a large enough clearing could be found, they used the opportunity to take a break and pass around a bottle of Liquid Vigor. 

One after another, they emptied three of the four smaller bottles. During the second of these small breaks, Zelsys took the time to slide the Tablet between her arm-cannon’s trigger lever and her forearm, tying it to her forearm with some of the loose bandages she had used to wrap her forearm previously. It was in part out of convenience, and in part because she wished to at least marginally conceal the weapon.

Eventually they came upon a rather well-defined footpath, following which led them to the edge of a large clearing amidst the trees. Makhus quickly sheathed his sword when the end of the footpath came into view, gesturing and hissing at Zelsys to “C’mon, walk ahead. Try to seem nonthreatenin’.”

She put on a friendly smile and did as was asked, emerging into the clearing and approaching the checkpoint with her hands to her sides. The checkpoint was a small brick and mortar building with barred windows. It stood at the side of a gravel road that seemed to begin right at the border crossing, snaking off into the woods at the other side. 

The border was outlined by a razor-wire topped chain-link fence, which stretched off in either direction and disappeared into greenery after only a few dozen meters. The crossing point itself had no gate or moving barrier, but was rather obstructed by gigantic caltrops - anti-vehicle barriers from the war. 

Sure enough, the building’s door soon flew open and from within emerged a man wearing stereotypical Grekurian officer’s garb, officer’s cap and huge black and gold coat included. His narrow, mustachioed face was pale, but not quite the snow-white pale of her compatriots, and he had truly impressive bags below his dark-brown eyes.

The man stared at Zelsys, reaching into his coat to pull out a pistol with a wide barrel and an orange gemstone at its back. Though he pointed it at her, his finger rested on the trigger-guard, and he didn’t seem particularly tense. 

“Approach with your hands where I can see them!” he barked, squinting at her as if he was trying to see through her. As she approached, both his expression and posture lightened, his gaze repeatedly jumping between her lower stomach, her face, and her left arm. Her smile only grew. 

“Are you alone?” he questioned.

“No, sir,” she said with no actual respect at all. “There are three others, two men and one woman.”

At that, he leaned over to look past her, and she was able to pinpoint the exact moment when he caught sight of her compatriots by the sudden stiffening of his features. Despite the fact she was far closer and had a visible weapon on her back, his gun snapped to aim at the three Ikesians, his index now hovering over the trigger. His face twisted into a snarl, filled with resentment and spite.

“We’re just scavengers, officer,” Makhus’s voice sounded from behind her. The officer cackled a disbelieving laugh, as if to mock the idea of trusting an Ikesian’s word.

“Really?! And you expect me to believe that when you’re carrying Ikesian military equipment? I’m no fool, Snow White. You don’t look like the posters, but that’s a pre-war uniform you’re wearing, minus the chest-plate.”

“I also have a pre-war saber,” Makhus rebuked, audibly fighting the urge to get into a shouting match with the officer. “There’s a hundred thousand more like it in the graveyard at the center of the E.Z.”

The officer’s eyes drifted over to Zelsys, then to two other people out of sight - Zefaris and Sigmund - before snapping back to Makhus. 

“Fine,” he mocked, directing his spite towards the Ikesians. “We’ll see if you’re war criminals yet. Follow me, hands where I can see them.”