NOVEL NEXT 82 – A Promise Upheld
For a few seconds it hung limp connected by a near-black layer of blood-stuff, but soon enough Zelsys was able to move the fingers and even bend her elbow, painful though it was due to the severed bone. Of course, the arm’s strength was barely a third of the right, seeing as neither the muscle nor the bone had been fully reconnected yet.
It didn’t matter. A grin crept into her face, and Zelsys lifted her left arm, burning lungful after lungful, marshalling the Eternal Beast’s defiance of nature’s cruel law to force the bone itself into knitting together, just as the Necrobeast had done with its spine. In the meantime Makhus had moved over to the flask on the stand, having removed it, poured in an ampoule of Rubedo and another of some white dust, shook it up, then plugged it with the cork attached to the tube before placing it upside-down on the stand.
With the needle in hand he came up to Zel, stating, “Impressive as near-instant recovery of function is, I’m not taking chances with fixing the connection. Also, good thing that you brought up Vitae, ‘cause I would’ve just stuck a bottle of dry bonemeld dissolved in Viriditas into your veins if you hadn’t.”
She just held out her arm, closing her fist tightly and flexing to make a vein pop out in a nonverbal prompt to finally stick the needle in. He did, indeed do that, taping it down with a piece of medical tape from the medical kit. The liquid flowing into her veins was very literally like liquid life, the same feeling as absorbing pure Viriditas amplified thrice over. It was intoxicating. This was the point where Sigmund glanced at the clock and quietly took his leave, murmuring about how he had to open the store.
“Right, if I know jack-diddly about you - which I’m really not sure I do - the arm should be in full working order within the week. You also won’t shit for a week ‘cause of the bonemeld, and once you do, it’ll be like passing rocks,” grinned the alchemist with the pain of knowing, only for realization to sweep it away followed by scientific curiosity.
“...Wait, how often do you normally-” he began asking.
Zel interrupted, not particularly eager to discuss her own digestive patterns, “Twice-ever since I got out of that bunker. I assume you want to take my blood again or do some other test?”
“Yeah, just the blood sample to check for mutagenic markers and signs of blood sepsis, infection, that sort of thing. The odds are next to none but I’m not risking it,” nodded the alchemist, going over to one of the cabinets to retrieve a now-familiar syringe. He drew her blood and that was that. Once the Vitae infusion ran its course, Zel got up intent on leaving, but stopped before she did.
Something burned behind the alchemist’s eyes. An itch, a motivation, a frustration, one she had willfully ignored for most of this day until now. Zelsys turned to Makhus, simply stating, “Come to the back yard once you’re done with the blood tests.”
He looked up to ask why, but both her and Zefaris were gone by then.
“Wait, that’s why you wanted him to come here? Sparring?” Zef questioned with amusement as she watched Zelsys cutting up one of the log-dummies with her cleaver. The amazon gathered the resultant lumber in the nook in the back, sitting down and clamping her cleaver’s blade between her knees as she began carving down the wood with surprising deftness.
Once she got most of the shape right she retrieved from Fog Storage the shortsword-like dagger that she had picked up back in the dungeon, rust flecks and all. It carved away at the hardwood without issue in spite of its state, and as Zelsys refined the shape of the wooden sword, she said, “I did make that promise, and this is as good a time as any.”
With a predatory grin on her face she looked up at Zef, adding that, “I’ve always been curious what fighting a trained swordsman is like.”
Some time passed. Five, ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, Zelsys quickly carving out four simplistic wooden swords in the timespan and beginning on a larger, paddle-like one to represent her own cleaver. She even went as far as to shape the curve of the blade and the hooked point. Another twenty minutes passed.
The door creaked open and Makhus stepped through, his gaze darting to the two women, to Zel’s cleaver as she kept it still between her legs, then to the small pile of wooden swords on the ground next to her.
“Sparring? You just wanted to spar with me, really?” questioned the alchemist disbelievingly, walking up. “I thought it was something to do with all the loot you still have in storage.”
“We’ve agreed to wait on dividing it up until the others come to take their share,” said Zef, accompanied by nodding from Zel as the beast-slayer finished carving dull serrations into the back-edge of her wooden paddle and stabbed the rusty dagger into the barrel-table. She leaned down, grabbed a wooden sword, and with full force hucked it at Makhus while calling out, “Catch!”
To her great satisfaction his arm snapped up and he grabbed the wooden sword by its hilt, and she saw his stare become like steel. She felt it. That aura of a knife’s edge which he had exuded when she first met him. Zelsys stood from her chair, in one swift motion grabbing the handle of and slipping the Lightning Butcher into its holster on the table.
“Come on, I know you’ve got it in you. You’ve been itching for a swordfight since we came into town, I can smell it,” she smugged at him, dropping into a low stance with her right leg bent at an almost right angle while the left remained straight, diagonal to the ground. Her left arm hung limp, her right holding the wooden sword on her shoulder.
