A vast and sprawling cadaver-mound loomed above and ahead. To describe it as a corpse, as a dead body, would have been a severe embellishment. This was not the nameless, six-armed war-god that made up a major landscape feature of the zone; it had been, presumably, one of that individual’s subordinates. And, unlike that six-armed corpse, this mass had long lost any coherence. It was indeed a pile of undifferentiated tissue with random anatomical features scattered all throughout, a mountain-sized tumor. Waterfalls of blood and pus cascaded down its hills and blind eyes stared blankly into the empty air. Zanma chanced upon a small caravan; a caravan that so happened to be going in the same direction. The corpse-mound didn’t rot; not in the way a beast rotted. Even so, its decay over the eons and the mining efforts of the locals had led to the reason for the caravan’s current halt: A cave-in. The huge stent that held the tunnel open had rusted out and collapsed at some point, perhaps even having been eaten away by the tumor. The sound of machinery and various cutters could be heard well before he saw them, and arguing soon cut through that noise, though this fell silent the moment Zanma was noticed. Alarm, weapons raised, shouts and demands, the usual.

  “Is this any way to treat a fellow traveling puppetmaster?” he called out, halting his puppet on the spot. He observed the situation, and, without hesitation, initiated the Grima Brand system. The White Serpent’s tendril-fingers drew back, mercurial silver spilled forth from the ends of its arms, and enveloped them, forming into bladed hooked shovels at Zanma’s will. He wasn’t done. The lower segments of its torso parted and unfurled into a series of spider-like limbs surrounding the fold-space storage intake, that great maw with its many grinders. In this manner, even slower than prior, the White Serpent lumbered forward, with Zanma disembarking on the way, as he guided it into the wall of meat and viscera to commence with the butchery. The caravan’s own two puppetmasters, older men with greying hair and one with a bushy beard, made various remarks of how it must be nice to be a wealthy young master, but they also readily bent the full force of their capabilities to assisting Zanma by removing what excavated biomatter the Serpent couldn’t grind up and devour. At one point, he had to back the Serpent out and have it expel what it had devoured, the blockage was just too long to dig through in one push. The merchants and scavengers whom the two older puppetmasters had been guiding just sat off to the side, markedly less dejected than before.

  It wasn’t long before the newly-expanded caravan had made their way through the tumor-mountain, carving through two more cave-ins and repairing the stents along the way.

  For a few days, Zanma traveled alongside them, finding that they were going to the same settlement, a place called Spillway, just at the edge of the Blood Swamp. Time passed. Zanma, having never dealt with senior puppetmasters besides Taisei, decided to approach them with caution and respect, in the hopes of extracting at least a few nuggets of useful advice from these experienced seniors. Surely their experiences were like their puppets, having great variation and concealing profundity under a guise of the ordinary.

  Those boring old farts were debating Aperture Theory again. Zanma had never observed anything akin to an aperture within his own psychoid. The theory, of course, addressed this with the claim that only higher-phase masters could do so, because the aperture resided even further into the mental plane than the psychoid itself, acting as a bridge. Old Taisei had described the mechanism of “psionic descension” as the use of the psychoid to directly exert one’s own will onto the physical world. In his theory, the psychoid was both an aperture and a container, but also neither.

  “My pineal gland isn’t a fucking keyhole!” the older, bearded puppetmaster shouted.

  This continued more or less until they arrived to Spillway. The two puppetmasters were so engrossed in their chain of arguments and hypotheticals that they kept going for hours and hours on end. When they were at an impasse, they would turn outward and question Zanma instead, using him as a tiebreaker. Naturally, whenever he agreed with one man, the other would dismiss his opinion on the basis of his young age.

  The same man who had previously insisted that his psychoid was not a keyhole was now ranting about the naming of the Zone. He insisted its naming as a Beach-head Zone was erroneous, claiming that the true meaning of the term was a double entendre, and that “the proper use” was to describe zones where “waves” of interference from other dimensions “lapped against the shore” of the Soltern’s dimensional substrate, or to describe areas where forces from other dimensions had intentionally breached the world-wall, making landfall, whether for peaceful or hostile reasons.

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  “In no way, shape, or form does this zone fulfil either of those qualifications. It’s a Zone Rouge, or a No Man’s Land, not a fucking Beach-head Zone!” he finished his rant.

  The other man, who had been quietly listening, warned him, “Don’t bring that up to any of the stalkers. I heard there have been duels fought just over newbies mentioning this, it’s a contentious topic.”

  Zanma took that to heart.

  Spillway lay ahead. An antediluvian water management complex, overgrown by fleshy quasi-vegetation, overwhelmed and corroded by the blood river that now coursed through it. Former water cleaning tanks were now filled by the undulating, pulsing sacs of blood-river water extraction biomachinery. An unpleasant place full of unpleasant people, but also the safest staging ground from which to cross the Blood Swamp, as he intended to do.

  A fist sailed by right in front of his face. A split-second later, a second fist shot right past him, catching on his sleeve and sending him spinning. The source: One hundred and twenty kilograms of biochemically enhanced muscle; a bulging mass of meat so potent the synthetic tendons had torn free of their owner's skin. Thick, glistening staples, half functional and half jewelry, were embedded all over the man’s body, holding together pale streaks of scar tissue. His name was Baikal. A true veteran of the Beach-head Zone, a man who had become a middle-stage Zero Phase evolver solely through scavenging and gradual effort, like stacking up pebbles to form a mountain. It almost felt disrespectful to acknowledge the fact that Zanma had a longer history of evolutionary practice than this man.

  Between his brows and the bottom of his nose, Baikal’s face had been reinforced by alloy plating, his eyes replaced by goggle-like ocular replacements. A balaclava-cut graftjob, common enough among stalkers that it didn’t stand out. It was a common saying that if you didn’t wear your gas mask, you would have to get one grafted to your face. The impassive, gleaming photoreceptor covers of Baikal’s ocular implants were the source of that saying. Besides this, his ears had been replaced by black-alloy implants of the same style, sealed against the elements, embedded with comms transceivers, and protruding just enough to maintain the head’s silhouette. He was stripped down to the waist, skin tanned, hair clipped short, the skin of his face pale from long years of enviro-mask wear.

  Numerous tattoos painted his long history, a variant of the Proper Invocation of the Sun written out across his back.

  Calf kick. Bent the legs just enough, and it goes wide. He jerked to-and-fro in a manner no living man should, holding himself up in poses where he should’ve fallen down. Every strike had the same flaw; full force, every time. It was remarkable the guy could keep it up this long.

  The simple fact of the matter was, Zanma didn’t truly belong here. In this situation, specifically. Certainly, his fundamental understanding of body mechanics and momentum allowed him a certain degree of martial prowess, but he was not a pugilist in any sense of the word. His hands were physically not built for punching, his shins were not deadened and hardened, his musculature was lean and developed for steadiness and precision. Nothing about his physique was suited to exerting brute force.

  And yet, his opponent, well into the fifth round, was visibly holding back tears of frustration, because Zanma had, with a blank expression, dodged another right hook by a finger’s width, and responded with a half-hearted slap on the face. Not even forceful enough to leave a proper mark.

  The reason for all this?

  A challenge born from a combination of the image Zanma projected and a reasonable misunderstanding of puppetmasters.

  To put it simply, a drunk scavenger had decided he didn’t like the way he carried himself, and so challenged him to an unarmed fight. The obvious answer would have been to refuse, and the challenger had anticipated such a response, surely intending to lambast the red-haired puppetmaster as a coward, only to find pause in the young man’s acceptance.

  And so, they had arrived to this point.

  The round timer ticked down, and Zanma considered letting this go on into the sixth round, perhaps even until the tenth, but he decided against it. A part of him was deathly certain that if he pushed it too far, if he tipped over the edge from comedy to humiliation, so too would his audience tip over from amusement to hostility. Indeed, the audience — in the end, this wasn’t really a fight to him, just another sort of performance. A very, very dangerous performance that could very well end with broken bones and an undue delay to his journey. But a performance nonetheless.

  “Brother, please. It has already been fifteen minutes. You’re starting to sweat black,” Zanma jested. It wasn’t uncommon to see brownish or even pitch-black “sweat” from low-phase Eaters. Their bodies had the means to exert enormous power for far longer than any ordinary human, but the infrastructure to sustain a closed loop cycle was not yet there, or was built atop the existing systems, co-opting the sweat glands to expel the massive buildup of waste metabolites.

  He really didn’t want to just bend his psionics to task and smash Baikal to the ground, but, increasingly, it seemed he would have to do just that. Now just to find a way to make it look good for both of them, so the big man wouldn’t hold a grudge. Zanma wanted to take him to the Blood Swamp. That was, after all, why he had approached Baikal, and why this stupid misunderstanding had taken place.

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