It had been a few minutes, and not more than two or three kilometers. Spillway had completely disappeared from sight even if it should be visible from here, as if the swamp’s maroon mists had devoured it. They arrived upon an island formed from pale-white calcified corpses, the smallest among them three or four times the size of any ordinary human, and with monstrous features among which horns were the most tame. There was no apparent path forward, only an endless expanse of red water, tiny outcrops, and eldritch, bone-tree mangroves, extending tendrilous roots or insectile legs into the water and almost imperceptibly walking through the marsh.

  Anomalies abounded here already, just a short walk from the shore. It was not an influx of signals, but more comparable to a night sky full of stars, easy to gloss over if one wasn’t looking for patterns. But Zanma was looking, and he realized the mangroves moved in concert with nearly invisible spatial anomalies. Perhaps to demonstrate, Baikal picked up a shard of stone-like bone and tossed it. It bounced off an invisible platform just beneath the water surface, then once more, only to finally hit open water. The splash was instantly followed by a deep, aggressive whirlpool that then erupted into a vertical pillar of liquid and gore, concealing needle-pointed tendrils of gnarled flesh and bone. Stepping off this island would be equivalent to wading into a minefield. The only true anomaly here was the thing that would allow them to pass. Zanma chose not to dwell on what sort of creature or creatures dwelt beneath the swamp in this region, he wasn’t sure what it might be. Perhaps it was the descendant of a living area denial system, a literal mine-field once deployed by Eaters.

  Baikal looked around, checked his watch and map, then nodded to himself. His watch. A mechanical timepiece. Only now Zanma had noticed it, fused into his hardsuit’s wrist with a custom-printed replacement plate. It boggled the mind, perhaps a sentimental object.

  “A bridge will form soon enough. This is as good a time as any to bring up what I mentioned earlier. You’ve made your interest in our Engram Seals obvious, and this is no surprise. I can take you to my usual supplier, in a settlement on the other side, but he only carries a limited supply, and thus only sells a limited quantity to outsiders. I know of a cross-tree, deep in this swamp, that has been in its budding cycle for the last two months or so. You can just feed it a simple rejuvenant serum and it will bloom, take some wax and bark, then you can harvest your bud and grow your own tree wherever you go. I brought the feed with me, no worries.”

  “And in exchange you want what, exactly?” Zanma asked forthrightly. Someone willing to do all this obviously thought he could and would offer up something of equivalent or greater value, as far as they were concerned.

  Baikal’s tinted, impenetrable visor stared up at Zanma, seated upon the Wyrmkaiser’s shoulder as if a throne.

  “Take me to the Wish Granter,” said the stalker.

  “If that’s what you want,” nodded the puppetmaster, having fully expected this.

  “So be it, then instead take me-” Baikal started, having expected to be refused. He halted, and, confused, questioned, “Wait, you will?”

  “I am going south, I will pass within its vicinity either way. If the Golden Sphere is truly where you wish to go, then I can take you there,” he repeated, holding back from lambasting the stalker on using that request as an opening salvo for negotiation.

  Silence descended for a short while. Baikal was clearly considering whether to actually take him up on it, and, it seemed, had decided to do so.

  “Then it’s settled. You get your sprout and my continued guidance in the mundane matters of the zone, and in return, you lead me to the Wish Granter.”

  “I only hope you’re not fool enough to run into the spatial distortion field surrounding it.”

  “Why? You’ll have already gotten what you want out of me by then, what difference would it make if I just wanted to kill myself in a roundabout manner?” the stalker laughed.

  “I am a conceited man. The idea offends me, I find it distasteful. An arrogant young master. Take your pick,” Zanma admitted. “I will take you there all the same.”

  He had said it as a dry joke, but it was true at its core. The idea of such a journey being a glorified suicide hike did feel distasteful to him. Besides, he had an actual reason to visit the Golden Sphere. There was no need to venture into that quarry for the purposes of his journey, but within his storage earring, there rested a fist-sized silver sphere. Even he didn’t know what it did, or what it was. He only knew what Old Taisei had told him: How close he had to get and how to activate it. Based on his view of his master, he assumed it would shut down the sphere, or at least send it into a defensive lockdown mode. Whether that would lead to fewer or more deaths, he couldn’t predict. As he saw it, shutting the sphere down would remove the greatest danger that it presented as an orphaned piece of delta technology, therefore it would be the most reasonable course of action, therefore he presumed something along those lines to be Taisei’s intention.

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  Once more, a silence descended. Baikal didn’t speak for a while, he just got moving once the bridge had formed, and Zanma followed after him. Fortunately, the path was both generously wide and stone-stable, the steadiest ground the White Serpent had stepped on in a while in fact.

  “The path ahead may not be smooth, but it is a straight line through the swamp. We ought to make it without dealing with any deathrattles,” the stalker finally piped up.

  “A straight shot through the swamp.”

  What a joke.

  It had been not even an hour, but in that hour, Zanma had navigated far greater and more numerous perils than he had in the week leading up to his arrival in the zone. Baikal walked by the Wyrmkaiser’s side, ever so slightly behind it, despite the puppetmaster’s offer to let him ride on its back or other shoulder. The stalker eyed the giant puppet with apprehension and a measure of fear, perhaps conflating it with Iron Ogres somewhat, which were known for their flagrant disregard towards anyone not explicitly IFF-tagged as an ally.

  Spatial distortions were the least of it; these were easy, he could use a thread to remotely set off those that behaved like one-off traps, and just avoid the rest. He could see them with his second-sight, and had spent some seventeen minutes with eyes closed just going through a field of such distortions. The hollowed corpses of vehicles poked up above the carmine swamp waters, some cut apart, others torn to bits, others still distorted by internal ammo explosions.

  All throughout the swamp, everywhere one looked, there were spheres of twisted, clumped together bioenergy, with tumorous masses of nerve tissue as their cores. Some floated in place, others were pinned stone-still, others darted around or moved along predetermined paths. Balls of fire, ball lightning, luminous-green corrosive gas, even masses of distorted, shimmering air. Geists, they were — pyrogeists, electrogeists, toxogeists, kinetigeists, and various other subtypes. They were mutated, degenerate bioweapons once used by the Eaters in the War for Axis Fulcrum. It was no wonder they were found here, Zanma guessed they were once deployed against the Iron Ogres as disposable attack drones. He was thankful that they had deteriorated this much; the ones he had read about could freely project their energy as a directed attack.

  They passed into a known anomaly, “The Guillotine Maze,” after the fact it was the single largest concentration of the anomaly known as Guillotine. The air shimmered all around in flat planes of spatial disconnect, anything that passed through them could be severed at a moment’s notice, at random. A flat pane of spatial distortion. The truly lucky could walk right through one and be fine, but here, the chance was one in a million. A simple test of “sticking a pipe in the anomaly” revealed the reason: Passing through a Guillotine left a faint, anomalous signature on the subject, reducing the odds of another safe crossing, like heating up a chunk of wood bit by bit until it ignites. No, he charted the path through properly. From far above, a pyrogeist, as if sensing that the travelers were navigating a maze of invisible razor-walls, began a meteoric descent towards their heads. The air around it ignited, a tail of plasma charted its path, and the sound barrier shattered with an unnatural sound like breaking glass. The shimmering heat-haze of Guillotine distortions tore apart as the geist passed through layer upon layer.

  The faint whirr and click of mechanisms. Electric cracking. The splashing of heavy feet on marshy ground. A rapid series of thundercracks rang out. The geist exploded with a high-pitched screech and a shower of blood. Baikal had done his job. Mercifully, killing these creatures was not as difficult as their mass implied. The fierce bioenergy barely contained within them would tear them to pieces if their equilibrium was disturbed, so one good hit was enough.

  Only, where one pyrogeist came, another followed, and with it, another, and another. Every single pyrogeist within hundreds of meters seemed to be drawn to them now. Zanma pushed the White Serpent to move faster, reaching to his earring to take a small canister out of storage. He sucked down a dose of Stimulant #3, the citrus-flavoured mixture best for accelerating subjective perception of time. For the duration, he would have “two seconds per second.” His perception of time remained the same, but he functionally thought twice as fast. Nearly half of the melange’s volume was made up of neurotransmitter precursors and magnesium solution, and even then, it would throw him into a terrible crash when it wore off. He would deal with it when it came.

  To move properly, the Wyrmkaiser required eight threads. Not to fight, just to move its great bulk, and not with any significant speed either.

  The Pillar Centurion required six threads to reach full operational capacity.

  Similarly, forming the Distortion Whip would require six threads.

  Zanma’s maximum threadcount was, sadly, thirteen. One short. Oh, how he cursed his own shortcomings. Sure, thirteen was better than most, but it wasn’t enough. Not by a longshot. Fifteen was the lower boundary of true talent, as far as threadcount was concerned.

  He had other methods. Naturally, he did.

  His hand snapped into a gesture of three middle fingers straight, outer two forming a ring, as he reached inward and distilled an exotic particle into physical existence. It flowed into the accelerator, entering the acceleration loop within his fingers, and he felt a warm thrum spread into his hand as he poured psionic force into the weapon and spun the particle up to breakneck velocities. A tiny structural fault in the accelerator and it would tear his hand to bits, but he would notice such faults and know not to take that risk. With a wave of his arm, a reddish, wavering beam went screaming skyward, and another pyrogeist burst into a fountain of blood mid-divebomb.

  Meter by meter, step by step, and geist by geist, the two men slaughtered their way deeper into the Guillotine Maze, soaked by a bloody rain of their own making.

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