Zefaris needed the tablet for one simple thing - to double-check whether she had indeed developed a new technique. She got as far as finding its listening and even opening the details readout, before she caught sight of the Inquisitor signing interrogative questions at Zel and felt the need to respond.

Only once the exchange was clearly over did she feel comfortable turning her focus back towards the Tablet. The new technique was unnamed as far as the device knew, though naming was no difficulty.

CONCUSSION IMPACT Type: Utility, Crowd Control Trigger: At-Will Effects: Kinetic Amplification C, Kinetic Proliferation B- Advancement: Use this technique to directly or indirectly cause lethal head trauma to a creature significantly larger or stronger than you.

She couldn’t help but find the Tablet’s suggestions somewhat entertaining. From what she’d seen, the device seemed to suffer from a quirk known to widely affect older devices of its type - a bizarre logic born from an arcane machine’s attempts at approximating parameters it hadn’t been designed to deal with. Some called it “Fog Logic”, others fear-mongered about artificial souls whenever a Tablet happened to be right about something. She set the Tablet down, as the bright glow of its projections hurt her eye in the setting sun’s dim light.

The man Strol had been all those years ago would’ve considered his current views of Pateiria extreme at best and outright insane at worst, but the war had changed him. After seeing both the best and the worst from all sides involved, he had come to a simple conclusion.

Out of all the countries that Ikesia had warred against, all had their heroes and good people, all were venerable and wise in their own ways, such that Ikesia could recover and eventually actively cooperate with them; be they Grekurian or Kargareth, or even the far-off kingship of Toten. But Pateiria… In its sprawling, mind boggling size, Pateiria festered with a seething, empire-wide resentment for anything and anyone that threatened or defied them even in the slightest manner. He’d encountered cases as extreme as calls for honor killings over the simple mention of a colony that had managed to wrench itself free from Pateirian control thanks to its status as a volcanic island - only the natives could survive there, their skin black as pitch and their bodies blazing with Ignis more brightly than a campfire from birth.

As things were at this very moment, there was no point to turning fear and wrath outward. The Blackwall was impermeable as far as any remotely realistic scenario could be concerned, thus the most reasonable course of action was to exterminate any holdouts and make sure they couldn’t damage the country more than they already had.

Strol couldn’t help chuckling at the fact he had arrived at the foregone conclusion that what he was doing was the right thing to do. Then, he passed out.

Zel and Zef drifted off to sleep soon after, while the Inquisitor remained awake well into the evening. She cautiously watched from the shack’s windows, making absolutely sure there were enough dead locusts to deter more of their kind, rather than attract them.

There was exactly one overly curious locust drone that wandered onto the clearing, and it turned on its heel the moment it saw the field of its slaughtered brethren.

It had only been a day since Zel and Zef left on their first major beast-slaying contract, but to Makhus it had felt far longer than that. Not because they were gone - because of all the work it had taken to get the store ready for opening. By the time Riverside Remedies finally opened, a furious storm had passed over the entire valley. Sig had become extremely useful in running the store, as people were for some reason more eager to trust the bald, bearded, alchemically scarred veteran with recommendations of elixirs than him - being that he constantly wore a war-knife and a five ‘o clock shadow.

The process of distilling the Necrobeast’s Azoth was… Well, complete. It was done. Makhus had stayed up throughout the entire storm to ensure nothing went wrong, and even though he dozed off at one point, it had worked! As far as he could discern without imbibing the elixir, he’d successfully extracted both the beast’s self-reconstitution and essentia breath traits, and now had them sealed as shimmering liquid inside an alchemic flask so thick that not even a direct hit from Zel’s arm-cannon could crack it. Sure, there were impurities, but that was to be expected - there would likely be very minor side-effects to either trait, but what those would be couldn’t be predicted.

During his time watching over the very end of the process, Makhus took to reading some of the other material on the dead alchemist’s desk. One of the stapled-together note compilations was entirely unencoded and seemed to mostly pertain to the true nature of deities like the Dead Gods, which Makhus found to be just intriguing enough to pass the time without drawing him in too deeply.

It spoke of the nature of gods as not individual entities, but as vestiges of will within the Sea of Fog that are naturally grasped and wielded by anyone and anything that has the will and aptitude to do so. It claimed that the entities now known as the Dead Gods were just three mortal rulers who had become so powerful that they were only equaled by one another, and how their power ultimately led to corruption proportional to their strength.

Being a stapled-together collection of notes, it quickly devolved into ramblings, from which point he moved back to the tedious work of decoding the journal. More journal entries. More travel logs. It was all. So. Pointless. He took to skipping pages and only deciphering small portions to get an idea of what the page read, frustration getting the better of the training that told him to be thorough and detail-oriented.

Driven by this very frustration, Makhus eventually flipped all the way to the end to try and find something that didn’t look like a gods-forsaken diary entry. The last page was a note in noticeably different handwriting, stapled in place of a page’s torn-off bottom half.

The top half was two-thirds jargon by volume even after he deciphered it, though what little he managed to make out seemed to be the author lamenting the fact that despite possessing fully-formed bodies, even the best of their subjects lacked any higher mental functions beyond the capacity to regurgitate information. This was all in line with previous homunculus research, but the note was what really interested him.

It is vital that we do not suffer the pitfalls that our northern colleagues have. All Type-1s are to be recycled for their constituent essentia; the solution to our problem lies in a different method. No matter how lacking our resources are, we must stop attempting to iterate on existing methods and attempt something truly innovative.

With how little time we’ve left until the bunker sinks, our best option is using our remaining material for a composite. Yes, all of it - with that many layers in the base template, the nascent homunculus will have more to work off of than any natural embryo.

With some luck, the composite will be more than able to get by on its own.

Makhus’ fascination with the implications of this one note was only matched by his frustration in how few answers it really held. There wasn’t time to spend any substantial time ruminating on it, as the very end of the distilling process was rather attention-demanding - he had to purge the contaminants into a separate flask and seal the shimmering elixir in its vessel.

Once the distillation was done, Makhus was finally free to begin several more alchemical processes using the supplies available to him in this very lab, ones that didn’t need to be constantly watched over. Riverside Remedies needed a restock, and blessing though it was, Riverside Remedies also was the only establishment with the means to produce specific elixirs in any quantity approaching bulk.

The four of them woke early in the morning, at the very break of dawn. Zelsys was first to wake, her mouth dry, her muscles stiff, and her stomach empty. Alas, she was feeling rather well, with most of the pain gone and even her minor wounds having sealed shut over the night’s course.

She did her usual morning stretches and retrieved four dental hygiene kits from Fog Storage, using the mead-like elixir to wet her toothbrush before she leaned out the window and brushed her teeth. Bitter peppermint and sweet honey wasn’t a combination she’d expected to work together, but it could’ve been worse.

While she was busy with this small ritual, she listened to the others waking. To her slight surprise, the Inquisitor woke almost immediately after her, whilst Zef of course took almost until she was done with brushing her teeth. Strolvath… Strolvath took a while.

The three women were halfway through their short breakfast when the singer woke, upon which the first thing he did was blindly reach into his pack for a bottle of Vitamax and down the whole thing in one go.

A long burp full of green Fog later he seemed to be fit as a fiddle, ravenously downing one of his rations alongside half a bottle’s worth of mead elixir. They departed soon after, and saw that the battleground around the shack was all the same. Even this far along they still followed the path plotted out by the map, for it once more led them into a tunnel of nigh-impenetrable brambles.

It only took a few dozen meters into the last stretch of their trek for the incessant sounds of locusts to once more overtake all others, skittering and chewing chief among them. The walls of their verdant path shook and shuddered constantly, locusts peering through what few gaps were to be found.

“Isn’t this indirectly feeding them?” Zel wondered.

Strolvath sighed heavily, “Yeah, it is. Just this artificial bramble is enough to replace all the locusts we killed yesterday, but it’s our best shot at reaching the dungeon unscathed.”

“Who even planted all this?” Zef cut in with a question of her own.

“The same madman that nearly snuck into the dungeon just to take pictures,” the singer chuckled. “War journalists are crazy bastards.”

Despite the all-consuming noise, something was off. The usual stench was absent, replaced by one more like that of dead locust. Moreover, the noise surrounded the bramble and only the bramble, as if there were no locusts spread throughout the rest of the forest.

When at last they emerged after a good twenty minutes of crawling through the arboreal tunnel, Zel’s suspicions were answered. It led into another stretch of forest, which according to the map was barely out of sight from the dungeon entrance. Wading through the grass and bushes to the sound of distant locust wings made them feel no less tense, with hands hovering over weapons and eyes picking out possible points of ambush. Even Strolvath broke his in-control facade, holding his boot knife and a bottle of Vitamax at the ready.

It felt as though the forest thinned with each step taken, patches of barren ground and trees stripped of their greenery slowly taking over until the forest was a barren maze of wooden pillars. They could clearly see locust drones surrounding them at a distance, and though at first it felt like they were being followed, it was the opposite - the drones leapt to the opportunity to give them a wide berth when the creatures smelled them coming.

“We still stink of impending death to them,” Strol pointed out. “They’ll avoid us unless directly ordered to do otherwise. Hate this part.”

At last, the desolate landscape she’d seen in the photos unfolded in front of Zelsys. Compared to her memory of the picture, the area of stripped land was nearly twice as large as it had been when the picture was taken. In the absence of any man made detritus, it looked even deader than the battlefield. Just… Bare dirt and pools of mud mixed with the locust’s yellowish waste.

There was no battle-line, no awaiting horde of locusts to stop them from crossing the desolate field. After exchanging looks, they took up a wedge formation with Zelsys in the front, the Inquisitor to the left, Zefaris to the right, and Strolvath himself behind all three.

It was to ready them against an assault they deemed inevitable, to ensure they could cross the field with a little less risk, but… The attack never came. As they made their way towards the cave’s mouth, more drones scuttled towards it, still giving them a wide berth. At one point, the flood of brownish chitin surrounded them utterly, painting out a nearly perfect circle of scent into which the drones would not venture.

The sudden, swarming retreat ended long before they reached the cave, but when it did, there was one figure waiting for them at its mouth. A slender figure, in a red dress. She reached out, beckoning with her mantis-like second forearm.

“If it isn’t the least hideous bug this side of the wall,” Zelsys smugged at the Red Mantis, provoking her from the very outset. “But then, that’s not saying much, is it?”

“That’s rich, coming from a meat golem with a man-jaw sharper than my scythes,” the Mantis spat back, audibly frustrated. “But then, it’s no surprise you’ve no sense for aesthetics. You are nothing more than a stained-glass simulacrum without an ancestry, without a people, without a purpose. Barely more human than some islander primitive!”

“Is that meant to induce an existential crisis?” Zel asked mockingly. “I suppose you would care for ancestry and bloodline, seeing as you lack any legitimate merits of your own.”

One of the many segments of her face twitching, the Mantis swept her gaze across the rest of them.

“Count yourselves lucky that we’ll let the dungeon kill you for us,” she said with murder in her eyes and venom on her tongue. As far as Zel could tell she wasn’t lying, but she wasn’t telling the whole truth either. It felt like she didn’t have a choice, even as she led them into the earth. The interior of the cave was nearly entirely covered in a material resembling the hives of wasps, organic and nearly fleshy in appearance. As the light of day faded from sight, Strolvath reached into one of his pockets and retrieved something, something that lit up milky-white when he flicked it - he’d taken the lightgem from the cabin.

Audibly perplexed Strolvath questioned her, “What made y’think we wouldn’t just kill ya?”

The mantis stopped dead in her tracks and whipped around, spreading her arms to their fullest extent, scythe-like mantis claws glistening in what little light reached this far down. Her face contorted into a predatory grin, and almost pleadingly she offered, “Go on, take your swing. Better make it count. Better kill me in one shot.”

She stared at him, and he stared right back. Her expression and body language alike shifted, and turning around she just said, “That’s what I thought.”

Each step deeper into the cave only made Zel’s suspicion grow deeper, scratching at the back of her mind like a bug in your ear. The Mantis made no qualms about making clear her desire to murder them right then and there, yet she took no actions, as if she were unable. But why?

Assuming the hive queen had a significant measure of control over the swarm, the only question was the reason behind her decision to let them enter the dungeon instead of just killing them before they could get in. A mischievous spirit made her want to prod and poke the bug-woman, to try extracting something, anything that would help lead her towards an answer, but she maintained self-control.

There would be plenty of time for questioning once she had the queen at gunpoint.

But then… Why would the Mantis risk her own life just to taunt them and lead them to the dungeon entrance? This question did indeed cross her lips, but before she could ask it, her answer manifested itself. Upon turning a corner, they were met not with more cave, but with a wall of solid chitin, its pitted surface split down the middle by a barely-visible seam. The Mantis ran her finger along the seam, exhaling what was doubtlessly a breath full of pheromones.

Scutting echoed from the other side of the wall, and it began to scrape against the inside of the cave as it moved inward. Bit by bit the chitin wall retreated leaving chitinous shavings in its wake. It eventually turned on its vertical axis and split in half, exposing itself as an overgrown, malformed locust.

Where human arms must have once been, there were now huge growths of chitin that attached directly to either half of the tunnel barrier, the joints reinforced with a great many overlapping plates. The sheer amount of plating on its arms contrasted with the rest of its body, which though massive, only had a thin exoskeleton. It had four gangly, long arms sprouting from its back, alongside several hollow tubes.

It let out a long breath, yet no air came from the tiny, recessed thing that was its head. At first she thought the tubes were a novel manner of respiration, but… Her instincts told her it wasn’t air that came out, that it had after all been a mistake to humor the Red Mantis.

Strol’s and Zef’s eyes lost focus, their legs became uncertain, and they crumpled to the floor like straw dolls. Zelsys felt herself losing focus as well, and though she instinctively took a breath, the invigoration of Fog only served to drag this moment out even longer. As she clutched for her cleaver her eyes hunted for the Mantis, but she was nowhere to be seen. The next moment, the Inquisitor fell to the ground, a stinger embedded in her back.

“How bothersome, it’s still awake…” lamented the Mantis. The last thing Zelsys felt was a stinger in her back, and the last thing she heard was a whispered taunt.

“I’ll stop your rotted heart right here and now,” the Mantis seethed into her ear as she felt her heartbeat stopping, her vision fading. “Consider it a mercy, you wretched thing. A mercy your friends won’t receive.”

Floating in cold, dark nothingness. Unable to feel, unable to think.

Then came a twitch, a surging spark that roused the heart and woke the senses to the wrenching pain of the stinger still wedged in her beating heart. Her muscles stiff, her mind hazy, Zelsys felt the clawed fingers of locust drones wrapped around her wrists and ankles. The familiar weight of her weaponry was gone - the Lightning Butcher and its holster, her arm-cannon and its harness, even the ammo belt.

She dared not open her eyes or even move a muscle, she dared not even breathe any more than was absolutely necessary. The stench of locusts suddenly faded, the air became inexplicably fresh, and the gait of the drones carrying her evened out before they came to a sudden stop - they’d reached the Fog Gate chamber. A weak light seeped through her eyelids as the gate came alive.

The Mantis began barking orders in Pateirian, and though Zelsys couldn’t understand the words being spoken, she instinctively knew the intended fates were worse than death. While the red one’s attention was clearly not directed towards her, Zelsys filled her lungs to their fullest, letting slip self-control in favor of vengeful murderlust.

The woman known as Red Mantis barked orders to her drones, using the words as no more than mnemonic mechanisms to release the correct pheromones. It wasn’t as if the drones could understand speech, and there wasn’t much else to do whilst they waited for the emperor-damned Dungeon Core to stop resisting and open the Fog Gate. Even when it obeyed the queen, it would only open a connection between the core chamber and the surface.

They needed an opposing force to traverse the dungeon and open up Fog transit, all she had to do was ensure they could be disposed of once they’d fulfilled their purpose. A small, bright-red trilobite-like insect - a pheromone-triggered killswitch clamped to the back of the neck. Everything had gone surprisingly smoothly, thanks to her liberal use of social pheromones.

Sure, just a single exposure to both them and the Doorman’s knockout gas was enough to build up a near-immunity level of resistance, but it wasn’t as if it mattered. Just this once was more than enough.

A shift in the air, a stir of movement from the dead homunculus. The lines of its skin flashed, pulsing light and electric arcs flaring out from its heart to the rhythm of frantic heartbeat. The drones that held it let go, forced by the current to throw themselves against the walls.

It landed on its hands and, with a pivot of its torso, used the wedge-shaped armor on its legs to bisect six of the nine drones in the chamber. Its foot just barely caught the seventh, smashing its head to pulp. Even the Mantis herself would’ve met this fate, were she not fast enough to step out of the way.

She lashed out with her arm-scythes thinking the homunculus must be vulnerable in such an awkward position, only for the creature to pivot downward and transition her spinning momentum into a wide sweeping kick.

The Red Mantis felt herself lose purchase, her right leg severed at the ankle and gushing hemolymph even as she began to stumble into the Fog Gate. Pivoting her arms and pulling the scythes back in an attempt to at least rip at the creature’s neck, she felt an arc of searing white lightning score her chitin.

Fog suddenly shrouded the skin of its neck, and she felt the root joint of her right arm-scythe being nearly ripped from its socket as if the force of its retraction had been reversed. The homunculus just ducked out of the way, and surged towards a drone, ripping off its mandibles and using them to disembowel it where it stood

Her last sight before she passed through was that of the homunculus’ silver-glowing eyes, Fog pouring from the contorted visage of rage it called a face. The silver-haired beast’s musculature slithered under its skin like serpents made of steel rope with each surge of lightning that arced across its body, its hands grasping for chitin plates to rip away and its fists lashing out for heads to cave in.

Between the moments it took to slaughter the last surviving drones, it even found the time to throw a murderous stare towards the Mantis, with its evil eyes that blazed with the same silver as the Sage’s. There was none of the Sage’s mild-mannered guile, none of his scheming intellect behind these eyes; there was only savage murderlust, unfettered by her ambush. Not a word was spoken, but she understood the message - she was next, were it to ever find her… When it found her.

The Fog Gate swallowed her, and the Red Mantis at last crossed into the relative safety of the core chamber.

Every movement made pain jolt through her body, but Zelsys didn’t care. It was familiar, now. Expected. She didn’t even bother to stop Fog-breathing, continually taking lungful breaths and slowly exhaling them as she got her bearings.

The Fog Gate had faded the moment that subhuman whore crossed its precipice, no worse for wear besides a missing foot and a sprained joint. At first she thought it’d just take a short while to re-open, but it didn’t. She thought the glyphs that really were the gate might respond to touch and a willed command, and indeed, they did.

A glow flowed through the many-layered pattern, wisps of Fog rising from the ancient stone as a blindingly bright projection flickered into being in the gate’s frame. A wireframe map with a small section shaped like landscape at the top and a sprawling megastructure underneath. It had a single central spire, broken up by five rectangular segments from top to bottom at regular intervals, with the topmost and lowermost segments containing some red dots.

Myriad smaller chambers sprawled out around the central spire, winding round in a spiral, always completing half a revolution between one segment and the next. Even assuming the rooms were not much larger than this one, the complex was far too massive to go through in any reasonable amount of time.

Zelsys made an assumption and tried to tap on the bottom segment, but all she received for feedback was a jolt of numbness up the arm and the entire wireframe briefly flashing red. Repeating the process for each segment from the bottom yielded the exact same result, until the topmost one - when she tapped this one, the projection flickered to a single vertical line and faded out.

“Start from the first floor, huh?” she thought. Whilst the gate stirred to life, she took a short while to retake her possessions from the clutches of the drones she’d just savaged so thoroughly. With each new passing day, her appreciation for the filth-proof properties of Fog-infused fabric grew. The Lightning Butcher and arm-cannon alike securely back where they belonged, she bent down toward Zef to wake her, first checking for a stinger in her back. Nothing, just a small bloodstain. Breathing and heartbeat steady. Good. The stinger embedded in her own heart made each of its beats pulse with a wrenching ache, but it wasn’t as if she could just yank it out. Not under these conditions.

A few light slaps on her face, a nudge, but no response. A mouth-to-mouth breath of Fog, and the markswoman’s eye fluttered open to a groggy, pained groan.

“Should’ve just shot the Mantis bitch and blasted the wall bug to bits with CP-T…” she growled with an audibly dry throat, reaching into her bag for one of her seal-bottles and chugging down a third of its contents.

“She’ll get what she deserves soon enough,” Zel added as she moved onto the Inquisitor. She pulled up the Inquisitor’s gas mask with the intent of breathing Fog into her face to wake her, but her eyes snapped open just as the mask rose beyond her scarred mouth. Her hand shot up to her face, pulling the mask back down as she scuttled backward and right into a pile of locust guts. The filth slipped right off the Fog-infused fabric of her coat when she stood, casting a scornful but understanding glare towards Zelsys.

Zelsys didn’t have the mind to react or even warn the woman, for what she’d seen under the mask boggled her utterly. What little she saw of the face under the mask was… Unsettlingly familiar, at least for what little focus she devoted it. A passing glance, a momentary consideration, nothing more.

Waking Strolvath was… An endeavor, to say the least. Nudging and slapping him didn’t work, so she just resorted to taking his knife and using the smell of…

“Whiskey?” she thought when the fumes hit her nose, having expected aggressive, alchemical scents of blood and fire. When she held it to his nose, Strol’s nose twitched and he stirred to consciousness almost immediately, taking his property from her and quickly closing the hidden flask as if just smelling its contents could send him into a blazing rage.

The Fog Gate flickered.

“Won’t stay open for much longer,” Strolvath said. “Let’s eliminate the queen and be done with this, without her the drones’ll just wander through the dungeon n’ die off.”

“It won’t open to anywhere lower than the first floor,” Zel sighed.

“Hard way it is, then,” the veteran laughed, slowly but steadily rising to his feet. “I‘on’t look forward to clearin’ a fuckin’ dungeon, but what can ya do.”

He cast his gaze to each of them in turn, the levity in his face replaced by a grim determination. Stepping towards and through the gate he said, “See y’all on the other side.”

The Inquisitor followed after him without so much as a word, with Zel and Zef passing through last.

One moment, Zelsys felt the grasp of her lover’s hand around hers - the next, it was gone. Warm buzz had washed over her when they stepped into the Gate, she flickered in and out of consciousness, only to emerge at the other side, alone.