Zelsys made her way out of the hive and down the main length of the chamber, intent on exploring the other branching path with the hope of recovering some of her other equipment. Well before she could reach the corner however, the floor came alive and an elaborate maze of pillars rose up before her, its hallways only a meter wide and illuminated faintly by nothing more than the vertical glowing lines on the pillars.

With a sigh, she stepped into the maze. A part of navigating it was her gut, but she also marked her path using the filth that covered her forearm, and when it was clean, she took to just spitting wherever she went. The sound of chattering mandibles and stomping feet resounded as she navigated the maze, its winding paths an obvious concession to compensate for lack of physical space. It was, after all, just one segment of a chamber, perhaps thirty meters wide and no more than twice that long.

As she made her way yet deeper into the maze of pillars, she felt her gut telling her in which direction to turn, she could tell in which direction the other creature was moving. A left turn, and it was in sight - a Warrior locust, but this one’s exoskeleton didn’t stretch and bend with every movement. It was solid, interlocking plates.

It still had the same weakness as those before it.

A breath of Fog, a momentary sprint, and she leapt onto its back. Already, Zelsys dug her fingers into the gap between the Warrior’s head and body, painstakingly wrenching its head free.

Flesh ripping. Cartilage popping. Hemolymph spraying.

The locust’s head fell to the ground with a thud, just as Zel plunged her arm into its neckhole, ripped through its soft tissues, and crushed its heart. She leapt from its back, leaving the Warrior’s body to tumble to the ground as she continued to search for an exit to the maze. Soon enough, she found two - one to the chamber’s door, one that led down the rightward branch.

Making her way down the latter first, Zel soon turned the corner to the right and came upon another wall of pillars, before which a single altar protruded from the floor. There was no glyph, no basin, no test - only her things. Her arm-harness, the holster of her blade with the Tablet securely inside it, even the ammo belt. With relief in her heart and a smile on her lips, Zelsys slid the harness over her left arm and strapped on the rest of her equipment, departing for the exit of this chamber.

Her gut told her she’d need every piece of equipment she had, and she looked forward to the challenges that lay ahead. No longer did she instinctively feel the need to survive - she felt a need to conquer the dungeon, to purge it of the locusts that infested it, driven by a desire to exact justice for the Red Mantis’s treachery. The betrayal of a momentary truce between enemies was even more severe than a betrayal that came out of nowhere, and Zelsys intended to punish it with equal severity.

To her, it wasn’t a matter of, “If I manage to reach the dungeon core.”

It was a matter of when and how.

There was a short moment of panic, when Zefaris passed through the Fog Gate. She found herself alone and disarmed, and without anywhere else to turn once the gate flickered out, she cautiously approached the door at the other side of the chamber.

Upon it lighting up and swinging open the markswoman traversed the hallway with equal caution, all the while she visually scoured her surroundings for anything and everything that could be used as a weapon. When the glyph beside the next door came alive at her approach and sprayed a message in Fog, a small portion of her nervousness became relief. All she had to do was find Pentacle in the chamber ahead, and all would be fine.

Until then, she’d need to employ other methods. The dungeon had taken her gun, her ammunition, and her bayonet, that much was true, but it had neither taken her bag, nor her phials of Compound P-T.

The doorside glyph at last wrote out its last message and the door swung open.

Light on her feet and mind racing, Zefaris skulked into the chamber, hugging the left wall whilst she built a mental map of the layout. A long, rectangular shape that bordered on an oversized hallway, with one side path to either side near the other end. There were two small hives between her and her goal, as well as a great many pillars risen from the floor in an inconsistent pattern.

A few three-pillar walls here, a pillar that reached to the ceiling there, but on the whole, the major effect was an uneven floor that somewhat mimicked a natural landscape. She could almost picture the chamber as a reflection of some long-forgotten battlefield in the middle of a forest.

The nearest hive’s Doorman retreated just as Zefaris neared the hive, and she had no choice besides stepping behind a pillar to take cover. She heard the click-clack of two sets of feet, followed by much heavier footfalls. With her back against the pillar the patrolling locusts passed to her left, thus she rotated around the pillar clockwise to stay out of sight, synchronizing her footsteps with those of the out-of-sight Warrior.

Silence.

The locusts had stopped. Mandibles chattering, cautious sniffing. These scant seconds felt as though an eternity, and then… They moved on. One of them chittered a noise that had the cadence of speech, and they continued walking. Why would they speak if they communicated with pheromones?

No time to question. As quickly and as silently as her legs would carry her, Zefaris slipped out of cover and traversed the chamber’s uneven terrain, slipping in and out of cover whenever even the slightest of noises that didn’t come from her echoed. Just as she neared the corner of the left-hand side path, seven locusts came walking out of it. She just barely managed to stop herself, to slip behind an L-shaped set of four pillars the tallest of which was just barely as tall as her, with the shortest one being a half a meter shorter.

Once more, the locusts hung around chittering. One of the drones stepped around the pillar, and once more Zefaris slipped past the corner, out of sight.

She could hear its slavering maw clicking just beyond the corner as she inched along the pillars, doing all she could to get away. The locust made a weird retching noise and retreated, whilst Zefaris finally slipped past the patrol when they at last continued their route.

Ever so slowly and ever so cautiously, the markswoman progressed through the narrower hallway, ducking behind every piece of cover to be found. At last, she reached the left turn at the end. A dead end, a single raised pillar with a glyph on the front and a slot in the top, holding her bayonet. The ground was even here, visually separating this small nook from the rest of the chamber.

With a disappointed sigh she approached the altar. The moment she took a step, there came a chattering noise from behind her. Then came another, and another - three drones had somehow followed her all this way without her noticing.

“Shit, they must’ve broken off from the patrol…” she thought as she dashed to get a hold on the weapon. It wouldn’t budge, stuck stiffly in the black stone. The three drones clambered over the very cover she’d hidden behind only seconds prior, visibly spraying their pheromones with every breath they took.

The moment their feet touched the more even ground of the dead end, they lunged forward. Zefaris sucked in a breath of Fog dodged the frontmost one’s lunge, blocking the second drone’s claw swipe with her arms whilst she twisted her body and delivered a sideways kick to the third drone, which sent it stumbling back.

An exhalation, a resolute knee to the bug’s gut, and a brief utterance.

“Move,” she said before her fist made contact. Tendrils of Fog spread out from the point of impact, and the drone came flying against the wall, its head whipping back against the stone and trailing brain matter as it slid down.

Another breath. Another invocation before the two others could reach her again.

“Homunculus Eye.”

Everything in her view came into focus. The first drone clambered onto the pillar and used it as a jumping-off point, leaping at her mandibles chattering, claws grabbing, vestigial wings beating. Zefaris saw it coming, and answered with an uppercut.

“Move!” she invoked again, a little louder this time. Fist met chitin, the force of impact amplified and spread out by tendrils of Fog. It sent the drone careening overhead, while Zefaris once more moved toward the bayonet, intent on pulling it free. The glyph on the front of the altar had already lit up, and it already read a message that she just barely managed to make out before she stepped around the altar, that she might not be flanked whilst she pulled.

A great deal of Fog was already fading around the words, suggesting that the altar’s entire spiel save for this final part had transpired whilst she was busy dealing with her assailants.

With this stone-blessed knife,

never let evil take root.

Her hands gripped tightly around its handle, Zefaris filled her lungs and exhaled all at once with a mighty pull. The screeching of metal against stone resounded, and with the bayonet now in her hands, an unfamiliar strength filled her arms. The blade was heavy, unnaturally so - damn-near as heavy as a full sized war-knife. She’d pulled it free just in time, for she used the momentum to help her step out of the way of a locust drone that leapt over the altar to get at her, the two others not far behind.

Zefaris took the bayonet in her right hand, and felt that the strength she’d felt in both her arms now fully affected the arm which held the blade. The connection was easy to make, between the blade’s history and what she caught of the dungeon’s own words - it must’ve been imbued with some variety of elemental Terra.

It was a whole another question whether the blade had absorbed something during its time stuck in Ubul’s back or whether the dungeon had merely imbued it in a way it found appropriate.

It was also a question for a later time, when she didn’t have slavering locusts swiping at her throat.

With her index finger securely in the blade’s loop, Zefaris stepped forward and drove a forward stab into the locust’s chest. There was a moment of resistance, and when its exoskeleton gave way, she let out a small exhalation as she drove it home at full force.

“Move.”

The bayonet went all the way through and out the locust’s back before her invocation took effect, its tendrils delivering a kinetic pulse just strong enough to make the dying locust fall backward.

A turn to the left, Zef grabbed a swiping arm and kicked its owner away whilst cutting off the limb, stepping towards the drone before it could regain its bearings and crushing its head against the wall with a steel-toed kick.

The third one might’ve gotten a hit in, as it managed to grab her knife arm. Unfortunately of it, said arm’s strength sufficed for a sharp twisting motion of the shoulder that let Zefaris break free of the bug’s grip and deliver a skull-smashing pommel strike right to its temple.

It fell to the ground, hemolymph gushing from the resultant crack. Even if their skulls didn’t have weaknesses like those of humans, severe head trauma worked on locusts all the same.

With the means to more readily defend herself sitting with reassuring weight in her grip, Zefaris made her way toward the rightward turn. Leaning her head out past the corner showed a clear path back to the main body of the chamber. The subject of crossing the gap to the other side path was a whole another matter.

The remaining locust-men from the patrol she’d partially evaded earlier were standing in the way, as if they had fully expected her to survive the drones and try to come through here later. Four in total, they were one heavily plated, top-heavy Warrior, and three drones arrayed in a row in front of said Warrior.

Whereas the drones were dead-eyed, twitching, and animalistic, their bulky superior had a glint of sentience in its eyes. It wasn’t quite human, but it could think. It clearly understood at least rudimentary tactics. The weight of seal-bottles in her backpack and paper cartridges in her pants pocket reminded her of an option.

Zefaris retreated a little ways and sat down on the ground, keeping hold of her bayonet. With her free hand, she firstly retrieved a seal-bottle of Vitamax from her backpack and secondly a handful of paper cartridges. The former would get used later, whilst the latter she had to prepare by tearing them open to get at the lead balls within.

She certainly didn’t have a throwing arm strong enough to match the fury of gunpowder and kinetic redirection glyphs, but she was confident in her ability to hit the Warrior’s head. In turn, she’d use the lead ball as a delivery vector and the Vitamax to supply the necessary essentia to trigger Bramble Shot.

Afterward, she could either just sprint past the drones and get her hands on Pentacle, or use the opportunity to take out the remaining members of the patrol, depending on whether or not any other factors were introduced. That was the plan, but Zefaris was more than aware of the fact that no plan survives first contact with the enemy.

Uncorking the bottle with her thumb she took a long swig, drinking down half its total volume just in case. Ethanol, herbs, and salty-minty Viriditas overwhelmed all sense of smell or taste. It reminded her of Zel.

Back in the backpack the bottle went and she stood, three lead balls in her left hand, one lead ball and the Stone-blessed Bayonet in her right.

With no particular hurry, she stepped past the corner and took up a stance with all her weight on the left foot. A breath of Fog as the locusts took note of her and twitched into motion, the drones running across the chamber whilst the Warrior stood resolute like a living wall.

She stepped forward, raised her left leg, then transitioned into a swing that translated her entire body into throwing strength, calling on her military grenade-throwing training and combining it with pitching techniques used in various sports. Zefaris had, in a manner of speaking, turned herself into a living trebuchet - and just as the real thing, all that kinetic energy sent the projectile careening at truly blistering velocity to its target.

A prolonged, nearly lungful exhalation of Fog, accompanied by a prolonged yet voiceless invocation, “Headpiercer Arts: Bramble Shot!”

When the lead ball left her grip glowing green and overgrown with brambles and she felt her heightened vitality fading, she knew the technique had triggered successfully. It arced over the drones’ heads, even as one leapt up and tried to catch it. There was a momentary realization in the Warrior’s beady little eyes accompanied by a stirring of its tremendous form, but its relatively slow reactions and lacking dexterity made any sort of dodging at this range functionally impossible.

It had the good judgment to try dropping down at the very last second, but the shape of its rock-solid carapace served as a funnel that led the speeding bullet right to its head.

The bramble-wreathed bullet stopped dead the moment it hit what could be considered the Warrior’s head as vines began to aggressively grow out from it, enwreathing their victim as they dug into the gaps of its organic armor and moved down its arms to immobilize them. It thrashed about and struggled, its mandibles chattering and its huge ape-like arms moving, but wherever it tore open a thorny vine, two more sprouts grew and created an even thicker tangle.

Zefaris threw the remaining bullets at the approaching drones, embedding one of them in a drone’s forehead and visibly damaging another’s left arm with another, whilst the third one served to just slow a drone down. By the time she got around to tossing the fourth, the drones were just about nearing melee distance and the Warrior’s upper half had been entangled by vines. They wrapped and immobilized its left arm altogether, whilst its head was being painfully forced out of its socket and its other limbs remained mostly unimpeded.

A breath. A step forward, right into the swiping claws of the locust drone whose arm she’d hit. The arm was slower, slower by a large enough margin for her to get rock-solid stab in right into its side.

With an exhalation, she pushed the bayonet all the way through and pushed through the momentum to place a deep cut across a second drone’s chest, finishing it off with a kick to the torso forceful enough to send its organs spilling out when it hit the wall.

The third one came at her from the right surprisingly silently, having seemingly made the assumption that her lack of a left eye would limit her field of vision. Zefaris fully believed that the only real downside to only having a single Homunculus Eye was the fact that if it were obstructed, she couldn't just open the bad eye it was compensating for - necessitating alternative compensatory behavior such as leaning the entire head around a corner that the left eye could see around.

A steel-toed kick to the bug’s chest sent it stumbling back even without the assistance of Concussion Impact, and a swift stab through the head dispatched it altogether. She didn’t dally a moment longer than necessary, taking another breath and moving as quickly as she could towards the Warrior - or rather, towards the Warrior’s left side.

Leaping across obstacle after obstacle, compensating for uneven floor panel height as she ran, even simply trying to not trip over something cost her time and noise. All the while, the Warrior struggled against its restraints and sprayed pheromones so thickly they became a visible miasma. Even under the rather optimistic assumption that they wouldn’t alert the other locusts until the visible substance reached a hive, the cloud was moving quickly enough that she had no chance of dispatching the Warrior before more of its kind came scuttling.

A decision was made, a plan formed - Zefaris had no choice but to bet everything on the mere possibility of Pentacle’s presence at the end of the other path. Fully leveraging her Fog-breathing and even the superhuman strength in her right arm, she traversed the uneven terrain and crossed the main width of the chamber. The Warrior wound back its right arm and spun around on its heel in an attempt to strike her, but she was gone by the time its colossal bulk crossed through her path - thanks in part to her decision to exhale her full lung capacity to throw off the bug’s estimation of her speed.

Soon enough, Zef reached and turned the fateful corner, arriving at a similar scene to the one at the end of the other side path. There were two differences.

The first was an eerie statue directly opposite the altar, depicting a skeletal soldier in Ikesian military uniform. His skeletal hand gripped an unsettlingly realistic sparklock with a very real hammer-firing mechanism - it even had an Ignis crystal sticking out the top. It seemed to follow her every movement, always aimed center-mass.

The second was the altar, for though it held Pentacle in a perfectly shaped cutout in the stone, the altar came alive in the worst way when she approached.

The glyph on its front lit up and the hole in the glyph’s center spewed Fog that arrayed into writing. Simultaneously, a ring of black stone as thin and as sharp as a razor began to rotate over her weapon, its circumference barely sufficient to avert collision with its grip.

The Fog-written words took form, and already she heard the skittering of insectoid feet in the distance as both the hive’s Doormen retreated inward to open a path.

A swift hand brings swift death,

dare you draw against the reaper?

A second, equally razor-thin ring came into motion around her gun, criss-crossing with the first, slightly slower such that they were never in sync. There came no second set of words, instead a pair of yellow-tinted lightgems came alive in the statue’s eye sockets and it locked eyes with her. The approaching footfalls numbered more than she could make out, but there were at least two Warriors among them - there was no question here, she had no choice but to get her gun or die trying.

Zefaris focused her mind not on the rings revolving, but on the grip of her weapon. It didn’t matter if she got cut, if the blades flayed the skin from her hand, as long as she pulled it free and shot the statue. As far as she was concerned, there were no blades. With a deep breath and a swift exhalation, she stepped forward and reached through the blades, pulling Pentacle free. With a sharp lean backward Zefaris tremendously sped up the time it took to bring her gun to bear, the light click of its trigger and the steady push of its recoil a reassuring sensation. When the smoke cleared the statue still stood, the lead ball splattered across its surface, but its eyes now shone blue.

One of the drones that went ahead came around the corner at this point, lunging for Zefaris whilst she struggled against gravity to get her bearings, only for its head to explode into tiny pieces when met by the statue’s hand-cannon.

Her mind already raced with a need to secure her position and begin dealing with priority targets, but her eye’s fully-focused peripheral vision still caught the altar’s glyph lighting up as a new message sprayed out of it.

To best the reaper is to befriend him,

share your friendship freely.

It was then that she finally felt her wound, not out of pain, but because of the warm stickiness that ran down her hand and into Pentacle’s workings. She couldn’t tell how deep or wide the wound was, but it couldn’t have been too serious if there was no gushing.

Leaning out past the corner, she fired a shot into the approaching horde and felt Pentacle shudder in her grip. This shot had very little recoil and the gun sang like a bell, the lance of fire that it spewed tinged by the redness of Rubedo. It punched clean through one, two, three locust drones, only to embed itself in the forehead of a Warrior.

Zefaris couldn’t help but grin - human sacrifice of even the smallest kind was generally frowned upon, but its efficacy in amplifying the effects of glyphs couldn’t be questioned. In this case, it didn’t bother her. A little blood and pain in exchange for her life, that was just a part of the day-to-day as a soldier.

The third shot rang out. Clang. Two more drones down, a second bullet right in that Warrior’s head, and this time it broke through. The sorry thing kept going even with its head splattered, however.

A breath of Fog. With an exhalation, she lined up a shot through its leg, hoping that it would ricochet off the floor into another insect. A spark of will, some Fog to burn, and a new technique could be born - perhaps she’d call it something like Rico-shot.

The flaming lance of lead did indeed hobble the Warrior, ricochet off the dungeon’s indestructible floor, and eviscerated a drone before it went flying, but there was no moment in time. No epiphany, no sudden realization. A new technique wouldn’t just come into being at her behest, but she’d be damned if she didn’t keep trying.

The idea of bouncing bullets off thrown coins had sparked in her mind, and she’d be damned if she didn’t achieve it.

She directed her fourth short into the neck-seam of the hobbled Warrior, hoping its exoskeleton would pose enough resistance for the lead to rip its insides to shreds rather than over penetrating. Click. Boom. The Warrior slumped forward, its guts pouring from its blown-open neck.

All that was left were the drones. The swarming, massed drones, climbing over one another in their mad scramble to traverse the dungeon’s uneven terrain. The fifth shot felled three more drones, their corpses taking place as further obstacles for those behind them.

Had she any other firearm, Zefaris might’ve considered trying to use the terrain to her advantage as a choke point, that she might eliminate her foes in melee. With the reassuring clang of Pentacle’s fifth shot still ringing in her ears, she just stepped back and made full use of her weapon’s ingenious reloading mechanism, slipping the bayonet into her belt and grabbing five cartridges from her pocket.

There was a small lever within reach of her thumb, which could be pushed down if the hammer was cocked to disconnect the trigger. In engaging this safety, she could safely use the trigger to rotate the cylinder as quickly as her trigger finger would go. Out of all things, Fog-breathing assisted in reloading the most.

Three seconds later, the cylinder had made a full revolution and its chambers were filled.

A frenetic three seconds more, they’d been rammed down and the ramrod lever was back in its place.

Now all it took was a flick of the thumb, and… A drone jumped on top of her, having run ahead of the horde. With its claws on her arms, its mandibles spread wide as it loomed over her, stinking saliva dripping from its maw as it readied itself to bite.

Breathe in. Breathe out.

With a forceful kick right between its legs, the creature went flying forward and right over her, planting its wide-open jaw against the wall. There was a sickening pop when the joints of its mandibles came free, hanging loosely as it struggled to its feet. A second kick for her bootheel to splatter its skull against the stone whilst she took aim at the bug’s kin.

She hadn’t bothered to count them previously, but by now, there were no more than fourteen. In any other circumstance, without Pentacle in her hand, this would have been a death sentence. Grasped by a muse born from Fog-intoxication and the thrill of combat, Zefaris began to echo the words she’d heard in the trenches on more than one occasion, often sung as a defiant shanty by soldiers who thought their deaths were nigh.

“Praise Gun, our Savior…” she murmured, chuckling at the absurdity of it, letting loose firebound death on the sorry things that raged ‘gainst her. Clang. Clang. Seven fallen, two dismembered and crawling.

“Hail Death, the Master!” she continued, a smile spreading across her face. It was all so ridiculous. Two more shots, five more dead. A fifth shot to finish off a drone that got a little too ahead of the pack, and back to reloading it was. Grab the cartridges, engage the safety, spin the cylinder whilst filling the chambers, spin it again whilst ramming them down. Five and a half seconds, a new record. The Fog made it so easy.

All this slaughter, all this power at her hands and the overwhelming odds against her, there was an uncharacteristic sense of levity to it. Though she was far from desensitized to violence, this singing gun in her bloodied hand made the violence at hand into a symphony, each clang of its hammer reminding her that these weren’t people; they were meat golems in the truest sense, controlled entirely by instinct and pheromones.

The Red Mantis knew what her subordinates were, and had the gall to accuse Ikesia of the very thing her side was guilty of. They were unworthy of consideration, remembrance, ire or even cruelty. In any other case, she would’ve been concerned at her own ability to dehumanize the enemy.

But there was no humanity to strip from these animals.

They couldn’t even be considered former humans.

Just bodies, hatched to stand between the Locust Nobles and a just death. And to the Locust Nobles, she afforded all the humanity they had; all the responsibility for their crimes, and all the punishment they deserved.

It didn’t matter how many enemies she faced, how much bigger than her they were.

With a breath of Fog, a steady hand, and five shots of forty-six caliber lead, she could stop anything that moved, and move anything that wouldn’t.

A thought crossed her mind, Fog pouring from her nostrils, “Why not try the coin-trick? I’ve still a few coppers.”

With her hand digging beneath what cartridges remained in her pocket, she dug up one of the three coppers at the bottom. A flick of the thumb, a breath of Fog, a glint of the coin, a pull of the trigger.

Click. Clang.

The bullet lanced right through the coin, carrying on its trajectory unimpeded, ripping off the forearm of an unfortunate drone. What a waste of ammo. Frustrated, Zefaris holstered her gun and pulled free her bayonet, marching against the remaining locusts with murder in her heart.

With each killing stab delivered, she invoked Concussion Blast to toss her limp victims off her blade. “Move! Move! Move!” the markswoman chanted, methodically wiping out drone after drone with a professional precision that only months of continuous warfare could drill into someone.

At the moment she had Pentacle in her hand, this had turned from a battle to an extermination. Right now, she was just finishing the job. A splattered head here, a stabbed-through heart there, her pursuers were no more.

The main chamber was empty, nearly silent. There were only the occasional noises coming from either hive, and with the Doormen still not having sealed the entrances, she faced little resistance.

Each hive held two more drones, each engorged with organic slurry, as well as Warrior cocoons. Most were empty, but those that held Warriors, she dispatched with a quick gunshot before they could hatch.

The drones were slow, and fell with little resistance. The Doormen were virtually defenseless, living doors in the truest sense of the word. She just scaled each one’s back and stabbed it in the head, leaving the shield-armed beasts to die where they stood.

At last, after this ordeal, Zefaris felt it appropriate to move on, leaving the second hive and walking towards the chamber’s door.

This chamber had been purged.

Only the Dead Gods and the Dungeon Core knew how many were left to go.