The grizzly work of total extermination became no easier as Zefaris plunged further into the dungeon. Emerging into chamber number two had her faced with a labyrinth of narrow corridors with small side chambers. It was confusing and disorienting at first, but the realization of what it was meant to replicate quickly dawned on her. These were the trenches. The very trenches that became the graveyard for so many warriors, both soldiers and Fog-breathers alike.

In the trenches long-distance mobility lost meaning, as did highly destructive arcane techniques and elaborate displays of martial prowess. It was butchery, down there. Butchery and slaughter, a barbarous scramble for survival that many of the enemy’s higher-ranking warriors just didn’t know how to deal with it. They kept trying to fight in the trench as if their big stupid sword wouldn’t just get stuck in the mud of the walls, as if there weren’t a dozen Ikesians with sparklocks waiting behind every corner.

Ambush tactics, traps, everything other than honorable combat had been the mainstay of her life for the short time she spent in the trenches, before she lost her eye. Stepping into something akin to those very trenches was a mixed sensation. She knew this place, knew how to traverse it, knew how to map it out, how to exploit its design to the absolute limit, even if the walls were indestructible black stone rather than rotted wood that barely held back a flood of silty muck.

These trenches, however, were not filled with allies. Instead of sparklocks, there waited gnashing jaws and slashing claws of drones, ones that heard her coming the first time around. There were just two of them this time, and she quickly snuffed out both of them with swift stabs to the head, but she knew it wouldn’t be this easy. Zefaris felt a tangible, oppressive silence press down on her as she snuck her way through the faux-trench, doing the best she could to muffle her footsteps against the black stone.

When she peeked past a corner and saw the huge back of a warrior blocking her path, her right hand kept subconsciously hovering over Pentacle, over that instrument of absolute power, but she couldn’t. Not here. Not yet. Who knew how many more chambers there were left until she would be able to meet Zel and replenish her ammunition. That’s not to mention the absolute guarantee of being overrun, if she were to make the mistake of calling attention to herself like this.

She took a hushed breath and scuttled towards the warrior, changing her grip on the bayonet to the upright orientation. A small hop onto its back gave her all the clearance she needed to bury her fingers in its eyes and her bayonet in its back, stabbing its spine at as many points as she could before she ripped the blade free and drove it back down into the bug’s head. Were she able, she would’ve carved it open, killed it properly, but Zefaris had neither the means nor the time to do so. This way its still-living body would sit inert in the trench, with no animal mind to command it, slowly bleeding out and withering away.

Clambering over its corpse and continuing through the trench, she came upon a group of drones. One after the other, they fell, their throats slit and heads run through. It wasn’t about killing them, or disposing of a threat. The more drones she felled, the more she realized they weren’t even worth the consideration to hate them. They were just parts of the hive, eyes and hands for the Queen. Right now, her reason to kill them was to silence them. To blind and deafen the hive to her presence.

Deeper into the trenches, deeper into the labyrinth. More drones, heading her way. She ducked back behind a corner and waited, waited until they were near, just long enough.

Inhale.

Step out, stab the leftmost one in the eye. Exhale, ripping the blade to the right and cutting right through the middle one’s head, then finish by plunging the point into the right one’s temple.

Further in. She had to be getting close to the exit of this chamber, she could feel it. Another warrior, this one facing her head-on. It roared the moment it spotted her, its vacant gaze turning to sharp, focused hatred as it charged down the trench.

“Damnit,” she blurted out, swapping the bayonet to her left hand before she instinctively reached for Pentacle. Its gunshot rang out with all the noise of a divine anvil, the blazing spear of lead piercing right through the insectoid gorilla’s head and out the back of its torso. It echoed a dozen times over throughout the trench, the sound of myriad chittering and thumping footfalls echoing well before it faded out.

So much for stealth, but by the sound of it, forcing her way through wouldn’t be much of an option either. Zefaris decided to retreat into the maze, listening for the sound of her pursuers and navigating the myriad intertwined, zigzagging trenches so as to both evade them and move closer in the direction she thought led to her way out of this chamber.

Left. Right. Left. Left. Left. Right. Right. Left. Right.

Both real trenches and these reproductions were built in a zigzagging pattern skewed heavily in favor of the defenders, so that no one enemy could drop into a trench and unleash hell down its full length. It was no wonder, then, that this faux-trench chamber even had foxholes and bunkers. The former, side chambers filled to bursting with small hives, their entrances plugged not by Doormen, but by the heavily-plated, oversized heads of deformed drones.

She didn’t even bother to try breaching them, only passing them by as she continued her escape. Slowly, the noise was dying down. While her boots click-clacked against the hard floor, it was far easier to conceal her footsteps than in the squelching muck of a waterlogged trench. Thus it was that Zefaris managed to evade some of her pursuers, many most likely having stayed behind in order to block off a path or wait behind a corner.

Sneaking about, taking weird turns to confuse the enemy, making noises and then slipping away, the whole charade stretched on for uncounted minutes. At times, she ran for her life as fast as her legs could carry her before diving into one of the rare uninfested side chambers. At others she moved through the trenches at a snail’s pace, and in these quiet moments Zefaris had time to think about her situation.

All of this, all of these close calls with death, this was normal. Zefaris not only knew how to evade a pursuer with superior numbers in the trenches, she’d gone out of her way to select specific training for it during her time at the academy. Running for her life through the trenches, looking for either a way out or an opportunity to thin out the enemy numbers - it was familiar. Never did she think that delving into the legendary dungeon would face her with situations that nearly perfectly reflected her military service, only mixed up with different variables.

Only… The familiarity felt wrong. She wasn’t the same as she'd been back then, this place wasn’t that familiar trench network, and these foes weren’t a mix of undertrained foot soldiers and ill-prepared Grekurian nobles. Back then, she was well-trained, that much was true, but she was inexperienced. It was in the trenches where she had faced death, where she had first killed, where she had witnessed the horrors of war and steeled her heart against them.

It was in the trenches where she had lost her eye, yet that lost eye was proof of her luck - it wasn’t a piece of shrapnel, or an unlucky ricochet.

It was luck that let her pay an eye for her life, when the bright flash of a Grekurian hero’s flashy technique caused light glare on another hero’s ridiculously gilded wheellock rifle.

However, she couldn’t be satisfied escaping with her life, not anymore. A hunger gnawed at the back of her mind, something she had only started to feel since that time with the rot-bear. It was the same defiant urge that made her dive into the crater and rip from Ubul’s stone skin the very bayonet that had saved her life. Zefaris couldn’t help herself, wanting to assert her will over these murderous things in the only way they could understand - violence.

The thought of using her war-knife came to mind, but its reach really wouldn’t be much of an advantage compared to the strength enhancement of the bayonet. Pentacle was out of the question too, seeing as she didn’t have the ammo to blast through all the bugs in this chamber and have any left over… But she had grenades and CP-T.

Still inching her way forward, she cautiously retrieved a grenade and a phial of CP-T from her backpack, not having bothered to strap the phial belt on. Familiar with how the process went, she undid the latch and sharply twisted the piece that would open the grenade’s compartment. It let out an ear-piercing screech as she unscrewed it, rusted metal scraping against rusted metal. As quickly as her hands could move, and faster still hastened by the breath of Fog, Zefaris pulled the seal and scooped all of the compound out of the phial and into the compartment. She managed to screw the cap back on and close the latch just in time before a pair of curious drones popped out from behind a corner, alerted by the noise.

One fell to a simple stab with her bayonet, the other to blunt-force trauma using the grenade as a mace, smashing its head in with three swift whacks that made no more noise than some satisfying crunching. Other soldiers feared that even a light tap could set the grenades off, but she’d handled them enough to know that nothing short of rupturing the shell and exposing the contents to open flame could cause such a thing.

With the bayonet in one hand and the grenade in her left, Zefaris snuck further through the maze, still trying to find her way out before she committed to her plan. On her way through that tangle of faux-trenches, she encountered three more patrols. Two groups of three drones each, both of which she eliminated without incident, and a single warrior blocking her path. This one very nearly caught sight of her, but it had fortunately just begun turning in place to pursue a different path. She eliminated it in a manner similar to the first one, jumping onto it and smashing its head with the grenade whilst she stabbed its spine to bits with the bayonet.

When at last she clambered overtop its inert body, traversed a few more zig-zag segments of trench, and leaned out past the corner, she saw not just a door, but one fortified as one would fortify a key choke-point. There wasn’t just a hive blocking the path, but one designed almost identically to actual Ikesian combat bunkers, suggesting that whoever commanded these locusts either had insider knowledge or had fought in the war to a great enough degree to figure out how the bunkers were built.

It couldn’t have been the dungeon core itself, seeing as the core couldn’t directly control locusts… Could it? “Did it get the Queen to cooperate for the sake of this one chamber?” Zefaris wondered.

It had one front entrance, blocked off by a doorman of course, with a number of windows overlooking the corridor that led up to it. These windows were manned by a type of locust she didn’t recognize, their arms fused together at the elbow into chitinous tubes from the bottoms of which hung engorged sacs, not unlike the Twitcher’s arms. They pointed these appendages out the windows into the corridor, making it obvious that they were ranged weapons.

Zefaris knew better than to try breaching a bunker through direct fire. She adjusted her hold on the grenade’s handle for a better throw and pulled the pin, stepping out from behind the corner as she tossed it right through the window with all the might she could muster. One of the gun-bugs was fast enough to step into its trajectory, but its sheer mass and velocity knocked it over and served to do nothing but ensure the grenade would land near the Doorman, rather than bouncing about in the bunker. In the seconds before the grenade went off the other watchman bugs opened fire, and Zefaris had no choice but to duck back behind cover.

Globs of bright-yellow goop splashed against the wall and over the floor just moments after she was out of sight, a mix of steam and rancid fumes rising from them. Briefly, the consideration of putting her gas mask on crossed her mind, but there wasn’t enough time to do it properly. Thus, Zef just sucked in as much fresh air as she could and broke into a full sprint down the trench, zig-zagging as she made her way towards the bunker. She could hear dozens of footsteps reverberating through the trench for a second or so, before the grenade’s fuse finally reached its end and a thunderous detonation resounded all around, blinding light flashing out the bunker’s windows.

The Doorman’s arm-shields visibly slumped and moved backward as it died where it stood, but there was still no gap. With who knew how many bugs right behind her Zefaris resolved to enter the bunker through the windows, squatting down and exhaling all the Fog left in her lungs to propel herself to a sufficient height. Were it not for the bayonet, she wouldn’t have reached the window, and wouldn’t have had the strength to hold on for long enough to pull herself up. When at last she squeezed through the window, an all-consuming stench of vile smoke filled her nostrils, just barely drowned out by the sweet clarity of Fog. Blindingly bright CP-T fires dappled the interior of the bunker-hive as though stars in the night sky, burning into its matter as if it were the stomach lining of a great beast.

Zefaris only got a scarce few moments before a glob of the vile liquid came flying at her, slow enough that she managed to step out of its way purely on reaction. “One of you fuckers survived, huh?” she murmured, noticing that the structure of the hive likely contained the blast. The other marksman-bug’s corpse laid exactly where it had fallen after the grenade smashed its skull, burned into pieces, having likely died from what CP-T splashed onto it rather than the blast.

Without stealth to keep up or worry for the loss of a single bullet, she pulled Pentacle and ventilated the locust where it stood. Its outlandish cannon-arm-thing burst on contact, spilling its vile contents all over its owner as the bug was slammed against the wall by the sheer force of impact, a gaping hole in its chest. It screeched as its chitin melted and all the contents of its gut spilled out within seconds of the sac bursting.

“As vile as ever,” thought Zefaris before she started cautiously traversing the burning hive-bunker on her way towards the other side of the structure. There was another Doorman to deal with blocking it, and this one she had to eliminate expediently. She could hear the front Doorman’s corpse being forced to move, the strange noises of a furious Warrior accompanied by the hammer-smashing of its arms against the Doorman’s inert arms. Powerful as it was, Pentacle couldn’t do this job, and she doubted CP-T could burn all the way through a Doorman in any acceptable amount of time.

Into its holster her handcannon went, and she began her grizzly work. Coming up behind the ponderous living wall of a locust, Zefaris took to carving it apart down the middle using her bayonet. Its soft back gave way under the barbarous strength it bestowed her, splitting open as its spine came apart and it grew inert, its guts spilling out around her boots. After the third pass, she’d already carved halfway through it but she couldn’t effectively reach far enough, now resorting to making use of her war-knife to finish the job. While she used the longer blade, she still maintained her grip on the bayonet, letting it hang off her hand by the ring to expedite her butchery. The last part of her grizzly work was severing the Doorman’s arms - after that, its body crumpled to the ground with little effort, and its arm-shields topped over with a swift kick.

And just in time, as she barely outran a furious warrior that headed charge after her. The door slammed open for her the moment she approached it, and slammed shut the moment she passed, crushing her pursuer into fine paste. The sounds of thumping and scratching could still be heard from beyond the door for some time, until there was the sound of colossal gears turning, stone shifting, bugs being ground in the cogs of a god-sized machine. Then, there were only the distant sounds of the dungeon’s workings and her own breath.

Now that she finally had a moment to breathe, Zefaris sheathed her war-knife and slipped the bayonet behind her belt, looking about in the intermediary chamber. It had a glyph on the wall with a control handle in a recess.

Curious, she came up to the glyph and took hold of the handle, feeling the familiar thrumming ache spike through her arm as it flickered to life and showed her an attribute readout. She furrowed her brow at what it claimed, briefly caught off-guard by the sudden, sharp growth in her attributes. Then, it hit her - in the last couple days, she’d dealt with things that would’ve spelled her death under any other circumstances, and even learned Fog-breathing. Of course she would’ve sharply grown, it was now that she had likely hit a plateau and would struggle to rise further.

NAME ZEFARIS SEX FEMALE SPECIES HUMAN (IKESIAN) FORCE D+ (C+) PRECISION B HARDNESS C+ AETHER C-

“What’s that rating in the brackets? Is that what the bayonet does?” she wondered, her eye wandering across the projection. It didn’t particularly matter after all, and she let go of the handle to turn her attention towards the other door, which was still very much not open. The glyph was maybe two-thirds filled out at best, so it’d take a little while before it opened.

So, she sat down and rested, digging up one of her two remaining coins and mulling over how she could possibly make the controlled ricochet technique function. It was partly because she truly believed she could do it, if she only figured out how, and partly to distract herself from worrying about the others. Not just Zel, Makhus, Sigmund, Strolvath, or even the Inquisitor, but damn-near every remotely tolerable face in Willowdale.

As far as she knew, the safety of the entire farming valley hinged on her group’s success, with how undermanned and obviously under-equipped the town’s militia seemed to be. No cannons, no artillery pieces, no mechanized transports, just civilians with old guns, sometimes not even up to the standards of military surplus. The sorry situation wasn’t surprising at all, but that didn’t change its severity.

If they didn’t stem the flow at the source, Willowdale would perish beneath a tsunami of chitin, perhaps doomed to fates worse than death if the Twitcher’s death-rattle was truthful.

“Only more reason to get things right,” she thought, flipping the coin between her fingers. Perhaps something similar to Zel’s Rebound Pulse? But how would she reproduce such a property, let alone infuse a coin with it?

Zefaris took a breath, trying to focus on imparting some property of the sort onto the coin as she exhaled. Of course, nothing happened. Furrowing her brow, she tried again, now trying to compress the Fog within her lungs. This too did nothing, only perhaps making her feel light-headed for a few moments.

More closely inspecting the coin, she saw that it was covered in dust, and polished it on the fabric of her pants. Looking it over she squinted, and seeing that it still had a smudge, breathed what Fog was left in her lungs upon its surface. When she brought it down to her trousers to polish the rest of the filth off, Zef noticed that the Fog clung to the coin as a strange, hair-thin film.

The thought crossed her mind that, “Maybe I could just… Breathe on it…”

Indeed she did, taking another breath of Fog and exhaling onto the coin as she focused her mind entirely on the idea of bouncing a bullet off the coin. As before, the Fog clung to its copper surface, yet it did nothing.

She flipped it up into the air, murmuring “Homunculus Eye…” as she traced its path. When the coin reached the apex of its flight it stopped dead for just a split-second longer than it should’ve, emitting a brief, just barely noticeable flash of light before it fell. On the way down it began to emit a whistle, flashing once more just before it hit the ground.

It didn’t clatter about, or just stop on impact - the coin bounced right into her forehead at the same force she had thrown it with, only losing its strange coating when it bounced the second time.

“Ow!” Zefaris exclaimed, more out of surprise than pain. She grabbed the coin, instinctively rubbing her forehead with her free hand as she muttered to herself, “What in the…”

The coin was completely pristine, it didn’t even have the scuff mark that landing on the hard floor should have caused. Zefaris couldn’t help grinning at this success, even if there was no way to know if it would work the way she wanted it to until she actually tried. With that in mind, she slipped the coin into the gap between her belt and her trousers before unholstering Pentacle and reloading the fired chambers, observing the door as she performed the repetitious motion. The glyph had already lit up to its full extent ready to open at her approach, and knowing that she likely wouldn’t get many opportunities to rest until the next intermediary chamber, Zefaris also took the time to retrieve the bottle of mead-elixir from her backpack and down a good long glug of the substance.

After that she walked straight through the door, Pentacle in her right hand and bayonet in the left in a reverse grip. She used the stone-like strength bestowed to her left arm to support her right, holding the bayonet such that it pointed forwards.

It swung open and slammed shut instantly and without any noise as expected, leading her into a corridor that stretched on for some time before it took a right-angle bend to the right. Following the corridor, Zefaris couldn’t help but feel a sense of foreboding, as if something was watching her. There was no sound of skittering feet, no moving shadows, not even a flicker of the many lightgems, which shone red rather than the usual bright white. Disconcerting as it was at first, she appreciated the improved visibility.

The turn led her down an egregiously long staircase, which itself only stopped at a landing exactly fifty-seven stairs down - she counted, if only to keep herself focused. More stairs, only fifteen down before another straight corridor. Amidst the crushing silence of this strange, dismal place, Zefaris couldn’t help turning her head at every little noise, every little flicker of a dying lightgem. There were stretches of corridor where she just walked for minutes at a time, and others yet when she kept being presented with binary choices of path. The first time she chose left, only to walk through and realize the choice was fake - the two paths rejoined only meters later.

The second time it was less obvious, but still noticeable. Still, a fake choice.

The third time, the fourth - it became increasingly obfuscated, with longer detours and such, but that didn’t change the fact she could just explore both paths to figure it out.

Was the dungeon just playing with her?

Then, there was the fifth one.

It was a binary choice as before, only… The lightgem that pointed to the left-hand path kept blinking back and forth between white and red. On one hand, it could be a trap. On the other, even just approaching the left-hand path seemed to upset whatever intelligence was orchestrating this farcical labyrinth. In fact, just looking down that way made strange scraping echo from past the walls and the ground shudder beneath her feet.

Zefaris chose the left-hand path, the rumbling intensifying with each step she took. It led her to a staircase that seemed to go on forever, or at least for too long to see the bottom. The light became deeper and deeper red as she traversed the stairway, until she was plunged into an utter darkness that even the Homunculus Eye couldn’t extract sight from, for there was no light to see.

Thus, she simply breathed. She knew well that Fog had a slight luminescence, she had seen it before.

After all, that had been their only source of light that night, back at the tavern.

When she looked back, Zefaris saw that there was no path back - only a wall. Deciding that the dungeon must be moving pieces around as she advanced, she gave up on trying to form a mental map.

Instead, she decided to count her own steps. Six-hundred sixteen Sage-damned steps later, she finally descended one last staircase and found a glyph door. It led into an entirely barren intermediary chamber, one that was nothing more than a barren chamber with a door at the other end.

The door’s glyph seemed to be lighting up very slowly at her approach, until the chamber itself seemed to move within the dungeon’s mechanism, nearly knocking her off her feet in the process. When Zefaris regained her footing, she saw that the door was fully lit up and clearly ready to open, yet still she hesitated. From beyond it came a whole host of horrible noises, from stomping and screeching to cracking and squelching, as if the many locusts within the next chamber were already facing another opponent.

She once more took up the same combat stance with Pentacle in her right and the bayonet in the left, using the left arm to support the right as she cautiously approached the door. At the other side, she was greeted by an image of slaughter the likes of which she hadn’t seen in quite a while, painted on the canvas of an ideal defensive battlefield.

It was a long hallway, full of cover and vantage points created from a combination of floor pillars and hive matter, as if in this one chamber the dungeon had been coerced into cooperating with the locusts. Wherever she looked she saw corpses or pieces of them, and yet she also saw more locusts than she had bullets. Some were wading over their fallen brethren, whilst others struggled to move after having had limbs ripped out of their sockets.

“What the fuck?” she muttered, utterly bewildered at the scene. So bewildered, that the first thing to come to mind was activating the Homunculus Eye, though doing as much didn’t exactly answer many questions on its own. Entering into the long, long killing field that this chamber would have doubtlessly been under any other circumstances, Zefaris quickly realized one thing.

Were it not for whoever inflicted this slaughter, she would’ve had no chance to go through this chamber. There were too many vantage points and too few hiding spots for her to sneak through, and unless she somehow manifested all the unfettered violence of a hero-noble, she wouldn’t have been able to force a path through. Indeed, as she advanced, the foes she saw were very much manageable. A drone or two here, a desperately charging warrior there. The drones, she dispatched without even considering a gunshot.

The warriors, they were a coin toss. Those that she managed to get from behind, she was able to eliminate with just the bayonet. Those that charged her, she treated as the huge animals they were - with a gunshot powerful enough to drop them dead before they could trample her. Advancing through the chamber led her closer to the source of the noise, as if whatever was causing it was always a solid distance ahead. By the time she reached what she thought to be the halfway point, she had already emptied and reloaded Pentacle twice over, had locust blood caked all over her clothes, and the noises had stopped… For a few moments.

No more did she hear carnage - only the occasional stirring of what few locusts still lived, as well as… Footsteps. Disconcerting, inhuman footsteps.

It wasn’t the sound of boots or bare feet, but the click-clack of stone against stone.

Then, there came the voices. There was a masculine one, howling words in Pateirian that she didn’t understand. She could, however, pick out how it sounded - it was angry. Angry and very, very afraid. Another voice joined in. Then another, and another. Gunshots rang out, as did the sound of several people running, the sound of flesh being rent asunder and the pained screams that arose from such violence. Soon, only one human voice remained - the very first one, the one that struggled most audibly of them all.

More yelling. More struggle.

The first voice broke through the silence again, now in Grekurian.

“We had an agreement!” he barked, accusingly. “One of them dies either way, whether it is by Fog Gate or by our hands!”

There came a laugh, one that resounded like the dungeon’s own clockworks and grinding stone stuffed into a shell and made to reproduce speech. It was a hollow sound, with no underlying emotion - not malice, not surprise, not anger or hate. Nothing.

“You Parasites presume too much,” the machine-voice said. “The Core has no obligation to tell you the truth. You were sent here to die, that I might give the one-eyed challenger a proper opponent. A fair one.”

“B-but the core-” the struggling voice stuttered, audibly stumbling over something and falling over before he could finish. There came the loud crunch of chitin being chopped through, then a pained grunt.

“The Core has no obligation to tell you the truth,” the machine-voice reiterated what it had said.

“H-how…”

“It cannot lie to challengers. You are not challengers,” it spat, a true sense of hatred building behind those artificial words. ”You are Parasites.”

There was a yell from the struggling voice, snuffed out by a loud crunch.

So closely did Zefaris listen, that her perception of her own surroundings slipped when she most needed it. A hitherto unseen artillery locust clambered atop a pillar. It let loose a glob of its vile liquid, which Zefaris just barely managed to duck under before she ended the creature with a swift gunshot to center-mass, so as to ensure that even if it somehow survived its arm-cannon-thing would be destroyed.

Strangely enough, it wasn’t the head that Zefaris found difficult to pick out, but other specific body parts. In her military career she’d focused on exploiting the tendency of Grekurian nobles to forego protective headgear even if they wore armor that could shrug off cannons, to the point that her first instinct was to go for the head.

Once she was certain it was safe to advance Zefaris moved ahead, striking down a few more drones before she finally reached the other end of the killing ground. Never before had she walked on so many corpses, passing through a door that she didn’t even know was there before it closed shut behind her. She found herself in a triangular chamber, whose shape the door that had just shut behind her completed. Even the floor panels were triangular, at least those that she could make out among the corpses. At the center of the chamber was… A statue? It looked like one of those spindly statues that were occasionally peppered throughout the chambers, sitting atop a raised-up floor pillar in a forward-leaning position, arms rested on its legs.

The humanoid form was there, but it was angular and sleek. The head was no more than a rectangle split down the middle, with a circular hollow at the center. She could pick out individual joints, its legs ended in flat surfaces rather than feet, and the rest of its body was so simplified and doll-like in design that its fully articulated hands actually stood out from the rest of the statue. No, it wasn’t the hands themselves that stood out. It was all the blood. Both its forearms and forelegs were utterly covered in a mixture of red and yellow, with flecks of both human blood and locust hemolymph streaked across its otherwise matte-black surface.

Holding her weapons at the ready and pointed straight at its head, Zefaris began circling it whilst maintaining enough distance that she thought it wouldn’t activate. She couldn’t help noticing the mutilated bodies strewn about, some drones, some Locust Nobles. There were at least a dozen Locust Nobles here, some still clutching their ill-maintained firearms whilst others had more traditional melee weapons, like swords and polearms.

Two-thirds or so had the expected mutations - plating, mandibles, feelers, vestigial extra limbs. The rest were some strange inbetween of locust and mantis mutations, with the characteristic sacred red chitin covering vital areas. Two of them had the same demon-mask facial mutation as the Red Mantis herself, one of whose right arm had entirely metamorphosed into a mantis blade. Judging by the dismemberment, the placement of his body right next to the statue, and the fact his skull was clearly stomped open, she wagered that he had to have been the first voice.

She turned her sight towards the door out of this chamber, gigantic and unmoving, its glyph utterly devoid of light. Then came the machine-voice, echoing throughout the arena, forcibly yanking her attention back to the statue. It sat stone-still upon that pillar, unmoving.

“I can’t just let you leave, you know,” it said. The statue raised its right arm, gesturing as if it was raising something… Only for a cluster of the pillars in front of her to rise. It turned where it sat to face her, the light within the hole in its face now visible. Pale, bright blue. It flickered as the creature offered, “Take a seat.”

When Zefaris hesitated, it reiterated its offer, “Go on. I couldn’t harm you even if I wanted to, right now.”

It just… Stared her down, unmoving, unblinking, until she said, “I would prefer to stand.”

“Very well,” the statue replied. “I am Subcore Sigma. Consider me an independent facet of the dungeon core. Just an automaton saddled with the responsibility of making sure the Parasites that climb to this floor don’t clog up the clockworks.” It stiffly gestured to itself, bringing to mind images of clockwork automata that she’d seen at fairs when she was little.

“...Climb?” Zefaris questioned, confused already by the golem’s statement.

Sigma nodded, explaining that, “Yes, climb. They cannot traverse the dungeon as you or I, so the Parasite-queen forces open pathways just big enough for her disgusting children to move through. The main Core permits this, as long as they only populate chambers that are meant to have enemies.”

“Then why-” she began another question, only for the statue to interrupt right away, as if it knew what she was going to ask.

“These Parasites tried to set up a certain-death scenario. I am here to act as a more fair replacement,” it said. “I believe they referred to me as a mini-boss, long ago.”

“Am I to defeat you?” she continued to question, even taking a breath of Fog in preparation for whatever attack the machine might launch at a moment’s notice.

Only, that didn’t come.