Unlike back there, they couldn’t cut through. Even without superhuman instincts such as Zel’s, they all smelt the sour miasma that suffused the forest, they all heard the distant beating of wings and chittering of human lower jaws that had turned to mandibles. The only smell that managed to punch through the odor of massing locust-men was the smell of pure Viriditas, small puddles of the emerald fluid glistened around the roots of some brambles.

“Of course it’s artificial,” Zel thought. The gigantic bushes they were struggling through were all too large, all too dense, all too vital to be natural. It was a wonder there was a noticeable path at all, with how quickly these monstrous plants had grown back in the E.Z.

Were they even the same plants anymore? Surely, exposure to such prodigal growth would change the greenery on a fundamental level. Could a plant develop an understanding of essentia and grow and Azoth as humans or animals could? After all, Strolvath did mention that plant life had souls. What form would the Azoth of a tree take? A gemstone in its roots? An impossibly succulent fruit that never fell?

Zelsys stifled a chuckle at her own tendency to ponder such things in the most dangerous of situations. The threat of impending death made the mind race, and even in the absence of a foe to direct her ire towards, the mental energy had to go somewhere. She could only focus so hard on following the path and keeping quiet.

With the sun out of sight and their path illuminated only by the dim red of its setting, it felt like it took them far longer to get through this part of their trek than it actually did. A little over an hour and a half of this tedious sneaking, and finally they neared the next stopping-point. Yet, Zelsys didn’t feel the tension easing up - it was only getting greater. Both the stench and the chittering of massed locust-men intensified to a noticeable degree as they neared the exit. There was also loud, sporadic screeching,

“What good that did us,” Strol grumbled as he emerged, immediately followed by the sound of the Inquisitor’s blade singing as she unsheathed it. A chittering laugh echoed, and finally she saw the fourth stopping-point, and the unwelcome guests who had waited for them here.

A sea of brown-black chitin encircled a double-layered circle of warding stones surrounding a hut on stilts, chittering drones scraping and biting away at both the outer barrier and the warding stones that held it up. It rippled like the surface of water as they struggled, but something told her the stones wouldn’t last forever like this. At a glance, Zelsys counted twenty, maybe twenty-five drones at most.

What truly drew her attention, however, were the three locust-men that stood out, for they truly fit the moniker. Just as the pistoleer that had survived a point-blank shot from Pentacle to the chest, they were unique, separate from the swarm. Either they were the unique cases that didn’t mutate into outright locust-men, or they were the scarce ex-humans among a swarm of locust-men that were born into the hive - Zelsys didn’t know, and though she knew she’d likely find out, she didn’t want to know.

Positioned at various points around the circle, all three had already turned to face them before Zelsys emerged from the tunnel of brambles. The Drones were starting to look up from their tedious task, doubtlessly just now heeding a silent pheromone command as they scrambled to form a pincer formation around their masters.

The leftmost one almost looked like a drone, his body fully encased in chitin. What set him apart from the horde were his towering, distinctly masculine human proportions and the pair of tired, bloodshot blue eyes peering from fleshy pits in his split-jawed face. The matte-black chitin that covered his body almost looked like a living suit of armor at first glance. A quartet of stubby insectoid arms sprouted from his back, keeping hold of a gigantic weapon, nearly as tall as him.

It was too big to be called a sword. Massive, thick, heavy, and far too rough. Indeed, it was a heap of raw iron.

He held himself with resolute dignity, but there were cracks in his visage. Zelsys could tell that he was struggling to hold onto sanity with splintered fingers, just as the Maneater was back before she put it to rest. She wasn’t sure why, but she subconsciously assigned him the nickname of Black Swordsman.

The middle one looked far more human, and was far less mutated. She was recognizably Pateirian, and could even be considered attractive in an unconventional sense. The visible parts of her limbs were encased in reddish chitinous plates that spiraled and whirled in elaborate, beautiful patterns, her arms bearing a set of extra joints between the elbow and the wrist, from which mantis-like blades sprouted, neatly folded away alongside her forearms.

Everything above her cleavage and below her eyes had fully mutated, once more covered in whirling patterns of red chitin all the way up through her split lower jaw, her lips and nose, the shapes of which were maintained within the mosaic of chitin and flesh. It almost looked like she was wearing a demonic war mask. A pair of insectoid feelers poked through her immaculately cut black hair, twitching and whipping about. What boggled the mind most was her attire - she wore a nearly pristine bright-red dress with golden inlays.

Zel remembered the mention of mantis-like mutations, and thought that perhaps this woman was one of the lucky ones. Between this fact and the colour of her chitin, it only made sense to think of her as the Red Mantis.

Furthest to the right and possessed of the least dignified mutations, there stood - or rather, twitched in place - a man-shaped creature whose upper body had completely succumbed to mutation, and though he wore both trousers and boots, both had plentiful holes to see the brown chitinous casement that covered his legs, let alone the thick black hairs that poked out through the fabric.