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.