At the mention of a Fog Gate, there sounded a not-so-distant scream, a single word in Pateirian that sounded rather much like “No!”

The chamber’s lightgems quickly began turning red, the doors’ glyphs lighting up in that very same sanguine colour before they slammed open to the chittering of uncountable feet from behind them. The chamber nearly instantly swarmed with every type of locust they had encountered up until this point, from lowly Drones through Warriors, Spitters, Beetle-boars, Gunners, Bug-deer, and Quill-shielders, among which were doubtlessly numerous Locust Nobles if their uniform aggressive advance was to go by.

Yet, there was no need to face this veritable army, for the Spearman had already begun chanting and violently slamming his spear against the ground, a cyan glow flowing out from him as a wall of pillars rose up before him. There was exactly one single locust that made it over the wall before the wall reached the ceiling, a winged Locust Noble that wielded a pair of short blades. Most of his body below the nose was covered in bright-red chitin, and a huge control parasite adhered to his back, running all the way down his spine. A pair of feelers protruded from his mottled, brownish hair, whipping about.

He didn’t even recover or look around, instantaneously lunging at Zelsys as if he could smell her. She could’ve cut him in half, but her first instinct was to kick the mutant into the very wall he’d just jumped over.

There resounded a crunch as his plating alongside his ribcage shattered from the impact, followed by his arm snapping at the elbow when he hit the wall, sliding down it to the ground. Even still, he struggled up to his feet, holding his right hand back with the obvious intention to stab whoever he could, even while his eyes remained locked steadfastly to Zel.

Zefaris and the Inquisitor both had their guns trained on him, and expecting this, Zel stopped them, “Hold on. You can dome him if he tries anything, just give me a second. I’ve got a weird feeling in my gut.”

Those eyes, those blank, glassy eyes. There was another gaze behind them, a gaze she’d only seen in her mind’s eye. A split-jawed grin formed on the Locust Noble’s face, and the voice that came out of his mouth was not that of a man, but of the seething, vitriolic Locust Queen that they’d heard screaming through the walls every time they thwarted her grasps at control.

“This body is already dead,” the Queen gurgled through the Locust Noble’s mouth, the dying man’s Ikesian as clear as the snow-white patches of unmutated skin on his forehead. “But you know that already. You ruptured a lung and ripped an artery with that mule kick of yours. So let me ask you a question before this body dies and you face me in my court.”

Zelsys let out a haughty, voiceless chuckle, her mouth twisting into a brief smirk as she gave a downward nod to prompt the question that she was certain would just be a veiled insult or threat of violence.

The Locust Noble instead scream-laughed a question that demanded an answer, “Do you really think you can just put a stop to everything the war has led to? That you can somehow be the sole super-soldier to force history off-course?!”

Regarding the locust with a lazy, contemptuous stare, Zelsys considered whether she should even answer. If spurning the Queen - no, if spurning the Parasite - would be the best answer.

The consideration vanished a moment later, washed away when the smug response flowed from Zel’s mouth as if on its own, “Of course I don’t, I can’t be everywhere at once. I’ll surpass your Emperor and spread the knowledge of how I did it to as many people as possible. Not for conquest, but because you couldn’t leave well enough alone.”

Zel chuckled to herself, squatting down to look the dying bug eye-to-eye. There could be heard a great deal of thumping, scratching, and screeching from beyond the wall. One could feel the raging horde’s onslaught through the wall and through the ground, even if they couldn’t break through the black-stone in any reasonable span of time.

“No, that’s not the whole truth,” she conceded to an unspoken question. She gathered every bit of vitriol she had, spitting it into the Queen’s face just as she had done to the Sister. It didn’t matter that she didn’t mean most of what she said. The words were a vehicle for her pent-up hatred.

By this point, the Caster had, with the Spearman’s help, already moved a ways away from the maddened, dying bugman, the latter scraping a glyph into the stone using his spear. The Caster chanted seven lines over and over, thumping his spear with blood running from his mouth and down his chest.

“There’s this itch in the back of my head,” she said. “I can’t help wanting to see how far I can go. Call me a natural-born thrillseeker, if you want. Just so happens that exterminating scum like you is both thrilling and morally correct, from my persp-”

The knife-wielding locust thrust his blade towards her neck before she could finish. She caught the wrist and laughed out loud. “Nice, you almost had me!”

Click. Clang. Splat. A ball of heated lead split the bug’s head down the middle as if it had been unzipped. Now it was a zipperhead in the truest sense. Zel immediately knew that it was a shot from Pentacle, going off the presence of a distinct smoke trail and the anvil-like noise. She gave Zef a look of appreciation as she pulled the knife from the bug’s hand, then proceeded to stand up.

A full-tang handle, a tapered blade, a sword-like crossguard. Its appearance brought to mind the idea of an arming sword with dwarfism. It was filthy and had some patches of rust, but Zel liked it enough to put it in Fog Storage as a souvenir. She’d get it cleaned up once all this was over. She needed something smaller than the heavy artillery of blades that was the Butcher.