The Queen’s stone arms slammed together under Zelsys, and into the air the coins went. As they rose up, Zefaris focused her mind and filled her lungs to their absolute fullest. She couldn’t afford to spare even a splinter of focus, and so resorted to invoking the technique out loud.

“Headpiercer Arts: Fivefold Concussion Impact!” she invoked, then began burning up her lung capacity gunshot by gunshot. She sucked in shallow breaths in the split-seconds it took her to re-aim and the cylinder to rotate.

Clang. Clang. Clang. Clang. Clang.

A flash came with each ricochet, and the Queen’s head jerked backwards just a little bit more with each bullet that hit. Placing Pentacle into the speedloader, Zef went on to grab her grenade and toss it to Zel, calling out, “Catch!”

To say that she was out of breath would’ve been an understatement - the markswoman had to catch herself from falling. She would’ve been riddled by harpoons before she could get up, if Strolvath hadn’t blown them to smithereens as he ran by. Zefaris wondered why, but as he neared the stone arms they began cracking and falling apart.

Zel reached the Queen just as the fourth gunshot struck her head, and she had jumped onto her face just in time to catch the grenade. Unfortunately, a harpoon ripped right across her forearm just as she did so, causing her to drop the grenade right into the Queen’s open mouth before she could arm it.

Harpoon after harpoon the tail fired at her, as if the Queen being knocked out by head trauma just angered the launcher-tail.

“I get it, you’re a separate bug,” Zel thought. Finding that she wouldn’t be able to finish off the Queen with the frenzied thing firing down on her, she jumped off onto the mega-hive’s roof. She channeled Graze Pulse through her upper back as she approached the hole from which the tail protruded. It rained down harpoons unrelentingly, each harpoon slipping off her back and each harpoon contributing to the pressure behind her right eye.

Gripping the Lightning Butcher with both hands she fed it a burst of Fulgur, causing the edge to rapidly become seethingly yellow. With a single stroke she discharged what little kinetic charge her Retributive Battery held, severing the thing and leaving behind a charred stump. It writhed and fired off harpoon after harpoon as it fell, while Zelsys turned and leapt back up onto the Queen’s bulbous mass of a head.

It remained limp even now, as Zel carved a path across her skull and reached her mouth. She stabbed the Butcher’s blade into the middle of the mother-bug’s giant forehead, its edge now glowing orange. Even with this assistance it struggled to penetrate to any significant depth, but it was stuck in solidly enough.

Planting her feet on the bug’s shoulders and aiming the gun right down the Queen’s gaping maw, Zelsys began to build up the inner focus to fire. Not to pull the lever, she would’ve blown the bug’s brains out at the first opportunity if she could’ve. No, it was to cast a single decisive Thundercannon using every scrap of built-up Fulgur that trailed from her eye, to take another lightning-strike of strain without falling to the ground and busting her skull open on the floor like an absolute chump.

Click. Click.

“Beast-butchering Arts!” she began, channeling Fulgur through her arm, feeling the muscles seizing up and twitching out of control.

Then, the Queen’s eyes snapped open and her head surged upward. Her mouth snapped open like a trapdoor to hell, ripping apart the distended skin of her face and exposing a set of fully insectoid mandibles.

Zel might’ve been able to move out of the way, if the Queen’s truly massive mandibles hadn’t telescoped out of her head a good half-meter’s worth to envelop the slayer’s arm. It wasn’t even the usual arrangement of a locust’s insectoid mandibles or a split lower jaw. The Queen’s entire mouth had been somehow transformed into a Moray-like, telescoping bio-mechanism.

Her upper teeth snagged against Zel’s arm-harness, but the lower jaw caught on meat and sunk in with all the anchoring and pain that came along with teeth cutting through skin and fat.

The Queen’s stone arms struggled against an unperceived impedance. Their fingers couldn’t untangle, their wrists couldn’t bend right, yet their wielder still forced the great constructs to move, in spite of the Victory Demon’s interference. To great noise and trembling they snapped off above the elbows, and the stumps waved about overhead while she thrashed around and struggled to bite through muscle that was more akin to corded steel rope than flesh.

Zel felt the Queen’s teeth cutting into her arm, and she knew she wouldn’t be able to fire the Thundercannon before she lost the limb altogether. Her only option would be to fire prematurely and hope the recoil would still dissipate through the arm-harness and carry her out of harm’s way.

Click. Boom.

Zelsys felt the recoil impulse at the same time as she felt the Queen biting down with utterly inhuman force. Teeth and bone alike shattered under the pressure, and considering the searing-hot pain, the Queen’s jaw wasn’t the only bone that broke. In a desperate last bid to help the recoil impulse push her free, she channelled Graze Pulse through her own raw stump, and it seemed to work.

She felt herself lose purchase as the Butcher came free and her severed left arm was pulled from the great locust’s maw, held on by nothing more than the kinetic dispersion harness.

Her arm gushed a truly tremendous trail of blood and screamed with incredible pain.

The silver-eyed slayer felt herself slipping into unconsciousness, but she refused.

The will to live and to exact retribution was greater than the middling, temporary pain of dismemberment. She’d had worse - hell, she’d inflicted worse upon herself just to produce a more impressive technique.

As she fell, Zelsys willed her heartbeat to slow and retook control of her breathing. With engine breathing having had become ragged and arrhythmic, she returned to the steady, deep breaths that came naturally.