Nowhere in her heart did she intend to actually sit through the auction, even if she was quite confident that Von Wickten was none the wiser as to her intentions with him; the off-chance that he had caught on and that he might try to escape was not an acceptable risk.

“Ah, however… I would truly prefer to see the knight captain right now,” she hissed through a false smile again, placing her hand on the crone’s shoulder just as she turned to leave. She squeezed just hard enough to cause pain, but not hard enough for it to be obvious she was doing it intentionally, gesturing at Victor with her other hand. “See, the reason I bought him and brought him here in advance was as a gift of friendship for the good knight captain, knowing his proclivities.”

She could feel the murder flare in Victor’s eyes, but was relieved to find he had read the situation and put on a timid facade. The crone scurried off back up the stairs, once again, the four of them waited. Jorfr pulled out his Tablet, which he had had the good judgment to take with him this time, idly swiping through it on the outside, when in reality, he was preparing to pull his hammer out of Fog Storage. Meanwhile, Zefaris had made her way into the midst of the pulpits and sat down at the outermost edge of one, turning her gaze towards the auctioneer’s booth, fully dilating her right eye and barely, just barely, opening the left; in truth she was observing the entirety of the room, committing to memory the faces of the unmasked and many of the masked, too, able to discern identifying facial markers through their fanciful and oft ineffective masks. They were already dead to a man by Zel’s reckoning, their lives forfeited the moment they had gone out of their way to obtain entry to this revolting place. Certainly, there was the tiny chance that someone known to neither the Bureau nor anyone in the Newman Sect had independently worked to enter this place and undermine it from within, but such a person would have the opportunity to reveal themselves when the violence began… Albeit not much time to do so.

Zel felt her Tablet buzz with a mnemonic message, one whose contents were equally reassuring and unsurprising. Of those Zefaris recognized, most were aligned with the Occupationist faction; not by an overwhelming majority, but that wasn’t an issue. Beasts were beasts, regardless of what political beliefs they claimed to espouse.

There came another earth-shaking rumble from overhead, and like clockwork, the crone soon returned. “The ah, the knight captain has agreed to see you now - but only you, alongside the gift here,” she croaked. Every fiber of Zel’s being wanted to just punch through the woman’s head right then and there, but she saw an opportunity in this; she would play along for now, get into the midst of this filth, and then set off her companions down here with a simple aetherwave transmission. Red was the wild card, here, but the good Lady Karmesin solved the problem by demanding: “I shall go as well. As you already guessed, I have come to ensure that this establishment is being run to imperial standards - such assurances include back-of-house operations, so to speak.”

“I understand your concern, but-” the crone began with a building sense of veiled threat in her voice, but the Lady in Red didn’t relent.

“No buts. The Duke knows I am here and I act as his representative, do you understand? You would be courting death if you were to refuse me, and trust me in this: I am both able and willing to act as the Duke’s executioner, unlike the knight captain,” the Lady in Red seethed, her presence bearing down not only on the crone but on the entirety of the room as well. As far as Zel could tell, she wasn’t lying either - merely twisting the truth to serve her ends. The crone had already shrank back, feverishly waving away the two guards which had the wherewithal to approach the Lady in Red.

And so, the party split for the time being, with Zel, Victor, and Red following the crone’s lead. Ascending the stairs, they were met with a smaller chamber half-filled by some half-dozen Dragon Knights, two of them with their own captives in tow. A blackstone door waited at the other end, opening into a short, enclosed hallway with another door at the other end, not unlike the airlocks of a Dungeon. Beyond this point, there came another chamber, the unmistakable stench of locust-kind flooding the nostrils upon the door’s opening. It was a chamber with a vaulted ceiling and a fountain in the middle, dried out and now operated by a new contraption puttering away as it fruitlessly pumped the fetid water through a soiled filter. The leg-trunks of a smashed-down statue poked up from the top of the installation, pieces of the statue itself still lying about in the room’s corners, the whole dismal scene lit by a number of lightgems in iron and brass stands, those which had been embedded in the walls long gone. Numerous red-armored locusts occupied this room, four of them stood guard at either door, wielding heavy sabers of Kargarian make, clad in restyled Second-model tank suits. Their eyes, from humanlike to beady to composite, all converged on Zelsys, and the tension rising from second to second could be felt by all present; mandibles clicked, antennae whipped about, hands reached for blades and pistols.

It was at that moment that Zelsys sent the mnemonic signal, knowing violence would be unavoidable from this point forward, for one simple reason: If there was one thing that could not be concealed from a locust, it was the pheromone-scent of his own dead brethren. Locusts released the stench upon death, and it didn’t just stick to a person, it seeped into their skin and hair and clothing, sticking around for days unless purged with special alchemical soaps and hot water.

She couldn’t help grinning, knowing full well that, of all people, Red was the most aware of this fact. A mere glance exchanged was enough for the two women to spring into action, both whipping around to strike down the armored locust to their side. Zel’s fist smashed into an iron helmet, the force reverberating through its wearer just long enough for her to draw in a breath, burn it, and begin Engine Breathing. In the same motion she pulled her arm back, and burning a lungful, smashed her fist right into the locust’s temple. The helm caved in with the sound of a gong, and the massacre began in earnest. The locust to Red’s left had already crumpled to the ground, his head landing in his lap, while Victor wisely took up a defensive position with his broken spear in one hand while he formed one of those weird bone-rockets in the other’s palm.

Victor could scarcely perceive what had just happened, the slaughter was truly unseen. One moment they’d been walking with Lady Karmesin, and the next, the two of them just… Started killing, like that. It was like there was no difference between normal existence and deadly combat for the two of them; something beyond Victor’s ability to process mentally. That hook-nosed woman, the crone, tried grabbing at him when she realized what was happening, only for Zelsys to dash across the room and kick her right into a wall, her skull smashing against the wall with enough force to break it.

The woman’s skin sloughed off and butterfly-like wings unfurled as she emitted a chattering cackle, remaining affixed to the wall. Vic let off his just-finished Devil’s Tooth at the crone, the projectile drilling into her spine and pinning her to the wall like an oversized entomologist’s display. An opportunistic locust-mutant tried to get at him, but Victor reached out and grasped the bones of another dead bugman at his feet, marshaling every ounce of his sway to rip the corpse’s ribs out through its back. His would-be assailant skewered his feet on this makeshift spike trap, leaving Victor with the time to build up power and blast the bug with Bonefire.

Chitin, flesh, and bone alike gave like rotten wood under Zel’s refined violence, locusts that would’ve once been legitimate opponents now so far below her that she found time and mental energy to keep an eye on Victor just in case he got cornered. To her relief, he didn’t. In a half-minute’s span, the room was cleared out, Red Locusts splattered across the walls and floor, one of the armored ones having had the dubious fortune of surviving a disabling blow. Zel foisted him up with one hand, finding the emergency release latch on his helmet and undoing it before she ripped it off his head, taking one of his mandibles with it.

“The door. Open it,” she commanded, nodding at the blackstone bulwark which the locust had once guarded. He emitted a malicious cackle and uttered something in Pateirian, forming a gesture with his fingers. The door came alive and began to rise, prompting Zelsys to drop the locust and erase his head with a stomp.

The very first thing to draw Zel’s attention when the door rose above her eyeline was the fact only two figures were present in the spacious inner sanctum, despite its ancient stone having been furnished to accommodate several dozen people. Von Wickten, still clad in his armor, but somehow wrong. She couldn’t quite tell from where she stood, but there was a subtle twitchiness to his movements, one unlike that which he could develop from the massive doses of Noon Dust he doubtlessly consumed. He stood at the foot of a tremendous spherical gemstone, easily as tall as he was and nearly too big to have fit through the sanctum door, an unearthly light issuing from and into him.

A huge, segmented frame of brass-encased machinery stood against the left-hand wall, black cables snaking from its sides across the floor towards some sort of jury-rigged techno-abomination, the bloated frame of a Locust Queen looming over it, being the upper half of a horribly mutated woman atop an armored insectoid lower half, egg sacs jiggling about on its underside while six massive legs held it aloft. Six human figures were arrayed around the technological altar, their right hands held up while the Locust Queen waved about a staff whose head was a ring with four smaller, jade rings jangling about its length.

Two of the figures had slotted their right hands into the device, while the third did the deed just as the scene came into view. The fourth, fifth, and sixth followed all at once at the sight of Zel’s intrusion, rushing to finish whatever they had started; it was at the moment of the sixth’s arm entering the machine that an unholy whirring started up and all six fell to their knees, their heads whipping back as baleful green light erupted from their eyes and mouths. The Queen slotted her staff into the contraption’s center, howling an invocation in words transcending language: “I am the gate, the key, the path! OPEN!”

The Fog Gate came alive right then, and as Von Wickten pushed the massive gemstone past its precipice, the gate’s living batteries began to burn out in brief flashes of iridescence, one after the other.

“So it was you who stole the Dragon’s Fifth Eye,” Red sneered as she stepped into the chamber in Zel’s wake.

As if being sucked in, the so-called Fifth Eye rolled on into the gate far faster than an object of its size had any right to. This all transpired in the span of the very first seconds after the sanctum doors had opened, and only now did both the Locust Queen and Von Wickten turn their full attention to the intruders... And yet, still they did not discern hostile intent.

"Ah, Newman, the soon-to-be Number Seven, and even the good Lady Karmesin!" the knight captain exclaimed, walking past the queen and the powderized corpses at her feet, leaning to glance past the trio and into the chamber behind them. "Did ah... Did our former employees overstep any boundaries? It is no issue if they courted death, though I trust I need not say that recompense equal to the cost of their replacement is only to be expected, yes?"