There was something wrong about his eyes; no longer were they lizard-like, but instead patterned. And his hair, his hair looked wrong as well, being a bit stiffer than it rightly should be, the strands perhaps twice or thrice as thick as was natural. Even his scales looked off somehow, they had a different sheen to them, more akin to the shine of Red’s chitin than draconic armor. She casually strode into the room, idly remarking as she scanned her surroundings: “Come now, you know how it is…”

Near enough the moment she passed him, her gaze fell upon something familiar that explained the subtle change in his appearance: A large jar covered in seals on a stone altar, the jar having been opened.

“...I just couldn’t help myself! With my cultivation method, it’s use it or lose it,” she lied. “Speaking of the perils of cultivation, say, how’s the side effects of that Gu I see you’ve used? Your hair’s looking awfully like feelers.”

“I give it a month before it turns into articulated chitin dreadlocks,” Red sneered from behind, bringing to mind the vivid memory of Zel’s fight with the Sister; besides being an insane traitor entombed in a suit of living armor, her most pronounced mutation was a mane of exactly what Red had just described. She was stalling somewhat, perhaps because she’d fully expected overt hostility, and partly because the violence didn’t seem to have started on the floor below just yet, whatever the reasons were.

“I’ve never felt better,” the knight captain uttered, his eyes shifting over to Victor before jumping back to Zelsys. “I suppose this gift shall be fitting recompense for that little… Mishap with our men.”

“It shall NOT!” came a sudden proclamation from the Locust Queen, her voice completely saturated with a thick Pateirian accent. “They were my children, it is I who was wronged by this one’s violent impulses!”

Zelsys could barely hold herself together at the farce unfolding before her, wondering whether these two genuinely thought the slaughter in the preceding chamber was anything remotely close to unintentional, or if they, too, were just putting on facades.

“Let me ask you a couple things, before we… Go on with this whole affair,” she sighed, squatting down in place, resting her arms on her knees. An unassuming position, but perfect to spring out of when it came to violence, the whole body being coiled like a spring. She already began breathing, “Firstly, what by the Dead Ones was that display? I am well aware of the technique used to open that Fog Gate, and I can scarcely imagine the arcane magnitude of an object that would require six souls to be burned up as kindling just to transport something of such a relatively small size. Secondly, where do your loyalties lie, exactly?”

Not waiting for a response, Zel continued, raising a hand to point to the doors at the other end of the sanctum as she turned her eyes up at the Red Locust Queen.

“When - not if, when - I break down that other door over there, will I find an aetherwave comms cabinet with a line directly to the Imperial Palace, like I did back in the Willowdale Dungeon? Or will there just be a bunch of egg sacs for me to smash?”

Aghast at what she’d just said, the Locust Queen didn’t even bother to cry out in anger, instead just raising her staff and uttering a scream of pure, brilliant indignation. The four jade rings around its perimeter glowed, and from the center of the main ring erupted a brilliant bolt of scarlet lightning intent on obliterating her. Zel held out a hand and just… Took the strike. It surged up her left arm like a wrathful serpent, but was subsumed before it could even touch her skin. Conveniently enough, it was now that she finally began to hear gunshots from underfoot.

“You dare?!” she cackled. “Not only do you insult me by trying to strike me with my own element, but such a weak manifestation of it as well? Chang Yi Sao, or whatever your name is, I would’ve expected a Pateirian like you to know better than to raise a hand at one so obviously your superior. Did the stench of your own pheromones perhaps cloud your senses to the point of blinding you to the magnitude of my presence?”

Frankly, Zelsys just enjoyed playing up this farcical role for a moment, embodying the archetypal role of a smugly superior cultivator which she’d read about in Pateirian historical accounts. It wasn’t an unbefitting role for her to play either; after all, she was indeed the elder of her own sect, and she had indeed advanced cultivation in a significant way in only a few months… Even if her advancement had really just been rediscovering old knowledge and recontextualizing it in a practical system without pointless mysticism.

A rising anger overtook her at the idea of all the innocent lives that must’ve been ruined by these creatures. Though she’s subtly begun Fog-breathing in order to saturate her own muscles, she now found herself projecting her voice at a volume far beyond the ability of any human, burning increments of her breath to speak louder than many could shout.

“Tell me,” she commanded the Locust Queen, inwardly flipping the switches which shifted her body into full combat mode. “Tell me, when I pull your legs off and skewer your head on one of them, will I be putting down a mere slaver, or one of the Emperor’s puppets?”

She glanced over to Von Wickten, his face filled with a mix of confusion and anger, as if he still hadn’t fully processed the reality of things. Heart pounding, breathing speeding up, blood flooding into the extremities. A soaring body high took root, the cocktail of an anticipatory rush and pure, brilliant hate, a hate so glorious and righteous it became a purely positive emotion of malicious intent.

“And you. Tell me, did you truly think we were anything alike? That I had challenged you under any pretense other than my own desire to humble you and my need to extract the keyphrase from the glob of congealed drugs and semen in your skull? Did you really catch on, was that why you ate a parasitic bug that’ll turn you into a hollow shell in a few years? In some desperate hope it would make you strong enough to overpower me?”

The knight captain’s features hardened with each insulting question, until, eventually, he exploded in rage and rancor, erupting in Zel’s direction. She stopped his assault dead with a simple front kick, sending the man skidding across the floor, his armor throwing sparks.

“Your technique is worse than amateur; it’s complacent!” she laughed, finally bothering to pull out her weapon as she raised her gun to the Locust Queen. “I scarcely need to pay attention to predict your next move!”

Before she could fire the Locust Queen howled in anger again, this time summoning rows of earthen spikes from underfoot whilst attempting to block off Zel’s escape route with conjured walls. It was all so, so terribly predictable… But then, there came something new: The manifestation of four ghostly swords, which the Queen took to puppeting with gestures of her staff, and which set upon Zelsys with an impressive fervor. Indeed, between the Queen and Von Wickten, there may have been a real struggle to be had here; had it not been for Red and Victor, that is. The Locust Queen, between spewing incantations to fuel her arcane assault, turned her eyes to Red, barking a command in Pateirian. The tone and length of the utterance, combined with Red’s reaction, were enough for Zelsys to guess that the Queen had likely assumed that Red would just automatically side with her.

The Lady in Red emitted an insulted scoff, spitting back also in Pateirian before transitioning to Ikesian: “I will not suffer traffickers infesting my domain, let alone ones that steal major artifacts like a Maxims-damned Dragon Eye! Fool that you are, your life is forfeit.”

Holding out a hand, the glistening gold of her mantis blade shot out from inside her sleeve. In the blink of an eye, Red slipped into one of the Queen’s numerous and sizable blind spots, and with an effortless swipe of her arm-blade severed one of the monstrosity’s rear legs. Meanwhile, Victor had formed a Devil’s Tooth the size of his forearm, which he launched directly at the Queen’s chest. Only in refocusing on defense by spinning her staff with kinetic magick did she avoid being drilled through, in which time her ghostly swords just hung there, motionless. When at last she resumed puppeting them, she split one off to attempt skewering Victor, but the young man had already gotten well out of harm’s way by following in Red’s lead and simply getting right up next to the Locust Queen. From this position did he spray a gout of slick, greasy mud right into Von Wickten’s path as the knight set off on a furious chase after Zelsys, who was laughing and taunting the Queen and Adalbert even now, uttering slurs and derogatory remarks the likes of which Victor hadn’t even conceived of beforehand.

Though his mud-slick was disarmed by Von Wickten merely leaping over it, Zelsys still capitalized on it by clotheslining the man, from which he, admirably enough, recovered with a sweeping low kick that she instinctively jumped over. He instantly followed by rising with an uppercut in the hopes of striking her mid air, but he failed to account for Zel’s absolutely unnatural flexibility; she simply dodged in mid-air by bending over backwards, only to spring back and stab into the armor gap of his elbow from one side while smashing the other side with a hammerfist, correctly counting on his arm to be durable enough that she wouldn’t stab herself. The exchange of blows which followed immediately after they both landed served to prove one thing: The Gu had magnified Von Wickten’s raw capabilities to a point where he could fight on par with Zelsys, although the tremendous boost to raw ability had only made his overreliance on it even worse. His sudden growth had been kneecapped by his own usage of the strength granted by the Gu as a crutch, rather than properly leveraging it with better technique.

Her ability to keep up with the monstrous bug-dragon-mutant wasn’t helped by the occasional flying-sword potshot from the Locust Queen, and so, Zel decided to create a bit of distance. She met several of Von Wickten’s strikes with elbow blocks enhanced with repeating casts of Siphoning Pulse, immediately burning the resultant kinetic charge to boost a backwards leap. Raising her arm-cannon to the Queen and burning breath after breath to charge up a Thundercannon, she saw that Red had already severed three of the monstrosity’s legs, with Victor having somehow clambered atop her bulbous thorax. The young mage had shrouded his broken spear’s blade in a maelstrom of Bonefire, and was just now using it to pry away a fourth leg. The Locust Queen kept screaming in Pateirian and trying to impale both of them with flying swords, but she physically couldn’t turn far enough to see either of them properly, and so even Victor had an easy time staying out of harm’s way. Such was the peril of prodigal size.

Zel’s attention only exacerbated the Queen’s alarm, such that she had managed to marshal the same staff-spinning defense by the time Zel pulled the trigger-lever and invoked: “THUNDERCANNON!”

With a bright-burning flash the lightning-shrouded shell erupted forth, yet to the Queen’s credit, she did manage to block it… Only for the staff to shatter under the force, sending the shell careening off into the ceiling. That self-same moment, Victor had managed to sever the fourth of the Queen’s six legs, leaving only the front pair. Red stepped out from the Queen’s blind spot, removing her mask with her right hand while conjuring the Subcore with her left, a malicious grin plain to see on her face. She took a little too much pleasure in barking a command at Victor: “Get down from there, unless you wish to be crushed!”

Unfortunately, Zelsys didn’t have the luxury of paying attention to the Locust Queen’s execution, as Von Wickten was very much a present and active threat. It wasn’t until she decided to grapple him that she got the upper hand, managing to land a flying headscissor on the man before she got right on top of him. She took her blade to his chestplate like one would a can opener to, well, a can. “I’ll give you this: You listened to my advice about making it a pain to get your armor off!”

The Butcher’s sawteeth screamed to life, then bit into the high-quality chain with which Von Wickten had had his armor’s straps replaced. He couldn’t be blamed; one couldn’t exactly get an entirely new suit of armor made in a few days, so replacing the old straps with chains was the next best thing. She could’ve just sunk the tuning-fork blade into the back of his head right here and now, but with righteous cruelty in her heart, Zelsys had decided to break the man, and in making this mistake, she had permitted him the time to trigger a gruesome metamorphosis. His armor exploded off of him well before she could force it off, the chains which had held it on him unlocking at his mental command just in time for a tremendous growth in size to blast the armor right off of him.