Zel found herself sent flying backwards, forced to springboard off of a wall, rolling forwards just in time to glimpse the gruesome unfurling of an immense body, rapid growth enveloping the host body. It was a form that towered at nearly twice her own height, a morphological inbetween of humanoid and draconic, with digitigrade legs and a massive bladed tail whose shape resembled a centipede. Von Wickten’s mutant body possessed tremendous claws and thick, crimson-red armor plates all over, overlaid on top of one another like the scales of a real dragon, covered in swirling patterns not unlike Red’s own chitin. His head was now reshaped to that of a Dragon Descendant, possessed of four eyes and three sets of backswept horns, his lower jaw split like the mandibles of an insect and lined with terrible fangs. In the middle of his forehead sat a fifth eye, but this was no eye; it was one end of a huge centipede, the Gu which he had consumed, which briefly darted out of the socket before retreating. He instantaneously drew in a tremendous breath, the scales on his chest lifting up as it expanded, baleful light shining through between them.

Most curiously… He had no wings. Not even stumps. Nothing.

ACCURSED METAMORPHOSIS

THE TRUE FACE OF A HOLLOW BEING

KODOKU RITE: SIN-SOAKED ENTOMODRAGON

A blast of yellow-tinged flame followed, directed squarely at Zelsys; she’d gone well before it struck, but the molten rock left after its impact sent a sufficient message. She couldn’t take a hit from that, there wouldn’t be anything left to pull back together. His tail whipped forward, bending like a spring as its tip ran through the stone floor and carved a line. A boastful gesture. Yellow venom dripped from both Von Wickten’s claws and mouth, slowly pooling at his feet. Zel decided to meet him head-on for the moment, if only to ascertain his capabilities, though she took care to squirrel away enough Pneuma to completely negate a direct hit from his tail or fuel a high-speed dodge if it came to that. Soon it became clear that his strength was not to be trifled with; even Von Wickten’s claws could rip through stone. His scales, chitinous as they were, were so large and thick that whittling them away with smaller ball lightning just wasn’t feasible short of focus-firing a single spot, and though the Butcher’s sawteeth could cut through them, it was too time consuming of an option to use unless she could mount him from behind.

Though she managed to get through his armor by resorting to an All-severing Thunderclap Sting, this lesser instance of the technique simply didn’t suffice to strike him down or even seriously wound him. It left a crater of shattered scales and shredded flesh alongside a deep, half-cauterized wound that spewed hemolymph like a fountain, but in moments, the blood congealed into a waxy plug, and the Butcher was now stuck. Zel found herself forced to leave her blade embedded in Von Wickten’s flesh in order to get away from him before he could blast her with the full might of his fake, but very much lethal dragon’s breath. It wasn’t a truly dire problem, she could retrieve her blade from afar, after all, but it was one of many proofs of the legitimate power Von Wickten had attained through union with that accursed bug. Zel’s gut told her that the object Red had referred to as a Dragon Eye had to have played a part. Perhaps he had stolen the remnant power of a real, but long-dead dragon, feeding his own mutations and the Gu in equal measure with it. She could only guess, and now was not the time for such considerations.

She managed to goad him into meeting her into a test of strength to gauge his sustained power, but after they locked hands, it became a deadlock that Zelsys found herself unable to break with any sort of expedience, staring into that hideous face up-close as the Gu emerged from his forehead and leered in her face. Von Wickten’s own eyes were now much like the “eye” at the end of that bug, filled with a hexagonal pattern. By anatomical definitions, Von Wickten could never be considered anything close to a proper Dragon Descendant; in fact, Zel’s marginal genetic heritage from the dragon-tree worshiping monk nobles, which caused the pattern of her eyes, made her more of a Dragon Descendant than Von Wickten was… And she said as much to taunt him, grinning ear to ear: “No wings, no true magic, yellow blood, and fake, chitinous scales… Truly, you are the furthest thing from a true dragon. The single drop of dragon’s blood in my veins makes me a truer descendant of dragons than you.”

The flash of fury and associated loss of focus was enough for her to marshal her strength, and with a mighty heave, throw Von Wickten’s giant form, slamming him back-first into the ground - or rather, into a series of just-raised stone pillars, which Red had raised after seeing what Zelsys was about to do. Though the impact cracked several of his scales and audibly popped his spine, Von Wickten managed to right himself only a moment after Zel had returned to a proper fighting-stance. Seeing that blunt force was their weakness, she thought to smash his scales; after all, her armored legs were such supreme blunt instruments that she could cut down trees with them.

And indeed, she might have very well smashed apart his armor as she unleashed a southpaw side kick, but far surpassing her expectations, the bug-dragon monstrosity of a man that stood before her managed to grab her foot. That was the first and last time she had underestimated him, swinging her other foot off of the ground with a sudden twist of her torso, manifesting a dozer-blade of congealed lightning around her boot only moments before it connected with the bicep of the very arm that had grabbed her. Though not nearly sufficient to sever his arm or even inflict a deep wound, the lightning had softened his scales enough that the impact shattered them, searing a deep-enough gouge into his arm that he hissed in pain and let go. The first blood was drawn, its purple-yellow substance oozing from the cauterized wound. Following the spin through even after he let go, Zelsys delivered another kick to his left side. He blocked it with his tail, forcing Zel to back off for the moment.

Meanwhile, Red had brought three pillars down on the Locust Queen’s thorax in sequence, pinning her to the ground; Red was taking excessive pleasure in punishing an expy for the Locust Queen she herself had been forced to serve, and insodoing, gave the Red Locust Queen an opening. In a desperate effort to save herself, the Queen manipulated her ghostly flying swords to sever her own back end just below where it connected to the front half of her mutant body, leaving her as a humanoid mutant with disproportionately large, powerful, and bladed legs. She howled in pain as yellow hemolymph sprayed out, but it soon ceased, and she spun around on one spindly leg with a dexterity that one who had just severed their own vital organs absolutely would not have. Red didn’t seem surprised at all at the spilling of milky-white, head-sized capsules from the cut-open thorax; if anything, she was surprised it had taken this long for the Red Locust Queen to take this measure, even if it was extremely drastic. Despite her size, the Queen was dextrous enough to get out of the way of the further pillars which Red manifested, creating distance and making her way to join Von Wickten’s side.

Red blocked off the Queen’s path by raising pillars across the entire chamber, splitting it down the middle with a cage-wall that Zelsys could still squeeze through; it was an opportunity the slayer took, choosing to eliminate the Queen before dealing with Von Wickten proper. She blasted across the chamber faster than the Queen could ever hope to move, her phantom swords stabbing and scoring the ground in Zel’s wake. As she neared Red and Vic, she pulled the grenade from her belt and tossed it to the young man, loading a Type-2 shell into her cannon right afterward.

She gestured to Red, before leaning in to instruct her protegé: “We’ll draw the queen in, immobilize her, and force her mouth open. You just pull the pin and throw the grenade in; that’s all you have to do.”

The young man nodded, knowing full well how to operate one of these from his time serving in the local militia, though he had only ever thrown training dummies that were loaded with tiny black powder charges for simulation purposes. Just as they’d planned, so too they did; through generous application of her ability to manifest pillars of false blackstone, and by drawing on the Terra-rich environment, Red was able to force the Queen to approach lest she be pummeled, while Zel helped the chase from another side by constantly pelting the insect-monarch with spheres of lightning that, bit by bit, ate away at the flesh of her back. Though she was fast and strong, the Locust Queen simply didn’t have much dexterity in her bipedal form, clearly not used to even walking in it, let alone fighting. The broken state of her staff, too, impeded her ability to maneuver her blades, which were barely a factor while they chased her like this.

Once she was in place, Red smashed the Queen from the front with three pillars to the stomach while raising one perpendicular to her slumped form from behind, up which Zelsys ran to reach the head. With all her might, muscles writhing under her skin as light flashed within them, she grasped the Locust Queen’s mandibles and pried them open. She could feel one of her biceps threatening to tear from the bone as the Queen struggled to close her mouth, and with no direct line to the ground, she couldn’t draw Metallum to reinforce it, leaving it a ticking clock. Fortunately, Victor wasn’t incompetent or stupid, and had pulled the pin right on time, but… The queen kept thrashing about, rendering a throw a true coinflip. He hated the idea of what he was about to do, but he did it anyways, sprinting up to the queen and burning a lungful of Pneuma to propel himself into a high jump tossing the lit grenade into the queen’s maw from mere meters away.

Zel felt her bicep tearing fibre by fibre, the tendon threatening to give, but it was the combination of slick insect-spit and the Queen’s continued thrashing that made her lose her grip. As Zelsys flew through the air the Queen’s jaws snapped shut, with the maddened, doomed woman lurching forward in an effort to at least sever her would-be killer’s arm.

It was a fate that had befallen Zelsys when she had shoved her arm down the Willowdale Locust Queen’s mouth. He had read about this, and as such had anticipated this possibility. Victor had had the good judgment to sharply breathe in as he flew, and now had the fuel to blast himself away with Aer magic. He had the good fortune… Of skinning his own forearm with a dying bugwoman’s teeth rather than lose the whole thing.

Though she was wrathful and fully intended to kill Zelsys, Red wasn’t so petty as to let someone uninvolved in their feud just fall to the ground and break his head open like a fucking watermelon. The Lady in Red caught Victor mid-fall, and even went so far as to raise a barrier of several short pillars to protect the both of them from the blast of gore and CP-T that originated from the Locust Queen. The compound’s burning globs seethed so intensely they burned into Red’s fake blackstone as if it were wood.

To her surprise, the young man wasn’t screaming or crying. He just raised his hand, and stared at it with a blank, vacant stare.

Red’s first thought was to reconstruct it; the amount of biomass lost wasn’t that major, but she wasn’t going to bet on some lanky teenager’s Vitae reservers. She retrieved a bottle of Tengri’s Tears and shoved it in his mouth, commanding him: “Drink. All of it.”

Only as he obeyed did she recall her Subcore and begin muttering the incantations of reconstruction, a protracted way of commanding the human body as the Dungeon Core had once commanded her: “Remake thyself.”

As his stripped-raw forearm became enveloped in serpents of iridescent Fog and crystalline ringing resounded over the sound of Zelsys arguing with and mocking Von Wickten, what grew back wasn’t skin. It was bone. Solid plates of it, interlocking and articulated, forming a whole gauntlet in place of lost skin. Certainly, the boy’s chest and a good part of his neck had such plating, but… That his body could grow solid bone so quickly, even with the aid of her magick, was a surprise.

“You’ve picked a good disciple if you teach at all like you fight…” she thought to herself.

Meanwhile, Zel had landed and now stood face to face with Von Wickten, the two separated by a cage-wall of rapidly crumbling faux-blackstone pillars, her right arm hanging limply by her side as she pulled out her Tablet, retrieving her box of alchemically activated iron pills. She popped two of them in her mouth, willing her body to break them down now, and so it was: Her stomach acid was alkahest, able to melt nearly anything.