Crossing the chamber’s threshold brought Zelsys through a bizarrely winding hallway with multiple full loops and downward stairways, then to an intermediate chamber about four meters wide and twice as long.

The door at the other side wouldn’t open at her rather brisk approach, its glyphs lighting up only halfway. In the short while she spent standing there waiting in the hopes it would open, she noticed the glyphs filling each time she heard the dungeon’s mechanisms rumbling.

After a solid ten seconds of waiting, she grew frustrated and decided to examine the rest of the chamber. Besides its pristine surfaces and fully functioning lightgems, the sole centerpiece was a familiar glyph plastered on one wall, underneath which was a small alcove in the wall. The alcove itself only held a bar with ergonomic grooves.

Unlike the door, the wall glyph lit up like the night sky the moment she stepped foot within arm’s reach of it, without any procedural increase in brightness. At this proximity, it became obvious why the glyph was familiar - it closely resembled the projection glyphs on her Tablet, at least in general construction. It flickered blue for a moment, then turned red and displayed a message in the same colour.

You’ve callously butchered enough of my children. Enjoy starving to death in this chamber, homunculus.

Raising an eyebrow, Zelsys reached in and took hold of the handle under the assumption it would let her exert her will over the glyph, as she did with her Tablet. Warm buzzing crawled up her arm, and the message flickered. A spark of will, a command to the arcane device.

Warm buzzing became pins and needles.

“Open the door,” she commanded in her inner monologue. Pins and needles became piercing pain, now as if thousands of needles pierced the skin that touched the handle every second. Zelsys fought it off with a breath of fog and a snarling grin, staring into the projection as she gathered every bit of mental fortitude she could muster.

There was a presence behind the red text, a presence other than the one that instructed her in the first chamber. Her deathgrip on the handle turned her knuckles stark white and made the joints of her fingers pop as sensation vanished from her forearm, a thumping numbness overtaking continuous pain.

Red words became red static as the glyph began to flicker in hypnotic patterns. The chamber’s lightgems went out one by one, until only the glyph’s blood-coloured strobing illuminated the chamber.

“So be it. Enter the chamber ahead and face your doom,” echoed a many-layered voice in Zel’s head, a stomach-turning image flashing in her mind’s eye at the same time. A Pateirian woman’s head, her lower jaw split and her face stretched to a sickening degree, deep red stretch marks covering her cheeks and forehead. It was the Red Mantis’s polar opposite; both were equally transformed, yet where one maintained a bizarre beauty throughout the transformation, the other only became more hideous. Perhaps it was merely the luck of the draw, or the person’s mental state influenced the process - she didn’t know, and didn’t care.

She would kill them both.

When the voice and image both faded, the glyph on the wall flickered out only to return in bright blue, the lightgems slowly coming back on as the projection took form. A staccato of messages, flickering in then changing the moment Zelsys had read them.

The Parasite was not meant to have influence here. Her hatred for you granted her the resolve to reach this far from the core chamber. She will render her children more aggressive, more dangerous. I can compensate, but a sacrifice is required. You possess a wendigo’s Azoth stone. It will be a suitable sacrifice.

A hole opened at the bottom of the alcove and Zel felt a mental pulse from the handle, beseeching her to let go. After stretching her wrist and doing a few hand exercises to make sure she hadn’t completely lost sensation in her forearm, she reached behind her back and retrieved her Tablet. Its familiar warmth spread through her palm as it came alive, as reliable as ever. With a few swipes and taps, she reached the item in question and retrieved it from the vortex.

This small, bulbous gem, born from the self-destruction of a desperate human life. Who knew how many the man-eater had murdered, how many souls had been snuffed out to forge this thing. It was only right to let the dead live on as another figment of her strength.

Zelsys dropped the stone into the hole, watching it disappear before the hole shut without a seam. The glyph came alive again, ominous clacking and thumping resounding from beyond the wall.

A message, one that hung there until she complied.

Grab the handle.

A pang of hesitation, suffocated by her trust of the machine’s inherently truthful nature. The dungeon didn’t lie. It told her it would try to kill her, and it had.

It told her the Lightning Butcher would wait for her in the chamber ahead, and she trusted that claim too. She took hold of the handle, gripped it tight, felt a thrumming sensation spreading through her arm. Thrumming became numbness, all feeling fading.

The wendigo is a beast of vengeance, an ancient guerilla sicced on invaders out of desperation. I will refine this unholy might, make it pure.

From the black stone emerged a hypodermic needle of the very same material, tremendously thick and tipped with a finer point than any blade. Zelsys watched it sink into her forearm, its angle shifting ever so subtly as it found a vein.

Her hand went cold, the device draining who knew how much blood before a second tube came out, just above the needle, stopping above the point where needle pierced skin. Out came a small glob of black substance with the consistency of molten asphalt, after which both tools slowly retreated back into the wall.

The projection changed one last time as sensation returned to her arm, a wrenching ache thumping through it. The goo quickly solidified into a rubbery consistency, sticking to her skin.

Two more flashed messages.

I know not how long it will take,

to make a boon of this.

I can only promise it will be ready,

before you reach the core chamber.

After the second one vanished, the glyph finally showed an utterly mundane personal profile of the sort that the Tablet showed. It looked much nicer and everything was worded with archaic, flowery verbiage, but the functionality was all the same.

This would’ve certainly been incredibly useful to anyone who didn’t have a portable version of the device, but to Zelsys, it was just a less practical version of what she already had. She let go of the handle, stopped craning her head at that uncomfortable angle, and sat down by the opposite wall with her Tablet in hand. There were two things she wanted to do before moving on.

The first was checking her traits, for posterity. It showed them the same way as before, only for the word “Survivor” in Survivor’s Instinct to flicker and become scrambled, until it was illegible. Zelsys tried checking its details, and most of the text here was scrambled as well. It all vanished, replaced by a system message as a familiar, warm thrum shot up her arm. The device was actively reading her, for the first time in a little while.

SCANNING UPDATING RECORD UPDATE SUCCESSFUL TRAIT ADVANCEMENT

Another flicker of the projection, a few stray wisps of Fog rising from the glyph.

SLAYER’S INSTINCT Type: Sensory Enhancement Trigger: Situational Effects:

Situational Awareness B-, Sense Motive C,

Danger Sense B-, Vulnerability Sense C+

Advancement: Exploit weaknesses. There is no beast that cannot be felled, one just needs to find the weakness.

“Is this why I knew where to pull…?” she wondered, furrowing her brow at the increasing vagueness of advancement hints. When could it have advanced? Thinking back, the most obvious options were either when she butchered the lightning, or when she used Stormsurge to restart her own heart after the Mantis stopped it.

At the end of the day, the specifics didn’t particularly matter. She took a few more moments to retrieve one of the stick grenades and examine it closely, finding guiding arrows on its metal casing that wordlessly instructed her to open a latch and twist a small piece at its very top. The piece screwed out, exposing a hollow inside the grenade with the letters “CP-T” in red, crossed out.

She wasn’t going to use more CP-T than she had to.

Zel stood to her feet, now pulling up Fog Storage. There was a particular item here that had grabbed her interest.

The survival sparkers.

She retrieved ten of them, scraping off their Ignis crystals on the edge of the grenade so that they fell into the hollow. Only then did she reach for one of the remaining CP-T phials, peeling its seal off and scooping the compound into the hole with a finger. Just half the vial filled the hole and then some, after which she corked the phial and put the seal back on.

Once these were in the weapon, she simply took care to not tip it over and walked over to the door. It came alive at her approach and swung open to a square chamber - at least, she assumed its original shape had been square. Most of the half opposite her was utterly consumed by one large hive, possessed of three entrances shaped exactly to fit their respective Doorman’s arm shields. Seeing as the hive didn’t reach the ceiling, she could see part of a path deeper into the chamber over the hive - right through the middle.

There was only a small obstacle between Zelsys and her way out of here - and assumedly her way to retrieving the Lightning Butcher. An U-shaped formation of locusts, three lines of drones standing as arm-cannon fodder before one line of Warriors. Behind the battle-line towered a graven commander, one whose sad visage was almost familiar.

It had a clearly feminine frame, its frame towering to three meters and then some. Pitch-black chitin partially covered its form, most segments on the forelimbs and torso replaced by bright-red, artisanal pieces that harkened back to the Red Mantis. Her head seemed to have itself metamorphosed, sprouting a substantial mane of many-segmented chitinous tendrils that superficially looked like hair. Zelsys couldn’t help mentally comparing them to the legs on one of those giant forest centipedes, the way they curled in… It made her want to shudder.

The commander looked like a female version of the Black Swordsman, but unlike her counterpart she didn’t have extra limbs sprouting from her back, and her weapon wasn’t a glorified wall of raw iron.

It didn’t look particularly refined, that was certain, but the sword whose pommel she rested her hands atop looked to be a rather practical two-hander built of the dungeon’s very own black stone.

What stood out most about this woman was her face. The lower half was covered by a bright-red chitinous mask aesthetically reminiscent of the Mantis’s, whilst everything between it and the hairline looked normal. This small slice of her human self revealed that she was not even Pateirian, both her skin tone and facial structure betraying her Ikesian ethnicity. Zelsys inwardly named her “The Sister”, purely due to her similarity to the Black Swordsman.

The Sister’s piercing, purple eyes tracked Zel’s every movement with a suspicious lack of hostility. In fact, even the other bugs were suspiciously calm. They weren’t twitching, clicking their mandibles, or moving towards her, even as she took a few careful steps to approach them, putting into her step all the swagger and ego that she could muster.

She waved her gun around, flashed a grin at the Sister, all to keep attention away from the grenade behind her back. The Sister flashed a razor-mawed grin of her own, lifting her sword and raising it on her shoulders as she leaned back against the hive.

Thundering at a volume that shook the ground and reverberated in Zel’s bones, she spoke in a sing-song accent, “You are courting death.”

With a chuckle of honest surprise Zel retorted, “My relationship with death is purely platonic, I assure you.”

“So I’ve heard,” the Sister said. “You’re the first to survive Heartstopper Venom. If you don’t mind me asking, how?”

“It stops the heart,” Zel admitted, raising her hand as she made a few small arcs jump between her fingers. “But it sure doesn’t stop it restarting.”

At that, the Sister looked taken aback, raising an eyebrow.

“Storm-Soul Cultivation? This far from Kargaria?” she questioned with an amused tone.

The Sister stopped leaning, taking on a wide stance. A set of locust wings spread out from her back, whirring as loud as any motor engine as she flew to the top of the hive.

“You’re more amusing that your siblings, homunculus. If you live through this, we might cross blades as equals,” proclaimed the Sister before she took a deep breath and exhaled a cloud of pheromones so thick it could be seen with the naked eye. She proceeded to step back and drop to the ground at the other side of the hive, just as the locusts that served her were all simultaneously driven to a murderous frenzy.

Zel took a breath into one lung whilst emptying the other, exhaling as she pulled the grenade’s fuse.

One second.

One and a half.

She tossed it and exhaled as she leapt backwards.

Two seconds.

She landed on her back, focusing on accelerating her own heartbeat, starting the Breath Engine and using her arms to shield herself from any shrapnel, rather than the charging bugs.

Three.

There was a thunderous noise, a flash of light, and a wave of heat when the grenade exploded - a three second fuse, to one tenth of a second.

Zelsys leapt to her feet, immediately grabbing a drone by the mandibles before she kicked it away, taking for herself a fresh pair of these makeshift weapons. As the smoke cleared, she saw that a third of the drones were killed where they stood by the blast, whilst another third were screaming and on fire. The Warriors weren’t any more unscathed, with the exoskeletons of those within the blast radius broken open and gobs of CP-T burning huge holes through their exposed insides. The grenade had, as far as she could tell, incapacitated nearly two fifths of the enemy number.

Her small experiment with survival sparkers seemed to have paid off as well, with a good half-dozen drones and a Warrior well outside the grenade’s range struggling to pry a blazing ember out of themselves.

That being said she still knew she was still outnumbered, wondering, “Ten to one? Fifteen to one? Twenty to one?”

In all this excitement, she didn’t bother to count. Zel used the mandible in her left hand to give a nearby drone an impromptu transorbital lobotomy, lodging it all the way in its skull before she crumpled its torso with a steel-shinned left kick. The thing went flying into one of its kin from the sheer force of impact.

The drones needed to be dealt with, but it was the warriors who were the real threat. Zelsys quickly thought up an impromptu path of approach from the left around the back, despite the lack of any gaps in the Warrior line at that spot. It didn’t matter. She’d just jump over them.

And indeed, she would. But first, there were no fewer than fourteen drones swarming around her, trying to surround her, and that just wouldn’t do. She also didn’t have the time to reload if she were to fire her gun, and frankly, she wanted to use her hands again.

So many different deformities on every drone. So many small flaws in their exoskeletons.

So many loose plates she could pry off that she might jam her arm into their guts to crush their hearts.

The body high of Fog-breathing had fully settled in now, steady puffs of Fog pouring between the teeth of her snarling grin. Zelsys let loose her inhibitions and charged forward, rejoicing at the cramp-like ache behind every cannonball punch and ironclad kick, laughing at the curious crunching of her prey’s exoskeletons when they fell to her.

It was then that she started counting, for no purpose other than to taunt the Warriors, for she was confident that they were just barely intelligent to understand mockery.

“Think I might need a leg-up!” she laugh-yelled a taunt in a mocking tone, to the pulse-punding rhythm of every skull she crushed with a punch and every torso she caved in with a kick.

She planted her boot-heel on a particularly bulky drone’s chest, pulling on its leg until the hip joint popped free and used the momentum to toss the liberated leg towards a small group of drones that were trying to get around back to ambush her. It bowled them over and indirectly killed one outright, its head smashed against the hard dungeon floor.

Breath by breath, limb by limb, drone by drone, she ripped and tore her way through more drones that she could bother to count, at last arriving within melee range of the outermost Warrior in the line. It and all the Warriors in the immediate vicinity surged into action, their bulbous little eyes glimmering with hatred as they wound their giant arms back and readied to strike at her.

Zelsys dodged to the left of the nearest Warrior’s strike, getting under its arm and pressing the muzzle of her arm-cannon right into its side. There would be no confrontation, no pitched combat. She’d picked this angle for a reason, made sure a shotshell was loaded for a reason. In the narrow window she had, Zel took care to lower herself so she was in line with the recoil impulse, preparing to use the wall as a springboard when the recoil inevitably threw her against it.

Click. Click. Boom.

Blinded by gunsmoke and the shockwave still echoing through her bones, Zelsys blindly bounced off the wall and through the sulphurous cloud. Passing through it and rolling into a standing position when she landed, Zel didn’t get so much as a second to take account of the destruction she had wrought.

What Warriors were still combat-capable were beelining towards her, one of them already taking a right-armed hammer-strike at her when she got up and another swiftly approaching from the left. She’d already worked the bolt, but the giant thing’s swing interrupted her just as the empty shell clattered to the ground. Her immediate opponent had been nicked by her gun, its exoskeleton missing a small piece and showing cracks on the left side.

Duck to the right. Right hook, exhaling.

Current surging, muscles cramping. Fist met chitin.

Crack.

Punch after punch, breath after breath, she smashed apart the Warrior’s armor. She could feel the other one approaching, its footfalls reverberating ominously. Knowing that it had likely readied itself to pulverize her, Zelsys held the breath of one lung in preparation whilst using the other to fuel her strikes.

At last her fingers sunk into its flesh, current surging through and turning the struggling locust’s tremendous strength against it. It nearly doubled over on top of her before she managed to invoke Heartbreaker. Her arm sunk deeper through its wound and reached the heart.

Just as it popped like a balloon in her grip, Zelsys felt the air behind her shifting, a strike swiftly approaching. An exhalation, a hardening of her back, she felt the Warrior’s fist strike her only to be sent careening back. The timing wasn’t quite right, but it was good enough.

Ripping her arm free and kicking the dead thing backward, she turned her wrath to the toppled-over ambusher. It wasn’t given even the honor of a thorough death - Zel pulled its head off and kicked its arms into pulp before she left it to die, turning to face the rest of its kin. Yet more Warriors had managed to reach close combat range by now, but she had at last taken the time to count them. Eleven that she could see approaching, likely more out of commission. Outnumbered, surrounded, and disarmed, the thought of reloading her gun didn’t even cross Zel’s mind.

This would be a laborious, brutal endeavor.

The perfect training environment.

Arms turned to loose-hanging sacs of meat under the pulverizing force of her steelshod legs, entire bodies crumpled to heaps of twitching muscle with no more than two fingers in a wound and some Fog to make the current flow.

She met many of their strikes head-on, countering their strikes with her left arm so that those she failed the return-to-sender would just knock her back a ways rather than pulverizing her arm. It still hurt, it still rattled the teeth and shook the bones, but she could take it.

Zelsys knew these were just foot-soldiers, she knew she’d face more and more individuals like the Black Swordsman or the Sister the deeper into the dungeon she traveled. This was her opportunity to get a stronger grip on the wild power of Stormsurge, that she might properly utilize it when the Lightning Butcher was finally back in her hands. She could electrocute a foe by using her own fingers as prongs, that much was true - but that was where her natural ability to directly weaponize this imprisoned lightning ended.

Zelsys didn’t have the skill, the means to project it outward in a meaningful way, the way she’d seen Zefaris do. With each Warrior she felled, every head she ripped off an every heart she crushed, she grew more frustrated. “It’s my lackluster grasp of the Fog, has to be,” she thought, standing above a twitching, headless carcass, her right arm covered to the shoulder in yellow viscera.

Her victim blindsided her, in its dying throes lashing out with a blind swipe that she just barely managed to dodge. Frustration boiled over, and forgetting that she hadn’t reloaded, Zelsys took aim at its chest and worked the trigger lever over and over. Her heart was beating like a machine-gun and her engine breathing made roped of Fog continuously pour through her snarling teeth.

Click-clack.

There was a shower of sparks that burned pinhead-sized pits in the Warrior’s exoskeleton. She didn’t care, trying to brute-force something to happen with sheer force of will and breath of Fog. Why did she struggle so much with offensive techniques when they came so naturally to Zefaris?

Click-click.

Another shower of sparks.

In the heat of the moment, Zelsys thoughtlessly worked the lever as hard as she could, even burning her exhalation to channel Stormsurge into the motion. She felt the muscles of her left hand twitching uncontrollable in a vice-grip, myriad tiny electric arcs crackling between her arm and the lever’s metal.

Click-click.

Instead of sparks, a burst of pea-sized white spheres issued forth, bounding into the locust-man’s chest in zig-zagging patterns, crackling with electric charge and chittering as they went. Upon impact there issued forth a series of loud cracks, the spheres exploding as they ripped holes into the dying bug’s exoskeleton. The smell of sulphur filled Zel’s nose as she felt her world come to a stop, her frustrated rage broken by this sudden discovery. It was so simple - her arm-cannon could already produce a prodigal amount of sparks, she just had to add some lightning.

Zel knew it would be harder to produce such effects without the assistance of a Fog-infused arm harness and a handheld spark machine, but that didn’t matter. The biggest flaw of her ranged weapon was the ammunition - limited and extremely powerful. This would bridge the gap.

The entire anger-induced episode spanned only a few seconds, but they were seconds in which she had been a sitting duck. She was already surrounded, three Warriors arrayed around her and readying to crush her from all sides. Having never seen her jump unassisted, they didn’t take into account what she did - ducking down as they charged, then exploding upward with half a lungful exhaled and half burned for Stormsurge.

As she rose up Zel watched the three locusts slam their arms down all in the same spot, each successive one’s smash crushing the arms of those who hit before it.

Click-clack. Click-clack. Click-clack.

Reaching the apex and beginning the descent, Zelsys fired off three shotgun bursts of miniature ball lightning, perfectly timed to her breathing rhythm so that as much Fog could be burned to fuel it as possible. The staccato of gunshot-like cracks was made all the sweeter by pained chattering and screeching, the final payoff being her being able to land right atop one Warrior and just plunging her arm into its exposed flesh to crush its heart.

Simultaneously, she fired off a burst each into the other Warriors’ faces, their eyes burned from their sockets and their shrunken brains exposed when their skulls were ablated. Freeing her arm from viscera once more, Zel jumped down to the ground and simply tipped the two living warriors over, kicking their arms to pulp and leaving them to die where they lay.

This reliable means of ranged offense that didn’t rely on physical ammunition would become a very, very good friend to her, that much was certain. Already she was considering having modifications done to the arm-cannon to better facilitate this mode of use.

Another ćharging Warrior, another raging bull goaded by battle-lust into breaking from the safety of numbers. They were tough, strong, and quite fast for their size, she had to give it to them - they would be optimal bulwarks in combat against relatively normal foot soldiers. She wagered the average sparklock would take a couple shots to punch through their armor, let alone put them down.

To her, though, they were the ideal punching bag. The perfect testing dummy for discovering and testing her own capabilities. Dodge under the right hook, kick its leg out to get it off balance. One shot to blind it, two shots to ablate the chest armor.

“Heartbreaker…” uttered to the sound of her arm plunging into viscera to finish it off. There was a rhythm to it.

Shot after shot, Heartbreaker after Heartbreaker, crushing kick after crushing kick, Zelsys brutally and maliciously put every remaining locust out of commission. When all was said and done, her right arm was thickly coated with viscera whilst her left was nearly pristine, and she was starting to feel the fatigue. With only a few drones left skittering about, she willed both her breathing and heart rate back to normal.

The body-high faded, and two realizations dawned.

First: She had to take a look at the new technique’s details, and if necessary, rename it.

Second, and more excitingly: If it could turn the sparks of a dry-fire to a ball lightning shotgun, what would it do with an actual shell in the chamber?

Eager though she was to find out, Zelsys wasn’t going to just waste ammunition when she could use it against the Sister. After a little while longer mopping up the drones, she scoured the yellow-painted floor for her empty shell and moved on. She moved on not by breaching the hive, but by simply jumping to its roof - there would be time to dispose of the Doormen later. In the distance was her opponent, standing with her legs wide and hands on the pommel of her sword.

An altar could be seen behind her, but her imperious figure obscured what it held. It was the Butcher. Had to be.

Zel sat down atop the hive and pulled out her Tablet, much to the Sister’s apparent bemusement.

The Inquisitor hated the feeling of traversing a Fog Gate. She felt that unnerving sensation wash over her, unimpeded by clothing or armor. The dungeon’s spiel written in Fog alleviated some of the concerns that arose when she realized all of her weapons were gone, from her sword, to her boot knife, to her sparklocks.

With a sigh into her mask, the Inquisitor took one of her spare Ignis gems, grasping it tightly in a gloved hand. With a breath of Fog and a muttered invocation, she stepped through the door. A long chamber with two side paths, both to the right. A hive blocked off the path down the middle, its Doorman already retreating as drones poured from the entrance.

Just another day on the job. The Inquisitor took a moment to button up her coat, walking calmly toward her foe.

Gnashing jaws and swiping claws were met by simple, effective violence.

A caved-in skull, a broken arm, a steel-toed kick.

The drones weren’t a threat, as long as she didn’t let them pile on. Even their limited offensive capabilities were worthless against her armor, struggling to even score the outer layers that knitted back together in seconds.

No, the real threat were those that charged out of the hive when the Doorman retreated far enough, four in total.

These chitin-clad gorillas with crushing strength and deceptive speed. She would boil them in their shells. With how huge their arms were, it would be best to either annihilate them from afar or get in too close for their comfort.

She hadn't expected to get an excuse for this, but a small part of her relished the opportunity. Even if she compensated by burning Fog, this technique would drain much of the gem’s charge. That was more than acceptable.

It was rudimentary, crude, and easily countered by anyone with the level of training required to use it. Against foes that had no way to counteract it, however…

“Heatshock,” she invoked in a hushed exhalation, and a crimson-orange corona surrounded her right arm. When she ducked under a Warrior’s punch and delivered a hook to its side, she only had a moment to get out of the way before it toppled over. The creature’s armor was unscathed, yet a mixture of foul steam and bodily fluids gushed out of its mouth as it writhed on the ground.

As she turned her gaze to the other bugs, the Inquisitor made a mental note, “More vulnerable to Ignis than expected.”

The remainder of the Warriors in this chamber met the same fate, boiled alive from the inside out whilst the Inquisitor remained unscathed. She took quite a few full strikes from drones and glancing blows from Warriors, but much of it was due to her own carelessness. The remaining insects, from Doormen to drones, were dispatched in a much more hands-on and arguably less painful manner, for the sake of resource conservation.

What purpose was there to dodging a strike that could not harm her? It was faster to lean into it and use the opening to dispatch the attacker. The first side path she explored was the one closest to the chamber’s entrance, leading her to a dead end blocked off by a wall of pillars. From the floor in front of said wall protruded three altars, one taller in the center that gripped her sword and two to the side, each bearing a basin with a hole in the bottom. The central pillar had a proximity activation glyph, at the center of which sat the nozzle of a Fog-writing device.

The blazing blade hungers,

like its prey.

Feed it till it’s sated,

or nurture it to strength.

The lifeblood of insects feeds,

the lifeblood of its master nurtures.

Choose one or both, but be warned: Greater growth necessitates more time. It would await in the chamber ahead.

When it mentioned the lifeblood of insects, the left basin’s glyph lit up. At the mention of her lifeblood, the right one did.

The Inquisitor wasn’t one to trust the Fog Logic of a dungeon, and so just returned to the nearest hive and hoisted one of the engorged drones over her shoulder. Bleeding it dry into the left basin seemed to have no effect at first, until she grabbed hold of her weapon and tried to pull it out. An inhuman force yanked it out of her grasp as her sword vanished into the altar, only to pop back up following a suspicious mechanical whirring.

She pulled it free, upon which all three altars vanished into the floor and she noticed what the altar had done. The fuel gem slot now held something unfamiliar, a gemstone of mixed blues and oranges that was encased in the dungeon’s black stone rather than brass. Whilst both her coat and her gloves were highly fire-resistant, she still held the weapon out with cautious suspicion as she willed it to ignite.

Tongues of blue-tipped fire that didn’t seem to radiate any heat at all danced across the edge, blazing brighter and more wildly than the flames produced by any ordinary fuel cell did. Despite her distrust of the dungeon core, it still rewarded her for choosing the easier path. A wry smile crossed her lips, though even if others were present it wouldn’t be noticeable in any way - she’d realized something. “The blood of insects feeds,” the dungeon said, and so it was. Though she had no way to know, something told the Inquisitor that this fuel gem would stick by her for a long, long time, that it wouldn’t just shatter into pieces after the third or fourth recharge and depletion cycle like standard fuel gems did.

She slid her blade into its sheath to put it out, and briskly made her way back to the main chamber. All that was left to do was clean up the survivors and retrieve her remaining property.