Sitting down against one of the chamber’s walls and pulling out the Tablet, Zelsys felt the thrumming warmth shoot up her arm all the way to the shoulder, more intense than usual. Even a few minutes after she had gotten out of the statue, the icy-hot feeling still persisted. The most intense of it was long gone, but the less intense it became, the more slowly it faded. Zel wondered if it was slower because there was less of the substance, and thus it took her body longer to break down and absorb the last remnants of it.

The device came to life, showing an unusual variation of the update message.

SCANNING UPDATING RECORD LIBRARY EXCEPTION FOUND RECOMPILING MNEMONIC RECORD

“I think it’s struggling to make sense of the Azoth’s effects,” Zef remarked as the message flickered in place for far longer than usual, a good half-minute. At last, it changed.

UPDATE SUCCESSFUL

It proceeded to show the usual attribute readout, at which point Zel swiped to the trait list. It had one new listing, colored in light purple.

ENGINE OF RETRIBUTION Type: Azothic Extract Trigger: Variable Effects: Dualism, Retributive Battery Advancement: Exact Retribution

The description was lacking at best, and instead of the usual extra text at the bottom there was a phrase in yellow.

Mnemonic Record

Curious, she tapped on it. That familiar, warm buzzing washed down her scalp and upper back, and she understood.

“You were right,” Zel said, backing out of this detail readout and swiping to the techniques list. “The Tablet couldn’t properly compile the information into text, so it just left it as raw memory.”

“So… Now you know what it actually does?” the markswoman squinted quizzically.

Furrowing her brow, Zelsys murmured, “I… Think I do?”

She focused on recalling the raw knowledge that had just poured into her head, finding that she couldn’t quite put it into words. It was like a dream, fleeting and hard to capture. Tapping the button again let her catch some of the knowledge and put it to memory, just enough to actually gather a coherent explanation.

“It uh… The Dualism effect lets me change how other techniques work in two different ways, and…” she trailed off, tapping the button again. The third time was the charm, and her understanding finally clicked together, just as her body finished absorbing the infusion and the last remnants of that icy-hot feeling faded. She grinned, and explained the rest in simple terms.

“Alright, I finally get it,” she said, willing the Tablet to show her the technique listing for Engine of Retribution. It listed four techniques, grouped in pairs. They were unnamed, but names for them flickered into place whilst Zelsys continued to explain.

Zefaris was caught unprepared for the surprisingly thorough explanation that Zel gave, simplifying a doubtlessly complex intermingling of traits and techniques down to the idea of two alternate combat styles. The explanation was, however, filled with such confidence and raw charm that only the chocolate-skinned amazon could exude, as far as Zefaris was concerned.

In Slayer Style, Rebound Pulse would siphon the energy of an attack to charge Retributive Battery, allowing Zelsys to just stop an attack dead and then hit back with her own strength, plus all the force behind the preceding attack. Zel supposed it could be called Siphoning Pulse for distinction.

On the other hand, Beast Style would cause Rebound Pulse to cover a much larger area and last longer with the same Fog investment. Instead of deflecting attacks it would make them slip off, drawing on the friction to charge Retributive Battery. This mode would also change how the battery would function, apparently rendering it into a much more literal Fulgur capacitor. This style’s altered defense could be distinguished as Graze Pulse.

Zelsys also mentioned that she felt like either style would probably influence how she fought, and that she wouldn’t know until she tried it.

“I’ll have to figure out a use for that Fulgur when I’m not close enough to use the saw, but I’ve got some ideas,” Zel said as she rose to her feet, pulling Zef with her.

Zef chuckled, half-jokingly questioning, “What, Thundercannon not enough for you?”

“You never know,” Zel responded as they passed into the intermediary chamber. “It might run out of ammo, or get jammed, or I might do something stupid and fuck up my arm too bad to work the lever.”

The chamber was an expanded version of the usual layout, with a projection glyph plus control handle on the wall to either side. The one on the left was the same pattern Zel had seen on floor one, whereas the one to the right looked like a downscaled and simplified version of the glyph in the Fog Transit chamber. In the short time whilst they waited for the door to the next chamber to open Zef curiously grabbed the right-side wall’s control handle to check the map. It showed two options.

Dungeon Map Path Map

Selecting the former showed a smaller version of the projection they’d seen back in the Fog Transit chamber, whilst selecting the latter showed a more detailed display of their path to the next Fog Transit chamber. Zef found that she could even will the map to zoom into some chambers and show their interiors. For the one they’d just left, it showed a static layout, and the same was the case for the next one. The last chamber on their path, it showed in real-time from multiple perspectives, each suspended within the eyes of an abstract, humanoid statue. There was a strange blur in the center of the chamber, a flickering gap in the projection that was overlaid with the golem head symbol.

“The map shows room layouts, but it’s obfuscating what the last room’s golem looks like,” the markswoman grumbled in annoyance, turning her gaze to Zel only for her eye to be drawn towards a bright, eyeball-sized sphere of lightning above her index finger.

While Zef examined the map, Zel attempted to produce some form of usable lightning without using her hands.

Running current through herself and even producing arcs up to about a meter in length, both of those came naturally. The issue was that the essence of Fulgur, being what it was, tended to act similarly to mundane electric current. Zelsys struggled over and over again to bend that flow, to make it come out of her shoulders or her back, but it didn’t want to. At most, she could produce small, unfocused arcs.

Not unless… Not unless she gave it a core to form around, like the sparks from her gun’s striker. Wondering if a sphere of Fog would be enough, Zel took another break and held up her index finger, compressing her lungs without exhaling as she focused on exuding a small bead of Fog from the digit.

A thin, glowing line ran down the length of her arm towards the digit, and a silver wisp as thin as a hair unwound from the tip of her finger. It tangled around itself and balled up into a bead no larger than a droplet of water, tenuously attached by the hair-thin umbilicus.

Then, it was a spark of will and more Fog to ignite it. A few tiny arcs jumped from her fingertip to the bead before the vague luminescence of Fog became seething, white lightning, chittering and chirping, just as Zef turned around to see it.

Her eye flicked from the orb to Zel’s face, then back to the orb, then back to Zel’s face.

“You figured it out already?” she questioned with audible befuddlement.

“Uh… If by it you mean a glorified parlor trick, sure,” Zel chuckled back, whipping her hand towards a wall. The tiny ball lightning zipped off, zigzagging on its path before it struck the wall and popped with a tiny flash of light, leaving no trace of its existence besides a few firefly-like flashes of ionized air.

Furrowing her brow and clearly curious as to how the possible new technique worked, the markswoman posed another question, “You can make a bigger one, can’t you?”

“Probably,” Zel replied. “Though I’d wager a sovereign that it’ll take a good bit of polish before it’s practical to use in a fight, since I had to extrude a Fog core for the Fulgur to stick to and all. Way easier to just… Y’know...”

She raised her left arm and mimicked the motion of pulling the lever, “Thundercannon.”

Their conversation might have continued, if the door hadn’t finished lighting up and slammed open, revealing a downward staircase. Relaxed discussion became relaxed caution as they peered down the stairs, advancing into the depths below.

Seventeen stairs to the next landing, then a right-angle turn.

No sound, only their own footfalls and breathing.

Seventeen more stairs. Another right-angle turn.

Then another.

And another.

Then, at last, another door, one that opened instantly at their approach.

Stepping through met them with a dimly-lit, square chamber. In its center sat a lithe young man draped in a loose, bright-red robe. He was surrounded by the corpses of Locust Nobles, fourteen in number. They varied from almost human to almost fully locust, and three of them possessed the telltale bright-red mantis mutations. Each of them had had their throat slit in the same, perfect way, and none of them showed signs of struggle.

The man’s skin and even his hair were utterly snow-white, accentuated by streaks of pink. Subtle chitinous plates could be picked out here or there, his pinky fingers entirely turned to armored talons. His facial structure was indistinct and so utterly symmetrical it was unnerving. In front of him were laid out carved bones atop a small mat.

Zefaris circled him with her gun squarely trained on his head, occasionally looking down at a corpse here and there to make sure they were really dead, whilst Zelsys just… Approached.

Cleaver in hand, she walked right up and squatted down in front of him, looking into his motionless face. She was ready to cut him in half the moment he moved, but she was also curious. This one didn’t quite give off the same crusty feeling as the other bugs. Even the Red Mantis had a faint trace of it, but this one didn’t exude venom, only tranquility.

His eyes shuddered open. Pure white, with a single dot each for a pupil. Smiling, he looked up at her.

“They weren’t lying when they said you looked like a walking propaganda poster,” he remarked with a richly accented voice as soft as silk and as tranquil as the dead of night. “I suppose you might wish to exterminate me, is that right?”

“I am to purge this place of locusts, make sure the hive isn’t a threat,” Zel admitted. “But you don’t look like a locust, or smell like one. In fact, you look like uh…”

She looked up to Zefaris for confirmation, “An Orchid Mantis, was it?”

Just as the markswoman got around to directly behind the bugman, she gave a hesitant nod, to which Zel turned her gaze back towards the strange man.

An unsettling, inhuman smile spread across his face, “Correct. My lack of murderous inclinations rendered my existence inconvenient to the Queen, so I was directed to consume the Blood of God until told to stop. Fortunately for me, my current state was the result, even if my mobility was impaired in the process.”

“So you’re stuck,” Zel said. ”Why? And what about all these corpses?”

“Yes, I am stuck. As for those whose shells surround us, they snuffed themselves out willingly,” he said, slowly gesturing around himself. “When a Locust Noble grows dissatisfied with their lot in the hive, they are sent to me to have their fortunes read. Some get their answers and walk away. Others choose to end themselves and give me answers in return, in the form of their death-rattle.”

Zelsys considered him for a moment, then looked up at Zef again, “See if the door will open. I don’t think we need to exterminate this one.”

The blonde backed up towards the door. Both her and Zel saw that the door wasn’t reacting in the slightest, and the Diviner inferred as much from their reaction.

Before either of them could say or do anything he let out a melancholic chuckle, “It can’t be helped, I suppose. Do not attempt to find another way, I knew that I would go out like this.”

Faster than the eyes could see, the Diviner raised his hand to his throat, digging his bladed pinky finger into the alabaster-like flesh and slitting his own throat. From the wound gushed forth milky-white, glimmering liquid, running off his robes without ever soaking in.

He took a gurgling breath, yet remained utterly calm as he spoke, his lungs audibly filling with blood with every word he spoke and every breath he took. Zel felt the blood surrounding her boots, but something compelled her to stay and maintain eye contact.

“I see now that I misinterpreted the others’ death-rattles,” he said. ”The embodiment of the war’s fallout, doomed to rage against the heavens beyond death itself, they said, each and every one of them.”

The Diviner coughed and choked on his own blood, taking another ragged, bubbling breath.

“Thgh-they spoke of a raging monsh… A monstrosity, an Engine of Retribution,” he continued, his voice becoming a reverberating, otherworldly noise. “I thought you would be a mindless killer, or bound by destiny as so many others, but now I see that you are so, so much worse.”

He chuckled to himself, then broke into a bloody, frothing cackle, all the while his own lifeblood flowed forth and pooled around him. When he next spoke, his voice was a wheezing echo, “You are the ideal in the propaganda poster, made manifest through vile alchemy, empowered by the afterbirth of the war. When faced with malicious pursuit, you choose to strike back rather than retreat.”

Another wheezing breath, and his voice became even more ghostly, now a truly horrendous death-rattle. And yet, he remained perfectly understandable.

“My masters know well how dangerous people like you are, they will do all they can to stamp you out. I suggest you seek out one of the ruined Cultivator Families, plunder their remnants for knowledge and artefacts. The dead won’t mind, I assure you.”

His voice fell silent, and the puddle of shimmering-white blood that he now sat in stopped glowing. Staring ahead, empty-eyed and unmoving with a tranquil smile on his face, the Diviner was dead.

Indeed he was dead, as the door’s quick lighting-up and subsequent quiet opening confirmed. Both of the women were more than ready to leave this unnerving scene behind, yet just as Zel stood up, the Diviner’s form twitched back to life. He wordlessly held out his hands over the divination bones, and they floated from the puddle to array themselves before his face.

For a moment he gazed at the bones, then snapped his dead-eyed stare to Zelsys.

“I looghk for-ward to watching youhr path unfhold,” the dead man wheezed. “Gho-o. The do-or will close soon.”

She didn’t need to be told twice.

When they finally entered the next intermediary chamber and felt the door slam shut behind them, they let both let out a sigh of relief. Zefaris leaned against the wall, using the short downtime to make absolutely sure Pentacle was fully loaded and wouldn’t jam, bewilderment evident in her face. In much the same manner, Zelsys mulled over the entire incident with the Diviner. It had only been seconds, and already it felt like a fever dream.

“Y’think he’ll just get back up as if nothing happened?” the slayer pondered out loud, considering how the man could survive slitting his own throat and bleeding out.

“Don’t know. Not so sure I want to know. He could’ve meant that he’ll watch you from the afterlife. Or he’ll just get a new body,” Zef replied.

The cyclops elaborated further, “There are so many contradictory fables about Orchid Mantis mutants that one can never know what is true. I’m a little hesitant to believe he was the real thing, even with what he did. What he said.”

“That ridiculous, huh?” Zel chuckled.

Zef nodded, “Yeah. Unassisted flight, immortality, completely nulling the abilities of other Fog-breathers, destructive power ten times what Ubul could bring to bear. Most likely a mix of official propaganda and battlefield myths.”

Then, it was silence whilst they waited for the door to open. It was occasionally broken up by the sound of Zefaris half-cocking the hammer, then letting it back down. At some point she stopped, looking up with an expression that made it clear she had just remembered something.

“Say, can you pull out a couple coppers and silvers out of Fog Storage?” she asked.

“...Sure? What good’re they going to be in a dungeon?” Zel asked back, though she had already pulled out the Tablet and opened Fog Storage. By the time the answer came, she was already holding the device above her open palm, watching individual coins fall out of the Fog vortex.

Two… Three… Four...

Clink… Clink… Clink...

“It somewhat ah… Slipped my mind back in the between-floor chamber,” Zef said somewhat flusteredly, before she swiftly moved onto explaining why she wanted coins. “I figured out how to bounce bullets off them. Five coppers and, say… three silvers should be good, I think. I really just want the silvers to see if they work any better than coppers.”

Zelsys couldn’t help chuckling at that as she handed over the handful of coins, “Sounds an awful lot like something I’d do if I used a reasonably-sized gun. Got enough ammo?”

Zef nodded as she stowed the coins away into a pocket, save for one silver that she absent-mindedly flipped between her fingers while they waited out the rest of the door’s timer. The distant thumping and clacking of the dungeon’s cogworks grew discordant, grinding and cracking breaking the everpresent rhythm. The chamber’s lightgems and the door’s glyph both flashed red for a moment, only for cyan cracks to spread across their surfaces moments later.

Both the gems and the door shattered along these cracks, the former exploding into shards whilst the latter crumbled inward, at which point they quickly passed through. At the other side awaited a clean chamber in the form of a great hall, only… It was wrong.

It was too clean.

While they could both hear the absence of distant sound that they’d grown to expect, Zelsys could feel it in her gut. This chamber wasn’t just empty, the map wasn’t wrong. She could feel an all-encompassing bloodlust in the air. They could still see the intermediary chamber, the other door’s normally white glyph lighting up all over again with a mixture of red and cyan. Red was growing more prominent by the second.

Step by step she advanced into the chamber, her back against Zef’s, her left hand on the trigger lever and her right on the Lightning Butcher. As they slowly advanced, they each readied themselves for combat.

Zelsys took controlled breaths, started the Breath Engine, pulled the Butcher from its holster. When they passed the first pair of doors, hell broke loose.

There were two doors on either side wall at equidistant intervals, each with a dormant glyph. They could swear they heard the telltale skittering of locusts from beyond those doors.

The moment they crossed that threshold, those glyphs glowed screamingly-bright red and the doors slammed open, unleashing a flood of slavering, raging locusts. Warriors, drones, even strange morphs with huge legs and small torsos, all of these locusts were noticeably different. They were bigger, more thickly armored than their brethren that dwelt above.

Even their movements were different, a nearly human-like intelligence behind their savage spread through the chamber. They knew exactly where to go, decisively forming a perimeter around the two beast-slayers and closing in.

At a glance, Zelsys could see why. There were Locust Nobles scattered all throughout, ones whose mutations were so far along they could blend in amongst the rabble, but subtle enough that they didn’t stand out. They could only be distinguished by the bright-red control parasites on the napes of their necks and the fact they constantly exhaled a visible miasma of pheromones.

“Focus on the Locust Nobles,” she said, not expecting a response. She still got one in the form of a gunshot followed by the cracking of chitin, squelching of gore, and falling of bodies. Three in a row, if she heard right among the sea of noise. It was swiftly followed by the sound of the bayonet crunching through skulls, stab after stab, accompanied by kicks and the occasional gunshot. “Move! Move!” she invoked, staggering even Warriors with the impressive strength of her left-handed punches.

Zel swung her cleaver, willing its edge to superheat with the intention of using it the same way she had back in the forest. However, it instantly became obvious that wouldn’t work. There were even more of them here than back there, and even her own circumstances weren’t the same.

The Butcher cleft locusts in half with little to no resistance, its shape and weight both shifting with every swing to maximize the potential force of impact and minimize recovery time. One drone after another, the realization dawned that they would be overrun if she tried to play it safe.

A sense of exhilaration rose within her chest, and seeing no reason to restrain herself, she invoked the Engine of Retribution.

“Style: Beast!”

That familiar, icy-hot feeling flooded through the silver conduits in her skin, only this time it didn’t hurt at all. It numbed the pain of contracting her muscles at full power with Stormsurge, it made her keenly aware of every silver conduit in her body. It made it easy to pour Fog through them and exude it through her skin.

A drone lashed out at her trying to slash her arm, and she just burned a third of a lung’s breath to form that slippery pelt of Fog around the limb for the split-second that was necessary. The bug’s talons slipped through the resulting short-lived, spectral fur, unable to bite into anything. They harmlessly brushed across her skin. It was like wearing the maneater’s skin, sewed into a skin-tight coat by the dungeon’s black thread. A moment later, she smashed its head with her gun’s barrel.

In that moment, she felt what she knew to be the Retributive Battery charging. It was a tenuous pressure building behind her right eye, the same one she had felt for a split-second when the statue’s talons pierced her skin. Her vision remained unclouded, yet Zelsys could feel a diminutive jet of Fog gushing from her eye.

She was using her left arm as a bludgeon, hefting her cleaver as if it were a near-weightless stick, cutting swathes through two, three locusts at a time. Chopping off limbs without so much as a lapse in momentum as the blade’s blood-red glow burned the stumps and evaporated their fetid blood, and shouting taunts that they couldn’t understand all the while. It was moments like these when Zelsys felt the most alive, when any small mistake could bring death.

All throughout, she learned to not fear their assaults, but rather see them coming, to exploit them. What did it matter if they swiped their claws or warriors swung their fists, when she could make it slip off with a bit of Fog and draw on the attack to fuel her own assault? With Beast Style’s version of Retributive Battery, there was no need to burn her breath to fuel Stormsurge.

In fact, she realized she could fire off Thundercannon without the risk of burning her full lung capacity and thus stopping the Breath Engine. This sole fact instantly skewed her planned tactics sharply towards the side of unrelenting butchery. A belly laugh echoed forth as she swung the butcher and witnessed it grow in length by nearly half a meter so that it cleaved a swathe through at least seven locusts at once. They were turned to a pile of writhing bodyparts and gushing hemolyph, and as she twisted around to recover from the swing, she counted the fourth of Zef’s gunshots ring out. One more and she’d need to reload.

Though Zelsys was confident in her ability to dispatch Warriors and Locust Nobles, she couldn’t do so at range nearly as quickly or precisely as Zefaris. Even to her battle-addled mind, it only made sense that she would clear out the front liners and leave the commanders to the one with a cold-iron five-shooter. It was thanks to this tactic that they progressively spun around as they fought back to back, advancing a little at a time towards the other side of the chamber over a floor paved with dead bugs.

Recovering from a wide, chaff-clearing cleave, she roused the sawteeth and directed their screaming wrath at a careless Locust Noble with a diagonal upward swing. He gurgled something in Pateirian as the screeching metal chewed through his hardened chitin and shredded his organs to bits. A slurry of blood, flesh, and shredded parasites poured forth.

Using the upswing for momentum, Zelsys drove the cleaver down again to cleave through an approaching Warrior’s head. The Butcher’s blade shifted its point to a beak, splitting the Warrior’s carapace down the middle with ease.

With each swathe cleft through the drones, the tougher locusts grew more aggressive; aggressive enough for the drones to get a few hits in whilst Zelsys was busy butchering their superiors. She had the situational awareness and reaction time to channel Graze Pulse as appropriate, though they managed to get a scratch in here and there. If they kept coming, she’d be overwhelmed at this rate, and she knew that Zefaris had it no easier.

She heard the sound of a coin flying through the air, a ringing sound echoing alongside a flash of light. Pentacle’s fifth shot resounded, and two lances of blazing metal soared overhead to annihilate a pair of Locust Nobles. One was the bullet, but the other looked like… A silver coin.

Zefaris felled rows upon rows of locusts with each gunshot, but she knew well that it was a doomed endeavor. There were too many, and they were too aggressive. She had been on the brink of tossing a grenade into the advancing horde and hoping that the corpses would shield her from the blast. Even with the rampaging violence of Zel’s new combat style, there were simply too many of them to realistically deal with. There was also the creeping dread of knowing that she would soon need to reload and, no matter how fast she was, they would exploit the gap.

Still, she was a professional who knew how to keep calm even under the pressure of impending death. There were two Locust Nobles still left within her field of view, both of them weaving about in an obvious effort to make her waste that last shot without killing either of them. Zefaris decided she wouldn’t leave it up to chance, pulling a silver coin and exhaling Fog on it.

In her mind sparked the idea of somehow turning the coin itself into a projectile, of distributing the technique’s total kinetic energy between the bullet and the coin.

“Can’t hurt to try,” she thought as she flipped the Fog-shrouded coin into the air.

It spun round and round on the way up, then flashed for a split-second. She was more than ready, having fired at where she had estimated it would stop by its trajectory. The bullet struck the coin, and Zefaris witnessed the bullet bounce at full velocity into the head of one Locust Noble whilst the coin flew off into the head of the other with a supersonic crack.

Zel laughed at the unexpected technique, just about ready to break a path through the encirclement so that Zef could have time to reload. Swinging the cleaver once more to clear away a few all too eager bugs, she slammed it into the seam between floor panels and pulled a CP-T phial from the belt, ripping off the seal with her teeth and shoving the whole thing down her arm-cannon’s barrel.

“Bring retribution equally unto all before me!” the beast-slayer screamed a spontaneous battle cry as she dug her heels in and grabbed her cleaver’s handle, bracing for recoil.

“Thundercannon!”

Click. Click.

Lightning surging, muscles twitching, blinding white arcs leaping down her arm.

Boom.

For a moment, everything went white. A colossal jet of pure-white Fog gushed forth from her right eye, runoff due to the technique’s inefficiency. It felt like being struck by lightning all over again, only… In reverse. All that violence, all that power, the friction of every single attack she had weathered in the preceding minute or so; it had been translated to Fulgur and set loose as a blinding tsunami of fire, lead, and ball lightning. The recoil made her body bend in ways she didn’t know possible, her ears ringing and bones reverberating with the technique’s all-consuming violence. She couldn’t see it, but she felt even the Butcher bend under the colossal forces, ever so slightly.

When Zel’s vision returned, she felt disorientated, weakened, and in pain. Many of her muscles twitched out of control, she struggled to keep up the rhythm of Breath Engine and had to actively focus on keeping her own heartbeat in rhythm. Still, it had worked, and before her stretched a cleared path to the exit. Or at least, as clear a path as it could be.

A great many chittering, flickering beads of light, like ten-hundred fireflies flashing above a field of screaming, burning locusts. Most of them were still alive, with eyeball-sized perfectly spherical holes punched through their bodies and globs of CP-T searing more tunnels into their flesh. Imbuing the Type-2 shell with Fulgur had granted it vastly superior penetration, effectively widening its area of effect and causing it to wound a large number of locusts instead of utterly shredding those in the immediate vicinity. The many smaller lead balls had carried CP-T on their way through, thus causing the wounds they inflicted to burn the victim alive from the inside out.

It almost seemed like the CP-T had multiplied in volume, though perhaps this was simply how the substance acted.

It was much the same the last time she had used it.

From there, it was a mad dash across the field of screeching, dying bugmen. Zelsys put the Butcher away for the time being, focusing entirely on stabilizing her left arm and aiming at any locusts that could try to grab her as she ran. Over and over, she worked the lever, over and over, she set loose miniature ball lightning in a shotgun-spread pattern to shred away at the dying creatures in her path. It was in part to purge excess Fulgur from her system, and in part as insurance on the off-chance that a locust garnered the willpower to strike even while it lay there burning to death. Step by step, blast by blast, locust by locust. Several locusts' bodies cracked from wound to wound and split open beneath the superhuman footfalls of the two Fog-breathers.

Zefaris finished reloading well before they crossed, and immediately started putting lead downrange.

“Move! Move! Move!” she barked with an ironclad calm, invoking Concussion Impact over and over again. It seemed like a waste to just keep them back when she could kill them, but her reasoning became clear when she pulled a stick grenade, cooking it for a moment before she tossed it into the regrouping locusts. Some of them clearly saw what she was doing and even moved to get out of the way, but the majority had already slipped back into their rabid, instinct-driven selves in the absence of specific pheromone instructions.

They finally reached the door. To finish off the remaining locusts and presumably make the door open, Zefaris fired off the rest of Pentacle’s cylinder, reloaded, and emptied it again down to two shots left. Zel took this brief respite to work her cannon’s bolt, finding that the spent shell casing had been etched with an elaborate lightning-shaped pattern.

She slipped it into the ammo belt and replaced it with a Type-1, hoping that she wouldn’t need to use a Type-2 again before she had some time to recover. She even pulled out one of the seal-bottles in her backpack and downed its contents, exhaling a puff of green Fog as she stored the empty thing.

With the only living locusts left in the ongoing process of dying, the glyph started lighting up, much to their relief. Thread by thread, spreading out across the glyph’s organic pathways. Only, the light soon became red, as did the chamber’s lightgems.

Throughout the chamber, there resounded the grinding of gears, the slamming of pistons, and the distant scraping of stone against stone. There were four loud thuds from beyond the red doors, and more locusts began pouring out. Zel guessed that they had just been delivered by the dungeon’s mechanisms. Not drones, or Warriors - entirely new morphs in compact squads led by a pair of lesser Locust Nobles each. In addition to their leaders, each squad had two Spitter locusts who rode atop mutated deer. These deer looked like mangy corpses put back together with insect parts and wrapped in parasitoid armor beetles, their antlers replaced by large, thick plates, perfectly shaped to support the rider’s deformed launcher-arms.

Beyond these, there were… Boars. Horrific, huge, angry boars. No, huge was an understatement - the forsaken things were the size of brown bears. Their front ends were entirely covered in plating so thick it put even a warrior drone to shame, their tusks turned to articulated pincers like those of hercules beetles. What was disturbing about these locust-boars was that they had absolutely minimal mutations, their eyes completely normal and as filled with wild rage as those of any breeding-season boar. All it took was a proportionally tiny control parasite, barely half the size of those used on humanoid locusts.

Zefaris instantly shot two of the Spitter locusts, pulling another grenade with her other hand. In much the same way Zel pulled a grenade of her own, but neither of them got to use more explosives. The ground beneath their feet shook with gigantic footfalls from the next chamber, and soon after this chamber’s lightgems shattered in a burst of cyan light. Pillars began rocketing up all the way to the ceiling, seemingly targeting the locusts; most missed altogether, took with them a limb, whilst three hit dead-on, smearing a beetle-boar and two Locust Nobles across the ceiling. Still, most of the assailants were unscathed, and even the two Locust Nobles who had lost an arm just kept going as if nothing had happened.

In fact, they became even more aggressive, weaving through the rising forest of pillars, trailing a miasma of pheromones for their subordinates to follow.

A mighty voice comparable to the thundering of an earthquake shouted a wordless cry from beyond the door, followed swiftly by an earthshaking impact that sent cyan-glowing cracks spidering across its stone surface. Then, another, and another. Something on the other side was trying to break down the door.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

Unwilling to hedge her life on the door getting broken down before the locusts would reach them, Zel took a moment to restart the Breath Engine. One of the beetle-boars charged far ahead of the pack, its pincers snapping. Zef shot it, but the bullet only cracked its incredibly thick armor.

“It’s fine, focus on the Nobles and Spitters,” Zel said, pulling the Butcher free once again, not waiting for a response before she ran right at the boar. She was still in pain and suffering with muscle spasms just frequent enough to be annoying, but it changed nothing about what she needed to do. If anything, it just motivated her to get rid of what excess Fulgur she was still charged with.

The beast saw her charging and released a gust of steaming breath, opening its pincers wide and changing direction to a collision course with the beast-slayer. Dragging her blade against the floor saw-side forward, Zelsys willed its sawteeth to wake only a few steps before she would collide with the boar. Then, it was half a lung’s breath to throw herself into a forceful forward jump right over the thing’s pincer-tusks.

It twisted its head in an attempt to catch her, snapping its pincers shut, but all it did was make sure the Butcher wouldn’t slip off before it split its head wide open. Zel felt the vibrations of the saw ripping through meat and bone, readily landing by the beast’s side when the resistance overwhelmed her momentum. She grasped the black-stone handle with both hands, pulling it back as the mutant animal thrashed about, wildly snapping its pincers and squealing bloody murder.

Chunks of chitin, flesh, and fur, fragments of bone, even mulched brain matter sprayed forth in every which direction as the screaming saw ripped its way through the beetle-boar’s head, frying the brain to mush well before it could be physically destroyed. And still, Zelsys struggled to pull the Butcher free, so resilient was the combination of boar skull and chitin plating.

One of the surviving Locust Nobles took notice, weaving between a number of pillars with a substantial black-stone axe gripped in his hands and ready to kill. Before Zelsys could decide on how to deal with him, a lance of flaming lead and gunsmoke turned his head to mush. The corpse toppled over under the weight of its weapon, bloody bubbles forming around its mouth as it began to speak in perfect Ikesian, of the sort used by those who knew the language fluently but hadn’t lived among its native speakers.

“The world does not revolve around you,” the dying locust gurgled, “it will not change just because you will it...”

Zel scoffed, finally ripping the cleaver free just in time to defend herself from one of the bug-deer. She caught its antler-shield with the Butcher’s edge, its convenient launcher-rest groove now serving to stabilize her blade. With her focus switched to the edge, the sawteeth fell silent and it went through the colour spectrum of hot iron, from dark red to bright red to orange. Vile-smelling smoke rose from the creature’s antler-shield, the blood that coursed through it spilling out and evaporating whilst the bug-deer emitted truly horrific noises.

Exhaling a lungful, she kicked the bottom of the deer’s jaw to drive the Butcher’s red-glowing blade through the antler-shield and into its skull. One more push to cut its head in two, and it crumpled to the ground. No enemy in sight, but she could hear them between the thunderous strikes that still resounded against the door. She could feel them, surrounding her, hiding from Zef’s gun behind the pillars.

She saw a copper coin come flying between the pillars, saw the flash of light and heard the ringing noise just after it passed out of view. The ever-familiar flaming spear of a bullet followed suit, only for the head-exploded corpse of another Locust Noble to topple out from behind a pillar ahead.

Thump. Thump

Another charging boar. This time, she jumped back to avoid its snapping pincers and invoked with a downward thrust, “Beheading Saw!”

The blade twisted itself in an unnatural way, its teeth undulating and changing shape to get wedged between individual plates of armor. A lung’s worth of Fog to fuel the saw and a single violent sawing motion was enough to get through, as the boar’s body was no more durable than a normal one’s underneath the extra armor.

From there, it was… Relatively smooth. Another beheaded beetle-boar here, a bisected deer there. The pillars had rendered Spitters worthless, as their launcher-arms were too long to maneuver between them without being pointed harmlessly upwards. Zel lost count at one point, but soon enough she felt that only one, maybe two Locust Nobles were left, as well as three or four of the animals at most.

A gunshot rang out, followed by the sound of a body toppling over. She heard a whisper in Pateirian, from behind a nearby pillar. Butcher in hand, she pursued the noise, swinging downward just as she turned the corner.

To Zel’s surprise she found her blade stopped dead by the crossguard of a strange sword-spear hybrid hewn from blackstone. It wasn’t its wielder's strength that stopped her, but the simple fact the weapon was standing on the ground. She could’ve killed him right then and there, but there was sapience in his body language. He was covered in chitin head to toe, his eyes were covered by characteristic bug domes, but this up close, she could see the completely normal human eyes behind the translucent chitin. The red control parasite on his nape was motionless, as if it had died and been subsumed into little more than a chitin plate.

Hearing two mutant deer approaching from the side, Zelsys looked off towards them, readying herself to eliminate the threat. Before she made a move, a miasma of blue-tinged pheromones spread out from the spear-wielding Locust Noble, seemingly prompting the mutant animals to stop and lie down.

“What are you waiting for?” the Locust Noble said in lightly accented Ikesian, his voice recognizable as young, filled with directionless anger and regret. “Do your job. Exterminate me.”