The green became blue, then red, then yellow, and so on, cycling through every possible and impossible colour in a flash. A second later it was gone, and the empty husk of what had once been the Caster fell to the ground to the clattering of his staff against the floor panels.

With an empty-eyed stare, the Spearman stood to his feet before the newly-formed Fog Gate, barren and grey as it was. Its edges rippled and warbled, expanding and contracting as if the membrane of a breathing lung with no frame to contain it. His eyes wandered down to the corpse and he wiped it away with his foot. The chitin fell to dust at the slightest touch, leaving behind only a shining, iridescent stone the size and rough shape of a plum.

“Was it really so bad as to use the last resort?” he asked the stone after picking it up. With a shake of his head, he put down the hand in which he held it and looked over in the party’s direction.

A heavy, shuddering sigh escaped his mandibles, “D-do whatever else you need to do before you pass, any further preparation. The Gate will hold for a while, as will the wall. There’s… No need to preserve the corpse, now. After all this, he’ll be reshelled in a golem.”

“I’m good, you?” Strol said, looking over to Zef. When she nodded in confirmation, he looked to the Inquisitor.

After a moment of hesitation, the Inquisitor reached into her coat and pulled out a second gun, sucking in a deep breath before Fog clouded the inside of her mask. Murmured Grekurian could be heard coming from her, though it was rendered into just noise by the addition of that gas mask. All Zel could make out was a voice that sounded surprisingly like her own, and the brief silences between individual words.

Spectral tendrils of Fog slithered down her arms, gripping the two guns and raising them above her head. The Inquisitor reached into her coat again, pulled out another pair, and repeated the process again, this time what she said sounded different, but somehow connected to her previous words. A third pair, a third line of incantation, this one bearing a sense of finality.

Even still, she reached into her coat once more, but these guns remained in her hands.

“Just how many guns do you have on you?” Zel asked, genuinely curious, forgetting that the Inquisitor didn’t speak most of the time.

“Eight,” Strolvath guessed, then looked to the Inquisitor. “It’s eight, isn’t it?”

She gave a slow nod, a gust of Fog venting from her mask’s exhaust port. Then came the simple act of placing fragile objects into Fog Storage - just bottles and rations, under the assumption that they’d be damaged beyond use in the coming fight.

“Where does the gate lead? Any idea?” Zef asked the Spearman as she slipped the Tablet into its place next to her cleaver.

“It’s a one-way transit to the Core Chamber’s gate. You’re going straight into the mouth of hell,” he answered.

An idea sparked in Zel’s mind at those words and she asked, “Can we toss objects through before we go?”

After a moment of consideration, the locust answered, “...Sure, but the first thing to pass through will destabilize the Gate and leave you with half a minute at best to pass yourselves.”

The slayer turned to her compatriots and pulled one of her two remaining grenades off her ammo belt, “How many of these and phials of CP-T do we have left?”

“You’re not throwin’ all of ‘em through the gate,” Strol answered, but he still pulled a grenade and a phial from his backpack. “One, maybe two, but any more’ll be too much. That, plus the fact that even twelve of ‘em wouldn’t be enough to blow up the queen for sure, and we still gotta walk through there to get outta here.”

“I want to throw a few of them in the gate, but I think it’d be ideal for you to have most of them and the rest be split up among us three,” Zel explained her intentions. “But first, we need to know how much of each we have.”

Across the four of them they had six grenades, five full phials, and the half-empty phial that Zel had held onto since her encounter with the Sister. The Inquisitor eagerly handed over her remaining explosives and CP-T, and refused a grenade when offered one. In the end two grenades went to Strolvath, while Zel and Zef each took one, with all five enhanced by a phial of CP-T each. The half-empty phial went down the barrel of Zel’s arm-cannon, and the last two grenades would be tossed through the gate. Zel filled each one’s hollow with half a phial of CP-T, filling the rest of the free space with gunpowder. Before she went further, she slipped her grenade into her belt, tying its fuse string around one of the belt loops so she could rip it off and toss it in one motion.

Gripping both grenades in her right hand, Zel pulled their fuses taut and looked over to the others. “Ready?”

Three nods. A yank on the fuses.

A second’s wait before tossing them in.

The grenades vanished through the Gate, sending two sets of rippled waving across its surface. Three more seconds passed, and instead of fading, the ripples only became more pronounced, more erratic. The Gate was visibly destabilizing. At last there came a brief, angered yell from the assumed direction of the Core Chamber. Zel took it as the command to grab her cleaver and jump through.

Emerging from the Gate, the very first thing she noticed was the air - it was thick with the stench of burning bugs and boiling protein slurry, but also something else. The air down here was more than twice as saturated with Aether than it was in the rest of the dungeon, to the point where Zel could feel herself absorbing the airborne essentia through her skin. Though it didn’t take conscious effort to keep engine breathing, even this method was noticeably easier here - a lungful of breath was less air and more Fog.

The second thing she noticed were her surroundings. The blown-to-smithereens, burning interior of a large hive, two dying Doormen right in her sightline as marks of where the doorways were. Locusts of both the Drone and Noble varieties laid on the floor, most still alive in seething agony, being burned open by globs of CP-T. There were a great many ovoid sacs attached to the hive’s floors, walls, and ceiling. Of these sacs some two-thirds had been ruptured, spilling their contents of nutrient slurry and half-formed locust drones. The hive’s structure had a great many cracks, with chunks of its matter falling from the walls and ceiling, exposing black-stone rod reinforcements within.

All this information was what Zel gathered in the very first moment right after she emerged from the Gate. Her mind kept on rushing by, her instincts ravenously devouring any and all sensory information to build a map of this place. In the very next moment, any importance that this single hive’s state might’ve held was washed away by the collapse of a Doorman. Its body toppled over forwards, revealing the rest of the chamber.

Even without moving an inch, without leaning or taking a single step, Zelsys was able to glimpse the dreadful truth of what they would have to deal with before even touching the Queen, wherever she was. She could make out three figures of vastly differing size, standing in an inward-facing trigonal formation.

There were two sets of superhumanly large feet visible off to the left and right, and right through the doorway was the only figure which she could see in its entirety. Facing away from her was the Red Mantis, her lower half so massively reinforced with large red plates that it looked like her upper half was riding the legs of a larger-scale statue. One of her feet had been replaced by a black-stone construct, painted blood-red but still obvious. Her upper half had similarly heavy-duty plates added over vital areas like the upper torso and shoulders, these in the form of far more obvious beetles whose legs hooked onto the root points of the Mantis’s own plating. She also had a giant red centipede wrapped around her midriff - perhaps flexible armor? It was so huge that Zelsys could see its bright-yellow legs digging into the Mantis’s flesh.

Strange, fleshy tendrils hung down from each of the Locust Nobles’ front ends - perhaps their chests or their faces, she couldn’t tell. They snaked across the floor to some sort of chitinous mass at the center of the formation.

The subtle tremor of the others’ boots touching ground when they crossed the gate snapped her out of her hyper-focused torpor. There was no more discussion to be had, no more planning, they had all agreed upon their roles beforehand.

Zelsys ran headlong out of the hive, Butcher in hand, it's blade already glowing a dull-red and its teeth already chittering even without her input. It was hungry, eager to bite into something. Seeing the chamber’s upper portions in her peripheral vision revealed its general size and shape. A septagon with a circumference somewhat larger than the Sister’s arena.

There was a hive against each wall, with the addition of a truly massive hive in the corner exactly opposite the Gate. It was easily the size of a small house, connecting the two smaller wall-aligned structures, and had a meters-wide opening in the top that she couldn’t see into.

The moment Zelsys stepped out into the chamber proper, the feelers that parted the Mantis’s hair whipped about and she reached up to her face, removing something before she turned around on a heel. It turned out to be some disgusting biomechanical inhaler mask, the mouthpiece a shaped sucker with mucosa visible on the inside. Its fleshy interior undulated alongside the tube as iridescent, Fog-like gas seeped out of the device. The Mantis’s mouth contorted into a grin, and her eyes grabbed Zel’s as she raised her other hand. She made a beckoning motion using both her fingers, and the massive mantis-blade protruding from her forearm just past the elbow. That motion revealed the changed state of even her arm-blades - once more it was additional plating, but more importantly, the bladed parts were now damascened golden metal, rather than chitin. Could it be some form of cold-iron?

Quickly nearing the center of the chamber, she felt her gut screaming at her to either turn or stop dead, and she chose the latter. It took her until she was face-to-face at point-blank range with the Red Mantis at the breakneck pace she was going. Looking at the mutant made her realize why she felt the need to stop, because the Red Mantis’s slightly disappointed expression shimmered and wavered. There was a barrier around the three bugmen.

Zel couldn’t even bring herself to be surprised at the two other figures’ identity - the Sister and the Black Swordsman.

Both of them had been layered upon with huge armor beetles and centipedes, though the Sister’s reinforced plating looked to be much lighter, predominantly centipede-based with thicker-shelled beetles to protect her chest, upper back, and the nape of her neck. Her hands gripped a repaired, golden-edged version of her blade, a gold-hued mend line demarcating where it had been severed previously.

However, far more disturbing than any bug armor was the state of her head. A gruesome crown of rainbow-hued crystalline spikes protruded from her skull at odd angles, and one even came out of her right eye like a torturous horn. The cloudy glimmer of these crystals reminded Zel of Azoth, somehow. The Sister’s head whipped around to look at her alongside the Mantis’s taunt, her good eye shuddering as it tracked her.

The Black Swordsman’s state was a whole nother matter. Even standing relatively still, it couldn’t be more obvious that he’d been dismembered and subsequently put back together. His limbs and body both were patched-up with armor centipedes, and they hadn’t been put back on at quite the right angles. The head that sat on his shoulders was most certainly not his own, disproportionately large and horrendously deformed. It would’ve looked comical, were it not for the inhuman expression of apathetic despair its face was stuck in.

Zel’s first guess was that the Queen ripped off some other Locust Noble’s head, stuck it onto the stump neck using a centipede, and pumped the corpse with parasitized energy from the Dungeon Core to animate it… Whatever that energy was, it was clearly not intended for a human or even ex-human body, considering the gruesome rainbow spikes that riddled the Black Swordsman’s new head inside-out at every-which angle.

His weapons were far more practical than she had remembered, these being a golden-edged black-stone war axe and a shield so thick and heavy it could’ve very well been a dungeon door.

Assuming that the barrier had to have a source, Zel’s gaze jumped from the lofty heights of that meat-morningstar of a head down to the very floor. There they were, rune stones as expected, wedged into a jagged, clearly artificial gap in the floor. They were, of course, perfect black-stone rectangles etched with equally perfect, red-glowing Pateirian symbols, but they served the very same purpose as those roughly-carved rocks around the forest cabin. Her first thought was to just kick one of them out, or try to destroy them with a low swing of her blade. She wasn’t eager to gamble on it, and so looked for a more obvious weak point. Maybe the tubes?

From where she stood, Zel had a good view of the device that those disgusting inhalers connected to. Its vaguely conical chitinous mass encased a sharp-edged polyhedron, only its very tip poking out of the mass. There was a flesh-tube thrice as thick as the others leading from the device out through the barrier and to that huge hive in the corner. There was a painfully obvious weakness in the barrier - a floor-to-ceiling vertical gap wide enough for an arm to fit through, or perhaps a grenade. Bingo.

“Hey, eyes down here,” the Mantis snapped with such profound, pure envy in her voice that Zelsys couldn’t resist going along with it.

“Don’t you go pretending to be mentally degenerating on me. It’s a real shame you know, I’d hoped to see you run face-first into the barrier,” the Mantis faux-whined, spinning the disgusting inhaler by its equally disgusting tube only to land it perfectly on her face, suck in a deep breath, and pull it off again with a gut churning smacking noise.

Rainbow-hued gas escaping with each word she added, “Guess we’ll have to pound you into paste ourselves.”

Zel chuckled indignantly, putting on her best condescending smirk as she stared down the Mantis. Even if she could only keep the exchange of insults going for a few seconds, it would be seconds of valuable intel-gathering.

“I snapped your foot off without even trying,” she spat, briefly looking at the replacement foot and back up to meet the red one’s glare. “What makes you think I’m leaving this place before you’re in more pieces than there are bugs on your skin?”

“With what, that stupid cleaver?” the mantis chuckled doubtfully before she broke into a hateful, boasting rant, spilling all the vitriol that she’d been stewing in since Zel embarrassed her at the surface Fog Gate. “Go ahead, smash it against my armor all you like, it’ll just get stuck and I’ll cut you in half. You’ve been scrambling for your life, growing more exhausted with each chamber, and your only rewards were doled out according to old rules by a dying god-machine. Meanwhile, I’ve been drinking full of the dungeon’s lifeblood ever since you four passed through that gate, and by the Emperor, I’m certain I could smash a war golem with my bare hands if I wanted to.”

While the Mantis went off on her rant, Zelsys would occasionally cut in with a brief, snide remark or snap back at her to keep her going. The red one held the barest minimum of her focus, while she plotted a path around the barrier to its weak point. It was around this point that the others caught up, and Zelsys had a realization. It was a farce. A play to buy time. She felt vitriol from the Mantis, sure, but there was also fear, fear and tension that alleviated each time she took another breath from that disgusting inhaler.

The Mantis was buying time, likely to finish whatever outlandish ritual the three were partaking in, one that was doubtlessly meant to guarantee their victory. With no way to know how many more breaths of the iridescent gas it would be until the process was finished, Zelsys chose to drop any pretense of subtlety and act.

“I’ll admit that you almost had me at the start there, but I’m not biting your bait,” she grinned, turning her heels as she spoke before she took off running around the barrier.

It was just before Zelsys stopped herself from running into the barrier that the others emerged from the hive, and all of them saw it happen. All three of them saw her come to a sliding halt right in front of the changed Red Mantis. More importantly, they all saw the barrier become concrete in reaction to a foreign presence, thus rendering it visible.

The Mantis acknowledged them with a tilt of her head and a malicious glance, a wordless affirmation that “These words of murder are meant for you too”.

Nevertheless, the vast bulk of her malice remained directed at the silver-eyed homunculus, and to Strolvath it was clear that the Mantis had built Zelsys up in her mind well beyond what the slayer was - a personal villain. Or perhaps the Mantis was just that frustrated after not being able to spit vitriol at someone without severe repercussions. It didn’t matter, she had to die either way.

Zefaris grasped a handful of coins, her gun at the ready and her focus honed to a needlepoint. The Philosopher’s Eye thrummed in its socket with each silvery exhalation even as she kept it closed. It was like the stone wanted her to use it, to release the Aether in her lungs through it as a violent discharge.

Alcerys recited the same reinforcement invocation every couple seconds, feeding more Aether into the Eight Stars of Calamity to prolong the technique’s duration and slightly amplify its impact. It’d take its toll in fatigue at best and horrible pain at worst, but that was her far wealthier future self’s problem.

And Strolvath… Strolvath strummed his strings and hummed his melody, both his music and his blazing light had died down to a subtle glow. No… Not subtle. It was ominous. It was the glow of a burning fuse and the distant thunder of a coming storm. The Old Soldier had another card up his sleeve, and he made it blatantly obvious.

Seemingly out of nowhere, Zelsys interrupted the Mantis’s ongoing tirade with a short remark and took off like greased lightning, leaving the Locust Noble frozen on the spot. Her left eye and mandible both twitched for a moment, then she dropped the nasty sucker-inhaler. Extending her arm-blades she turned on a heel and launched herself towards the barrier’s other side, right over that chitinous mass in the middle that the tubes were connected to.

Zelsys ran as quickly as her feet would carry her, keeping the Butcher’s point only centimeters above the floor. Lightning surged through her legs with every step as she circumnavigated the barrier’s perimeter, intent on tossing the explosive and severing the large cable within the same half-second. She yanked the grenade off her belt just as the gap in the barrier came into direct view, tossing it right through as she ran by and severed the larger tendril.

Somewhat surprisingly, the Mantis had reached the gap in the barrier just as the grenade passed through it - not before, not after, but at the exact, perfect time. Not because she caught it and tossed it back, or because she managed to swat it out of the barrier - it was because the grenade bounced off her forehead with a hollow thunk and tumbled even higher into the air.

The fury-stricken Mantis slipped right through the gap, turning on a dime to give chase with arm-blades held out wide and eyes locked dead-on to Zelsys. A maddened, twitching stare, mandibles spread wide in an animalistic threat display. With her gilded arm-blades she lunged towards the beast-slayer, faster than any foe she’d faced before.

Faster than she could fully process. Zel’s mind simplified the motion down to smudged colours, her peripheral vision fading as her brain prioritized the greatest threat according to her Slayer’s Instinct. Everything else came to a crawl, the world outside the impending clash faded from perception for the sake of surpassing the limits of her reflexes.

Barely, just barely, Zelsys managed to pull the Butcher upward to stop her own impending decapitation. Those golden blades locked into a cross against the cleaver’s dull-red edge, scraping against it as they locked eyes. The impact buckled her knees and very nearly broke her grasp, only offset by a lungful’s exhalation and her grasping the sawteeth with her bare hands. Those she grabbed dulled themselves before she even touched them, but their shape still dug into her hand.

Neither blade was sharp enough to bite into the other, but Zelsys had a stronger stance, a heavier weapon. With a spark of will she directed the stored Fulgur to heat her weapon’s edge, and as it crossed the boundary of sun-yellow she could see the subtle discoloration of rapidly-heated metal spreading across those golden blades. She could smell the stink of burning chitin, not from the golden edges, but from the chitin that held them in place.

“Cle-cke-cle-cke-ke,” chattered the Red Mantis, cackling a mad, wordless noise.

Boom. The barrier’s interior was filled with colossal pressure and fire, the majority of its rune-stones exploding into shards and dust in rapid sequence. A considerable splash of CP-T was forced out through the gap in the moments before the barrier failed and flickered out. Right into the hole in that large hive’s ceiling, prompting the ground to tremble and a foreboding tremor to originate from the mega-hive.

With an ironclad side kick to the leg, Zel broke her opponent’s balance for long enough to slip her blade free of the deadlock with a sharp twist and downward yank. She followed through with an upswing as part of the motion to change out of reverse-grip, the cleaver’s tip extending out into a spur with a loud screech just before she did it. It cut across the red one’s stomach, partially cutting the armor centipede before it caught the bottom of her chestplate. It cut a small gash into the thick plate before getting stuck, freed by the blade’s reversion to its natural form.

Zel quickly returned to a stable stance and got a proper grip on her cleaver, but the mantis made her pay for the wound inflicted with one of her own. Lashing out with both blades, Zel only managed to block the left one using her arm-cannon’s barrel. It slid off the metal and the red one turned it to a downward swing, but she caught the wrist with an ironclad grip before the blade could touch her neck. On the right side, though, she suffered a light slash across the torso, just barely deep enough to scrape a rib.

Refocusing from heating the edge to fuelling the sawteeth, she managed to bring her cleaver’s saw-side to bear faster than the Mantis could pull her blade free. It bit in at a diagonal angle across the forearm. The saw’s screaming chatter was muted by the vibration of chitin being sawed apart and the screams of said chitin’s owner.

Just as she breached the plating and hemolymph began spraying out, the Mantis sent herself flying into the air with an on-the-spot jump, ragged wings spreading out of her back.

There was a series of rings and flashes off to the side, followed by a quick series of clanging gunshots. One of these struck the side of the red one’s head, sending her careening to the ground. Surprisingly enough, she landed upright and stood back up with a bullet embedded part way in her skull. It clearly didn’t do her mental state any good, considering the unhinged screams of Pateirian insults that she let out as she charged headlong at Zelsys.

Once more slipping into the trance-like hyperfocus of a duel, the silver-eyed beast-slayer laughed at her opponent and took up a countering stance. Left hand held out, cleaver held high, legs wide and low with the left foot forward.

“Style: Bea-” she began, only to be interrupted by a suspiciously close stomp and the shifting of air. Her instincts screamed and she saw the Mantis’s gaze snap to something to her left, ever so briefly. Zelsys was certain that she wouldn’t be able to dodge without at least her legs being caught by whatever it was. She turned to face it, breaking the flow of engine breathing to fill her lungs so that she might burn their full contents for a Rebound Pulse.

She’d expected a sword, an axe, or even a stomping foot.

Not a giant fist.

It was organized chaos, right from the get go. Zelsys got caught up in a duel with the Red Mantis in the seconds between her tossing the grenade and it exploding. Its explosion managed to shut down the barrier, but the Black Swordsman and the Sister were mostly unharmed. Neither of them could break out of their stupor quickly enough to remove their inhalers, as was shown when the remnants of the devices clattered to the ground.

They walked out of the smoke with cracked plates and globs of CP-T but they were such walking tanks they were far from incapacitated.

The Inquisitor kept her distance and pelted the Sister with barrage after barrage of bullets. So consistent was the masked woman’s aim that the Sister was completely blinded well before the second salvo.

Meanwhile, Zefaris breathed a lungful’s Fog onto the same batch of five coins for the second time, tossing them all high into the air. Her gaze and mind both dwelt on helping Zelsys break the deadlock she seemed to be stuck in, even if it was only one bullet. Of the remaining four, she would direct one to the Sister and three to the Black Swordsman, if only because the black one’s attention seemed to be worryingly drifting towards Zel.

Five shots in quick succession. With a somewhat awkward motion she slotted Pentacle into the speedloader, holding onto her gun with an almost painful tightness as she felt a series of ten rapid force impulses. The Black Swordsman’s head veered to the side as one of the bullets lodged into his skull, but for some reason the other two were sent into the wrist of his shield-arm. Their impact splintered the vulnerable chitin around the joint and made him drop his shield. It thudded to the ground, but the frankly ridiculous mass of black-stone that he used as a shield had no issue standing solid on its own. Zefaris thought that perhaps the technique targeted any weak points and was perhaps confused by the fact that the Black Swordsman’s head was not his own.

Perhaps out of frustration, confusion, or because his body remembered Zelsys as the one who destroyed his left arm the last time, the Black Swordsman raised his mangled fist and punched down at her. She didn’t seem to take notice until he had already taken the swing, turning her entire body on the heel of her right foot without significantly changing her countering stance. All she did was pull her left arm back, as if… No, she couldn’t. She wasn’t that foolhardy, was she?

It seemed that she was, if the Fog that shrouded her fist was anything to go by. Even the Mantis didn’t seem like she wanted to risk trying to take that opportunity, perhaps waiting to see if the beast-slayer would just get made into paste.

The Fog-drunk slayer met the colossus’ punch with her own. Bright light flashed from the point of contact to the sound of a thunderous crack, and then… Nothing. She stood unmoved, and the black bug’s fist had been stopped.

But then, the Black Swordsman’s left arm burst at the seams. Plates cracked and flew off, hemolymph sprayed from the gaps, the limb crumpled like an empty can and bone fragments burst from his flesh in every direction. His shoulder popped out the back of the socket, bursting out through layers of armor accompanied by a geyser of bile-colored fluid.

All at once, his arm had been subject to the force of a punch that had carried a major portion of his body weight, in a single, perfectly linear impulse.

“Return to sender!” she laughed as Fog began sputtering out her nostrils again. Barely a half-second to resume engine breathing.

Another half-second to clamber atop the obliterated limb and begin running up it towards the giant’s head, where even he wouldn’t dare swing that ridiculous axe. Killing the Mantis remained Zel’s main priority, but this tower of meat was the biggest roadblock between the slayer and her ability to carry out that retribution. Her other options were to fully focus on dealing with the Mantis and risk being blindsided, or try fighting both of them at once and thus be unable to fully focus on either.

Using the tip of her cleaver as a hook to climb the last few steps to his neck, Zelsys pulled her blade back and steadied herself atop his shoulders. Gripping the handle with one hand and the guard with the other she invoked, “Beheading Saw!”

She had considered whether the Mantis might try to interrupt her. However, she found relief in the relentless barrage of bullets that Zefaris began unloading at the red bug the moment Zel was out of the firing line. Some were Concussion Impacts, others were bounced off coins, but the majority were shots specifically directed to make the Mantis dodge away from Zelsys and the Black Swordsman.

He stood back up just as the saw ripped into the centipede around his neck. Heave-ho, heave-ho, breath by breath she ripped through the armor and into the meat. The saw struggled to chew through his vertebrae, and it quickly became obvious why when black sand started flying out amongst the gore. The point where the new head met the spine was reinforced with black-stone so thoroughly that there was no way to cut around it. It was a miracle he could still turn his head.

The axe flew overhead just then, and she decided she wasn’t willing to risk cutting through the extra black-stone. She ripped the saw free and changed her grip so that the sawteeth faced towards her, hooking the saw under the bugman’s neck as she felt his body shift again and the axe passed dangerously close to her.

“Style: Beast!” she invoked as she began to saw away at the inner part of the black bug’s neck. She intentionally avoided burning all her lung capacity on fuelling her muscles and the saw, watching out for the impending axe swing. When, moments later, she felt the Black Swordsman beginning to swing again, she more than willingly leaned into it as she channeled Graze Pulse, just close enough to brush by.

The charge she received from just that one gigantic swing sufficed to make her eye vent a geyser of Fulgur as long as she was tall. Just as she did so, Zel heard Zefaris yell “Move!” and saw a bright flash of light from just outside her field of vision, but didn’t think about it beyond just registering the occurrence as part of the fray.

Amidst the carnage Strolvath ran around the chamber’s perimeter, battering down the doorways to hive after hive with concentrated sonic assaults. Two, he cleared out by tossing a grenade in. By the third one, the Sister had taken notice despite her blinded state and started following the music. It only made sense, since the old soldier’s song was the most distinct and arguably loudest noise in the entire chamber, not to mention the pain it doubtlessly caused her through resonance.