Zef’s success in driving the Red Mantis away from Zelsys had the side effect of driving the rage-maddened bugwoman towards her, seemingly uncaring for the numerous bullet craters dotting her carapace. Even after she riddled the red one’s midsection with eight gunshot wounds and shot off the upper third of an arm-blade, the Mantis persevered in madly zigzagging and fly-jumping to close the distance.

And in the end… It worked. At nearly the exact same time that Zelsys used Graze Pulse on one of the black titan’s axe swings, the Mantis reached Zefaris. Not only that, she reached the blonde right after she had fired off the last shot and placed Pentacle into the reloader - the bugwoman either knew how to count gunshots, or she just got lucky.

Her first impulse was to use her bayonet, but… She didn’t. Without thinking about it, Zefaris just opened her left eye and emptied her nearly-full lungs in one exhalation. It was like drawing on muscle memory that wasn’t entirely her own, a nudging impulse from the stone itself.

“Move!” she called out, and a torrential outpour flowed out through the Philosopher’s Eye.

The stone eye emitted a flash that blinded even Zefaris, and she heard a loud crack. When her vision returned a half-second later, the Mantis was careening towards the wall and there was an arm-thick trail of Fog between her head and the bug’s previous position.

Pentacle had already reloaded, and Zefaris gladly exploited the bug’s inability to change her course to send three gunshots right into her head. With the stone eye still open she could even see what Zelsys was doing at that very moment, and it was… Well, it was something.

The silver-eyed slayer had sawed a hole into the Black Swordsman’s neck, causing hemolymph to curtain the bug’s entire front end. She used the cleaver’s massive width to force the bug’s head to tilt back and wrench the wound open and stuck her left arm down the wound into his esophagus, her eye-trail burning away at his face all the while.

“Beast-butchering Arts!” she roared with barely-contained laughter and the trail suddenly vanished as huge arcs of white lightning jumped from her body and scorched trails into the Black Swordsman’s armor.

“Thundercannon!” she finished. There was a muted boom, and an avalanche of chitin sloughed off the black bug. Armor beetles and even his own plating burst right off him, like the bark of a tree struck by lightning. Only the massive centipedes that held him together seemed exempt, for when the current killed them their legs just dug in even harder. The bugman’s stomach bulged outward and burst open accompanied by bright light. A flood of protein slurry, parasites, and CP-T came forth from the head-sized hole, leaving a hole into his cavernous stomach cavity - it was now a shredded hole of meat and liquid, its remaining tissues being cooked by the charged lead ball and burned through by globs of CP-T. The black bug’s body locked up where it stood, his ruined left arm twitching uncontrollably and ripping itself apart even further. His right, on the other hand, went from being halfway through a chopping motion to dropping the axe and impotently knife handing the air.

Zelsys felt the giant’s body cooking alive, felt his pulse go from a steady thump to an erratic machine-gun rhythm, but it didn’t stop. By some freak occurrence, one of his lungs seemed to have remained intact as well, and she wasn’t going to risk having this monstrosity get back up later.

Her arm already halfway up the elbow down the wound, she sunk it even further in.

“Heartbreaker!” she invoked with the bare minimum amount of Fog burned. It helped get her arm in there, guiding her hand out through the ripped-apart esophagus towards his heart, all that she needed. After that, she just started firing off Thundercannon after Thundercannon.

If a shotgun-spread of pea-sized ball lightning could ablate armor chitin, it could rupture a heart. With the first shot, his heartbeat became even more erratic, losing all rhythm.

The second caused no perceptible change.

With the third there came a flood of vile lifeblood pouring out around her fingers, washing over her forearm, filling the gaunt-cannon’s barrel, simply everywhere. She could’ve sworn the black bug let out a relieved sigh when his heart burst, sinking to his knees just as Zel pulled her arm free.

While Zelsys butchered the Black Swordsman, Strolvath struggled to even stay alive in the face of the Sister’s blind onslaught. He had given up on clearing out the other hives until she could be dealt with, forced to focus on not getting minced up and splattered across the floor.

As the Sister chased him near the surviving hives, her pheromones made their Doormen step back to allow the half-berserk locusts within flood forth. These lesser bugs couldn’t effectively assault Strolvath if he just played the right frequency to batter most of them into submission, but there was a problem. The Sister was unaffected by the frequencies that harmed the drones, and vice versa.

Surprisingly enough, what affected the Sister seemed to also affect the relatively small number of beetle-boars and gunner drones included amongst the dozens of generic drones, probably because the same armor bugs and parasites were used on the animals.

So it was that Strolvath continued to struggle, forced to rapidly switch between frequencies as he whittled away at the general group and picked them off one-by-one with his stake, all the while trying to cripple the Sister. He didn’t think he could kill her, but if he could just… Get at her legs…

It wasn’t working. Whenever he got close, she’d just stomp and kick and swing her sword in low arcs, her blindness damn-near nullified by Strolvath’s reliance on sound. He came within inches of dying no fewer than thrice over the course of a half-minute’s time, only saved by his liberal usage of directed sonic shockwaves and the Inquisitor’s dead-eye fire support.

But that wouldn’t last long. Already she’d spent two-thirds of her ammunition, and at this rate she’d be through it all before they even saw the Queen. Even specialized in locust extermination and using Victory Echoes, he couldn’t properly do his job. It frustrated him, drove a burning stake into the heart of his pride and set the whole thing ablaze.

An opportunity presented itself. He had entered one of the hives to get a moment of respite and to funnel the drones through a small opening. Its black-stone rod reinforced structure was tough enough to stand even the Sister’s incessant pounding, at least for the time being. More importantly, the great many drones that flooded through didn’t just vanish once they died. After the twentieth man-shaped thing, the doorway had been clogged shut.

Sure, he could blast it open, but he wouldn’t. Not just yet. Strolvath would take this moment to use his ace in the hole, to take a serum he had hoped he wouldn’t need to take. In part because it was tremendously difficult to obtain now, and in part because describing its side-effects as unpleasant was an understatement at best. But it couldn’t be helped now.

Crovacus had asked him to take this job as a safeguard. To make sure that there was someone the governor fully trusted on the extermination team. To balance out the Inquisitor’s potential conflict of interests and the two new slayers’ lack of previous credentials. Strolvath was the safeguard, and he would play his role.

He pulled up his pants leg, opened his leg, and pulled out the puzzle box. From the puzzle box he pulled a phial no larger than his pinky finger, and put the box back in its place. It was wrapped entirely in a green-blue containment seal, and there was only one other phial like it in the box.

Snapping the phial’s neck and breaking the seal in a single motion, he kicked it back and shot the pitch-black contents into his throat. The urge to vomit gripped his insides as the liquid near-instantly absorbed through his stomach, but he knew to resist it.

Coughing and spitting, Strolvath struggled to his feet and continued singing, mentally counting down from sixteen. He had to burn it before then, or the sheer distilled essentia he’d just ingested would begin melting his cardiovascular system.

“Hgroaagh!” yelled the middle-aged soldier with a stomp and a strum. An ill-focused wave of concussive force erupted forth, and blew away the corpses clogging his path.

“Your people know me as a Victory Demon,” he yelled. “Now let me show you what that title really means! Victory Echoes: Hellfire Mantle!”

Strolvath’s upper half became utterly enveloped in fire. His shirt burned away in a flash and was replaced by a pulsating, undulating cloak of blood-red fire whose shape mirrored a commander’s trench coat. Much of his head was enveloped by this same fire that somehow conformed to the usual shape of his hair. The Brass Eye started emitting a white-hot projection of itself overtop the right half of his face, while the left had become like a blazing coal. Each word he spoke and each breath he took caused gouts of flame to spill forth from his face, and even his normal speech thundered with enough force to shake the ground.

“Every burned town, every scorched field, every innocent life rendered to ash by the Divine Army, all those flames burn on in me! While this fire of retribution still burns Ikesia cannot know defeat!” he roared over the growling, distorted tones of his instrument.

He played three times faster. Moved three times faster. Killed three times faster. His voice became just as ear-splitting and rugged as the strings he plucked, and yet he remained perfectly intelligible. Even amidst the all-consuming carnage, all those in this chamber could make out the individual words of his blood-boiling, chitin-shattering song.

It was a manifesto, a lofty declaration of his unending patriotism and dedication to his nation rather than its borders.

“In this burning heart, there can never be surrender!” he declared, smashing the heads of drones whose carapaces happened to not resonate with his music. He leapt and zipped around with speed rivaling Zelsys at her fastest, weaving circles around the Sister’s echolocation-driven rampage as he continually put holes in her legs with his stake.

“BUNKER!” he still called out with each activation of the device, yet it didn’t interrupt his song at all, as if he now had two voices to sing with. It glowed bright-orange and reverberated with such violence that the holes it left behind could easily be mistaken for the results of anti-armor explosives.

The old soldier exploded into a flaming avatar of nationalism and sonic mayhem. So forceful did his music become that each strum and each howled lyric could be seen ripping chunks out of the Sister’s exoskeleton and shaking all the nearby hive matter to pieces.

She collapsed under her own weight and struggled to move, her bodily fluids boiling out of every uncovered orifice and wound. Despite the fact the Black Swordsman’s corpse and the Red Mantis were both all the way across the chamber, they too were affected. The Mantis, too, began boiling in her own shell, and her armor too began bursting right off her skin plate by plate, but unlike the Sister she wasn’t being torn apart where she stood. Much the same couldn’t be said for what was left of the black-armored titan, as the sonic trauma was melting his cadaver into a barely-coherent pile on the floor.

Unfortunately, it seemed that the Victory Demon’s true form was the final straw needed to wake the Queen from her slumber. Perhaps it was the bone-shaking volume of his music or the heat he exuded, but it was most likely the effects he had on the mega-hive, causing portions of its roof to cave in.

Having put the Black Swordsman to rest, Zelsys looked to finish dealing with the Mantis.

She saw that the red bug had somehow been thrown all the way across the chamber and was just now clambering down the wall of a hive. Her chest-plate was covered in huge cracks that just begged to be exploited, her body riddled with bullets. Bullets too big to come from the Inquisitor’s pepperboxes.

“So that’s why the mad cunt didn’t try to stop me,” Zel chucked inwardly.

Zelsys briefly stowed her cleaver and reloaded her arm-cannon with malicious intent. The empty shell took the fresh one’s place in her ammo belt. Back out the cleaver came, and once more she strode straight towards the Red Mantis, only now noticing that one of her arm-blades had been broken. In fact, she seemed to be in a stupor, her mouthparts shifting as she did strange gestures with her fingers. There was no Fog coming out of her mouth, no tangible intent behind her eyes, just detached emptiness.

“Is she…” the slayer furrowed her brow. “Is she praying?”

Her train of thought was rammed right off its rails by a roaring invocation and a wave of heat, a manifestation of manhood so violent it made a stick grenade seem like a firecracker by comparison.

Seeing and hearing such a manifestation of superhuman masculinity, she couldn’t help letting out a wholeheartedly impressed laugh. Zelsys had arrogantly thought that she would have no issues keeping up with and outperforming surviving Ikesian cultivators, but now, she wasn’t so sure. The Sister delivered a flurry of slashes and strikes that Zelsys would’ve had no choice but to dodge, but Strolvath didn’t even bother. He belted his dedication to his nation even louder than before, strumming in perfect rhythm to the blinded Locust Noble’s assault.

Even with gaping holes in her legs and her guts boiling out of her mouth, the Sister barely slowed down. One of Strolvath’s pilebunker kicks ripped a tendon and caused her to fall, but the bugwoman caught herself and started crawling. Even on the ground and crippled she was no slower - if anything, she only grew more savage and pursued the musician with more fervor. Seeing the nearly comical degree of physical trauma that she had withstood, it was clear that Sister’s body was far, far more structurally sound than the Black Swordsman’s.

The ground quaked and an angry groan echoed.

One could hear Pateirian speech and moments later there she was, emerging from the hole in the mega-hive’s roof.

The Queen. The Parasite.

That hateful stare of knowing, pained eyes, the rage behind them equaled only by the great shame and sorrow of being seen as she was. And who could blame her? Her split-jawed, distended, horrifically stretched-out face was the most human part of her. Her skull was a tumorous, bulging thing, iridescent crystalline formations rupturing the bone from within, trickles of half-dried blood still surrounding freshly-emerged crystals.

And her body, oh by the Dead Gods, her body. The tremors of her emergence had collapsed what little of the mega-hive’s left wing remained, exposing her egg-birthing lower portion for all to see.

One could mistake the egg-birthing sac for a second hive in itself, if only it didn’t undulate and squirm all over to the rhythm of the many eggs pushing their way to the egg laying orifice, which piled egg on egg upon egg onto a great pile. A pile that had begun growing at an alarming rate, now that most of the surviving drones that would’ve carried the eggs away had either been ripped apart by sonic resonance or crushed by rubble.

Her upper half, on the other hand, resembled a human woman’s in the vaguest possible sense. Nearly everything was plated in brownish-red chitin, everything was distended to a comical degree. Her torso was girded in a black-stone harness, to which were attached gigantic black-stone arms, each possessing an extra elbow and ending in clawed hands. They were not just long enough to reach the ground, but long enough to reach damn-near a fourth of the way across the chamber, if the Queen put her mind to it. A pair of tiny, atrophied human arms hung from her shoulders.

Looking across the chamber her gaze briefly stopped at each of the slayers in turn, but it finally settled on Zelsys.

“Geh-heh-eh-eh… A homunculus, an Inquisitor, a Victory Demon, and a war criminal walk into a dungeon. Talk about a sad joke,” the queen said with a forced, disbelieving cackle. Her intonation was somehow even more accented than Zelsys remembered. Her voice sounded from the floor and the walls, from everywhere at once, and even still it was barely loud enough to be audible. There was a cracking noise, and a long scorpion-like tail burst through the mega-hive’s roof right behind the Queen. Instead of a poisoned tip it had what looked to be a harpoon-launcher, yet it had no harpoon. The tail undulated upwards and a slimy harpoon pushed its way partway out the tail’s tip.

The appearance of that weapon didn’t make Zelsys fearful. It made her giddy at the prospect of easy charge for Retributive Battery. When the Queen let it rip right at her the beast-slayer just broke into a sprint right at the Red Mantis, who had remained relatively still until now. She was visibly struggling to resist the urge to puke up her own organs that Strolvath’s music instilled in her. One of her hands sat on her stomach, the other held down an armor beetle on her shoulder that seemed eager to jump ship.

Channeling much of her breath into Graze Pulse, Zel put her full trust in her comrades to finish the Sister off, and knew she was right to do so. Even as harpoons brushed across her back and she felt the pressure build behind her eye, even as she threw herself at the Mantis with a cry on her lips.

Either the Queen would stop firing at her to avoid hurting the Mantis, or she would foolishly skewer her own servant. Going by the distinct absence of followup projectiles, she seemed to have chosen the former, redirecting her wrath at the Inquisitor.

“Now Butcher, bring me their heads!” laughed the Fog-drunk homunculus as she saw the Mantis’s arm-blades extending into a half-hearted defense. Yellowish liquid began leaking from the bugwoman’s nose and ears, even from the tear duct of her left eye. Zel made it obvious that she intended to meet the clash head-on, and the red one took the bait. She dropped into a slide right when the Mantis lunged, willing the Butcher to change the direction of its sawteeth. It did so just in time with a loud metallic screech, just in time for the saw to rip through the red one’s leg.

The Butcher’s saw reached its end just as it hit bone. Without any better options, Zel dug her heels in and grabbed for the Mantis’ leg, simultaneously dragging her opponent to the ground and stopping herself.

She sprung to her feet. Her chest heaving and her senses ready to defend against an incoming harpoon, she moved back over to the mantis as quickly as she could.

The red one lifted herself with the aid of her wings, hemolymph gushing from the wound in her leg. It frothed and bubbled to the frantic rhythm of Strolvath’s performance as she turned to face Zelsys again. Arm-blades out, held in an almost boxer-like manner, legs wide and weight on the right foot to compensate for the wound. And yet, Zel’s focus was drawn elsewhere.

Even from all the way over here and with most of her attention already taken up, she could clearly see him. So over the top and flashy was the Victory Demon’s ongoing struggle against the Sister that Zel couldn’t help sneaking a peek.

A half-second later, there came a harpoon that would’ve gone right through her head. Zelsys didn’t know if she would be able to channel Graze Pulse again in time, and she never would find out. It was the Red Mantis herself that leapt at the projectile and grabbed it out of the air, spinning around on the heel of her good leg and throwing it back at the Queen.

Confusion overtook Zel’s killing instinct, and she fell into a state of absolute caution - fully prepared to continue fighting at a split-second’s notice, but a mere observer for the moment. Cleaver at the ready, arm-cannon’s trigger lever in a vice-grip, the beast-slayer watched what the Red Mantis would do next. It didn’t do a whole lot to alleviate her confusion.

The Queen blocked the projectile with one of her gigantic stone arms, barking a question in Pateirian that sounded equal parts accusatory and confused. Still, just loud enough to be heard over the fray.

The Mantis gave a likewise, short response in Pateirian, her tone relieved and scornful, yet calm.

Despite the doubtlessly horrendous pain she was in, despite her numerous injuries, despite the violence all around, despite the eyeball-sized bullet lodged into her temple, there was not a grain of undue emotion to her tone. Somehow, by some divine feat of composure, the Red Mantis sounded utterly, immovably calm.

In a breath’s timespan, the Queen’s authority and anger was replaced by the heart-scrambling fear of someone who had just heard their own death sentence.

Another question screamed so loud it briefly overtook even Strolvath’s music.

With a clack of her mandibles and a brief look back at Zelsys, the red one grabbed the centipede on her stomach and pulled it off. Tossing it aside she reached behind her back and dug her thumb under one of the plates on her lower back, and pried this one off too. Afterwards she tore through a thin flesh membrane, and pulled free a tiny, thin slip of milky-white stone with jade-green flecks. It was as thin as the blade of a knife, as wide as the red one’s thumb, and thrice as long as it was wide. Something was carved into its surface, but Zelsys couldn’t tell what.

“I am glad to let you know that you’ve been deemed a liability!” she called out in crystal-clear Ikesian, holding out the carved slip between her fingers. With a gesture of her left hand, the slip took on a bright silver glow and began emitting a thick trail of Fog.

With a bestial howl of utter desperation, the Queen reached out and tried to grab at the Mantis with her left arm and fired off harpoon after harpoon. Yet her attacks just bounced off an invisible wall, as if the stone slip had just conjured an impenetrable barrier out of nowhere.

Unmoved by the display, the Mantis continued to speak as if she were reading off a legal document. Still she used Ikesian, making no effort to conceal the fact she was doing it so that Zelsys would understand what was being said.

“By Divine Decree, our soul-binding contract is null and void!” continued the red one as the talisman’s rope of Fog began to coil around her like a snake.

She turned back to Zelsys once again, and in a much quieter voice said, “Count yourself lucky that this is bigger than you. When I see you next, you’re dead.”

Before Zel could say anything - or even think of something to say in the first place - the Mantis made an exaggerated gesture to her left and exclaimed an incomprehensible chant. She repeated the same thing upward, downward, and to her right, each time chanting a slightly different line. Each time she was more thoroughly enwreathed by Fog, and by the time she finished the fourth line, it was difficult to even discern her silhouette.

Then, there was nothing.

No additional flash of light, no thunderclap, no gate she stepped through.

The Red Mantis just vanished where she stood, leaving in her stead an absence of light and a fading cloud of Fog.

“I don’t… I don’t think I can even be surprised anymore,” Zel thought as she let out a deep sigh. She wanted to grasp for surprise, to let out a chuckle of disbelief, but it wasn’t there. The precipice of normalcy was far out of sight.

Zelsys shook her head and regained her bearings, expecting the Queen to redouble her assault, this time directing it at her. It didn’t come.

Clang. Clang. Clang.

Gunshot after gunshot, Zefaris bombarded the Queen. Some of her bullets bounced off the parasite’s stone arms, others bounced off the gemstones that protruded from her head, but a few embedded themselves in her skull.

Clang. Clang.

A lull in the gunfire. Zefaris opened her eye, sucked in a deep breath, and exhaled all at once with an exclamation.

“Move!” she yelled, and her stone eye expelled a blindingly-bright silver missile that struck the Queen’s forehead nearly instantly. Its impact made the bulbous thing whip back so violently that it was a wonder the mother-bug’s neck didn’t snap, but it certainly stunned her.

In this moment, Zef’s attention turned towards Zelsys. It was a brief meeting of the gazes, a wordless agreement to ignore the ridiculous events surrounding them until such a time came that they could think on the absurdity of it all in safety. An agreement to just finish the job, dispose of the Queen, and get it all done with.

“Betrayers, child-killers, foul whores and putrid posers! The blood you shed waters the soil from which your demise grows!” belted the old soldier as he pilebunker-stomped the Sister’s broken form into vaguely recognizable meat with rapid-fire sonic pulses took the function of a meat-jackhammer. He wasn’t even bothering to rhyme at this point, moreso just screaming his own rage and sorrow in vaguely lyrical form.

The rhythmic calls of “BUNKER! BUNKER! BUNKER!” from his second voice were just background vocals at this point.

When he finally managed to destroy her lungs and rupture her heart, he thought to stop himself. He thought that it was enough, only to find that the locust still moved. Yet, she didn’t stop thrashing about - the gemstones in her head began to glow and give off iridescent Fog, as if the arcane substance was being burned to sustain life beyond its natural boundaries. He had attempted to crush her skull, to run it through or shake her brain to mush, but it was as though her head was one huge rock. No amount of stomping or gunshots could pierce it. So it was that he had resolved to ruin the body beyond any possibility of life.

Never did he expect that it could barely be called humanoid by the time it finally died. The Inquisitor hadn’t run out of bullets by now, she had entirely given up on firing at the Sister well before Strolvath was finished with the monstrosity.

But at last, it was done. His right leg was so covered in viscera that he was surprised it hadn’t jammed… And the Sister’s carcass moved no more. Finally, he could focus on helping the others deal with the Queen.

The ground shook and there came a yell.

“Just fucking die already!” the great locust howled, firing harpoons and smashing her arms down on each of the other slayers. He wondered why she hadn’t targeted him, but then he noticed a good half-dozen broken-apart harpoons nearby. The flame-wreathed victory demon grinned. While the Queen was mostly unaffected by his current performance, the harpoons resonated at the same frequency as the Sister’s armor.

Strolvath kept on singing and playing at that frequency as he strode across the chamber towards the Queen, but he used his second voice to throat-sing. He cycled through frequencies to try and find one that would elicit a visible response from the mother-parasite.

“I’ll be your demon, your devil, your bulwark for hate!” sung the Victory Demon, making up the words as he went along. “Spit your accusations at me, I’ll still say Ikesia over all else!”

The Inquisitor was, well… Carving into the Queen’s abdomen in an effort to eventually reach her insides from the bottom. The blue fire of her Aquila Calibur spat and surged with each cut, but it was a real struggle to make even small advances. At least her efforts were rewarded with grunts of pain every time she made a cut.

Her Eight Stars Formation had long run out by now, but she still had firepower ready - she’d made sure to avoid discharging one of her guns, just in case.