“Just fucking die already!” Zel heard the Queen howl as a black-stone arm smashed down onto her.

She’d switched to Slayer Style only moments after the Mantis vanished. To her relief, she found that doing so didn’t just make all the Fulgur she’d built up in Beast Style disappear. It was still there, still leaking out bit by bit.

Although she was able to dodge the attack, Zelsys channeled a brief Siphoning Pulse through the palm of her left hand and simply tagged the Queen’s finger. There was visible loss of velocity, minor though it was, and Zel began to feel pressure behind her left eye as well.

She wasn’t quite foolhardy enough to willingly risk getting crushed by those big ponderous arms. So it was that Zel murmured to herself, “Style: Beast…”

Surprisingly enough the mother-bug had resorted to using her right arm for defense, placing it between her head and wherever she thought Zefaris was. Of them four, it was her that managed to push that monstrosity onto the defensive, despite the Inquisitor’s mutilatory efforts.

“What, just put the gun in my mouth and pull the lever? Are you too lazy to kill me yourself, or what?” Zel teased, slowly closing the distance. Not just so she could strike, but also to get a better look. There was something behind the Queen’s eyes, a foreign glimmer that reminded her of… The puppeteered Locust Nobles. It didn’t feel like the mother-bug was being puppeted herself, but Zel’s gut certainly told her that someone else was watching through the great locust.

“Must really drive you up the wall that an artificial freak like me stands closer to divinity than you ever will, doesn’t it? But y’know what they say, if you were worthy you wouldn’t have turned into a locust,” she continued, intentionally putting on a monologue to seem off-guard. In reality, she was just waiting for a harpoon to siphon for charge.

The Queen’s temper flared readily even at an uninspired provocation. She brought both her arms to bear on Zelsys from either side, trying to crush her in their midst whilst firing a harpoon above to stop her from jumping out of the way.

With an exhalation and a mocking laugh, the slayer jumped directly upwards anyway, reaching up with her left arm and channeling Graze Pulse around it. Three harpoons had been fired in quick sequence, all three of which were led precisely-enough to hit in the absence of extra factors. They were slowed and made brittle by Strolvath’s music, then shattered by the passing of Zel’s arm. She didn’t even have to hit them, just the strain of being made to bounce off her skin was enough to turn them to splinters - splinters that further contributed to charging the Retributive Battery as they fell. Landing on the black-stone constructs moments after they slammed together, she took off running up the right arm to try and reach the Queen.

Zefaris had foreseen what Zel was trying to do, and she’d prepared a handful of coins to use the window of opportunity. She wouldn’t use Concussion Impact through the Philosopher’s Eye unless she had to, instead opting to keep using her bullets as a vector for one simple reason. One of those shining Fog-missiles burned enough Aether to impart Concussion Impact onto three bullets. She was sure the Eye was just as efficient if not more efficient at manifesting the technique as Pentacle, but using her gun she could cause the Queen far more head trauma in this short opening.

The Queen’s stone arms slammed together under Zelsys, and into the air the coins went. As they rose up, Zefaris focused her mind and filled her lungs to their absolute fullest. She couldn’t afford to spare even a splinter of focus, and so resorted to invoking the technique out loud.

“Headpiercer Arts: Fivefold Concussion Impact!” she invoked, then began burning up her lung capacity gunshot by gunshot. She sucked in shallow breaths in the split-seconds it took her to re-aim and the cylinder to rotate.

Clang. Clang. Clang. Clang. Clang.

A flash came with each ricochet, and the Queen’s head jerked backwards just a little bit more with each bullet that hit. Placing Pentacle into the speedloader, Zef went on to grab her grenade and toss it to Zel, calling out, “Catch!”

To say that she was out of breath would’ve been an understatement - the markswoman had to catch herself from falling. She would’ve been riddled by harpoons before she could get up, if Strolvath hadn’t blown them to smithereens as he ran by. Zefaris wondered why, but as he neared the stone arms they began cracking and falling apart.

Zel reached the Queen just as the fourth gunshot struck her head, and she had jumped onto her face just in time to catch the grenade. Unfortunately, a harpoon ripped right across her forearm just as she did so, causing her to drop the grenade right into the Queen’s open mouth before she could arm it.

Harpoon after harpoon the tail fired at her, as if the Queen being knocked out by head trauma just angered the launcher-tail.

“I get it, you’re a separate bug,” Zel thought. Finding that she wouldn’t be able to finish off the Queen with the frenzied thing firing down on her, she jumped off onto the mega-hive’s roof. She channeled Graze Pulse through her upper back as she approached the hole from which the tail protruded. It rained down harpoons unrelentingly, each harpoon slipping off her back and each harpoon contributing to the pressure behind her right eye.

Gripping the Lightning Butcher with both hands she fed it a burst of Fulgur, causing the edge to rapidly become seethingly yellow. With a single stroke she discharged what little kinetic charge her Retributive Battery held, severing the thing and leaving behind a charred stump. It writhed and fired off harpoon after harpoon as it fell, while Zelsys turned and leapt back up onto the Queen’s bulbous mass of a head.

It remained limp even now, as Zel carved a path across her skull and reached her mouth. She stabbed the Butcher’s blade into the middle of the mother-bug’s giant forehead, its edge now glowing orange. Even with this assistance it struggled to penetrate to any significant depth, but it was stuck in solidly enough.

Planting her feet on the bug’s shoulders and aiming the gun right down the Queen’s gaping maw, Zelsys began to build up the inner focus to fire. Not to pull the lever, she would’ve blown the bug’s brains out at the first opportunity if she could’ve. No, it was to cast a single decisive Thundercannon using every scrap of built-up Fulgur that trailed from her eye, to take another lightning-strike of strain without falling to the ground and busting her skull open on the floor like an absolute chump.

Click. Click.

“Beast-butchering Arts!” she began, channeling Fulgur through her arm, feeling the muscles seizing up and twitching out of control.

Then, the Queen’s eyes snapped open and her head surged upward. Her mouth snapped open like a trapdoor to hell, ripping apart the distended skin of her face and exposing a set of fully insectoid mandibles.

Zel might’ve been able to move out of the way, if the Queen’s truly massive mandibles hadn’t telescoped out of her head a good half-meter’s worth to envelop the slayer’s arm. It wasn’t even the usual arrangement of a locust’s insectoid mandibles, or a split lower jaw. The Queen’s entire mouth had been somehow transformed into a Moray-like, telescoping bio-mechanism.

Her upper teeth snagged against Zel’s arm-harness, but the lower jaw caught on meat and sunk in with all the anchoring and pain that came along with teeth cutting through skin and fat.

The Queen’s stone arms struggled against an unperceived impedance. Their fingers couldn’t untangle, their wrists couldn’t bend right, yet their wielder still forced the great constructs to move, in spite of the Victory Demon’s interference. To great noise and trembling they snapped off above the elbows, and the stumps waved about overhead while she thrashed around and struggled to bite through muscle that was more akin to corded steel rope than flesh.

Zel felt the Queen’s teeth cutting into her arm, and she knew she wouldn’t be able to fire the Thundercannon before she lost the limb altogether. Her only option would be to fire prematurely and hope the recoil would still dissipate through the arm-harness and carry her out of harm’s way.

Click. Boom.

Zelsys felt the recoil impulse at the same time as she felt the Queen biting down with utterly inhuman force. Teeth and bone alike shattered under the pressure, and considering the searing-hot pain, the Queen’s jaw wasn’t the only bone that broke. In a desperate last bid to help the recoil impulse push her free, she channeled Graze Pulse through her own raw stump, and it seemed to work.

She felt herself lose purchase as the Butcher came free and her severed left arm was pulled from the great locust’s maw, held on by nothing more than the kinetic dispersion harness.

Her arm gushed a truly tremendous trail of blood and screamed with incredible pain.

The silver-eyed slayer felt herself slipping into unconsciousness, but she refused.

The will to live and to exact retribution was greater than the middling, temporary pain of dismemberment. She’d had worse - hell, she’d inflicted worse upon herself just to produce a more impressive technique.

As she fell, Zelsys willed her heartbeat to slow and retook control of her breathing. With engine breathing having become ragged and arrhythmic, she returned to the steady, deep breaths that came naturally.

The big issue was landing. With her left arm out of commission, she couldn’t effectively use the harness to soften the sudden stop. But then, she felt herself slowing mid-fall, her descent softened by pulses of rumbling noise so deep that it turned the air to molasses wherever they came.

It was Strolvath. Of course.

She didn’t even bother trying to land. Her gut told her she wouldn’t need to, and she didn’t - a strong arm gripping a bayonet caught her and helped her stand on her feet, accompanied by an equal expression of concern and cold, killing rage towards the perpetrator.

The horribly mangled, partially hollowed-out, yet somehow living perpetrator, whose crystal-laden, bulbous head shone with shades beyond visual perception and gave off rainbow-coloured Fog in those very same colours. Her mutilated visage could scarcely be seen through the quickly-forming cloud, only perceptible as a bizarre impression of itself within the fog.

“Nice catch,” chuckled the beast-slayer, her face twisted into a truly beast-like expression. She stepped forward on her own, her stance solid and her eyes focused despite the curtains of blood that spilled forth from her arm. She allowed the Butcher to slip from her grip, reaching up to her stump arm and jamming her fingers into the open veins to staunch the torrent. The audible grinding of her teeth was the only evidence of how much it hurt.

From the steel-barreled maw there had issued forth the grapeshot-laden inferno of a Type-2 Anti-Cultivator Shell, shredding and mulching the mother-bug’s internal organs without recourse.

Muscle, soft tissue, bone, all gave way to a ballistic onslaught that dwarfed the firepower of many old-model field cannons.

Yet, she lived.

Just like the Sister, the Queen too had survived bodily harm that long passed the point of instant death through the power of the crystals burgeoning from her head.

Then, there came a second detonation in her gut - it was the grenade which she’d unwillingly swallowed, and it had just annihilated what little remained of the Arch-Parasite’s internal organs. What CP-T it had contained splashed all throughout the cavernous pupa of the Queen’s form, burning holes wherever it landed and stripping bare the quintessence of what she was.

An oversized head attached to a black-stone reinforced spine.

What had just transpired above didn’t fall on deaf ears to Alcerys.

She was close to breaching through the abdomen and into the thoracic cavity, only a few good hacks away. If only the organs that formed the eggs weren’t so impossibly though, if only…

A second detonation.

The force of it somehow didn’t annihilate the tissue between her and the queen’s thorax, even as rivers of organic mulch ran around her boots and screeching larvae squirmed all around. No, it blew a wave of fat and tissue right past Alcerys, exposing the reason why she was struggling to move further.

It wasn’t an entirely organic apparatus that formed the eggs within the queen’s body.

Rather, it was an utterly alien cavity laden with prismatic shards of that rainbow-coloured, azoth-like stone, protruding from the meat and threaded all throughout it just as sinew and fat would be otherwise. The tissues surrounding this bug-womb proved impervious to heat when she tried to slash through them, and so Alcerys resorted to cutting around them.

She’d wanted to avoid the detour, but the grenade’s detonation had done most of the legwork.

After a good four flame-wreathed cuts and some unpleasant squeezing, the Inquisitor found herself in a cavernous chimney of dying, burning meat, held aloft by chitinous plates and a near-indestructible spine.

For the first time in a long while, she was stumped.

“How the fuck am I supposed to kill something that just keeps going without any organs?”

Sheathing her blade Alcerys stared upward, blood and viscera dripping down her mask and armored coat.

There was a spot between the skull and the spine, a tiny little gap nary an inch across, where vital arteries had once entered the brainstem. Through this hole, she would have to shoot to injure the mother-bug.

Four shots.

She aimed her pepperbox and, compensating for the barrel offset, fired.

Thwack. Everything shook, and the bug let out a chattering noise that would’ve doubtlessly been accompanied by screaming, had the bug-mother lungs to scream with. They were tattered meat that hanged overhead, now.

The second shot bounced.

Alcerys managed to turn the barrel assembly and even aim, but found no reason to fire a third shot.

Strolvath had stopped trying to find a resonant frequency with which to directly harm the queen, and was now directing concussive bursts of sound in the mother-bug’s general direction. Even still, these vibrations were so forceful they made her bleed from every facial orifice imaginable and shattered the odd chitin plate here and there.

Zefaris scrounged around in her pocket for coins. Despite her meticulous collecting of used coins for re-use she’d lost the vast majority of them. She now had only three coppers and a silver. She took these four and breathed on each in turn, holding no expectations for what would come next. For all she knew, Zelsys would burn all her built-up Fulgur and smite the Queen with a lightning bolt.

The Beast-slayer stared up at the Locust Queen, both of them mutilated and stripped of their most potent weapons. At this range, the Lightning Butcher was all but a glorified toothpick, even though it had carved a sizable crevice into the bug-mother’s skull.

Driven by a mixture of Fog intoxication and brain-splitting pain into a state of rapturous, devil-may-care invincibility complex, Zelsys roared freely the first words that came to her mind.

“A lil’ too gamey for ya? A little too dense? Huh, you subhuman whore?! You’ve done nothing but put a ring on the reaper’s finger with that stupid bite.”

There came forth a cackling laughter from the beast-slayer. It went on for only a few seconds, yet was somehow still just a little too long for comfort.

“What were you thinking?! That a little dismemberment would somehow stop me?! Knock me down, I just get up. Stop my heart, I'll start it up again. Even if you take off all my limbs, I'll ride the jets of blood to rip your neck out with my teeth and figure out how to put myself back together. Unless you fuckin' grind me down to the last speck, I'll just keep at it. And what do you know? I might come back as a mass of meat - I’ll still be more human than you even then.”

It looked like the Queen wanted to talk back, her jaws rattling and snapping, her head swaying and human arms gesticulating in place, but she had no lungs or vocal chords to speak with.

“I do owe you something.”

Zelsys took a deep breath and spoke, yet no Fog came out of her mouth.

“In all the world and beyond, to no kings, gods, or devils will I bow!” she proclaimed. Her lungs emptied, the silver lines under her skin shone, and many thin wicks of Fog arose from them, forming into tiny spheres.

Another deep, full breath.

“For as long as this body of mine moves, I will exact retribution!” continued the slayer as more and more tiny spheres of Fog formed immediately around her body, attached by hair-thin threads of Fog. From her back, to her arms, even right above her head in a strange sort of crown.

“And never will I give mercy to those who would show me none!”

All at once, the great jet of white light that trailed from her eye sputtered out. A half-second passed, and in a blindingly-bright display of lights, tendril-like arcs of white plasma arced and slithered across the homunculus’s skin. They leapt even between the stump of her arm and the hanging-on limb, inside her mouth and between her teeth.

One by one in rapid succession, all the Fog beads that she’d manifested were struck by these arcs, becoming chittering beads of ball lightning, each the size of an eyeball. Each shone as brightly as a lightgem, but soon enough, a few bright points became an eye-burning constellation that outlined Zel’s form.

Yet even surrounded by who knew how many beads of lightning, its fury still arced across her skin.

With a guttural growl of pain the beast-slayer pulled her good hand free, gesturing towards the Locust Queen’s head. Arcs of electricity jumped between her index and middle finger as she sucked in another ragged breath.

Manic, fog-drunk, and exsanguinated, Zelsys still held onto the fundamental desire to seal her feats into techniques by naming them. The flickering, chittering lights that surrounded her conjured the image of a swarm of fireflies.

“Beast-butchering Arts: Dance of the Fireflies!”

A thin beam of lightning leapt forth from her index finger, spiraling and branching in a single flash until it met the wound in the arch-parasite’s forehead. It left no wound, not even a scorch mark - just a path of flickering lights.

All else followed.

Zefaris and Strolvath watched the entire casting process happen, and both of them knew to back away the moment Zel’s eye-trail vanished.

It felt like an eternity, even to them. The tension in the air was palpable, not just in the figurative sense - firefly-like static discharges flashed all around them, at first sporadically, but soon they became as dense and as blinding as the lights that Zelsys had formed around herself.

Then at last, after all that buildup, that guiding bolt leapt from her finger.

“Beast-butchering Arts: Dance of the Fireflies!”

So called out the beast-slayer.

A sphere of lightning ripped itself free from her arm, screaming death as it whizzed through the air. A second followed in its stead. A third, a fourth, a fifth - a half-dozen of them flew off before the first one hit.

When the first one hit, it was like the world stopped for a moment. There was a flash of light, a thunderous crack, and an expansion. For a flash so short that even Zefaris struggled to see it, the tiny lightning sphere expanded fivefold, evaporating flesh and bone wholesale and ripping at everything else with the residual shockwave.

In moments, the onslaught of thundercracks and flashes became too much even for the seasoned soldier. For the first time in a long while, Zefaris genuinely felt the need to shield her eyes from the light.

Thundercrack after thundercrack in staccato resounded all around as Zelsys’s onslaught ripped away at the Queen’s head, chewing through flesh and reinforced bone nearly unimpeded until it met the iridescent gemstones that filled her skull.

But then, even the gemstone yielded. They knew it was so, for its rainbow-hued shards sprayed forth and clattered to the ground with bell-like ringing.

The last firefly had danced, and Zelsys had no more to give.

Muscles spasming under residual currents, her hand wandered back to her stump arm. She’d lost enough blood to feel light-headed even while Fog-breathing, but she didn’t care. The only thing that mattered in this single moment was seeing the arch-parasite’s ripped-open head, and to her great satisfaction, that was exactly what Zelsys saw.

Amidst the cavernous remnants of a gigantic skull, there was a surprising absence of gore. It was like a bowl, filled with organic slurry and a great many iridescent gemstones.

“Finally,” she sighed, and all the beastlike tension vanished from her face. “The hard part is done. Now let’s clean up the stragglers.”

“You’re nearly as pale as me and probably in shock, I don’t think you should…” Zefaris cut in with genuine concern, but she was interrupted by Strolvath of all people.

“If she sits down she ain’t gettin’ back up,” he rumbled as he began walking towards the mega-hive. “It’s better if she stands, just make sure the stump ain’t gushin’ and her heart rate’s low.”

Zel looked down at her cleaver, then at Zef, “On second thought, we should bandage it so I can at least use my good arm and put dangly over here into Fog Storage so it doesn’t start rotting before we can reattach it.”

Alcerys hadn’t just seen the Queen’s skull get blown wide open, she had very clearly heard Zelsys invoking a three-line incantation while she tried to aim her third shot. By the time the so-called “Dance of the Fireflies” first struck, she’d given up on finishing the mother-bug off and moved onto trying to carve her way into the rest of the mega-hive.

A few minutes passed.

Strolvath, still maintaining his Hellfire Mantle, followed in the Inquisitor’s stead. Between his sheer concussive power and the Aquila Calibur, it still took them a while to breach the Queen’s corpse from the inside to enter the hive, as the structure had no other obvious entryway.

In this time, Zelsys and Zefaris just sat down on a relatively clear patch of the floor, firstly taking off the kinetic dispersion harness and with it the severed left arm. Zefaris placed the limb as it was into Fog Storage and retrieved a medical kit, using the supplies contained therein to treat Zel’s stump.

First came disinfectant that, according to the beast-slayer’s gritted teeth and hisses of pain, burned more than actually having her arm bitten off. Then it was a wound sealant powder that sucked up liquid and quickly formed an artificial scab. It was universally one of the first components to go in a medical kit to the point of them being stolen before the kits were even issued to a unit, so Zefaris was very much surprised when she found an untouched one in the first kit pulled from storage.

With the artificial, weirdly smooth scab formed, the stump was then bandaged just tightly enough to not cause permanent tissue damage, though Zefaris doubted even a tourniquet would prevent reattachment in Zel’s case. All in all, the loss of an arm was rendered many times lesser than expected.

With a word of thanks and a kiss on the cheek, Zel got up to go pick up her cleaver while Zef packed up the medical kit and put it back in storage. It thrummed reassuringly in her hand, its weight seeming even lighter than before. Just as she slipped it back into its holster she saw a man-sized section of the mega-hive’s front wall collapse, falling into dust under the relentless pounding of sonic shockwaves. In the hole stood, of course, Strolvath, and his gaze quickly found Zel’s.

He looked at her, then at Zefaris, then back at her.

“You two might uh… You might want to come take a look at this. There’s so much shit in here that I couldn’t describe it even if I tried,” thundered the musician. The sheer gravity and volume of his voice almost came across as comical when he talked with a normal, if confused inflection.

Zel and Zef exchanged looks and strode into the mega-hive together. They stopped for a brief moment right after they passed the makeshift entryway, briefly taking a look around the interior of the Queen’s corpse. A moment later, they followed through the carved path into the hive. Ducking through a tunnel of cauterized meat was a strange experience to say the least, but far from the strangest they’d been through.

They emerged to a surprisingly spacious tunnel, filled with a strange mixture of the worldly and the otherworldly. Black cables and organic tubes hung all over the place from the ceiling and the walls, black-stone mingled with chitin and hive matter so smoothly it became indistinguishable at points.

It was easily large enough to accommodate the Queen’s sizable form, with a great deal of frivolities lined up against the walls. Paintings of various opulently-dressed Pateirians lined the walls, some actually nailed into the hive matter whilst others were just squished into it. There were even red-tinted lightgems embedded into the hive matter right above the paintings to illuminate them.

Walking even deeper and past a bend, they came upon what Strolvath had likely referred to when he mentioned not being able to describe what was back here. There were two matters of interest back here.

The first was a nook with a strange machine surrounded by an even stranger shrine. It was a bulky thing with a vast round-buttoned mechanical keyboard and a great many brass tubes tipped by nozzles arranged in rows at its back. The device seemed to be the chief of Strolvath’s interests, as he went right up to it and started fiddling with its typewriter-like keyboard.

The second was a doorway to the left, which led to a smaller sub-chamber of the hive, containing an impressive deal of goods alongside another doorway at its other end. Some were things clearly brought here by the locusts - mostly boxes, some of which had been breached, spilling their contents of coinage, glass phials, makeup, and jewelry. The rest of the man made stuff was… Elixir. Huge glass growler bottles of the sweet-smelling carmine liquid, labeled with nothing more than the containment seals that kept the liquid stable.

All of these man made goods took up the left side of the sub-chamber.

The other side contained some man made things, sure, but it was largely vastly more interesting loot. Iridescent gemstones, golem cores, huge slabs of black-stone, piles and piles of lightgems, plumes of damascened gold and iron. There were metal basins of gold-coloured paste and black-stone molds that looked strangely similar to the Red Mantis’s blades, even crystalline flasks of mercurial liquid - perhaps just regular mercury, but Zel’s first thought was pure Azoth. She wagered most of what was on the right had been taken from the dungeon - perhaps looted from some actual physical storage chamber, or forcibly extracted by the Queen from Fog Storage.

Near the other end of the sub-chamber, the Inquisitor was squatted down looking at a painting whose subject was well out of sight.

“What’s past there?” Zel asked, pointing at the doorway at the back.

“The dungeon core,” Strolvath grumbled as he selectively pressed keys, very obviously doing his best to keep his voice down. “Go talk to it if you want, it just sounds tired and apologetic. Told me we can take anything from here and that it’s sorry it can’t give us proper end of dungeon rewards.”

After observing Strol’s fidgeting with the machine and its seemingly arbitrary responses in click-clacky, occasionally Fog-spraying responses, Zel did as the old soldier suggested. She walked right through the hoard-chamber, her eyes stiffly fixed on the corridor beyond. There was no door, no shining core, just matte-black stone floor and the bottom of a staircase.

Zelsys stepped into the corridor and made her way towards the staircase with Zefaris in tow, finding it curious that the staircase appeared to just stretch on infinitely upward.

One step up it, and nothing happened. Two, three, five, seven.

At the seventh step, something changed. It felt somewhat like stepping through a barrier, like some unseen, unassailable force had just judged her and deemed her worthy of passage.

The eighth step made everything unfurl.

The stairs ended here, everything beyond this point simply vanished to reveal a narrow black-stone walkway that stretched some twenty steps above a bottomless abyss of swirling iridescent Fog.

It was certainly a hell of a view and would’ve put them on edge, but considering that Strolvath had already spoken with the Core put both their minds at ease.

Reaching the end of the walkway had them peering into the swirling infinity below for a few seconds before something emerged from the depths. It was a… Vague, formless mass of iridescent gemstone that perpetually trailed this equally iridescent Fog. The shapeless cloud swirled about for a while, pieces sticking together and slowly taking a somewhat humanoid shape.

The humanoid descended onto the very edge of the walkway, the remaining pieces returned to the swirling vortex, and it spoke. Its voice came from everywhere all at once, but it was soft. Indeed it was soft, and dull, and apologetic - it carried an exhaustion that surpassed any human reckoning.

“I must thank you for terminating the progenitor of the infestation that plagues my halls and clogs my mechanisms. You must be rightly expecting a reward, but… I am in no state to muster one you three are deserving of,” said the dungeon core’s avatar. It held out its hand, and a Fog vortex formed in its palm. From within emerged a small black-stone box of similar proportion to an eyeglass case, gently landing in the avatar’s palm when the vortex vanished.

It stepped forward, and held it up so it was clearly visible. The top of the box split down the middle and opened, revealing three rows of seven off-white, oval shaped pills.

“The pills within this are yours to give away,” it said, then proceeded to explain what the pills did. “Swallowing one will crack the user’s Azoth Stone, forcefully pushing one past the bottleneck between First and Second Circle. A word of warning: It is an unpleasant ordeal even for the worthy, and may outright kill one of weak constitution or has a particularly developed Azoth Stone. The individual will excrete a great deal of impurities through the skin, and will emerge cleansed whether they like it or not. If one who does not have an Azoth Stone swallows a pill, the pill will emerge on the other end undigested.”

The box closed itself, and the avatar held it out within Zel’s reach.

“These pills are bestowed upon you not because you cleared the dungeon or purged the infestation, but because you did all this after having visited the Third King’s Oracle. As compensation for the absence of a proper reward, please take anything and everything within the hive. As long as you transport it in Fog Storage, everything should survive the trip to the surface.”

Zel cautiously took the pill box while the avatar spoke, finding that her hand just passed through the construct’s foggy form. She slipped it into the Butcher’s holster, and found a question gnawing at her mind.

“...What’s with the iridescent crystals and Fog?”

The avatar spread its arms, gesturing to the vortex that surrounded them.

“In the simplest possible terms, it’s the medium that I use to control the great cogworks, to form matter from the primordial Fog. It’s a mixture of Aether and Azoth in mundane terms. As you saw, it doesn’t play nice when a living thing tries to consume it, but it does have the unfortunate effect of sustaining a soul’s grip on the body well beyond the point of death.”

It held out its hand and an iridescent gem rose out of it, separating from the avatar’s mass.

“Feel free to salvage what crystal you can from the Parasites’ corpses, it’s tainted to me. Passage through the Fog Gate will just separate out the Azoth component…” it said, and some two-thirds of the gemstone’s total mass vanished in a puff of iridescent Fog. What was left behind was an intricate latticework of white gemstone.

“...Leaving behind pure, stable Aether. It’s not exactly a king’s bounty, but it’s something.”

Zel was just about ready to turn and walk back down those stairs, but Zefaris asked another question before she could do that.

“By the Fog Gate to the surface, do you mean the one we entered the chamber through?”

“Yes,” nodded the figure, stepping back and over the edge and plummeting into the otherworldly maelstrom below.

Still, the Dungeon Core spoke a final farewell, “I must return to my work. The Parasite left myriad holes for me to plug.”

The two beast-slayers turned and returned to the staircase, not looking back. Zef stuck around in the hoard-chamber after something caught her eye, while Zel returned to the strange machine to find Strolvath still tinkering with it.

He regarded her with a sideways glance and a question, but his focus remained chiefly on the strange machine.

“Helluva view ain’t it? With the stairs and the walkway over the cosmic maelstrom. Gotta give it to the Dead Ones, they had a knack for grandeur.”

Zel murmured a vaguely agreeable noise, her attention having been grabbed by the device in favor of pointless busy talk.

“What’s that machine?” she asked.

“Do I look like I know?” Strol responded absent-mindedly.

“Yes.”

“I don’t know what it is, but I’ve sure got some ideas. Considerin’ the Fog nozzles, the general size of it, and the keyboard… I wager this is probably the comms array that transmitted and received the aether wave comms we intercepted.”

Clack.

Brrrring. Brrrring. Brrrring.

A tiny bell rang inside the machine, and seemingly without further input it came alive. Its spouts began continuously spraying Fog until a generous screen of the substance had coalesced at the back of the machine, running down like water between the keys and back into the case.

Just over the surface of the Fog screen formed a projection of a portrait, its subject of long hair, opulent dress, and unreasonably fair complexion. It rang some bells, but she felt the need to get a proper close-up look.

“Mind if I uh… Take a closer look?” she murmured, even though she had already stepped right up to the machine and Strolvath had already shuffled over slightly to make space. Despite his hellfire-wreathed state, the tremendous heat he gave off wasn’t at all overwhelming even this up close. In fact the general intensity of his flames had been progressively fading for a little while now, like an actual fire running out of fuel.

The projection sat at a height where even Zel had to look up slightly to make eye contact with its subject, and she very quickly realized why his appearance was familiar. It was the Divine emperor, down to the streaks in his otherwise near-white hair, the high collar, and the exaggerated v-neck.

“Isn’t that the Divine Emperor?” Zel asked.