There was something wrong about his eyes; no longer were they lizard-like, but instead patterned. And his hair, his hair looked wrong as well, being a bit stiffer than it rightly should be, the strands perhaps twice or thrice as thick as was natural. Even his scales looked off somehow, they had a different sheen to them, more akin to the shine of Red’s chitin than draconic armor. She casually strode into the room, idly remarking as she scanned her surroundings: “Come now, you know how it is…”

Near enough the moment she passed him, her gaze fell upon something familiar that explained the subtle change in his appearance: A large jar covered in seals on a stone altar, the jar having been opened.

“...I just couldn’t help myself! With my cultivation method, it’s use it or lose it,” she lied. “Speaking of the perils of cultivation, say, how’s the side effects of that Gu I see you’ve used? Your hair’s looking awfully like feelers.”

“I give it a month before it turns into articulated chitin dreadlocks,” Red sneered from behind, bringing to mind the vivid memory of Zel’s fight with the Sister; besides being an insane traitor entombed in a suit of living armor, her most pronounced mutation was a mane of exactly what Red had just described. She was stalling somewhat, perhaps because she’d fully expected overt hostility, and partly because the violence didn’t seem to have started on the floor below just yet, whatever the reasons were.

“I’ve never felt better,” the knight captain uttered, his eyes shifting over to Victor before jumping back to Zelsys. “I suppose this gift shall be fitting recompense for that little… Mishap with our men.”

“It shall NOT!” came a sudden proclamation from the Locust Queen, her voice completely saturated with a thick Pateirian accent. “They were my children, it is I who was wronged by this one’s violent impulses!”

Zelsys could barely hold herself together at the farce unfolding before her, wondering whether these two genuinely thought the slaughter in the preceding chamber was anything remotely close to unintentional, or if they, too, were just putting on facades.

“Let me ask you a couple things, before we… Go on with this whole affair,” she sighed, squatting down in place, resting her arms on her knees. An unassuming position, but perfect to spring out of when it came to violence, the whole body being coiled like a spring. She already began breathing, “Firstly, what by the Dead Ones was that display? I am well aware of the technique used to open that Fog Gate, and I can scarcely imagine the arcane magnitude of an object that would require six souls to be burned up as kindling just to transport something of such a relatively small size. Secondly, where do your loyalties lie, exactly?”

Not waiting for a response, Zel continued, raising a hand to point to the doors at the other end of the sanctum as she turned her eyes up at the Red Locust Queen.

“When - not if, when - I break down that other door over there, will I find an aetherwave comms cabinet with a line directly to the Imperial Palace, like I did back in the Willowdale Dungeon? Or will there just be a bunch of egg sacs for me to smash?”

Aghast at what she’d just said, the Locust Queen didn’t even bother to cry out in anger, instead just raising her staff and uttering a scream of pure, brilliant indignation. The four jade rings around its perimeter glowed, and from the center of the main ring erupted a brilliant bolt of scarlet lightning intent on obliterating her. Zel held out a hand and just… Took the strike. It surged up her left arm like a wrathful serpent, but was subsumed before it could even touch her skin. Conveniently enough, it was now that she finally began to hear gunshots from underfoot.

“You dare?!” she cackled. “Not only do you insult me by trying to strike me with my own element, but such a weak manifestation of it as well? Chang Yi Sao, or whatever your name is, I would’ve expected a Pateirian like you to know better than to raise a hand at one so obviously your superior. Did the stench of your own pheromones perhaps cloud your senses to the point of blinding you to the magnitude of my presence?”

Frankly, Zelsys just enjoyed playing up this farcical role for a moment, embodying the archetypal role of a smugly superior cultivator which she’d read about in Pateirian historical accounts. It wasn’t an unbefitting role for her to play either; after all, she was indeed the elder of her own sect, and she had indeed advanced cultivation in a significant way in only a few months… Even if her advancement had really just been rediscovering old knowledge and recontextualizing it in a practical system without pointless mysticism.

A rising anger overtook her at the idea of all the innocent lives that must’ve been ruined by these creatures. Though she’s subtly begun Fog-breathing in order to saturate her own muscles, she now found herself projecting her voice at a volume far beyond the ability of any human, burning increments of her breath to speak louder than many could shout.

“Tell me,” she commanded the Locust Queen, inwardly flipping the switches which shifted her body into full combat mode. “Tell me, when I pull your legs off and skewer your head on one of them, will I be putting down a mere slaver, or one of the Emperor’s puppets?”

She glanced over to Von Wickten, his face filled with a mix of confusion and anger, as if he still hadn’t fully processed the reality of things. Heart pounding, breathing speeding up, blood flooding into the extremities. A soaring body high took root, the cocktail of an anticipatory rush and pure, brilliant hate, a hate so glorious and righteous it became a purely positive emotion of malicious intent.

“And you. Tell me, did you truly think we were anything alike? That I had challenged you under any pretense other than my own desire to humble you and my need to extract the keyphrase from the glob of congealed drugs and semen in your skull? Did you really catch on, was that why you ate a parasitic bug that’ll turn you into a hollow shell in a few years? In some desperate hope it would make you strong enough to overpower me?”

The knight captain’s features hardened with each insulting question, until, eventually, he exploded in rage and rancor, erupting in Zel’s direction. She stopped his assault dead with a simple front kick, sending the man skidding across the floor, his armor throwing sparks.

“Your technique is worse than amateur; it’s complacent!” she laughed, finally bothering to pull out her weapon as she raised her gun to the Locust Queen. “I scarcely need to pay attention to predict your next move!”

Before she could fire the Locust Queen howled in anger again, this time summoning rows of earthen spikes from underfoot whilst attempting to block off Zel’s escape route with conjured walls. It was all so, so terribly predictable… But then, there came something new: The manifestation of four ghostly swords, which the Queen took to puppeting with gestures of her staff, and which set upon Zelsys with an impressive fervor. Indeed, between the Queen and Von Wickten, there may have been a real struggle to be had here; had it not been for Red and Victor, that is. The Locust Queen, between spewing incantations to fuel her arcane assault, turned her eyes to Red, barking a command in Pateirian. The tone and length of the utterance, combined with Red’s reaction, were enough for Zelsys to guess that the Queen had likely assumed that Red would just automatically side with her.

The Lady in Red emitted an insulted scoff, spitting back also in Pateirian before transitioning to Ikesian: “I will not suffer traffickers infesting my domain, let alone ones that steal major artifacts like a Maxims-damned Dragon Eye! Fool that you are, your life is forfeit.”

Holding out a hand, the glistening gold of her mantis blade shot out from inside her sleeve. In the blink of an eye, Red slipped into one of the Queen’s numerous and sizable blind spots, and with an effortless swipe of her arm-blade severed one of the monstrosity’s rear legs. Meanwhile, Victor had formed a Devil’s Tooth the size of his forearm, which he launched directly at the Queen’s chest. Only in refocusing on defense by spinning her staff with kinetic magick did she avoid being drilled through, in which time her ghostly swords just hung there, motionless. When at last she resumed puppeting them, she split one off to attempt skewering Victor, but the young man had already gotten well out of harm’s way by following in Red’s lead and simply getting right up next to the Locust Queen. From this position did he spray a gout of slick, greasy mud right into Von Wickten’s path as the knight set off on a furious chase after Zelsys, who was laughing and taunting the Queen and Adalbert even now, uttering slurs and derogatory remarks the likes of which Victor hadn’t even conceived of beforehand.

Though his mud-slick was disarmed by Von Wickten merely leaping over it, Zelsys still capitalized on it by clotheslining the man, from which he, admirably enough, recovered with a sweeping low kick that she instinctively jumped over. He instantly followed by rising with an uppercut in the hopes of striking her mid air, but he failed to account for Zel’s absolutely unnatural flexibility; she simply dodged in mid-air by bending over backwards, only to spring back and stab into the armor gap of his elbow from one side while smashing the other side with a hammerfist, correctly counting on his arm to be durable enough that she wouldn’t stab herself. The exchange of blows which followed immediately after they both landed served to prove one thing: The Gu had magnified Von Wickten’s raw capabilities to a point where he could fight on par with Zelsys, although the tremendous boost to raw ability had only made his overreliance on it even worse. His sudden growth had been kneecapped by his own usage of the strength granted by the Gu as a crutch, rather than properly leveraging it with better technique.

Her ability to keep up with the monstrous bug-dragon-mutant wasn’t helped by the occasional flying-sword potshot from the Locust Queen, and so, Zel decided to create a bit of distance. She met several of Von Wickten’s strikes with elbow blocks enhanced with repeating casts of Siphoning Pulse, immediately burning the resultant kinetic charge to boost a backwards leap. Raising her arm-cannon to the Queen and burning breath after breath to charge up a Thundercannon, she saw that Red had already severed three of the monstrosity’s legs, with Victor having somehow clambered atop her bulbous thorax. The young mage had shrouded his broken spear’s blade in a maelstrom of Bonefire, and was just now using it to pry away a fourth leg. The Locust Queen kept screaming in Pateirian and trying to impale both of them with flying swords, but she physically couldn’t turn far enough to see either of them properly, and so even Victor had an easy time staying out of harm’s way. Such was the peril of prodigal size.

Zel’s attention only exacerbated the Queen’s alarm, such that she had managed to marshal the same staff-spinning defense by the time Zel pulled the trigger-lever and invoked: “THUNDERCANNON!”

With a bright-burning flash the lightning-shrouded shell erupted forth, yet to the Queen’s credit, she did manage to block it… Only for the staff to shatter under the force, sending the shell careening off into the ceiling. That self-same moment, Victor had managed to sever the fourth of the Queen’s six legs, leaving only the front pair. Red stepped out from the Queen’s blind spot, removing her mask with her right hand while conjuring the Subcore with her left, a malicious grin plain to see on her face. She took a little too much pleasure in barking a command at Victor: “Get down from there, unless you wish to be crushed!”

Unfortunately, Zelsys didn’t have the luxury of paying attention to the Locust Queen’s execution, as Von Wickten was very much a present and active threat. It wasn’t until she decided to grapple him that she got the upper hand, managing to land a flying headscissor on the man before she got right on top of him. She took her blade to his chestplate like one would a can opener to, well, a can. “I’ll give you this: You listened to my advice about making it a pain to get your armor off!”

The Butcher’s sawteeth screamed to life, then bit into the high-quality chain with which Von Wickten had had his armor’s straps replaced. He couldn’t be blamed; one couldn’t exactly get an entirely new suit of armor made in a few days, so replacing the old straps with chains was the next best thing. She could’ve just sunk the tuning-fork blade into the back of his head right here and now, but with righteous cruelty in her heart, Zelsys had decided to break the man, and in making this mistake, she had permitted him the time to trigger a gruesome metamorphosis. His armor exploded off of him well before she could force it off, the chains which had held it on him unlocking at his mental command just in time for a tremendous growth in size to blast the armor right off of him.

Zel found herself sent flying backwards, forced to springboard off of a wall, rolling forwards just in time to glimpse the gruesome unfurling of an immense body, rapid growth enveloping the host body. It was a form that towered at nearly twice her own height, a morphological inbetween of humanoid and draconic, with digitigrade legs and a massive bladed tail whose shape resembled a centipede. Von Wickten’s mutant body possessed tremendous claws and thick, crimson-red armor plates all over, overlaid on top of one another like the scales of a real dragon, covered in swirling patterns not unlike Red’s own chitin. His head was now reshaped to that of a Dragon Descendant, possessed of four eyes and three sets of backswept horns, his lower jaw split like the mandibles of an insect and lined with terrible fangs. In the middle of his forehead sat a fifth eye, but this was no eye; it was one end of a huge centipede, the Gu which he had consumed, which briefly darted out of the socket before retreating. He instantaneously drew in a tremendous breath, the scales on his chest lifting up as it expanded, baleful light shining through between them.

Most curiously… He had no wings. Not even stumps. Nothing.

ACCURSED METAMORPHOSIS

THE TRUE FACE OF A HOLLOW BEING

KODOKU RITE: SIN-SOAKED ENTOMODRAGON

A blast of yellow-tinged flame followed, directed squarely at Zelsys; she’d gone well before it struck, but the molten rock left after its impact sent a sufficient message. She couldn’t take a hit from that, there wouldn’t be anything left to pull back together. His tail whipped forward, bending like a spring as its tip ran through the stone floor and carved a line. A boastful gesture. Yellow venom dripped from both Von Wickten’s claws and mouth, slowly pooling at his feet. Zel decided to meet him head-on for the moment, if only to ascertain his capabilities, though she took care to squirrel away enough Pneuma to completely negate a direct hit from his tail or fuel a high-speed dodge if it came to that. Soon it became clear that his strength was not to be trifled with; even Von Wickten’s claws could rip through stone. His scales, chitinous as they were, were so large and thick that whittling them away with smaller ball lightning just wasn’t feasible short of focus-firing a single spot, and though the Butcher’s sawteeth could cut through them, it was too time consuming of an option to use unless she could mount him from behind.

Though she managed to get through his armor by resorting to an All-severing Thunderclap Sting, this lesser instance of the technique simply didn’t suffice to strike him down or even seriously wound him. It left a crater of shattered scales and shredded flesh alongside a deep, half-cauterized wound that spewed hemolymph like a fountain, but in moments, the blood congealed into a waxy plug, and the Butcher was now stuck. Zel found herself forced to leave her blade embedded in Von Wickten’s flesh in order to get away from him before he could blast her with the full might of his fake, but very much lethal dragon’s breath. It wasn’t a truly dire problem, she could retrieve her blade from afar, after all, but it was one of many proofs of the legitimate power Von Wickten had attained through union with that accursed bug. Zel’s gut told her that the object Red had referred to as a Dragon Eye had to have played a part. Perhaps he had stolen the remnant power of a real, but long-dead dragon, feeding his own mutations and the Gu in equal measure with it. She could only guess, and now was not the time for such considerations.

She managed to goad him into meeting her into a test of strength to gauge his sustained power, but after they locked hands, it became a deadlock that Zelsys found herself unable to break with any sort of expedience, staring into that hideous face up-close as the Gu emerged from his forehead and leered in her face. Von Wickten’s own eyes were now much like the “eye” at the end of that bug, filled with a hexagonal pattern. By anatomical definitions, Von Wickten could never be considered anything close to a proper Dragon Descendant; in fact, Zel’s marginal genetic heritage from the dragon-tree worshiping monk nobles, which caused the pattern of her eyes, made her more of a Dragon Descendant than Von Wickten was… And she said as much to taunt him, grinning ear to ear: “No wings, no true magic, yellow blood, and fake, chitinous scales… Truly, you are the furthest thing from a true dragon. The single drop of dragon’s blood in my veins makes me a truer descendant of dragons than you.”

The flash of fury and associated loss of focus was enough for her to marshal her strength, and with a mighty heave, throw Von Wickten’s giant form, slamming him back-first into the ground - or rather, into a series of just-raised stone pillars, which Red had raised after seeing what Zelsys was about to do. Though the impact cracked several of his scales and audibly popped his spine, Von Wickten managed to right himself only a moment after Zel had returned to a proper fighting-stance. Seeing that blunt force was their weakness, she thought to smash his scales; after all, her armored legs were such supreme blunt instruments that she could cut down trees with them.

And indeed, she might have very well smashed apart his armor as she unleashed a southpaw side kick, but far surpassing her expectations, the bug-dragon monstrosity of a man that stood before her managed to grab her foot. That was the first and last time she had underestimated him, swinging her other foot off of the ground with a sudden twist of her torso, manifesting a dozer-blade of congealed lightning around her boot only moments before it connected with the bicep of the very arm that had grabbed her. Though not nearly sufficient to sever his arm or even inflict a deep wound, the lightning had softened his scales enough that the impact shattered them, searing a deep-enough gouge into his arm that he hissed in pain and let go. The first blood was drawn, its purple-yellow substance oozing from the cauterized wound. Following the spin through even after he let go, Zelsys delivered another kick to his left side. He blocked it with his tail, forcing Zel to back off for the moment.

Meanwhile, Red had brought three pillars down on the Locust Queen’s thorax in sequence, pinning her to the ground; Red was taking excessive pleasure in punishing an expy for the Locust Queen she herself had been forced to serve, and insodoing, gave the Red Locust Queen an opening. In a desperate effort to save herself, the Queen manipulated her ghostly flying swords to sever her own back end just below where it connected to the front half of her mutant body, leaving her as a humanoid mutant with disproportionately large, powerful, and bladed legs. She howled in pain as yellow hemolymph sprayed out, but it soon ceased, and she spun around on one spindly leg with a dexterity that one who had just severed their own vital organs absolutely would not have. Red didn’t seem surprised at all at the spilling of milky-white, head-sized capsules from the cut-open thorax; if anything, she was surprised it had taken this long for the Red Locust Queen to take this measure, even if it was extremely drastic. Despite her size, the Queen was dextrous enough to get out of the way of the further pillars which Red manifested, creating distance and making her way to join Von Wickten’s side.

Red blocked off the Queen’s path by raising pillars across the entire chamber, splitting it down the middle with a cage-wall that Zelsys could still squeeze through; it was an opportunity the slayer took, choosing to eliminate the Queen before dealing with Von Wickten proper. She blasted across the chamber faster than the Queen could ever hope to move, her phantom swords stabbing and scoring the ground in Zel’s wake. As she neared Red and Vic, she pulled the grenade from her belt and tossed it to the young man, loading a Type-2 shell into her cannon right afterward.

She gestured to Red, before leaning in to instruct her protegé: “We’ll draw the queen in, immobilize her, and force her mouth open. You just pull the pin and throw the grenade in; that’s all you have to do.”

The young man nodded, knowing full well how to operate one of these from his time serving in the local militia, though he had only ever thrown training dummies that were loaded with tiny black powder charges for simulation purposes. Just as they’d planned, so too they did; through generous application of her ability to manifest pillars of false blackstone, and by drawing on the Terra-rich environment, Red was able to force the Queen to approach lest she be pummeled, while Zel helped the chase from another side by constantly pelting the insect-monarch with spheres of lightning that, bit by bit, ate away at the flesh of her back. Though she was fast and strong, the Locust Queen simply didn’t have much dexterity in her bipedal form, clearly not used to even walking in it, let alone fighting. The broken state of her staff, too, impeded her ability to maneuver her blades, which were barely a factor while they chased her like this.

Once she was in place, Red smashed the Queen from the front with three pillars to the stomach while raising one perpendicular to her slumped form from behind, up which Zelsys ran to reach the head. With all her might, muscles writhing under her skin as light flashed within them, she grasped the Locust Queen’s mandibles and pried them open. She could feel one of her biceps threatening to tear from the bone as the Queen struggled to close her mouth, and with no direct line to the ground, she couldn’t draw Metallum to reinforce it, leaving it a ticking clock. Fortunately, Victor wasn’t incompetent or stupid, and had pulled the pin right on time, but… The queen kept thrashing about, rendering a throw a true coinflip. He hated the idea of what he was about to do, but he did it anyways, sprinting up to the queen and burning a lungful of Pneuma to propel himself into a high jump tossing the lit grenade into the queen’s maw from mere meters away.

Zel felt her bicep tearing fibre by fibre, the tendon threatening to give, but it was the combination of slick insect-spit and the Queen’s continued thrashing that made her lose her grip. As Zelsys flew through the air the Queen’s jaws snapped shut, with the maddened, doomed woman lurching forward in an effort to at least sever her would-be killer’s arm.

It was a fate that had befallen Zelsys when she had shoved her arm down the Willowdale Locust Queen’s mouth. He had read about this, and as such had anticipated this possibility. Victor had had the good judgment to sharply breathe in as he flew, and now had the fuel to blast himself away with Aer magic. He had the good fortune… Of skinning his own forearm with a dying bugwoman’s teeth rather than lose the whole thing.

Though she was wrathful and fully intended to kill Zelsys, Red wasn’t so petty as to let someone uninvolved in their feud just fall to the ground and break his head open like a fucking watermelon. The Lady in Red caught Victor mid-fall, and even went so far as to raise a barrier of several short pillars to protect the both of them from the blast of gore and CP-T that originated from the Locust Queen. The compound’s burning globs seethed so intensely they burned into Red’s fake blackstone as if it were wood.

To her surprise, the young man wasn’t screaming or crying. He just raised his hand, and stared at it with a blank, vacant stare.

Red’s first thought was to reconstruct it; the amount of biomass lost wasn’t that major, but she wasn’t going to bet on some lanky teenager’s Vitae reservers. She retrieved a bottle of Tengri’s Tears and shoved it in his mouth, commanding him: “Drink. All of it.”

Only as he obeyed did she recall her Subcore and begin muttering the incantations of reconstruction, a protracted way of commanding the human body as the Dungeon Core had once commanded her: “Remake thyself.”

As his stripped-raw forearm became enveloped in serpents of iridescent Fog and crystalline ringing resounded over the sound of Zelsys arguing with and mocking Von Wickten, what grew back wasn’t skin. It was bone. Solid plates of it, interlocking and articulated, forming a whole gauntlet in place of lost skin. Certainly, the boy’s chest and a good part of his neck had such plating, but… That his body could grow solid bone so quickly, even with the aid of her magick, was a surprise.

“You’ve picked a good disciple if you teach at all like you fight…” she thought to herself.

Meanwhile, Zel had landed and now stood face to face with Von Wickten, the two separated by a cage-wall of rapidly crumbling faux-blackstone pillars, her right arm hanging limply by her side as she pulled out her Tablet, retrieving her box of alchemically activated iron pills. She popped two of them in her mouth, willing her body to break them down now, and so it was: Her stomach acid was alkahest, able to melt nearly anything.