The pain of impact jolted her back to her senses. For the second time this day, she’d been stripped of her weapons and equipment, this time so thoroughly that even her shin-plates were gone. On the upside, she no longer felt a stinger stuck through her back and into her heart - there was only a dull pain to the new tissue that plugged the hole.

She found herself in a Fog Gate chamber identical to the one on the surface, spat out by a gate identical to the one she’d entered, its light flickering and dying moments after she woke. The door at the other side of the small, rectangular chamber was still shut; as it was, its halves formed a glyph that spanned the entire door, which already weakly glowed when she woke. It was a colossal, elaborate pattern that spanned two-thirds of the door’s surface, lacking a single core symbol; it resembled serpents or perhaps roots made up of interlocking sigils, entangling the door and one another.

Myriad thoughts and emotions swirling in her head, Zelsys stood to her feet and approached the door. The glow intensified with her approach, until it swung open to let her pass without the slightest sound just as she would’ve bumped into it.

Beyond it lay… A hallway. As tall and as wide as the door itself, every surface smooth, black stone, carved with a great many channels - some followed the length of the corridor, whilst others changed direction, but seemingly never at a sharp angle. There was also the reason for her ability to see in the utter absence of sunlight, these being immaculately carved prism-shaped lightgems that sat embedded in the stone walls, well out of reach.

At the end of the hallway, perhaps only a few dozen meters away, there was another door. Simply walking through the hallway, there was a palpable sense of tension. Zelsys felt lighter on her feet, what pain she still felt was numbed, there was this familiar invigoration, as if the very air down here was suffused with Fog. At her approach, this door’s glyph lit up too and it too opened, leading her to…

Another small, rectangular chamber, with another door at the other end. There was nothing here, but her gut told her there had to be something. Anything. Maybe in the walls?

It was in the walls. The left wall, right next to that other door, specifically. A small glyph with a nozzle in the center. As the two door glyphs had, it too seemed proximity activated, prompting the nozzle to sputter and spit ribbons of Fog that formed letters, words, and soon full sentences. It was an unfamiliar script, one she couldn’t read, yet her brief attempt at interpreting was apparently enough to make the Fog rearrange itself into readable, if archaic Ikesian.

How curious - the first worthy challengers in centuries,

at an inopportune time such as this.

Know that I will not be merciful, but I will be generous. These halls are yours to plunder.

The words stuck around for barely long enough to read, their constituent Fog fading out in mere seconds. More Fog poured from the hole in the wall, and more words formed.

The Parasite’s grip is weak here, but our time is short. Traverse my halls, purge the Parasite’s children.

Fear none, slay all, and take without remorse. The beasts will do the same and far worse if you let them.

“Where are the others? And what of my weapons?” Zelsys questioned, expecting no reply. The stream of Fog sputtered, stopped, and resumed, writing out the response.

Your tools of butchery are in the chamber ahead,

you need but find them.

As for your companions,

they face their own trials.

You will find one another soon,

whether they survive or not.

The flow of Fog ceased and the glyph went dark, the door swinging open to reveal the chamber ahead. A long chamber with a door at the other end and two side paths to the right, the walls adorned with surreal, angular sculptures of puppet-like humanoids, their faces flat and bearing the same glyph that she’d seen next to the door.

When she at last decided to cross the precipice the door slammed shut behind her, the chamber sprawling out before her.

With naught but her own breath to break the silence, Zelsys could hear everything within the chamber and beyond. The click-clacking of an elaborate mechanism beneath the floor and behind the walls, the distant thumping of gigantic pistons, the skittering of chitin-plated feet to her right…

“Need a weapon first…” she thought, shutting out her instincts as she searched the chamber for something she could weaponize, anything. A pang of hope flashed in her mind at the sight of a nearby statue that had been broken apart, with a few of the pieces looking to be small enough for use as clubs.

Wrapping her fingers around what had been the statue’s forearm, she found that it was light - far too light, even more so than dry wood. Without any sharp edges, it would be a completely inefficient force multiplier. While she searched for any fragments that were sharp enough to use the sounds of locust-men grew louder, more frantic, their scuttling and chattering accompanied by horrid squelching and cracking.

The scuttling stopped, only to resume seconds later - now swiftly approaching, two sets of heavy footfalls thumping from beyond the corner. Knowing there was no point to hurriedly trying to find a shank, Zel stood to her feet and breathed, filling one lung whilst emptying the other.

“Unarmed it is…” she sighed inwardly, channeling the lungful of Fog she had to exhale in starting the Breath Engine to break into a sprint; speeding up her heartbeat and pushing her legs to their fullest capability. She ran around the corner even before any of the approaching locusts could reach it, leaping feet-first towards the opposing wall and using it as a springboard.

In the split-second she had between hitting the wall and jumping off, Zelsys saw the sources of those heavy footfalls and chose to strike at them first. The group was made up of five locust drones and two locusts nearly as tall as her, possessed of a top-heavy form with stubby, thick legs and huge arms that nearly reached the ground. Their heads were recessed into their upper bodies and their chitin glistened, flexing as they moved - still soft from whatever process they had undergone to take on this Warrior-like stature.

Was it procedural growth and molting? A complete metamorphosis? It didn’t matter.

Their armor was still weak. Even at a momentary glance, Zelsys knew where to pull and where to dig her fingers in to make their meatsuits come apart like wet paper.

At last she springboarded off the wall, barreling into the left Warrior. It raised its left arm to try and stop her surprisingly quickly, but she just took hold of it and let her momentum do the rest, hoping that the Warriors still had human skeletons, so that she might use their bones as weapons. Her hope was dashed when she felt the arm’s carapace rip away, with no hard resistance or dislocation felt.

Hemolymph gushed for a moment before the Warrior’s stump shoulder sealed itself, and it took a swing with its good arm. Zelsys had already lunged for a drone, her grin flashing as she crushed the locust-man with sheer weight and ripped its mandibles from its head, stomping on its skull before she moved onto its compatriots.

Chitin-crusted pseudo-karambits in hand, she disemboweled the one-armed Warrior crotch to chin, pulling through on the momentum to bite into the other Warrior’s chest. The mandible began to cut, but then got stuck as the soft chitin bunched up under it. Before she could take a swing with her left the Warrior made a strike of its own, smashing down on her right shoulder with such prodigious force that it buckled even her knees.

It stared down at her, its vacant stare briefly lit up by recognition, immediately overtaken by all-consuming hate. Before it could do anything else, Zelsys let go of the stuck mandible and wrapped her arm around its arm, simultaneously shifting her weight to her right leg. In a moment she exhaled a full lung and used the Fog to fuel a crushing flex that severed the Warrior’s forearm and a violent side kick, so forceful it swept it off its stubby little feet.

Both of the remaining drones finally arrived at the decision to lunge at her, but they were too late. She’d already filled both her lungs and recovered from her kick, using her left foot as a pivot point for a roundhouse kick that smashed both the drone’s heads and ended with an axe kick to cave the Warrior’s skull even further into its torso, splattering hemolymph and mutated brain matter.

To her surprise, the disemboweled, one-armed Warrior managed to rock itself to its feet, its stomach hollow while its vital organs were kept safe by a separate compartment in the upper torso.

“Clever,” she admitted, letting out a chuckle at the idea that had just crossed her mind. Would it work? She could only guess until she tried it.

She reared back, breathing in as the Warrior pulled back it's good arm for a punch. With an exhalation and a duck to the right, she thrust her open hand into the locust-man’s gaping chest cavity, her fingers in a claw-like arrangement ready to grab and rip out, exclaiming, “Heartbreaker!”

A moment later, the Warrior’s stone-shattering jab had missed her head by mere centimeters and her seeking grasp had taken a sharp upward turn, her fingers ripping through muscle membrane and ligament alike to find the creature’s deceptively-placed heart - on the right side of its chest, near the very bottom of its organ-sac.

Zelsys had no way to know it was there, yet Heartbreaker still guided her hand towards it. With a yank and a kick that struck the inner back wall of its torso, she ripped the Warrior’s heart out and crushed it in her hand.

The foul-smelling viscera, sticky and slimy, came off with some effort after she rubbed her hand on her trousers, the fabric just barely coarse enough to get the filth off. Letting out a breath and willing her heartbeat back down to a more relaxed rate, Zel found the drone whose head was most intact and ripped off its mandibles before moving on.

There was still skittering and lurching to be heard down this branch of the chamber, evidenced by a tumorous dome made of solid hive material, its wall spilling out from beyond a left turn. It had a clear recess in the shape of an entryway, but there was a suspiciously familiar chitinous wall plugging it.

Walking towards it, she ruminated on a method of elimination. Perhaps it would be a good idea to go around. Did the dungeon take all her weapons? It had taken the ammo belt, so grenades weren’t an option.

A realization. The dungeon hadn’t taken her supply of Compound P-T.

She cautiously took a vial and pulled the seal free, uncorking it in the process. The Compound instantaneously began to turn bright orange on contact with the air, and when she stuck her finger into the vial, it came out as a thick, oily jelly. It would be just sticky enough to apply. Unsure of how quickly the Doorman of this hive would react, Zelsys made sure to dig out the entire vial’s contents so she could quickly apply and ignite it.

It wasn’t much, but she hoped it would be enough. With a short breath of Fog and a brief sprint, she ran up to the Doorman and smeared the glob of CP-T along the seam between its arm plates, the compound dense enough for all of it to transfer to the pitted surface with naught but a thin layer of grease left on her fingers. It covered barely half the length of the seam, but it would have to be enough. The chitinous barrier began to stir just as she finished applying the Compound, and without any access to a conventional ignition source, Zel had no choice but to use an electric arc.

A breath of Fog, an electric arc between the fingers of her clean hand so as to not set herself ablaze. The arc flickered across the top of the line for a few seconds and all the while the chitinous wall retreated, millimeter by millimeter. Then, all at once, the whole line of gel caught fire.

It was a flash of light and a wave of heat that made her step back, followed by the stench of burning chitin and the Doorman’s pained screeching. In seconds, Compound P-T burned a hole big enough to see the creature’s twisted head through, its mandibles twitching as it struggled against the weight of its own body.

Zelsys waited for it to retreat far enough into the hive to free up the passageway, using the time afforded to start the Breath Engine and place herself into a combat-ready stance, keeping her right hand free whilst she gripped a locust mandible in the left, with the other one slipped into her belt.

The plates finally parted, hemolymph running down their edges as Compound P-T continued to burn, the Ignis crystals suspended within it melting inward whilst the gel burned away at the exterior. When Zelsys finally stepped past the ponderous creature that was the Doorman, it exhaled that self-same knockout gas the other one had, yet Zelsys felt… Almost nothing.

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Instead of a wooziness that dulled the mind and weakened the body, there was only a brief wave of numb heat that washed over her before the effects of Fog combined with the stench inside the hive overpowered it. The hive was one large chamber, containing basins of some liquid to the left and five cocoons lined up against the right wall - two of which had already ruptured. There were seven locust drones tending to these cocoons, their stomachs distended and bulging with the same yellowish liquid as was contained in the basins. Some type of protein slurry, perhaps.

They didn’t seem to even notice her entry, until the Doorman’s exhalation reached them. By the time they did, Zelsys already leapt onto the creature’s back and began ripping out its breathing tubes, one after the other. With the chitinous tubes ripped free and the wounds bleeding down the Doorman’s respiratory system, she left it to drown in its own hemolymph and moved onto the others. It was too slow to be a threat.

A stomach-bursting kick that sent a drone flying into another, spraying the sickly-sweet smelling contents of its gut all over. A slash to cut the throat of a second, an uppercut to decapitate a third. These drones were engorged, they were slow and clumsy. But they were a good distraction - good enough for one of the cocoons to burst whilst Zelsys slaughtered them.

Good enough to give the newborn Warrior time to set its sights on her and charge ahead, its fresh chitin stretching to a sickening degree with every movement. With but a step to the side and a yank on the arm of a drone she had in reach, Zelsys made the Warrior charge through it and right into the shuddering Doorman’s back.

The drone’s hemolymph sprayed into gaped-open breathing tubes, the Warrior’s chitin plates flexing under the strain like an inflated waterskin. The Doorman didn’t budge - it was dying where it stood, but still it stood. With surprising speed and agility, the Warrior stepped back and whipped around on its heel, twisting its leg into a spiraled aberration as it tried to use the momentum to deliver a devastating right hook.

It sailed right over Zel’s head just as she dove in low, and the Warrior barely stopped itself with its other foot before the strain overwhelmed the tensile strength of its chitin. Zelsys had already dived in, slashing into the stretched-thin material with the mandible. She let go of it the moment she felt it pierce the outer layer, rising to her feet as she took the other mandible into her right hand and brought it down on the Warrior’s back, dragging down as far as it would go before the bunched-up chitin stopped it. Simultaneously, she wrapped her left arm around the Warrior’s left, crushing it into immobility with a Stormsurge-fuelled flex. Even she couldn’t open her grapple now, so almighty was the current coursing through her bicep.

She only managed a half-meter gash down the Warrior’s back, but that was enough to justify letting go of the mandible. With the exhalation of a full lung, she plunged her open hand into the wound.

“Heartbreaker!” she exclaimed, feeling the ephemeral force guide her arm down and to the right, and she crushed the Warrior’s heart the moment it was in her grip. It struggled for a few seconds more, then fell limp in her grasp, just as its left arm burst under her grip. It took some effort to wrench her bicep out of its cramped state, and by then even the fourth cocoon had hatched.

It didn’t bother her. Not one bit. Her grin flashing and an unconscious chuckle rumbling from her throat, she charged at it much in the same way Halxian had charged at her - a savage beast, low to the ground and arms held out with grasping fingers.

The difference was that she knew when to use such a stance - the Warrior’s stubby legs and top-heavy build naturally rendered its lower half a target. Even still, it wasn’t stupid. It knew its weakness was being targeted, even if its intent to pound her into the ground with a downward piledriver punch was broadcast clear to see by the upward movement of its arms.

It wasn’t its fault that Zelsys knew to step aside just as it began to swing downward, then used its arms as a ramp to get at its head and rip it from its neck. Not wanting to take the risk, she plunged her arm down the neckhole, taunting.

“Tough on the outside, soft on the inside,” she taunted as she ripped through the membrane of its organ-sack. “Perfect for a Heartbreaker like me.”

A grip on its heart, a crushing squeeze, a quick yank. She dispatched the last Warrior before it could hatch, kicking it inside its cocoon until her steel-toed boot punctured the carapace and then plunging her arm into the hole to crush this one’s heart as well.

To her surprise when she at last looked around the now-silent hive, she realized there was a Doorman directly opposite the one she’d killed. It stood motionless, ignorant to the slaughter within the walls of its own hive - was it ignorant, or aware of its helplessness?

It didn’t matter. Zelsys took the time to climb its back and dig her hands into the pit in which its head sat, yanking on it until the creature retreated far enough to create a gap she could squeeze through. At that moment, she ripped its head off and tossed it aside, then returned to investigating the hive. It didn’t matter if the insect’s body remained alive for a while longer.

There was functionally nothing of interest within the hive, but what was of interest was what hid beyond its exit. Zelsys had assumed that both of the side paths somehow connected, but that turned out to not be the case - when she squeezed her way past the still-living, headless Doorman, she was met with a short stretch of the chamber’s full width that ended in a dead end that held the Lightning Butcher.

Before this wall, a perfectly rectangular pillar protruded from the floor to waist height. The Lightning Butcher was embedded into a slot in its top, and it had a hole surrounded by a glyph on the side that faced the hive’s exit. Similar pillars stood to the central one’s left and right, each of their tops shaped into a basin whose bottom held a glyph and a hole. Even the wall wasn’t a solid piece, but rather as if the panels of the floor had risen up as pillars to form a wall.

Zelsys tried just approaching her weapon and pulling it free, but unsurprisingly, it wasn’t that simple. The glyph on the pillar’s front lit up to her approach, and Fog poured from the hole, forming text in the same segments as before.

The butchering blade hungers,

like its prey.

Feed it till it’s sated,

or nurture it to strength.

The lifeblood of insects feeds,

the lifeblood of its master nurtures.

Choose one or both, but be warned:

Greater growth necessitates more time. The butcher would await in the chamber ahead.

When it mentioned the lifeblood of insects, the left basin’s glyph lit up. At the mention of her lifeblood, the right one did. Cryptic as it was, she reached an assumed conclusion quickly.

First, she returned to the hive, pushing back on the headless Doorman until it stepped back a little further.

Second, she ripped out the mandibles of two drones to replace those she’d used and to have a backup.

Third, she hoisted one of the drones whose stomach was still intact and carried it to the left basin, cutting open its stomach so that the protein slurry within would pour into it. As the contents of the drone’s gut vanished into the hole at the bottom of the basin, the glyph progressively lit up, until with the last drops the glyph had lit up fully and the drainage hole suddenly closed shut from within.

She was very much confident in her ability to fare without her cleaver for one more chamber, but before she went as far as bleeding herself to try and fulfill the secondary criterion, Zelsys wished to try a more creative solution.

A lungful of Fog, exhaled into the right basin. Silvery wisps of her exhalation slowly drifted into the basin, then were sucked in when the first one reached the bottom.

To her joy, it worked.

To her disappointment, it only worked partially.

The glyph lit up, yes - but only halfway. Another exhalation wouldn’t budge it, even when some of the Fog entered the hole. The dungeon wouldn’t let her leave here entirely unscathed, it seemed. A small cut on her arm, nowhere near deep enough to hit a vein - a small stream of blood, directly into the hole. It poured, and poured, and poured, the glyph slowly lighting up.

It took her nearly a full minute of bleeding before the glyph fully lit up and the drainage hole shut, and the moment it did, she retracted her arm and turned it wound side up. Her arm was ice-cold and she felt a tangible loss of strength, but it was done.

The Lightning Butcher slid into its slot down to the hilt and the central pillar once more spewed fog as the side pillars slowly descended into the floor.

Power demands sacrifice,

and self-sacrifice is greatest of all.

May you have the strength

to see the fruits of this sacrifice.

The pillars vanished, covered over by new panels that slid into place to cover them.

Zelsys felt her strength slowly returning already, and a wrenching hunger rising in her stomach to match. Her instincts told her to eat, told her to go to the protein slurry basins.

Somehow, she knew she needn’t even touch the vile substance to extract sustenance from it.

Somehow, she knew to plunge her bare arm into it and simply will her body to take from it what it needs, just as she’d done back in the bunker.

As disgusting as it was on a surface level, seeing as it was a half-digested slurry of animal flesh and plant matter, Zel didn’t particularly care.

By the time her hunger vanished, the basin was no emptier, yet the slurry had noticeably lost color - in the end, she hadn’t taken in so much as a speck of the physical matter. It had only taken her body a while to absorb the essentia it needed to make more blood on short notice.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the dungeon…

Strolvath came through the gate, and immediately knew it had taken something from him. What it was that it had taken became obvious on equally short notice - his boot knife was gone, as were both of his backup sparklock pistols. Even his prosthetic leg felt lighter, with the cold-iron stake hidden within it gone.

It hadn’t taken his lute, perhaps because it knew he wouldn’t use it as a bludgeon and that stripping him of it wouldn’t impede his abilities in any meaningful way. He knew what had happened, where he was - a Trial of Solitude, one of the few properly documented trials that people faced in the dungeon, perhaps because it was also one of the few trials that people consistently survived.

It wasn’t meant to kill, or even maim - it was meant to challenge one’s natural abilities as a control test.

Strolvath knew, but not because he’d read it in a book.

In this Aether-rich air, among these walls of black stone, he came alive. It was down here, without the watchful eyes of those he fought alongside, that he had a moment of freedom.

Down here, he could take a breath and unlock the joints of his artificial leg, to walk around the small transit chamber without hobbling.

Down here he could take all the time he needed to recite his prayer to the Dead Gods, out loud, without muddling the Old Ikesian words with modern slang for fear of seeming archaic or betraying his identity.

Strolvath the Musician.

Strolvath the Veteran.

Strolvath the Counter-propagandist.

All three were facets of his identity, but meaningless without the context that he had to withhold from all but a tiny few.

Not even the Provisional Governor knew, despite his attempts to find out through investigations of varying subtlety. The Inquisitor was doubtlessly one of these, despite the Governor’s half-truthful claims that she was one of the last qualified for a mission as dangerous as this.

Strolvath pulled up the leg of his trousers, took off his boot, and cautiously undid the puzzlebox-like mechanism that kept the faux-pegleg cover in place over his prosthetic leg. Its clockwork mechanisms click-clacked to life, cold-iron singing with each tiny movement as he reached between its metal bones and pulled free a small wooden cylinder.

Within this cylindrical puzzlebox, there were several things - a suicide pill chief among them, the original formula for Victory Wash in its purest form. This wasn’t what he needed.

He needed a brownish tablet that stunk like whiskey, which he dropped into his bottle of Vitamax, swirling it about and reciting his prayer while the tablet dissolved. It would turn the elixir into a rancid, leathery-herbal swill, but it would be a swill that would let him invoke Victory Echoes at a lesser intensity and sustain it without burning himself.

Within the puzzlebox, there were also photos, all the size of postage stamps, all taken in full colour despite the expense. Some were of his family, some were of random strangers, some were of people he’d killed, all of the same quality in case someone other than him ever got their hands on the box.

Among these photos was a black-haired man whose skin was a little darker than that of an Ikesian, whose square jaw didn’t quite look like that of a Grekurian, whose hazel eyes glimmered with nostalgia for an era that had yet to come. His implacable visage would’ve stood out, had he ever shown it to the public.

Strolvath gazed into the photograph’s pinhead-sized eyes, hearing the tablet’s sizzle cease as it just about stopped dissolving. With a grimace expectant of the foul taste, he toasted to a dead friend.

“She’ll finish what you started, old friend. I’ll make sure of it,” he murmured to himself, before he closed shut the puzzlebox and put it back inside his clockwork leg. The door glyph lit up and spewed its fog-written spiel whilst Strolvath downed the entire bottle of Vitamax, before he walked right through the glyph-etched door and down the hall. All the while, he continued guzzling down the foul liquid, fighting his gag reflex and feeling the burning sensation slowly spread out from his gut.

The smell of burning wood filled his nostrils as his mustache began to smolder, and in turn, an equally smoldering strength flowed through his body. The door at the other end lit up and opened, and Strolvath was greeted by a long chamber full of agitated locust-men, some crawling out of small hives whilst others stumbled around in confusion, having obviously been plucked by the dungeon’s great machine from elsewhere just to die at his hands. Despite their numbers, they lacked a commander to point him out as a target - the huge ones with beady little eyes were the only ones to charge the moment they caught sight of him.

With a deep chuckle, he reached for his instrument and began strumming out a violent cadence like that of a thousand guns firing in sequence, invoking his incantation of choice in its fullest, “The beasts claim they’ve won… Yet our Victory Echoes.”

With no need to worry about concealing who he was and what he could do, without the need to avoid friendly fire, Strolvath marched into the waiting jaws of death with a flame in his gut and a song on his lips. The dungeon’s black stone trembled beneath his feet, and with each word of his song, with each strum of his lute, more locusts were struck down by his sonic onslaught.

Some fell apart, ripped to pieces by sonic resonance. Others fell where they stood, bile gushing from every orifice as their bodily fluids boiled inside them. The vast majority, Strolvath struck down personally, caving in their weakened chitin with the strength of his clockwork leg.

All the while, he just kept playing his music, sing-screaming the lyrics to a song that he rarely had reason to perform for anyone but himself. They were lyrics to a song the man in the photo had once played for him, bastardized to now express his own frustrations. Accusations and screaming declarations of his murderous intention, sung with the same breath as lofty claims of his intention to defend his home country to the bitter end.

The blaze in his gut traveled upward, turned his deep tenor to a screaming roar as Strolvath let loose all inhibitions. He was not only not trying to control himself, but actively stoking the flames of his own emotions to fuel the sonic inferno that stood between him and the slavering locusts. The Brass Eye came alive from the energetic runoff of his performance alone, and it saw not fear, but seething hatred among the locust-men, even as raging soundwaves ripped them apart.

Strolvath lost himself in the music, progressively transitioning from the lyrics and melody of one song to another, freely altering the words and chords alike as his murderous whim demanded. Hive after hive, locust after locust, he marched on through the chamber and ripped apart with sound all who stood before him, be they Drone, Warrior, or Doorman.