It had been a scant few minutes before they returned, the two of them rising from the projection glyph before its Fog Gate shut under their feet.

Strolvath could discern a subtle shift in the slayer’s aura, a shift as subtle as the turn of a blade within the wielder’s hand. Something had certainly changed, but he knew he couldn’t extract what it was even if he tried.

So it was that he simply sat back and rested for a bit longer while the others prepared to finally depart, sipping Vitamax in tiny sips. This time it wasn’t to soothe his ever present aches, but because it helped alleviate the acute pain of that very amplifier that he had Delta jam into his throat.

Zel made her way to reunite with Zef the moment she regained her bearings, whereas the Caster reunited with the Spearman, speaking in hushed tones. The Caster shook his head, sighed loudly, then seemed to concede on something. That something became clear when he, once again, walked to the projection altar, while the Spearman walked out in front of them and tried to get their attention.

Tok. Tok. Tok.

He thumped his spear, then wordlessly gestured with it towards the projection altar just as the Caster raised his staff again, flipping it upside-down. Its other end split into myriad needle-thin points folded out in a narrow cone, and the Caster cautiously pushed it into the stone. Stone-still he stood as the Spearman led the others onto the platform, and they carefully stood around in anticipation of the Fog Gate’s opening. With a turn to the right a new gate glyph pattern lit up, and the gate opened all at once with a burst of Fog, for just long enough for them to fall through.

They lurched downward, falling through the gate, and struggled for a moment as they fell onto a platform and regained their bearings. From there, it was a short ride down through a dimly-lit shaft atop an awkwardly small platform, during which Zelsys noticed that by some mechanism of the Fog Gate, the Caster had retained his staff and it had returned to its default state. The platform stopped not to a hallway or a chamber, but at a bare wall.

Before either of the four slayers could question, their locust allies stepped up to a wall and each in turn thumped the ground. It fell away to reveal nothing, and the sound of the cogworks overwhelmed all other sounds. Thumping, clacking, sliding and grinding, it was all that could be heard, and the locusts beckoned them to follow as they stepped into the grey nothing.

The group found themselves treading a precarious staircase that spiraled down, each of them occasionally gazing out into the nothingness that surrounded them. There was no light down here, everything was consumed by an ever-present grey Fog that made it feel as though this place truly was an emptiness outside normal existence. And yet, every once in a while they could catch brief glimpses of distant structures so magnitudinous and empyrean that the mind struggled to comprehend.

Down and down through the grey, down a staircase that felt both narrow, yet impossible to fall off of. No wind, no sky above, no ground below, it stripped even this precarious path of any felt danger, even if a single wrong step would likely mean certain doom.

Such danger was replaced by something far more tangible, for soon enough the staircase began to crumble underfoot. At first, a stair fell out behind them. Then, a crack appeared under Strol’s footstep. Moments later, they found the staircase crumbling to pieces just behind them, ushering them downward with greater urgency than any of them was comfortable with.

Slowly though, a septagonal platform ringed by seven archways faded into sight, connected to the stairs by a short walkway. Down and down they went towards the walkway, always just barely ahead of the staircase’s decay.

One by one, they reached the walkway and crossed it to the platform, it too crumbling underfoot. At first cracking, then shaking, then falling to pieces. Being the last in line, Strolvath had to take a leap of faith over the edge to make it.

Once again did the two locusts thump their weapons against the ground, and the platform sunk into the nothingness below. Though slow at first, their descent quickly sped up well past the velocity of a freefall, and yet there was no wind rushing past them and no struggle to keep their feet planted. The only sensation that clued them into just how quickly they were moving was the pressure of g-forces within their own bodies.

And all about them, the density of the obscuring haze grew lesser, unshrouding the workings of the dungeon. No, it was more like the cogworks were spontaneously forming out of the grey, simply appearing from its depths. On their way down they witnessed veritable mountains of mechanisms, slabs of black-stone being shifted by gigantic platforms.

To those of them who could see just beneath the surface-veil of things - Strolvath and Zefaris, that is - it was clear that this wasn’t the default state of the dungeon’s internal workings. All this machinery, all this nonsensical clockwork that would be impossible to maintain, it had an ephemeral quality that reminded them of particularly convincing theatrical projections. Particularly Strolvath, who had seen such technology being tested in the capital - projections so convincing they fooled ninety men out of a hundred, and of the ten that were not fooled, eight had a Homunculus Eye while the other two had undergone anti-illusionism “Evil Eye” training.

He looked upon the great god-machine that surrounded them, and knew this physical manifestation to be only partly real. A representation that the dungeon had no choice but to conjure for the sake of the observers, that the truth of it wouldn’t drive them mad.

“We must minimize how long we spend here,” the Caster broke the all-encompassing background noise. “Our presence and observation forces the dungeon’s mechanisms to manifest into realspace. They would have no issue withstanding such strain normally, but with things as they are now there is no telling how long they can last until they start sinking.”

A few moments later, the platform came to a sudden stop.

Matte-black ground stretched out all around them, shrouded by that dismal greyness with perhaps twenty or thirty meters of visibility in any direction. A thump of the Caster’s staff sent a thin line of cyan light snaking across the ground, and he led them in pursuit of it.

They walked, and walked, and walked, following the little glowing line all along.

Eventually, they came upon a tiny black-stone hut standing freely in the middle of the nothingness, its glyphic door painted over with a bright-red hieroglyphic symbol.

The two locusts stared up at it, the Spearmen murmuring a quiet, “Oh no.”

The Caster’s reaction was far less reserved, as he raised his staff and started thumping it against the door whilst screaming a diatribe in hectic, half-slurred Pateirian. Only when the Spearman reached out for him did he snap out of it, quickly quieting down and exchanging a few more words with his counterpart, still in Pateirian. He then looked back to the four slayers and sighed, “We uh… We might be stuck. I can try something to open a path forward, but it will likely just lead us into a deathtrap. If there are any fast preparations you wish to make, make them now.”

“Uh-huh…” grumbled Strolvath as he sat down and pulled up his right pants leg, exposing the wood-encased artificial leg beneath. Before anyone could ask what he was doing, he had already made the casing click open with a few awkwardly-positioned presses at various points on the wood, revealing the fully metallic prosthetic underneath, though its substantial internal volume also contained a much smaller wooden puzzlebox. He removed the aforementioned puzzle box, opened it with a few more strange holds and motions of his fingers, and from the box quickly removed a rusty-brown pill.

In seconds, the box was back inside his leg and he had stood back up, already reaching into his backpack for a half-empty seal-bottle, which he had with him despite the fact he should’ve probably run out of elixir by now. Zel wagered he had carried more than they had found on the way to the dungeon, or maybe the Inquisitor had given him some of hers. He then dropped the pill into the bottle and swirled it about for a good ten seconds, murmuring prayers in Old Ikesian under his breath. He proceeded to tip the bottle over while pressing it to his mouth and used the vortex to down the whole thing in one go. It slipped from his grip and shattered on the stone beneath, yet the noise was drowned by the cogworks.

It only took until the inevitable burp for his facial hair to begin smoldering and his Brass Eye to take on the infernal glow of hot metal, at which point he regarded everyone present before settling on the Spearman and barking, “The fuck’re you standin’ around for? Ain’t we in a hurry?!”

“I… Yes,” nodded the bugman, joining his counterpart in their effort to open the door.

Wide, sweeping gestures, murmured incantations, the thumping of black-stone rods.

Cyan light rising from the ground, closing in as great clockworks formed from nothingness all around them, closing in as their noise consumed everything. The small hollow they were contained in was illuminated by the nearly blinding green-blue, glyphic patterns that now covered the ground.

Two wordless exclamations in quick succession, each accompanied a thump of each locust’s rod.

The first against the ground, to which the light moved from the ground to their staves.

The second against the door, bestowing the light unto the stone in the form of myriad cracks.

The cogworks stopped, falling silent.

A moment later, there came a deafening clack when the cogworks resumed, and the door shattered inward with the force of a gale force wind and a sonic crack that made the ears ring and shook the bones. The rubble vanished into an already-opened, dismal grey Fog Gate.

Hurrying into the opening before anyone could question what had just happened, the duo led the party through the gate and into a long, dimly lit hallway that was as tangled as it was impossible. Turns that should’ve just led them back to an earlier point were the least of the inconsistencies. There were crossroads with one option blocked off by an invisible wall, every single one of which the two locusts shattered, and then decided whether to proceed down the previously blocked-off path based on whether their breaching ritual triggered any signs that they had annoyed the Queen, such as the lightgems flashing red or distant screaming.

There were also the occasional traps with no signs of their presence, which the two Locust Nobles defused by invoking their limited authority over the dungeon for just long enough to let the entire party pass before the trap went off at full power.

All the while, Strolvath’s body served as a not insignificant light source, the smoldering glow of his hair, his veins and his scars breaking apart the dim, weak flicker of the corridor’s pseudo-real lightgems.

When at last they reached the end of the corridor, there was no door. It was just an empty door frame and a wall of pillars right beyond it. The three pillars that were visible each had numerous, blood-red symbols painted on them, ones that those in the party who understood Pateirian recognized as insults and mocking implications of inevitable doom.

“This… This is bad,” the Caster remarked gravely, running his hand across the bloodred symbol. “There wasn’t supposed to be anything down here. This place was marked as primordial soup, a blank slate waiting to be formed. We should’ve been able to just make a gate straight to the core, but… It seems someone’s already been here. The Parasite likely thinks she is gaining control, that she is able to break the rule of no impassable obstacles, when in reality the Core is just taking our presence into account.”

The Caster and the Spearman exchanged looks and began another ritual, murmuring three-line incantations each as they thumped their rods, causing the tools to glow with faintly visible cyan lines. Slowly, the pillars before them sunk down and created a path.

The collective authority of the Caster and the Spearman could only force open a narrow path, at points only one floor panel wide. At these points, they naturally fell into a formation with Zelsys in front, after whom came the Spearman, then Zefaris, then the Inquisitor, then Strolvath, and lastly the Caster.

“We know how to find a path out of here,” the Caster reassured. “I just hope we find it before the loyalists find us.”

For a good three, perhaps four minutes, they walked in a mostly straight line, turning right twice. The first time when they reached a wall, the second when they reached a corner.

They faced a two-row firing line line of strange locusts, with those in front kneeling and those behind them standing. The arms of those in front were morphed into tower shields which were covered in spikes that sat within the large chitin plates loosely enough that it was clear they were meant to detach. Their arm-shields were easily large enough to mostly cover their users, yet their heads peeked overtop as if they wanted to watch.

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As for those in the second row, their arms were massively distended, with short upper portions and lower halves nearly half as long as they were tall. The upper portions of the limbs swelled with essentia sacs, while the lower portions were covered in thick carapace that held dozens of equally thick spikes. From the undersides of their arms hung long belts of fleshy webbing that held numerous chitinous spears, and these spears protruded from the former places of their wrists, now just muzzles for the harpoon-guns that were their arms.

At the back of the line, a Locust Noble stood atop the back of a Warrior locust. He wore a loose purple robe, and was fully metamorphosed up to just below his eyeline, just like the Red Mantis. What was visible of his carapace was so covered in red plates that it nearly hid his true, locust nature.

His eyes stared down at them, steel in both colour and gaze. The next moment, he raised his hand and simply gestured in their general direction.

“Danmaku!” he roared to his soldiers in a warbling, but perfectly clear voice, filled with the powerful presence of an experienced and charismatic commander.

In perfect alignment, the two-row firing line barked a wordless response and all hell broke loose; hundreds of quills flew down the corridor, loosed in such a tightly timed sequence as to create a continuous flow.

----------------------------------------

By the time the robed locust barked his command, Zelsys had already begun engine breathing.

“Style: Beast!” she invoked when the locusts shouted their response, holding up the Butcher’s flat in front of her head and torso as a shield. She also channeled Graze Pulse through the portions of her body that were most at risk of being hit; her arms and upper legs.

Well before even a single quill would strike, Zelsys heard an all-consuming, melodic, deep drone coming from behind. It washed over her and proceeded onward, a noise so loud it shook black grains loose from the walls, yet one that left her unscathed. When the tide of quills collided with it they began to shudder and visibly slowed down, and she knew the reason behind it. Strolvath had his own method of anti-projectile defense after all.

The vast bulk of the quills struck the Butcher’s flat, shattering into splinters on impact with a barely-felt impulse. Most of the others struck at a shallow-enough angle to just slip off, their great velocity and surprising mass translated to the feeling of a rough branch brushing past her skin. Once was nothing, ten times it was a little irritating, but dozens and dozens of quills began to grind her skin raw. Her legs instead grew battered from constant impacts no matter how lessened they were, even if the Fog-infused fabric could knit itself back together faster than the quills could shred it apart.

Those that did manage to bite in, perhaps one in ten, caused shallow, rabidly-bleeding scratches.

It didn’t matter.

Every quill that brushed past her only served to grow the pressure behind her right eye, and the jet of stark-white Fog quickly grew to the length and width of an arm, whipping about with such violence that it shredded gashes even into the black-stone wall of pillars at her right side.

It made her feel invincible. That pressure, that all-consuming static that pulled at her from the inside like the tension of an impending lightning bolt. Her spontaneous electric phenomena were no longer limited to semi-random discharges, her body now surrounded by a great many firefly-like sparks that flickered in and out of existence in the fractions of a second. The only thing she could think of was how much she wanted to set all that charge loose upon those who had allowed her to build it in the first place.

Before she could do so, however, five glowing coins flew skyward in sequence, their singsong tones drowned out by the all-consuming pandemonium. Five anvil-ringing gunshots then resounded in the very same sequence, each striking a coin in turn and each ricocheting to a target in the firing line. The very first one annihilated the commander, its amplified kinetic energy causing the bullet to vaporize his head and split his torso halfway down the middle. The four that came after each punched a hole in the firing line, ripping through heads of the Quill-shielders in front at such angles that the bullets ricocheted off the floor and struck the Gunners from below, shattering legs and rupturing groins.

“Now Butcher, bring me their heads!” laugh-yelled the lightning-eyed slayer, charging ahead with her blade still held in front of herself, one hand on the grip and the other on the guard. It trembled in her hand, thick arcs leaping across its surface as its sawteeth screamed for blood and its edge seethed bright-orange, bordering on yellow.

The tide of quills had become a steadier flow, with the majority of shielders having expended their supply. It was thinned out even further by the violent, uncontrollable arcs that now leapt from Zel’s skin, lashing out at incoming quills and shattering them into tiny pieces with bright flashes of light and ear-piercing screeches of ionized air.

Her sheer velocity made raindrops of blood slip off her skin where otherwise they would’ve run down her arms and legs. The ever-so-brief thought of using droplets of her own blood as a medium for ball lightning crossed her mind, and in her battle-addled state, she didn’t feel a reason to avoid trying it. “If this doesn’t work, I’ll just butcher them the proper way,” she thought to herself as she jumped over the shield wall, focusing on charging the droplets that she trailed with Fulgur. The lessening of pressure behind her eye told her it had worked, before she landed behind the firing line and instantly spun around to swing in a wide arc at the Gunners’ head-height. Her swing sent eight heads toppling to the ground in sequence and leaving only a few Gunners alive.

For a scant few moments, at least. A split-second later, tiny spheres of reddish light slammed down on the firing line, zipping through the air and striking absolutely anything that Zelsys thought of as a target. Dozens of them struck in sequence, vaporizing gaping holes into the heads and torsos of the survivors. First it killed the surviving Gunners, then it worked away on the Shielders, destroying the heads of two or perhaps three of them.

Between her initial jump and when the crimson ball-lightning struck there were barely a few seconds, just long enough for Zelsys to readjust her breathing and get her bearings in preparation to burn the rest of her built-up Fulgur in butchering the Shielders.

Only, that opportunity didn’t come. The others had moved ahead and there thundered a resounding, bone-shuddering sound, a throat-song thrumming all about, and she witnessed every single Shielder boil inside its shell, bubbling fluids spraying and bursting from every seam, whether the creature was alive or dead. Those of them who still lived when it struck emitted high-pitched screeching that would best bedescribed as a tea kettle combined with a deathrattle. Strolvath’s violent song even made black sand pour from the ceiling.

Unsure how to dispose of the potentially hazardous charge, Zel decided to simply shunt all of it into the Butcher and let it do what it would. She expected it to just fire up particularly intensely, perhaps spit uncontrolled arcs of lightning, but no such thing occurred. There was a sudden flowing sensation through her sword-arm as the pressure behind her eye vanished, the blade shuddered in her grip, and then fell silent. When she looked upon it in confusion, she found that a small portion of the etched lightning-like pattern on its flat had taken on a faint glow. It was perhaps a fifth, or a sixth of the pattern’s full size.

Thinking no more of it, she used the cleaver as a lever to wrench apart the two centermost Shielders, finding that their shields had tiny vestigial arms on the sides that clasped together both to form two arm-shields into one, and to form a solid shield wall with more than one Shielder present. A quick up-down wiggle of the cleaver severed these and allowed her to clear the obstruction to let her comrades pass unimpeded.

Over that short time, she got a decent grasp of how the killzone had been set up. It was just a small hollow in the chamber full of pillars, a smooth floor space as large as four by four pillars.

The Spearman passed her, thumping his spear against the door in an attempt to open a path while Zef looked her over with a concerned eye. Already, her wounds had stopped bleeding thanks to their mostly superficial nature, but that fact did nothing to detract from just how thoroughly covered in blood her arms were.

“No direct hits?” the blonde questioned, to which Zelsys just shook her head.

“I sure fuckin’ hope so!” thundered Strolvath from behind, then cleared his throat and apologized at a more reasonable volume. “Sorry, still gettin’ used to one of my rewards.”

He directed his eye at Zelsys, giving her a cursory look before asking, “Did I slow the quills down enough? Didn’t get as good a look as I could’ve, had to guess their composition.”

“You slowed them down plenty,” Zel replied. Strol gave a fiery nod and shuffled past into a corner, taking great care to avoid touching anyone. As he passed, Zelsys noticed that even the veins of his hands and his fingernails looked like they were smoldering, despite the absence of actual smoke.

Next came the Inquisitor. Gripping a four-barreled, exquisitely crafted sparklock in her right hand and keeping her left on her sword’s handle, she regarded Zel with a combination of caution and resentment so thick it was easy to discern even through the filter of that gas mask. Zelsys felt some sort of hostile intent from the woman, but it was vague. Remote. Distant.

It wasn’t quite murder or even betrayal, it felt a lot more like the Inquisitor just wanted to fight her. If that turned out to be the case, Zel was more than willing. The next moment, the Inquisitor had passed and the Caster entered, exchanging a look with the Spearman before he came up to the door. The path closed behind him, pillar after pillar slamming to the ceiling.

Yet again, it was murmured incantations and rhythmic thumping to force the door open.

Yet again it worked, shattering the door to pieces, but Zel could tell that it was taking its toll on the two. All of the slayers could tell. They moved slower, the Caster’s hunch became more pronounced, the Spearman had begun actively leaning on his weapon for support. Their breathing grew labored and chitin was growing discolored, off-white crack patterns spreading across the biggest plates.

After he passed through the door and rounded a corner, the Caster could even be heard coughing up a glob of semi-congealed hemolymph, thumping his staff in an attempt to mask the gutchurning noise.

Following after him, the others were greeted by a massive hall that stretched on for so long that the grey haze of this place obscured the other side, much to the two locusts’ apparent worry. There were equidistant doors on the walls every twenty or so meters, as if this chamber were a far larger version of the ambush hallway Zel and Zef had dealt with on floor two.

“You sure you can get us to the core?” Zel questioned the Caster. “You look like just getting us this far has you standing one foot in the grave.”

“Ygh-you’re not wrong,” the locust cough-laughed.

“We’d be able to shatter a hundred doors if need be, but those blood-red marks are curses. In the last chamber we wegh… Whgrrrgh… We weren’t forcing the pillars down, but stopping them from crushing you when you walked over them. The red-marked doors are cursed to kill anyone who passes through them,” he rasped. “We can- Hgrgh… We can dispel such things, but doing so over and over again takes its toll, dirties the soul. I’ve been taking most of the taint, but it’s more vile than I expected. It’s like my veins are full of mercury. I’m a dead man walking.”

“This is a giant ambush, ain’t it?” Strolvath looked to the Spearman, and received a slow, solemn nod.

It seemed like the Locust Noble wanted to say something, but he was cut off by the Caster rasping, “Ngh… Not if I can help it. My odds of escaping this place in my current state are near-zero, I might as well truly do all within my power to ensure the dungeon’s continued survival.”

Instantly, the Spearman’s eyes went wide and he sputtered, “You can’t!”

“I must!” rebuked the Caster, rising to his feet with the aid of his staff. “I can feel myself rgh… Rotting alive. Only the Core can save me, and only with… Without the Parasite to impede it. As longhrk… Long as you leave here before I die, my body will be frozen between existence and nonexistence until it is retrieved. Now raise a wall of pillars so I can opgh… Open a gate.”

At the mention of a Fog Gate, there sounded a not-so-distant scream, a single word in Pateirian that sounded rather much like “No!”

The chamber’s lightgems quickly began turning red, the doors’ glyphs lighting up in that very same sanguine colour before they slammed open to the chittering of uncountable feet from behind them. The chamber nearly instantly swarmed with every type of locust they had encountered up until this point, from lowly Drones through Warriors, Spitters, Beetle-boars, Gunners, Bug-deer and Quill-shielders, among which were doubtlessly numerous Locust Nobles if their uniform aggressive advance was to go by.

Yet, there was no need to face this veritable army, for the Spearman had already begun chanting and violently slamming his spear against the ground, a cyan glow flowing out from him as a wall of pillars rose up before him. There was exactly one single locust that made it over the wall before the wall reached the ceiling, a winged Locust Noble that wielded a pair of short blades. Most of his body below the nose was covered in bright-red chitin, and a huge control parasite adhered to his back, running all the way down his spine. A pair of feelers protruded from his mottled, brownish hair, whipping about.

He didn’t even recover or look around, instantaneously lunging at Zelsys as if he could smell her. She could’ve cut him in half, but her first instinct was to kick the mutant into the very wall he’d just jumped over.

There resounded a crunch as his plating alongside his ribcage shattered from the impact, followed by his arm snapping at the elbow when he hit the wall, sliding down it to the ground. Even still, he struggled up to his feet, holding his right hand back with the obvious intention to stab whoever he could, even while his eyes remained locked steadfastly to Zel.

Zefaris and the Inquisitor both had their guns trained on him, and expecting this, Zel stopped them, “Hold on. You can dome him if he tries anything, just give me a second. I’ve got a weird feeling in my gut.”

Those eyes, those blank, glassy eyes. There was another gaze behind them, a gaze she’d only seen in her mind’s eye. A split-jawed grin formed on the Locust Noble’s face, and the voice that came out of his mouth was not that of a man, but of the seething, vitriolic Locust Queen that they’d heard screaming through the walls every time they thwarted her grasps at control.

“This body is already dead,” the Queen gurgled through the Locust Noble’s mouth, the dying man’s Ikesian as clear as the snow-white patches of unmutated skin on his forehead. “But you know that already. You ruptured a lung and ripped an artery with that mule kick of yours. So let me ask you a question, before this body dies and you face me in my court.”

Zelsys let out a haughty, voiceless chuckle, her mouth twisting into a brief smirk as she gave a downward nod to prompt the question that she was certain would just be a veiled insult or threat of violence.

The Locust Noble instead scream-laughed a question that demanded an answer, “Do you really think you can just put a stop to everything the war has led to? That you can somehow be the sole super-soldier to force history into a complete left turn?!”

Regarding the locust with a lazy, contemptuous stare, Zelsys considered whether she should even answer. If spurning the Queen - no, if spurning the Parasite - would be the best answer.

By this point, the Caster had, with the Spearman’s help, already moved a ways away from the maddened, dying bugman, the latter scraping a glyph into the stone using his spear. The Caster chanted seven lines over and over, thumping his spear with blood running from his mouth and down his chest.

“I am the gate, the key, the path! Open!”