After the second one vanished, the glyph finally showed an utterly mundane personal profile of the sort that the Tablet showed. It looked much nicer and everything was worded with archaic, flowery verbiage, but the functionality was all the same.

This would’ve certainly been incredibly useful to anyone who didn’t have a portable version of the device, but to Zelsys, it was just a less practical version of what she already had. She let go of the handle, stopped craning her head at that uncomfortable angle, and sat down by the opposite wall with her Tablet in hand. There were two things she wanted to do before moving on.

The first was checking her traits, for posterity. It showed them the same way as before, only for the word “Survivor” in Survivor’s Instinct to flicker and become scrambled, until it was illegible. Zelsys tried checking its details, and most of the text here was scrambled as well. It all vanished, replaced by a system message as a familiar, warm thrum shot up her arm. The device was actively reading her, for the first time in a little while.

SCANNING

UPDATING RECORD

UPDATE SUCCESSFUL

TRAIT ADVANCEMENT

Another flicker of the projection, a few stray wisps of Fog rising from the glyph. 

SLAYER’S INSTINCT

Type: Sensory Enhancement

Trigger: Situational

Effects: Situational Awareness B-, Sense Motive C, 

Danger Sense B-, Vulnerability Sense C+

Advancement: Exploit weaknesses.

There is no beast that cannot be felled, one just needs to find the weakness.

“Is this why I knew where to pull…?” she wondered, furrowing her brow at the increasing vagueness of advancement hints. When could it have advanced? Thinking back, the most obvious options were either when she butchered the lightning, or when she used Stormsurge to restart her own heart after the Mantis stopped it.

At the end of the day, the specifics didn’t particularly matter. She took a few more moments to retrieve one of the stick grenades and examine it closely, finding guiding arrows on its metal casing that wordlessly instructed her to open a latch and twist a small piece at its very top. The piece screwed out, exposing a hollow inside the grenade with the letters “CP-T” in red, crossed out.

She wasn’t going to use more CP-T than she had to.

Zel stood to her feet, now pulling up Fog Storage. There was a particular item here that had grabbed her interest.

The survival sparkers. 

She retrieved ten of them, scraping off their Ignis crystals on the edge of the grenade so that they fell into the hollow. Only then did she reach for one of ther remaining CP-T phials, peeling its seal off and scooping the compound into the hole with a finger. Just half the vial was enough to fill it the rest of the way, after which she corked the phial and put the seal back on.

Once these were in the weapon, she simply took care to not tip it over and walked over to the door. It came alive at her approach and swung open to a square chamber - at least, she assumed its original shape had been square. Most of the half opposite her was utterly consumed by one large hive, possessed of three entrances shaped exactly to fit their respective Doorman’s arm shields. Seeing as the hive didn’t reach the ceiling, she could see part of a path deeper into the chamber over the hive - right through the middle.

There was only a small obstacle between Zelsys and her way out of here - and assumedly her way to retrieving the Lightning Butcher. An U-shaped formation of locusts, three lines of drones standing as arm-cannon fodder before one line of Warriors. Behind the battle-line towered a graven commander, one whose sad visage was almost familiar. 

It had a clearly feminine frame, its frame towering to three meters and then some. Pitch-black chitin partially covered its form, most segments on the forelimbs and torso replaced by bright-red, artisanal pieces that harkened back to the Red Mantis. Her head seemed to have itself metamorphosed, sprouting a substantial mane of many-segmented chitinous tendrils that superficially looked like hair. Zelsys couldn’t help mentally comparing them to the legs on one of those giant forest centipedes, the way they curled in… It made her want to shudder.

The commander looked like a female version of the Black Swordsman, but unlike her counterpart she didn’t have extra limbs sprouting from her back, and her weapon wasn’t a glorified wall of raw iron.

It didn’t look particularly refined, that was certain, but the sword whose pommel she rested her hands atop looked to be a rather practical two-hander built of the dungeon’s very own black stone. 

What stood out most about this woman was her face. The lower half was covered by a bright-red chitinous mask aesthetically reminiscent of the Mantis’s, whilst everything between it and the hairline looked normal. This small slice of her human self revealed that she was not even Pateirian, both her skin tone and facial structure betraying her Ikesian ethnicity. Zelsys inwardly named her “The Sister”, purely due to her similarity to the Black Swordsman.

The Sister’s piercing, purple eyes tracked Zel’s every movement with a suspicious lack of hostility. In fact, even the other bugs were suspiciously calm. They weren’t twitching, clicking their mandibles, or moving towards her, even as she took a few careful steps to approach them, putting into her step all the swagger and ego that she could muster. 

She waved her gun around, flashed a grin at the Sister, all to keep attention away from the grenade behind her back. The Sister flashed a razor-mawed grin of her own, lifting her sword and raising it on her shoulders as she leaned back against the hive. 

Thundering at a volume that shook the ground and reverberated in Zel’s bones, she spoke in a sing-song accent, “You are courting death.”

With a chuckle of honest surprise Zel retorted, “My relationship with death is purely platonic, I assure you.”

“So I’ve heard,” the Sister said. “You’re the first to survive Heartstopper Venom. If you don’t mind me asking, how?”