With every ounce of vitriol, every bit of mean-spirited mentality she could muster, Zelsys put on an act to try and provoke the Red Mantis into making a mistake, into striking out in anger so that she could exploit it. Alas… The Mantis didn’t fall for it. Her blank expression turned not to one of anger or hurt, but to one of concession, of grudging respect. 

“I’m impressed,” she smiled, her mandibular lower jaw splitting and shifting ever so slightly. “Not only do you stink like the so-called “Sage”...” she continued, spitting the last word like an insult as she gestured air-quotes in mockery. “You even speak like him and use the same provocation tactics as him. We’ll see yet if you’re as cowardly as him.” 

While she spoke, the Black Swordsman slowly, deliberately reached for the handle of his weapon, his vestigial arms raising it into his waiting grip. They let go just as he hefted it forward, stopping it dead just above the ground and causing his feet to sink into the soil from the sheer momentum.

Twitcher, on the other hand, just… Twitched, really. His legs wide and arms to his sides, he stood in place as his dead black eyed stared into space, the sacs on his forearms beginning to inflate. He was clearly preparing for something, but Zelsys could see that Zefaris had her eye on him and her hand on Pentacle’s grip. 

“I’m just a beast-slayer, and so is my blade. It’s what we do,” she grinned, taking hold of the cleaver with both hands as she took up a proper stance. 

“Now, Lightning Butcher! Bring me their heads!”

Fog poured out between her grinning teeth and a high-pitched buzz sounded as the cleaver’s sawteeth came alive. 

A melodious laugh rung out from the Mantis’s mouth, and just like that… She disappeared. The woman stepped back, sinking into the wall of bodies that stood arrayed behind her, vanishing near-instantly without a trace - one moment she was there, and then there was just a wall of dead-eyed locust-men. At that very moment, the constant chittering of the drones died down. They momentarily froze in place, their feelers twitching about, only to come surging forward as a flood of swiping and snapping mandibles. 

Zelsys charged headfirst into the coming flood, wordlessly channeling the Beheading Saw technique as she slaughtered her way through drone after drone. The Lightning Butcher’s sheer mass combined with her superhuman strength to turn her into a whirling dervish of growling metal and stinking hemolymph, the saw perfectly severing the heads of locust after locust with little perceptible resistance whilst the superheated cutting edge cleft their bodies and limbs asunder in wide, bulldozing swipes.

The sounds and sights of her allies fighting registered on her senses, but they were out of focus, sensory information of secondary priority to her immediate surroundings. Pentacle’s gunshots, Twitcher’s pained screeching, the whooshing of fire and singing tones that accompanied the Inquisitor’s very literal flaming sword as she carved a path of her own through the locusts.

“One… Two… Three… Four… Six…” she counted in her head, using the record of her slaughter to maintain an iron grip on her breathing. Just as she performed a wide right-handed swing whilst readying herself to finally fire a shotshell into the horde, she felt it. For but a split-second, she felt the air displacement of an approaching, annihilating force - the Black Swordsman’s colossal weapon, stabbing down towards her faster than she could get out of its reach. Out of the way, perhaps, but not out of its reach. 

Without thinking, she held out her open left palm and exhaled through her skin, unconsciously approximating the weapon’s approach velocity. It was faster than she could get out of the way, that was true - but it was nowhere near faster than she could perceive. 

With an open palm shielded by nothing but silver light and rising wisps of Fog, Zelsys met the two-hundred kilo mass of speeding metal… And sent it careening upward over the Black Swordsman’s head at nearly full speed. Nearly. The timing was off. Only by a split-second, but here even a hundredth of a second mattered. 

Even scattered across her entire body by the arm-harness, the small fraction of kinetic energy that she had failed to deflect was enough to send Zelsys sliding backward, a sharp pain momentarily shooting through her body before the body-high of Fog drowned it out. The giant maintained his grip on the great weapon as it drew a perfect arc and cleaved an entire tree through the middle on the way down, embedding itself solidly in the ground. Unbothered, the giant ponderously turned and began pulling it free, turning his head as he struggled and giving Zelsys a puzzled look.

Even as she let out a brief, bloody cough, Zel couldn’t help but grin at the giant, struggling with the sheer bulk of his own weapon. “Sheer size has no intrinsic merit!” she laughed, exhaling a full lung of Fog to muster a surge of strength of sufficient potency to cleave asunder the three locusts that were nearly upon her from a standstill. Two-thirds of her exhalation were normal, whilst one-third was burned as fuel for Stormsurge, forcing the muscles involved in the upward swing of her cleaver to painfully contract at their absolute maximum power.

Meanwhile, the sound of Strolvath’s grand throat-singing finally resounded and the locusts’ carpaces began to warp under resonance, yet they seemed mostly unbothered. Their movements became choppy and erratic with brief moments of utter motionlessness between sharp and faster than usual movements, but this made the fight no easier - only different.

She liked different. 

Zel rolled her shoulder and pushed through on what the Black Swordsman had so rudely interrupted, gut-punching the nearest locust with her left arm whilst she used her cleaver’s blade as area denial by swinging it in wide, flowing arcs to sever limbs and inflict imprecise wounds. It didn’t need to be precise or fast, it just needed to keep the other locusts off her for long enough to get a shot off.

Click. Click… Boom.