The cyclops elaborated further, “There are so many contradictory fables about Orchid Mantis mutants that one can never know what is true. I’m a little hesitant to believe he was the real thing, even with what he did. What he said.”

“That ridiculous, huh?” Zel chuckled.

Zef nodded, “Yeah. Unassisted flight, immortality, completely nulling the abilities of other Fog-breathers, destructive power ten times what Ubul could bring to bear. Most likely a mix of official propaganda and battlefield myths.”

“...Sure? What good’re they going to be in a dungeon?” Zel asked back, though she had already pulled out the Tablet and opened Fog Storage. By the time the answer came, she was already holding the device above her open palm, watching individual coins fall out of the Fog vortex. 

Two… Three… Four...

Clink… Clink… Clink...

“It somewhat ah… Slipped my mind back in the between-floor chamber,” Zef said somewhat flusteredly before she swiftly moved onto explaining why she wanted coins. “I figured out how to bounce bullets off them. Five coppers and, say… three silvers should be good, I think. I really just want the silvers to see if they work any better than coppers.”

Zelsys couldn’t help chuckling at that as she handed over the handful of coins, “Sounds an awful lot like something I’d do if I used a reasonably-sized gun. Got enough ammo?”

Zef nodded as she stowed the coins away into a pocket, save for one silver that she absent-mindedly flipped between her fingers while they waited out the rest of the door’s timer. The distant thumping and clacking of the dungeon’s cogworks grew discordant, grinding and cracking breaking the everpresent rhythm. The chamber’s lightgems and the door’s glyph both flashed red for a moment, only for cyan cracks to spread across their surfaces moments later. 

Both the gems and the door shattered along these cracks, the former exploding into shards whilst the latter crumbled inward, at which point they quickly passed through. At the other side awaited a clean chamber in the form of a great hall, only… It was wrong.

It was too clean.

While they could both hear the absence of distant sound that they’d grown to expect, Zelsys could feel it in her gut. This chamber wasn’t just empty, the map wasn’t wrong. She could feel an all-encompassing bloodlust in the air. They could still see the intermediary chamber, the other door’s normally white glyph lighting up all over again with a mixture of red and cyan. Red was growing more prominent by the second.

Step by step she advanced into the chamber, her back against Zef’s, her left hand on the trigger lever and her right on the Lightning Butcher. As they slowly advanced, they each readied themselves for combat. 

Zelsys took controlled breaths, started the Breath Engine, pulled the Butcher from its holster. When they passed the first pair of doors, hell broke loose.

There were two doors on either side wall at equidistant intervals, each with a dormant glyph. They could swear they heard the telltale skittering of locusts from beyond those doors.  

The moment they crossed that threshold, those glyphs glowed screamingly-bright red and the doors slammed open, unleashing a flood of slavering, raging locusts. Warriors, drones, even strange morphs with huge legs and small torsos, all of these locusts were noticeably different. They were bigger, more thickly armored than their brethren that dwelt above.

Even their movements were different, a nearly human-like intelligence behind their savage spread through the chamber. They knew exactly where to go, decisively forming a perimeter around the two beast-slayers and closing in.

At a glance, Zelsys could see why. There were Locust Nobles scattered all throughout, ones whose mutations were so far along they could blend in amongst the rabble, but subtle enough that they didn’t stand out. They could only be distinguished by the bright-red control parasites on the napes of their necks and the fact they constantly exhaled a visible miasma of pheromones.

“Focus on the Locust Nobles,” she said, not expecting a response. She still got one in the form of a gunshot followed by the cracking of chitin, squelching of gore, and falling of bodies. Three in a row, if she heard right among the sea of noise. It was swiftly followed by the sound of the bayonet crunching through skulls, stab after stab, accompanied by kicks and the occasional gunshot. “Move! Move!” she invoked, staggering even Warriors with the impressive strength of her left-handed punches.

Zel swung her cleaver, willing its edge to superheat with the intention of using it the same way she had back in the forest. However, it instantly became obvious that wouldn’t work. There were even more of them here than back there, and even her own circumstances weren’t the same.

The Butcher cleft locusts in half with little to no resistance, its shape and weight both shifting with every swing to maximize the potential force of impact and minimize recovery time. One drone after another, the realization dawned that they would be overrun if she tried to play it safe.

A sense of exhilaration rose within her chest, and seeing no reason to restrain herself, she invoked the Engine of Retribution.

“Style: Beast!”

That familiar, icy-hot feeling flooded through the silver conduits in her skin, only this time it didn’t hurt at all. It numbed the pain of contracting her muscles at full power with Stormsurge, it made her keenly aware of every silver conduit in her body. It made it easy to pour Fog through them and exude it through her skin.

A drone lashed out at her trying to slash her arm, and she just burned a third of a lung’s breath to form that slippery pelt of Fog around the limb for the split-second that was necessary. The bug’s talons slipped through the resulting short-lived, spectral fur, unable to bite into anything.