“It stops the heart,” Zel admitted, raising her hand as she made a few small arcs jump between her fingers. “But it sure doesn’t stop it restarting.”

At that, the Sister looked taken aback, raising an eyebrow. 

“Storm-Soul Cultivation? This far from Kargaria?” she questioned with an amused tone. 

The Sister stopped leaning, taking on a wide stance. A set of locust wings spread out from her back, whirring as loud as any motor engine as she flew to the top of the hive. 

“You’re more amusing that your siblings, homunculus. If you live through this, we might cross blades as equals,” proclaimed the Sister before she took a deep breath and exhaled a cloud of pheromones so thick it could be seen with the naked eye. She proceeded to step back and drop to the ground at the other side of the hive, just as the locusts that served her were all simultaneously driven to a murderous frenzy.

Zel took a breath into one lung whilst emptying the other, exhaling as she pulled the grenade’s fuse. 

One second. 

One and a half.

She tossed it and exhaled as she leapt backwards.

Two seconds.

She landed on her back, focusing on accelerating her own heartbeat, starting the Breath Engine and using her arms to shield herself from any shrapnel, rather than the charging bugs. 

Three.

There was a thunderous noise, a flash of light, and a wave of heat when the grenade exploded - a three second fuse, to one tenth of a second.

Zelsys leapt to her feet, immediately grabbing a drone by the mandibles before she kicked it away, taking for herself a fresh pair of these makeshift weapons. As the smoke cleared, she saw that a third of the drones were killed where they stood by the blast, whilst another third were screaming and on fire. The Warriors weren’t any more unscathed, with the exoskeletons of those within the blast radius broken open and gobs of CP-T burning huge holes through their exposed insides. The grenade had, as far as she could tell, incapacitated nearly two fifths of the enemy number.

Her small experiment with survival sparkers seemed to have paid off as well, with a good half-dozen drones and a Warrior well outside the grenade’s range struggling to pry a blazing ember out of themselves. 

That being said, she still knew she was still outnumbered, wondering, “Ten to one? Fifteen to one? Twenty to one?”

In all this excitement, she didn’t bother to count. Zel used the mandible in her left hand to give a nearby drone an impromptu transorbital lobotomy, lodging it all the way in its skull before she crumpled its torso with a steel-shinned left kick. The thing went flying into one of its kin from the sheer force of impact.

The drones needed to be dealt with, but it was the warriors who were the real threat. Zelsys quickly thought up an impromptu path of approach from the left around the back, despite the lack of any gaps in the Warrior line at that spot. It didn’t matter. She’d just jump over them.

And indeed, she would. But first, there were no fewer than fourteen drones swarming around her, trying to surround her, and that just wouldn’t do. She also didn’t have the time to reload if she were to fire her gun, and frankly, she wanted to use her hands again.

So many different deformities on every drone. So many small flaws in their exoskeletons.

So many loose plates she could pry off that she might jam her arm into their guts to crush their hearts. 

The body high of Fog-breathing had fully settled in now, steady puffs of Fog pouring between the teeth of her snarling grin. Zelsys let loose her inhibitions and charged forward, rejoicing at the cramp-like ache behind every cannonball punch and ironclad kick, laughing at the curious crunching of her prey’s exoskeletons when they fell to her.

It was then that she started counting, for no purpose other than to taunt the Warriors, for she was confident that they were just barely intelligent to understand mockery. 

“Think I might need a leg-up!” she laugh-yelled a taunt in a mocking tone, to the pulse-punding rhythm of every skull she crushed with a punch and every torso she caved in with a kick. 

She planted her boot-heel on a particularly bulky drone’s chest, pulling on its leg until the hip joint popped free and used the momentum to toss the liberated leg towards a small group of drones that were trying to get around back to ambush her. It bowled them over and indirectly killed one outright, its head smashed against the hard dungeon floor.

Breath by breath, limb by limb, drone by drone, she ripped and tore her way through more drones that she could bother to count, at last arriving within melee range of the outermost Warrior in the line. It and all the Warriors in the immediate vicinity surged into action, their bulbous little eyes glimmering with hatred as they wound their giant arms back and readied to strike at her. 

Zelsys dodged to the left of the nearest Warrior’s strike, getting under its arm and pressing the muzzle of her arm-cannon right into its side. There would be no confrontation, no pitched combat. She’d picked this angle for a reason, made sure a shotshell was loaded for a reason. In the narrow window she had, Zel took care to lower herself so she was in line with the recoil impulse, preparing to use the wall as a springboard when the recoil inevitably threw her against it.

Click. Click. Boom.

Blinded by gunsmoke and the shockwave still echoing through her bones, Zelsys blindly bounced off the wall and through the sulphurous cloud. Passing through it and rolling into a standing position when she landed, Zel didn’t get so much as a second to take account of the destruction she had wrought.  

What Warriors were still combat-capable were beelining towards her, one of them already taking a right-armed hammer-strike at her when she got up and another swiftly approaching from the left.