213/214 - Retribution Equally Unto All/Cavalry

A/N: Missed out yesterday, doubling down today. Might need to take a day or two off soon to deal with some health stuff, but it's a 50/50 right now.

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“Bring retribution equally unto all before me!” the beast-slayer screamed a spontaneous battle cry as she dug her heels in and grabbed her cleaver’s handle, bracing for recoil. Thundercannon!”

Click. Click.

Lightning surging, muscles twitching, blinding white arcs leaping down her arm.

Boom.

For a moment, everything went white. A colossal jet of pure-white Fog gushed forth from her right eye, runoff due to the technique’s inefficiency. It felt like being struck by lightning all over again, only… In reverse. All that violence, all that power, the friction of every single attack she had weathered in the preceding minute or so. It had been translated to Fulgur and set loose as a blinding tsunami of fire, lead, and ball lightning. The recoil made her body bend in ways she didn’t know possible, her ears ringing and bones reverberating with the technique’s all-consuming violence. She couldn’t see it, but felt even the Butcher bend under the colossal forces, ever so slightly.

When Zel’s vision returned, she felt disorientated, weakened, and in pain. Many of her muscles twitched out of control, she struggled to keep up the rhythm of Breath Engine and had to actively focus on keeping her own heartbeat in rhythm. Still, it had worked, and before her stretched a cleared path to the exit. Or at least, as clear a path as it could be.

A great many chittering, flickering beads of light, like ten-hundred fireflies flashing above a field of screaming, burning locusts. Most of them were still alive, with eyeball-sized perfectly spherical holes punched through their bodies and globs of CP-T searing more tunnels into their flesh. Imbuing the Type-2 shell with Fulgur had granted it vastly superior penetration, effectively widening causing it to wound a large number of locusts instead of utterly shredding those in the immediate vicinity. The many smaller lead balls had carried CP-T on their way through, thus causing the wounds they inflicted to burn the victim alive from the inside out.

It almost seemed like the CP-T had multiplied in volume, though perhaps this was simply how the substance acted. It was much the same the last time she had used it.

From there, it was a mad dash across the field of screeching, dying bugmen. Zelsys put the Butcher away for the time being, focusing entirely on stabilizing her left arm and aiming at any locusts that could try to grab her as she ran. Over and over, she worked the lever, over and over, she set loose miniature ball lightning in a shotgun-spread pattern to shred away at the dying creatures in her path. It was in part to purge excess Fulgur from her system, and in part as insurance on the off-chance that a locust garnered the willpower to strike even while it lay there burning to death. Step by step, blast by blast, locust my locust. Several locusts' bodies cracked from wound to wound and split open beneath the superhuman footfalls of the two Fog-breathers.

Zefaris finished reloading well before they crossed, and immediately started putting lead downrange.

“Move! Move! Move!” she barked with an ironclad calm, invoking Concussion Impact over and over again. It seemed like a waste to just keep them back when she could kill them, but her reasoning became clear when she pulled a stick grenade, cooking it for a moment before she tossed it into the regrouping locusts. Some of them clearly saw what she was doing and even moved to get out of the way, but the majority had already slipped back into their rabid, instinct-driven selves in the absence of specific pheromone instructions.

They finally reached the door. To finish off the remaining locusts and presumably make the door open, Zefaris fired off the rest of Pentacle’s cylinder, reloaded, and emptied it again down to two shots left. Zel took this brief respite to work her cannon’s bolt, finding that the spent shell casing had been etched with an elaborate lightning-shaped pattern.

She slipped it into the ammo belt and replaced it with a Type-A, hoping that she wouldn’t need to use a Type-B again before she had some time to recover. She even pulled out one of the seal-bottles in her backpack and downed its contents, exhaling a puff of green Fog as she stored the empty thing.

With the only living locusts left in the ongoing process of dying, the glyph started lighting up, much to their relief. Thread by thread, spreading out across the glyph’s organic pathways. Only, the light soon became red, as did the chamber’s lightgems.

Throughout the chamber, there resounded the grinding of gears, the slamming of pistons, and the distant scraping of stone against stone. There were four loud thuds from beyond the red doors, and more locusts began pouring out. Zel guessed that they had just been delivered by the dungeon’s mechanisms. Not drones, or Warriors - entirely new morphs in compact squads led by a pair of lesser Locust Nobles each. In addition to their leaders, each squad had two Spitter locusts who rode atop mutated deer. These deer looked like mangy corpses put back together with insect parts and wrapped in parasitoid armor beetles, their antlers replaced by large, thick plates, perfectly shaped to support the rider’s deformed launcher-arms.

Beyond these, there were… Boars. Horrific, huge, angry boars. No, huge was an understatement; the forsaken things were the size of brown bears. Their front ends were entirely covered in plating so thick it put even a warrior drone to shame, their tusks turned to articulated pincers like those of hercules beetles. What was disturbing about these locust-boars was that they had absolutely minimal mutations, their eyes completely normal and as filled with wild rage as those of any breeding-season boar. All it took was a proportionally tiny control parasite, barely half the size of those used on humanoid locusts.

Zefaris instantly shot two of the Spitter locusts, pulling another grenade with her other hand. In much the same way Zel pulled a grenade of her own, but neither of them got to use more explosives. The ground beneath their feet shook with gigantic footfalls from the next chamber, and soon after this chamber’s lightgems shattered in a burst of cyan light. Pillars began rocketing up all the way to the ceiling, seemingly targeting the locusts; most missed altogether, took with them a limb, whilst three hit dead-on, smearing a beetle-boar and two Locust Nobles across the ceiling. Still, most of the assailants were unscathed, and even the two Locust Nobles who had lost an arm just kept going as if nothing had happened.

In fact, they became even more aggressive, weaving through the rising forest of pillars, trailing a miasma of pheromones for their subordinates to follow.

A mighty voice comparable to the thundering of an earthquake shouted a wordless cry from beyond the door, followed swiftly by an earthshaking impact that sent cyan-glowing cracks spidering across its stone surface. Then, another, and another. Something on the other side was trying to break down the door.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

Unwilling to hedge her life on the door getting broken down before the locusts would reach them, Zel took a moment to restart the Breath Engine. One of the beetle-boars charged far ahead of the pack, its pincers snapping. Zef shot it, but the bullet only cracked its incredibly thick armor.

“It’s fine, focus on the Nobles and Spitters,” Zel said, pulling the Butcher free once again, not waiting for a response before she ran right at the boar. She was still in pain and suffering with muscle spasms just frequent enough to be annoying, but it changed nothing about what she needed to do. If anything, it just motivated her to get rid of what excess Fulgur she was still charged with.

The beast saw her charging and released a gust of steaming breath, opening its pincers wide and changing direction to a collision course with the beast-slayer. Dragging her blade against the floor saw-side forward, Zelsys willed its sawteeth to wake only a few steps before she would collide with the boar. Then, it was half a lung’s breath to throw herself into a forceful forward jump right over the thing’s pincer-tusks.

It twisted its head in an attempt to catch her, snapping its pincers shut, but all it did was make sure the Butcher wouldn’t slip off before it split its head wide open. Zel felt the vibrations of the saw ripping through meat and bone, readily landing by the beast’s side when the resistance overwhelmed her momentum. She grasped the black-stone handle with both hands, pulling it back as the mutant animal thrashed about, wildly snapping its pincers and squealing bloody murder.

Chunks of chitin, flesh, and fur, fragments of bone, even mulched brain matter sprayed forth in every which direction as the screaming saw ripped its way through the beetle-boar’s head, frying the brain to mush well before it could be physically destroyed. And still, Zelsys struggled to pull the Butcher free, so resilient was the combination of boar skull and chitin plating.

One of the surviving Locust Nobles took notice, weaving between a number of pillars with a substantial black-stone axe gripped in his hands and ready to kill. Before Zelsys could decide on how to deal with him, a lance of flaming lead and gunsmoke turned his head to mush. The corpse toppled over under the weight of its weapon, bloody bubbles forming around its mouth as it began to speak in perfect Ikesian, of the sort used by those who knew the language fluently but hadn’t lived among its native speakers.

“The world does not revolve around you,” the dying locust gurgled, “it will not change just because you will it...”

Zel scoffed, finally ripping the cleaver free just in time to defend herself from one of the bug-deer. She caught its antler-shield with the Butcher’s edge, its convenient launcher-rest groove now serving to stabilize her blade. With her focus switched to the edge, the sawteeth fell silent and it went through the colour spectrum of hot iron, from dark red to bright red to orange. Vile-smelling smoke rose from the creature’s antler-shield, the blood that coursed through it spilling out and evaporating whilst the bug-deer emitted truly horrific noises.

Exhaling a lungful, she kicked the bottom of the deer’s jaw to drive the Butcher’s red-glowing blade through the antler-shield and into its skull. One more push to cut its head in two, and it crumpled to the ground. No enemy in sight, but she could hear them between the thunderous strikes that still resounded against the door. She could feel them, surrounding her, hiding from Zef’s gun behind the pillars.

She saw a copper coin come flying between the pillars, saw the flash of light and heard the ringing noise just after it passed out of view. The ever-familiar flaming spear of a bullet followed suit, only for the head-exploded corpse of another Locust Noble to topple out from behind a pillar ahead.

Thump. Thump

Another charging boar. This time, she jumped back to avoid its snapping pincers and invoked with a downward thrust, “Beheading Saw!”

The blade twisted itself in an unnatural way, its teeth undulating and changing shape to get wedged between individual plates of armor. A lung’s worth of Fog to fuel the saw and a single violent sawing motion was enough to get through, as the boar’s body was no more durable than a normal one’s underneath the extra armor.

From there, it was… Relatively smooth. Another beheaded beetle-boar here, a bisected deer there. The pillars had rendered Spitters worthless, as their launcher-arms were too long to maneuver between them without being pointed harmlessly upwards. Zel lost count at one point, but soon enough she felt that only one, maybe two Locust Nobles were left, as well as three or four of the animals at most.

A gunshot rang out, followed by the sound of a body toppling over. She heard a whisper in Pateirian, from behind a nearby pillar. Butcher in hand, she pursued the noise, swinging downward just as she turned the corner.