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160 - Never Let Evil Take Root

She could hear its slavering maw clicking just beyond the corner as she inched along the pillars, doing all she could to get away. The locust made a weird retching noise and retreated, whilst Zefaris finally slipped past the patrol when they at last continued their route.

Ever so slowly and ever so cautiously, the markswoman progressed through the narrower hallway, ducking behind every piece of cover to be found. At last, she reached the left turn at the end. A dead end, a single raised...

159 - Tactical Stealth Operations

With a sigh, she stepped into the maze. A part of navigating it was her gut, but she also marked her path using the filth that covered her forearm, and when it was clean, she took to just spitting wherever she went. The sound of chattering mandibles and stomping feet resounded as she navigated the maze, its winding paths an obvious concession to compensate for lack of physical space. It was, after all, just one segment of a chamber, perhaps thirty meters wide and no more than twice that long....

158 - Soul-Sword-Single-Strike

A twitch of the eye, a sharp inhalation, a sudden assault of strikes. Makhus could feel and see them coming, but he lacked the inhuman speed bestowed by Fog-breathing. He blocked some, dodged others, backpedaling through the alleyway as he watched for any gap in the Pursuer’s savage assault. With his senses entirely overtaken by sensory overload and his reflexes doing the vast majority of the work while he looked out for an opportunity to break the pattern of reflexive defence, Makhus had b...

157 - The Burning Heart

The vast majority, Strolvath struck down personally, caving in their weakened chitin with the strength of his clockwork leg.

All the while, Strolvath just kept playing, sing-screaming the lyrics to a song that he rarely had reason to perform for anyone but himself. They were lyrics to a song the man in the photo had once played for him, bastardized to now express his own frustrations. Accusations and screaming declarations of his murderous intention, sung with the same breath as lofty c...

156 - Son of Fog

As disgusting as it was on a surface level, seeing as it was a half-digested slurry of animal flesh and plant matter, Zel didn’t particularly care. All it took to push past the initial stench was a long, long drink of mead elixir.

By the time her hunger vanished, the basin was no emptier, yet the slurry had noticeably lost color - in the end, she hadn’t taken in so much as a speck of the physical matter. It had only taken her body a while to absorb the essentia it needed to make mor...

155 - Ritualistic Sacrifice

The difference was that she knew when to use such a stance - the Warrior’s stubby legs top-heavy build naturally rendered its lower half a target. Even still, it wasn’t stupid. It knew its weakness was being targeted, even if its intent to pound her into the ground with a downward piledriver punch was broadcast clear to see by the upward movement of its arms.

It wasn’t its fault that Zelsys knew to step aside just as it began to swing downward, then used its arms as a ramp to get ...

154 - The First Extermination

It would be just sticky enough to apply. Unsure of how quickly the Doorman of this hive would react, Zelsys made sure to dig out the entire vial’s contents so she could quickly apply and ignite it.

It wasn’t much, but she hoped it would be enough. With a short breath of Fog and a brief sprint, she ran up to the Doorman and smeared the glob of CP-T along the seam between its arm plates, the compound dense enough for all of it to transfer to the pitted surface with naught but a thin l...

153 - Rip and Tear

The scuttling stopped, only to resume seconds later - now swiftly approaching, two sets of heavy footfalls thumping from beyond the corner. Knowing there was no point to hurriedly trying to find a shank, Zel stood to her feet and breathed, filling one lung whilst emptying the other.

“Unarmed it is…” she sighed inwardly, channeling the lungfull of Fog she had to exhale in starting the Breath Engine to break into a sprint; speeding up her heartbeat and push...

152 - The Trial of Solitude

“It won’t open to anywhere lower than the first floor,” Zel sighed.

“Hard way it is, then,” the veteran laughed, slowly but steadily rising to his feet. “I‘on’t look forward to clearin’ a fuckin’ dungeon, but what can ya do.”

He cast his gaze to each of them in turn, the levity in his face replaced by a grim determination. Stepping towards and through the gate he said, “See y’all on the other side.”

The Inquisitor followed after him without so muc...

151 - The Undying Spark

The Red Mantis felt herself lose purchase, her right leg severed at the ankle and gushing hemolymph even as she began to stumble into the Fog Gate. Pivoting her arms and pulling the scythes back in an attempt to at least rip at the creature’s neck, she felt an arc of searing white lightning score her chitin.

Fog suddenly shrouded the skin of its neck, and she felt the root joint of her right arm-scythe being nearly ripped from its socket as if the force of its retraction had been reve...

150 - Sudden Death

Assuming the hive queen had a significant measure of control over the swarm, the only question was the reason behind her decision to let them enter the dungeon instead of just killing them before they could get in. A mischievous spirit made her want to prod and poke the bug-woman, to try extracting something, anything that would help lead her towards an answer, but she maintained self-control.

There would be plenty of time for questioning once she had the queen at gunpoint.

But th...

149 - Into the Mouth of Hell

They departed soon after, and saw that the battleground around the shack was all the same. Even this far along they still followed the path plotted out by the map, for it once more led them into a tunnel of nigh-impenetrable brambles.

It only took a few dozen meters into the last stretch of their trek for the incessant sounds of locusts to once more overtake all others, skittering and chewing chief among them. The walls of their verdant path shook and shuddered constantly, locusts peeri...

148 - Dawn of the Fateful Day

It had only been a day since Zel and Zef left on their first major beast-slaying contract, but to Makhus it had felt far longer than that. Not because they were gone - because of all the work it had taken to get the store ready for opening. By the time Riverside Remedies finally opened, a furious storm had passed over the entire valley. Sig had become extremely useful in running the store, as people were for some reason more eager to trust the bald, bearded, alchemically scarred veteran with ...

147 - Symbol of Rank

She sat on the cot with her eyes closed, leaning against the wall, resting her head on Zef’s shoulder while she sipped the golden nectar. A breath of Fog in, a breath of Fog out, and the pain faded a little more. The silvery threads snaked their way through the air, drifting towards the ground as they slowly faded out. But a few of them reached the Lightning Butcher, and its metal teeth drank the Fog like the maw of a parched beast, ringing with soft metallic notes.

The Inquisitor’s...

146 - Safe for Now

“Hrrgh… Victory Echoes!” he roared, and fire issued forth from his mouth. Twitcher’s blowtorch of a left arm was met with his fist, plugging shut the muzzle then splitting it wide open until the insect’s forearm fell apart at the seams. Somehow, the essentia sac remained intact even as it fell to the ground and spilt its volatile, noxious contents onto the dirt.

Twitcher turned his body to swing his entire right arm into a vague approximation of a punch, but Strol countered by...

145 - One Retreats, One Returns

Having just barely managed to fully awaken the Brass Eye before the Black Swordsman disappeared into the treeline, Strolvath discerned a short snippet from the train of thought that the man was constantly broadcasting.

It wasn’t even an internal monologue. Just raw emotion interspersed with fragmentary snippets of words that began as abruptly as they began.

“Hurt… Arm gone… Failed… Dishonored… Mother punish...”

The chitin-plated titan forced his way into the tr...

144 - Sever the Hand

She’d already figured out that it was faster to place a cartridge in each chamber and then simply ram them all down in sequence, but it still took precious seconds - an eternity in the blazing inferno of combat.

Just as she reached a tree and ducked behind it her ears filled with the mighty roar of a high-powered shell being fired, the ground trembling underfoot from the vibration as the dying screams of drones who didn’t die instantly echoed.

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143 - Assault Combat

Strolvath knew by heart the tones to resonate a locust drone’s carapace. He also knew they weren’t the greater threat here. He needed to put that gigantic beast of a warrior out of commission. To start with, he murmured his prayer to the dead gods and began throat-singing, and from there started tuning his voice in an attempt to find the frequency that would affect the Black Swordsman.

It didn’t matter how, whether it resonated his chitin to weaken it or made his hemolymph boil. I...

142 - The Measure of a Slayer

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 l...

141 - Red Mantis

A small puddle of off-yellow excretions was already forming beneath him as long strings of caustic spit poured forth from his perpetually slavering, chittering maw; lamprey-like teeth filled the gaping hole that had once been a mouth. His head was covered in spiky hairs, a pair of truly insectoid eyes bulging out of visibly human eye-sockets.

The forearms were unnaturally bulky, bearing great plates of solid chitin in the shape of small heater shields on the outside, whilst the undersid...

140 - Encirclement

Unlike back there, they couldn’t cut through. Even without superhuman instincts such as Zel’s, they all smelt the sour miasma that suffused the forest, they all heard the distant beating of wings and chittering of human lower jaws that had turned to mandibles. The only smell that managed to punch through the odor of massing locust-men was the smell of pure Viriditas, small puddles of the emerald fluid glistened around the roots of some brambles.

“Of course it’s artificial,�...