101 – 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 reversed. The homunculus just ducked out of the way, and surged towards a drone, ripping off its mandibles and using them to disembowel it where it stood
Her last sight before she passed through was that of the homunculus’ silver-glowing eyes, Fog pouring from the contorted visage of rage it called a face. The silver-haired beast’s musculature slithered under its skin like serpents made of steel rope with each surge of lightning that arced across its body, its hands grasping for chitin plates to rip away and its fists lashing out for heads to cave in.
Between the moments it took to slaughter the last surviving drones, it even found the time to throw a murderous stare towards the Mantis, with its evil eyes that blazed with the same silver as the Sage’s. There was none of the Sage’s mild-mannered guile, none of his scheming intellect behind these eyes; there was only savage murderlust, unfettered by her ambush. Not a word was spoken, but she understood the message - she was next, were it to ever find her… When it found her.
The Fog Gate swallowed her, and the Red Mantis at last crossed into the relative safety of the core chamber.
Every movement made pain jolt through her body, but Zelsys didn’t care. It was familiar, now. Expected. She didn’t even bother to stop Fog-breathing, continually taking lungfull breaths and slowly exhaling them as she got her bearings.
The Fog Gate had faded the moment that subhuman whore crossed its precipice, no worse for wear besides a missing foot and a sprained joint. At first she thought it’d just take a short while to re-open, but it didn’t. She thought the glyphs that really were the gate might respond to touch and a willed command, and indeed, they did.
A glow flowed through the many-layered pattern, wisps of Fog rising from the ancient stone as a blindingly bright projection flickered into being in the gate’s frame. A wireframe map with a small section shaped like landscape at the top and a sprawling megastructure underneath. It had a single central spire, broken up by five rectangular segments from top to bottom at regular intervals, with the topmost and lowermost segments containing some red dots.
Myriad smaller chambers sprawled out around the central spire, winding round in a spiral, always completing half a revolution between one segment and the next. Even assuming the rooms were not much larger than this one, the complex was far too massive to go through in any reasonable amount of time.
Zelsys made an assumption and tried to tap on the bottom segment, but all she received for feedback was a jolt of numbness up the arm and the entire wireframe briefly flashing red. Repeating the process for each segment from the bottom yielded the exact same result, until the topmost one - when she tapped this one, the projection flickered to a single vertical line and faded out.
“Start from the first floor, huh?” she thought. Whilst the gate stirred to life, she took a short while to retake her possessions from the clutches of the drones she’d just savaged so thoroughly. With each new passing day, her appreciation for the filth-proof properties of Fog-infused fabric grew. The Lightning Butcher and arm-cannon alike securely back where they belonged, she bent down toward Zef to wake her, first checking for a stinger in her back. Nothing, just a small bloodstain. Breathing and heartbeat steady. Good. The stinger embedded in her own heart made each of its beats pulse with a wrenching ache, but it wasn’t as if she could just yank it out. Not under these conditions.
A few light slaps on her face, a nudge, but no response. A mouth-to-mouth breath of Fog, and the markswoman’s eye fluttered open to a groggy, pained groan.
“Should’ve just shot the Mantis bitch and blasted the wall bug to bits with CP-T…” she growled with an audibly dry throat, reaching into her bag for one of her seal-bottles and chugging down a third of its contents.
“She’ll get what she deserves soon enough,” Zel added as she moved onto the Inquisitor. She pulled up the Inquisitor’s gas mask with the intent of breathing Fog into her face to wake her, but her eyes snapped open just as the mask rose beyond her scarred mouth. Her hand shot up to her face, pulling the mask back down as she scuttled backward and right into a pile of locust guts. The filth slipped right off the Fog-infused fabric of her coat when she stood, casting a scornful but understanding glare towards Zelsys.
Zelsys didn’t have the mind to react or even warn the woman, for what she’d seen under the mask boggled her utterly. What little she saw of the face under the mask was… Unsettlingly familiar, at least for what little focus she devoted it. A passing glance, a momentary consideration, nothing more.
Waking Strolvath was… An endeavor, to say the least. Nudging and slapping him didn’t work, so she just resorted to taking his knife and using the smell of…
“Whiskey?” she thought when the fumes hit her nose, having expected aggressive, alchemical scents of blood and fire. When she held it to his nose, Strol’s nose twitched and he stirred to consciousness almost immediately, taking his property from her and quickly closing the hidden flask as if just smelling its contents could send him into a blazing rage.
The Fog Gate flickered.
“Won’t stay open for much longer,” Strolvath said. “Let’s eliminate the queen and be done with this, without her the drones’ll just wander through the dungeon n’ die off.”