109 – 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.

As she made her way yet deeper into the maze of pillars, she felt her gut telling her in which direction to turn, she could tell in which direction the other creature was moving. A left turn, and it was in sight - a Warrior locust, but this one’s exoskeleton didn’t stretch and bend with every movement. It was solid, interlocking plates.

However, it still had the same weakness as those before it.

A breath of Fog, a momentary sprint, and she leapt onto its back. Already, Zelsys dug her fingers into the gap between the Warrior’s head and body, painstakingly wrenching its head free.

Flesh ripping. Cartilage popping. Hemolymph spraying.

The locust’s head fell to the ground with a thud, just as Zel plunged her arm into its neckhole, ripped through its soft tissues, and crushed its heart. She leapt from its back, leaving the Warrior’s body to tumble to the ground as she continued to search for an exit to the maze. Soon enough, she found two - one to the chamber’s door, one that led down the rightward branch.

Making her way down the latter first, Zel soon turned the corner to the right and came upon another wall of pillars, before which a single altar protruded from the floor. There was no glyph, no basin, no test - only her things. Her arm-harness, the holster of her blade with the Tablet securely inside it, even the ammo belt. With relief in her heart and a smile on her lips, Zelsys slid the harness over her left arm and strapped on the rest of her equipment, departing for the exit of this chamber.

Her gut told her she’d need every piece of equipment she had, and she looked forward to the challenges that lay ahead. No longer did she instinctively feel the need to survive - she felt a need to conquer the dungeon, to purge it of the locusts that infested it, driven by a desire to exact justice for the Red Mantis’s treachery. The betrayal of a momentary truce between enemies was even more severe than a betrayal that came out of nowhere, and Zelsys intended to punish it with equal severity.

To her, it wasn’t a matter of, “If I manage to reach the dungeon core.”

It was a matter of when and how.

There was a short moment of panic, when Zefaris passed through the Fog Gate. She found herself alone and disarmed, and without anywhere else to turn once the gate flickered out, she cautiously approached the door at the other side of the chamber.

Upon it lighting up and swinging open the markswoman traversed the hallway with equal caution, all the while she visually scoured her surroundings for anything and everything that could be used as a weapon. When the glyph beside the next door came alive at her approach and sprayed a message in Fog, a small portion of her nervousness became relief. All she had to do was find Pentacle in the chamber ahead, and all would be fine.

Until then, she’d need to employ other methods. The dungeon had taken her gun, her ammunition, and her bayonet, that much was true, but it had neither taken her bag, nor her phials of Compound P-T.

The doorside glyph at last wrote out its last message and the door swung open.

Light on her feet and mind racing, Zefaris skulked into the chamber, hugging the left wall whilst she built a mental map of the layout. A long, rectangular shape that bordered on an oversized hallway, with one side path to either side near the other end. There were two small hives between her and her goal, as well as a great many pillars risen from the floor in an inconsistent pattern.

A few three-pillar walls here, a pillar that reached to the ceiling there, but on the whole, the major effect was an uneven floor that somewhat mimicked a natural landscape. She could almost picture the chamber as a reflection of some long-forgotten battlefield in the middle of a forest.

The nearest hive’s Doorman retreated just as Zefaris neared the hive, and she had no choice besides stepping behind a pillar to take cover. She heard the click-clack of two sets of feet, followed by much heavier footfalls. With her back against the pillar the patrolling locusts passed to her left, thus she rotated around the pillar clockwise to stay out of sight, synchronizing her footsteps with those of the out-of-sight Warrior.

Silence.

The locusts had stopped. Mandibles chattering, cautious sniffing. These scant seconds felt as though an eternity, and then… They moved on. One of them chittered a noise that had the cadence of speech, and they continued walking. Why would they speak if they communicated with pheromones?

No time to question. As quickly and as silently as her legs would carry her, Zefaris slipped out of cover and traversed the chamber’s uneven terrain, slipping in and out of cover whenever even the slightest of noises that didn’t come from her echoed. Just as she neared the corner of the left-hand side path, seven locusts came walking out of it. She just barely managed to stop herself, to slip behind an L-shaped set of four pillars the tallest of which was just barely as tall as her, with the shortest one being a half a meter shorter.

Once more, the locusts hung around chittering. One of the drones stepped around the pillar, and once more Zefaris slipped past the corner, out of sight.