163 – Retribution Equally Unto All

“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 she 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 its area of effect 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 by 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-1, hoping that she wouldn’t need to use a Type-2 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.