166 – Delta

It ticked Zefaris off immediately, and she questioned the subcore as she hesitantly holstered Pentacle, “If you don’t mind me asking, why do you speak as you do, when Sigma spoke in a manner more befitting a machine?”

A chuckle sounded from the huge golem, a grinding thunder that perfectly fit its form. “Observant. My brother uses shells sparingly, as tools to be discarded. He deals with other sapients just as sparingly, forming a new personality for each interaction. I can not afford either of these luxuries, and thus have developed a semi-permanent personality.”

It fell silent, freezing in place, its eye flickering a staccato. When the golem resumed motion, it turned in place and began to walk with a titanic sense of urgency, beckoning them to follow in its thunderous voice.

“Come, we do not have time. I must expedite the trial if you are to have a chance at purging the Parasite,” it proclaimed, and the quartet followed. The locust-men without hesitation, the beast-slayers with a slight semblance of it.

They walked through the intermediary chamber, its door already open, into a long chamber segmented into three sections with thick glowing lines on the floor. The first segment was a deep pit with large, densely-packed black-stone spikes at the bottom.

There was no path across, no control handle, no terminal… Delta and the two locust-men just walked into the pit as if nothing was amiss, walking across thin air as wisps of bluish Fog rose up around their footsteps. They trailed a slowly fading, glowing path across the pit. Hesitantly, Zel and Zef followed suit.

While Zelsys simply followed the path while curiously looking around, Zef’s gaze quickly strayed towards the ceiling. Up there, she saw it, outlined on the ceiling panels; the path, outlined in a continuous line of outcropped panels. She decided it’d be easier to just follow the footsteps.

The path across the pit was long and winding, the pit filled with corpses both old and new. From ancient, bleached human skeletons, empty locust husks, to rancid beetle-boars corpses, bloated with decay. What felt strange was the distribution; it was everywhere, even under the path.

When Zefaris pointed it out, Delta responded with a chuckle and a remark of, “I change the path every once in a while, and set the Fog Bridge to semi-random low capacity when this chamber isn’t in use. The loyalists haven’t figured out the first part, they keep falling off midway through the crossing.”

Reaching the other side of the pit, they crossed the first glowing line. The line flickered out, and a wall of pillars rose up behind them. A huge glyph lit up across the wall’s surface, forming into a projection that soon cleared up into a mirror image. Ahead was a seemingly clear floor, until Delta stepped forward and the panel lit up beneath its foot. Another step, another lit up panel. One after the other, the golem plotted out a path across the floor, and they followed rather than take a risk. Zelsys looked back on the mirror-wall, and saw that it showed two lit-up panels ahead of where Delta was at any given moment, thus showing the path.

Still, they were curious, and Zelsys spoke out, “First it was a pit of spikes, what’s this one? Will a pillar splatter me across the ceiling if I step in the wrong spot?”

“Some will,” the Caster murmured. “Others will fry you, or burn you alive. This one used to be a floor of eyes with flamethrowers in the pupils. You were to only step on eyes with a particular pattern in the iris, but it was too easy.”

Step by step, they traversed along this path too. As with the Fog Bridge, this path was winding, but unlike the previous one, it had awkward u-turns and even a few gaps that they had to step or jump over. At the other side, crossing the glowing line made another wall of pillars rise behind them. This one had no glyph, it was in fact just a wall.

At the third segment, a number of pale-yellow lines across the floor lit up in a regular interval between where they stood and the door. Myriad holes opened up in the walls, from small ones barely big enough for an arrow to ones tall and wide enough that Zelsys wagered she could squeeze into them if she really tried.

Delta almost stepped forward, only for a line to turn bright red when his stone leg crossed it. A barrage of black bullets ripped from the wall, saturating the whole area as rows of black-stone spears and blades stabbed and slashed forth from the larger holes.

The golem rumbled a noise of discontent, “She’s rigging the trap to be unbeatable. I’ll just…”

A stomp sent a pulse of cyan light radiating out, a few glowing lines rocketing about through the seams between the panels, traveling down the length of the chamber. One by one, the glowing lines flickered out and the walls sealed up. Grumbling in a manner reminiscent of rocks grinding together, the golem walked ahead towards the exit from the chamber.

“The Parasite’s attempts at manipulation have been getting more and more desperate since you four entered the dungeon,” he complained with no attempt at hiding his annoyance. “Crazy bitch would sooner try to absorb the Core or jam the cogworks than face opposition. Doesn’t even care that she’ll die unless she cooperates.”

“I think she’s very much aware, but unwilling to accept her predicament,” the Caster said with a sense of schadenfreude. “She thinks herself a queen, better than an ancient machine. You know how much the loyalists hate the Three Kings’ works.”

Zefaris felt the need to genuinely think back on their conversation in the Fog Transit chamber when Zel nodded and, without missing a beat said, “Yeah, I do.”

She recalled that she had indeed told Zel of what Sigma told her, having omitted the parts regarding her brief mental connection to the machine-intelligence and the resulting humanlike corruption of its speech patterns.