183 – Breach and Clear

“You’re not throwin’ all of ‘em through the gate,” Strol answered, but he still pulled a grenade and a phial from his backpack. “One, maybe two, but any more’ll be too much. That, plus the fact that even twelve of ‘em wouldn’t be enough to blow up the queen for sure, and we still gotta walk through there to get outta here.”

“I want to throw a few of them in the gate, but I think it’d be ideal for you to have most of them and the rest be split up among us three,” Zel explained her intentions. “But first, we need to know how much of each we have.”

Across the four of them they had six grenades, five full phials, and the half-empty phial that Zel had held onto since her encounter with the Sister. The Inquisitor eagerly handed over her remaining explosives and CP-T, and refused a grenade when offered one. In the end two grenades went to Strolvath, while Zel and Zef each took one, with all five enhanced by a phial of CP-T each. The half-empty phial went down the barrel of Zel’s arm-cannon, and the last two grenades would be tossed through the gate. Zel filled each one’s hollow with half a phial of CP-T, filling the rest of the free space with gunpowder. Before she went further, she slipped her grenade into her belt, tying its fuse string around one of the belt loops so she could rip it off and toss it in one motion.

Gripping both grenades in her right hand, Zel pulled their fuses taut and looked over to the others. “Ready?”

Three nods. A yank on the fuses.

A second’s wait before tossing them in.

The grenades vanished through the Gate, sending two sets of rippled waving across its surface. Three more seconds passed, and instead of fading, the ripples only became more pronounced, more erratic. The Gate was visibly destabilizing. At last there came a brief, angered yell from the assumed direction of the Core Chamber. Zel took it as the command to grab her cleaver and jump through.

Emerging from the Gate, the very first thing she noticed was the air - it was thick with the stench of burning bugs and boiling protein slurry, but also something else. The air down here was more than twice as saturated with Aether than it was in the rest of the dungeon, to the point where Zel could feel herself absorbing the airborne essentia through her skin. Though it didn’t take conscious effort to keep engine breathing, even this method was noticeably easier here - a lungful of breath was less air and more Fog.

The second thing she noticed were her surroundings. The blown-to-smithereens, burning interior of a large hive, two dying Doormen right in her sightline as marks of where the doorways were. Locusts of both the Drone and Noble varieties laid on the floor, most still alive in seething agony, being burned open by globs of CP-T. There were a great many ovoid sacs attached to the hive’s floors, walls, and ceiling. Of these sacs some two-thirds had been ruptured, spilling their contents of nutrient slurry and half-formed locust drones. The hive’s structure had a great many cracks, with chunks of its matter falling from the walls and ceiling, exposing black-stone rod reinforcements within.

All this information was what Zel gathered in the very first moment right after she emerged from the Gate. Her mind kept on rushing by, her instincts ravenously devouring any and all sensory information to build a map of this place. In the very next moment, any importance that this single hive’s state might’ve held was washed away by the collapse of a Doorman. Its body toppled over forwards, revealing the rest of the chamber.

Even without moving an inch, without leaning or taking a single step, Zelsys was able to glimpse the dreadful truth of what they would have to deal with before even touching the Queen, wherever she was. She could make out three figures of vastly differing size, standing in an inward-facing triangular formation.

There were two sets of superhumanly large feet visible off to the left and right, and right through the doorway was the only figure which she could see in its entirety. Facing away from her was the Red Mantis, her lower half so massively reinforced with large red plates that it looked like her upper half was riding the legs of a larger-scale statue. One of her feet had been replaced by a black-stone construct that had been painted blood-red, but was still obvious. Her upper half had similarly heavy-duty plates added over vital areas like the upper torso and shoulders, these in the form of far more obvious beetles whose legs hooked onto the root points of the Mantis’s own plating. She also had a giant red centipede wrapped around her midriff - perhaps flexible armor? It was so huge that Zelsys could see its bright-yellow legs digging into the Mantis’s flesh.

Strange, fleshy tendrils hung down from each of the Locust Nobles’ front ends - perhaps from their chests or their faces, she couldn’t tell. They snaked across the floor to some sort of chitinous mass at the center of the formation.

The subtle tremor of the others’ boots touching ground when they crossed the gate snapped her out of her hyper-focused torpor. There was no more discussion to be had, no more planning, they had all agreed upon their roles beforehand.

Zelsys ran headlong out of the hive, Butcher in hand, it's blade already glowing a dull-red and its teeth already chittering even without her input. It was hungry, eager to bite into something. Seeing the chamber’s upper portions in her peripheral vision revealed its general size and shape. A septagon with a circumference somewhat larger than the Sister’s arena.

There was a hive against each wall, with the addition of a truly massive hive in the corner exactly opposite the Gate. It was easily the size of a small house, connecting the two smaller wall-aligned structures, and had a meters-wide opening in the top that she couldn’t see into.