184 – Triumvirate

The moment Zelsys stepped out into the chamber proper, the feelers that parted the Mantis’s hair whipped about and she reached up to her face, removing something before she turned around on a heel. It turned out to be some disgusting biomechanical inhaler mask, the mouthpiece a shaped sucker with mucosa visible on the inside. Its fleshy interior undulated alongside the tube as iridescent, Fog-like gas seeped out of the device. The Mantis’s mouth contorted into a grin, and her eyes grabbed Zel’s as she raised her other hand. She made a beckoning motion using both her fingers, and the massive mantis-blade protruding from her forearm just past the elbow. That motion revealed the changed state of even her arm-blades - once more it was additional plating, but more importantly, the bladed parts were now damascened golden metal, rather than chitin. Could it be some form of cold-iron?

Quickly nearing the center of the chamber, she felt her gut screaming at her to either turn or stop dead, and she chose the latter. It took her until she was face-to-face at point-blank range with the Red Mantis at the breakneck pace she was going. Looking at the mutant made her realize why she felt the need to stop, because the Red Mantis’s slightly disappointed expression shimmered and wavered. There was a barrier around the three bugmen.

Zel couldn’t even bring herself to be surprised at the two other figures’ identity - the Sister and the Black Swordsman.

Both of them had been layered upon with huge armor beetles and centipedes, though the Sister’s reinforced plating looked to be much lighter, predominantly centipede-based with thicker-shelled beetles to protect her chest, upper back, and the nape of her neck. Her hands gripped a repaired, golden-edged version of her blade, a gold-hued mend line demarcating where it had been severed previously.

However, far more disturbing than any bug armor was the state of her head. A gruesome crown of rainbow-hued crystalline spikes protruded from her skull at odd angles, and one even came out of her right eye like a torturous horn. The cloudy glimmer of these crystals reminded Zel of Azoth, somehow. The Sister’s head whipped around to look at her alongside the Mantis’s taunt, her good eye shuddering as it tracked her.

The Black Swordsman’s state was a whole nother matter. Even standing relatively still, it couldn’t be more obvious that he’d been dismembered and subsequently put back together. His limbs and body both were patched-up with armor centipedes, and they hadn’t been put back on at quite the right angles. The head that sat on his shoulders was most certainly not his own, disproportionately large and horrendously deformed. It would’ve looked comical, were it not for the inhuman expression of apathetic despair its face was stuck in.

Zel’s first guess was that the Queen ripped off some other Locust Noble’s head, stuck it onto the stump neck using a centipede, and pumped the corpse with parasitized energy from the Dungeon Core to animate it… Whatever that energy was, it was clearly not intended for a human or even ex-human body, considering the gruesome rainbow spikes that riddled the Black Swordsman’s new head inside-out at every-which angle.

His weapons were far more practical than she had remembered, these being a golden-edged black-stone war axe and a shield so thick and heavy it could’ve very well been a dungeon door.

Assuming that the barrier had to have a source, Zel’s gaze jumped from the lofty heights of that meat-morningstar of a head down to the very floor. There they were, rune stones as expected, wedged into a jagged, clearly artificial gap in the floor. They were, of course, perfect black-stone rectangles etched with equally perfect, red-glowing Pateirian symbols, but they served the very same purpose as those roughly-carved rocks around the forest cabin. Her first thought was to just kick one of them out, or try to destroy them with a low swing of her blade. She wasn’t eager to gamble on it, and so looked for a more obvious weak point. Maybe the tubes?

From where she stood, Zel had a good view of the device that those disgusting inhalers connected to. Its vaguely conical chitinous mass encased a sharp-edged polyhedron, only its very tip poking out of the mass. There was a flesh-tube thrice as thick as the others leading from the device out through the barrier and to that huge hive in the corner. There was a painfully obvious weakness in the barrier - a floor-to-ceiling vertical gap wide enough for an arm to fit through, or perhaps a grenade. Bingo.

“Hey, eyes down here,” the Mantis snapped with such profound, pure envy in her voice that Zelsys couldn’t resist going along with it.

“Don’t you go pretending to be mentally degenerating on me. It’s a real shame you know, I’d hoped to see run face-first into the barrier,” the Mantis faux-whined, spinning the disgusting inhaler by its equally disgusting tube only to land it perfectly on her face, suck in a deep breath, and pull it off again with a gut churning smacking noise.

Rainbow-hued gas escaping with each word she added, “Guess we’ll have to pound you into paste ourselves.”

Zel chuckled indignantly, putting on her best condescending smirk as she stared down the Mantis. Even if she could only keep the exchange of insults going for a few seconds, it would be seconds of valuable intel-gathering.

“I snapped your foot off without even trying,” she spat, briefly looking at the replacement foot and back up to meet the red one’s glare. “What makes you think I’m leaving this place before you’re in more pieces than there are bugs on your skin?”

“With what, that stupid cleaver?” the mantis chuckled doubtfully before she broke into a hateful, boasting rant, spilling all the vitriol that she’d been stewing in since Zel embarrassed her at the surface Fog Gate. “Go ahead, smash it against my armor all you like, it’ll just get stuck and I’ll cut you in half. You’ve been scrambling for your life, growing more exhausted with each chamber, and your only rewards were doled out according to old rules by a dying god-machine. Meanwhile, I’ve been drinking full of the dungeon’s lifeblood ever since you four passed through that gate, and by the Emperor, I’m certain I could smash a war golem with my bare hands if I wanted to.”