195 – Dance of the Fireflies
“What were you thinking?! That a little dismemberment would somehow stop me?! Knock me down, I just get up. Stop my heart, I'll start it up again. Even if you take off all my limbs, I'll ride the jets of blood to rip your neck out with my teeth and figure out how to put myself back together. Unless you fuckin' grind me down to the last speck, I'll just keep at it. And what do you know? I might come back as a mass of meat - I’ll still be more human than you even then.”
It looked like the Queen wanted to talk back, her jaws rattling and snapping, her head swaying and human arms gesticulating in place, but she had no lungs or vocal cords to speak with.
“I do owe you something.”
Zelsys took a deep breath and spoke, yet no Fog came out of her mouth.
“In all the world and beyond, to no kings, gods, or devils will I bow!” she proclaimed. Her lungs emptied, the silver lines under her skin shone, and many thin wicks of Fog arose from them, forming into tiny spheres.
Another deep, full breath.
“For as long as this body of mine moves, I will exact retribution!” continued the slayer as more and more tiny spheres of Fog formed immediately around her body, attached by hair-thin threads of Fog. From her back, to her arms, even right above her head in a strange sort of crown.
“And never will I give mercy to those who would show me none!”
All at once, the great jet of white light that trailed from her eye sputtered out. A half-second passed, and in a blindingly-bright display of lights, tendril-like arcs of white plasma arced and slithered across the homunculus’s skin. They leapt even between the stump of her arm and the hanging-on limb, inside her mouth and between her teeth.
One by one in rapid succession, all the Fog beads that she’d manifested were struck by these arcs, becoming chittering beads of ball lightning, each the size of an eyeball. Each shone as brightly as a lightgem, but soon enough, a few bright points became an eye-burning constellation that outlined Zel’s form.
Yet even surrounded by who knew how many beads of lightning, its fury still arced across her skin.
With a guttural growl of pain the beast-slayer pulled her good hand free, gesturing towards the Locust Queen’s head. Arcs of electricity jumped between her index and middle finger as she sucked in another ragged breath.
Manic, fog-drunk, and exsanguinated, Zelsys still held onto the fundamental desire to seal her feats into techniques by naming them. The flickering, chittering lights that surrounded her conjured the image of a swarm of fireflies.
“Beast-butchering Arts: Dance of the Fireflies!”
A thin beam of lightning leapt forth from her index finger, spiraling and branching in a single flash until it met the wound in the arch-parasite’s forehead. It left no wound, not even a scorch mark - just a path of flickering lights.
All else followed.
Zefaris and Strolvath watched the entire casting process happen, and both of them knew to back away the moment Zel’s eye-trail vanished.
It felt like an eternity, even to them. The tension in the air was palpable, not just in the figurative sense - firefly-like static discharges flashed all around them, at first sporadically, but soon they became as dense and as blinding as the lights that Zelsys had formed around herself.
Then at last, after all that buildup, that guiding bolt leapt from her finger.
“Beast-butchering Arts: Dance of the Fireflies!”
So called out the beast-slayer.
A sphere of lightning ripped itself free from her arm, screaming death as it whizzed through the air. A second followed in its stead. A third, a fourth, a fifth - a half-dozen of them flew off before the first one hit.
When the first one hit, it was like the world stopped for a moment. There was a flash of light, a thunderous crack, and an expansion. For a flash so short that even Zefaris struggled to see it, the tiny lightning sphere expanded fivefold, evaporating flesh and bone wholesale and ripping at everything else with the residual shockwave.
In moments, the onslaught of thundercracks and flashes became too much even for the seasoned soldier. For the first time in a long while, Zefaris genuinely felt the need to shield her eyes from the light.
Thundercrack after thundercrack in staccato resounded all around as Zelsys’s onslaught ripped away at the Queen’s head, chewing through flesh and reinforced bone nearly unimpeded until it met the iridescent gemstones that filled her skull.
But then, even the gemstones yielded. They knew it was so, for myriad rainbow-hued shards sprayed forth and clattered to the ground with bell-like ringing.
The last firefly had danced, and Zelsys had no more to give.
Muscles spasming under residual currents, her hand wandered back to her stump arm. She’d lost enough blood to feel light-headed even while Fog-breathing, but she didn’t care. The only thing that mattered in this single moment was seeing the arch-parasite’s ripped-open head, and to her great satisfaction, that was exactly what Zelsys saw.
Amidst the cavernous remnants of a gigantic skull, there was a surprising absence of gore. It was like a bowl, filled with organic slurry and a great many iridescent gemstones.
“Finally,” she sighed, and all the beast-like tension vanished from her face. “The hard part is done. Now let’s clean up the stragglers.”
“You’re nearly as pale as me and probably in shock, I don’t think you should…” Zefaris cut in with genuine concern, but she was interrupted by Strolvath of all people.
“If she sits down she ain’t gettin’ back up,” he rumbled as he began walking towards the mega-hive. “It’s better if she stands, just make sure the stump ain’t gushin’ and her heart rate’s low.”
Zel looked down at her cleaver, then at Zef. “On second thought, we should bandage it so I can at least use my good arm and put dangly over here into Fog Storage so it doesn’t start rotting before we can reattach it.”