ARC FINALE – It Has To Be This Way

It would be a lie to say that emerging into the outside world greeted them with a breath of fresh air. The air was still thick with the stench of locust-kind, the dungeon entrance surrounded by a ghastly scene. On the upside, the Fog Gate had conferred its usual benefits of cleansing filth and healing minor wounds, including the numerous scratches that covered Zel’s arms and torso. In fact, the absence of these smaller wounds only served to exemplify how miraculous it was that her chest-wrap was still holding together.

Perhaps the only disappointment was that some of the stench seemed to have clung on even through fog transit.

Almost like a graveyard, a field of dead locusts stretched out before the mouth of the cave, illuminated by the low-hanging sun’s pinkish-orange rays. Dozens and dozens of them. The doorman that had blocked it previously was just sitting right outside, so motionless it might as well be dead.

Most of them were drones, seemingly having collapsed with their hauls of biomatter as they tried to reach the mouth of the cave. Leaves, fruits, tree bark, half-rotted meat, even entire animal carcasses. A small minority were Locust Nobles, recognizable by their differing chitin patterns or residual human features. Then, a short distance within eyeshot, the field of corpses just ended. One could draw a circle using the outermost corpses as a guide and the dungeon entrance would be in the middle.

As the exterminators strode through the desolate stretch of land, they noticed something that was consistent across all the dead Locust Nobles. Each and every one of them had a control parasite that looked like it had burst, and the drones had streams of hemolymph running from their ear holes.

“I thought killing the Queen wouldn’t just make the rest of them fall dead,” Zel spoke up.

“Don’t think it did,” Strol remarked, turning over a dead drone with a half-hearted kick, looking down on it for a moment before moving on. “I’d wager the aether wave communications array’s self-destruction sent ripples across the Sea of Fog, big enough to give aneurysms to the weaker locusts that were near the dungeon entrance. There were probably more locusts gathered here that just got a headache and left when they saw the runts dropping dead.”

“Those’re gonna have to be dealt with, too,” Zel sighed with the same resigned tone that one would use after doing housework only to find that there is more housework to be done. “It was fine to leave a couple bugs alive down in the dungeon since they’ll either starve or get crushed, but I bet they’ll cause trouble out here.”

“Yeah,” the singer agreed. “Drones won’t cause much trouble since they only live a couple months and can’t reproduce on their own, but any surviving mutants will continue with banditry and terrorism. Not our job to clean ‘em up, fortunately. The new Slayer’s Guild will take care of that.”

Zefaris chipped in, “I didn’t know there was a Slayer’s Guild in Willowdale.”

“There isn’t one, not anymore. Kinda fell apart after the whole crew got hired as a supplementary force and wiped out by some jackoff with a sentient ice-imbued flail,” he continued. “Ain’t official, but I’d bet my left nut that Estoras will use the locust remnants as leverage to justify diverting funds to restoring the guild. It’ll be a better source of competent fighters than any dumbshit cultivator family if you ask me.”

There wasn’t much conversation to be had after that. Zel and Zef were just glad to be in one another’s company without having to fight for their lives, and Strolvath fell conspicuously silent after his brief rant about the merits of slayer’s guilds over cultivator families.

For a while they walked the desolate forest in silence, still on the lookout for any lurking locusts. Every once in a while they’d catch glimpses of a skittering drone here or there, but they weren’t consistent with their previous stalking behavior. They acted more like prey animals than anything, chattering their mandibles and running for their lives at the first sight of the exterminators.

It was Strolvath that broke the silence, once again defying his physical exhaustion with a chuckle when a drone noticed them and ran away for the fourth or fifth time. He reacted by running a finger across his own bare chest and sniffing it.

“Oh yeah, that’s pheromone goop alright.” He grimaced, rubbing his hand off on his trousers. “We must stink like the death itself to them.”

Then once again, it was silence. Exhausted footfalls, cracking of dead branches, the occasional rustling of a map as they tried to navigate. At first they’d intended to just retrace their steps, but Strolvath brought up that he recalled one of the unvisited stopping-points having had a buried ration cache, meaning it was likely still intact.

Driven by the promise of a full meal rather than just enough, Strolvath plotted a new course and they took towards it. Slowly as they were going already due to their collective exhaustion, the singer slowed them down even further, stopping after some ten minutes of marching to dig through the pockets of his trousers. He pulled out a pocket watch-sized compass, smacked it a few times, then tossed it away in anger.

“Fuckin’ needle got melted solid,” he grumbled, looking to the others. “Any of you got a compass?”

Zefaris knew for certain she didn’t, and the Inquisitor making no indication of even trying to look, Zel took out the tablet and looked through Fog Storage. After a bit of looking she found several compasses separated by type, picking one at random and handing the dinky sheet metal thing to Strolvath.

He grumbled under his breath and let out a tired sigh as he shook it around to make it actually point. Once satisfied he peered at the map again before he haphazardly crumpled it, stuffing it into his pants pocket and continuing on with the march in an entirely different direction than they’d been going up until now.

For minutes they walked as such, and minutes became hours. Desolation surrounded them the entire way, a graveyard of upturned dirt and stripped logs that pointed like bones to the heavens. A dead drone or a half-eaten animal could be found here or there, but the exterminators paid no mind.

Zel even managed to mentally check out for much of the march to the stopping-point, despite the still-intense pain of her severed arm. It was basically just a fire pit and a pair of large lean-tos surrounded by a circle of runestones, which itself was surrounded by the remnants of a bramble-dome, torn-up roots poking from green-stained ground in a nearly perfect circle.

Quite a few of the runestones were cracked and there was even a visible gap in the small barrier dome, with the firepit and lean-tos bearing scratches that made it obvious the locusts had looked through here.

Fortunately, there was no upturned earth or dug-up pit, meaning that the buried rations had remained undisturbed. Zel used her cleaver as a glorified shovel, allowing its colossal weight to plunge it into the ground behind the left lean-to where Strolvath pointed, and with a single Fog-empowered wrench she forced the box out of the ground along a sizable pile of dirt.

Her, Zef, and the Inquisitor cautiously moved the box over to the lean-to while Strolvath worked on gathering some wood for the fire. Opening it up and seeing two days’ supplies for four people packed in straw held all the excitement and satisfaction of discovering a king’s larder, as far as Zelsys was concerned. Where the others reached for food first and a seal-bottle second, she instantly grabbed a bottle and uncorked it with her mouth, only grabbing a wax-paper bundle when she was already chugging the herbal elixir.

Sure, on one hand she was pretty sure that if it came down to it, she could get back to Willowdale on her own even without any rations. That didn’t mean she particularly enjoyed hunger, even less so now that it had been exemplified to ravenous proportions by her body’s efforts to compensate for massive blood loss.

The sun was very nearly setting by now, so they retrieved some of the lightgems they took from the hoard and placed them around the campsite. They glowed the self-same ominous red that had symbolized the Queen’s forceful grasps for control back in the dungeon, their meaning now twisted by what had transpired hours earlier to symbolize the four’s victory in the face of that monstrosity.

Alongside them they also retrieved a few survival sparkers, using these to light the fire.

Zel unbuckled the Lightning Butcher’s holster and put it aside before she finally sat down under one of the lean-tos next to Zef, chewing a piece of dried pork and flushing the violently salty taste with sips of Vitamax. As much as she still disliked it in comparison to Liquid Vigor, it numbed pain and washed away fatigue just as well.

So it was that the beast-slayer gazed into the sea of lights above, allowing her mind to empty and taking in only the sounds of her surroundings. The crackling of the fire, the clicking of Pentacle’s mechanisms as Zefaris cleaned the gun, the sporadic string strums and quiet hum of Strolvath’s attempts to perform despite his state. Soon the hissing of meat joined the background noise, as Zef had retrieved some metal skewers from Fog Storage and set them up by the fire with a variety of things from salted pork, to bacon, to pieces of carrot and potato.

Eventually Strolvath began performing a song that she could’ve sworn she’d heard before, though she couldn’t quite recognize it to the fullest.

“A new world is calling, for a new unfolding, a new man crawling out into the light…” sung the old soldier with a voice so hoarse she could practically hear the pain behind every word. He wasn’t even trying to stay on-tune, more so just singing for its own sake. Zel heard him break into a cough, then drink some more Vitamax.

A different tune. A different song. Vague humming took the place of lyrics.

Zel finished the bottle.

Minutes passed. Strolvath asked Zef for more skewers, then set up several of them on his side of the fire-pit.

She felt a tense glare directed squarely at her face.

A lazily opened eye showed her a masked face and a pair of hazel eyes staring from behind the visor, tense and conflicted.

“What’s with you?” Zel prodded, slowly sitting up into a cross-legged position. “You’ve been giving me dirty looks since the first time we met, and I can tell that it’s not just ‘cause of how I look. C’mon, out with it.”

The Inquisitor stared her down, and she saw the cogs turning behind her eyes. She raised her hands to sign, only to stop for a moment and instead reach behind her head. With a slight motion and the subtle sound of a small buckle being undone, the mask loosened. Another motion, a second buckle, and it fell away.

Zelsys was left looking at her own face, scarred and filled with a confused mix of anguish and hate. She felt Zefaris stop what she was doing, freezing solid where she sat, and Strolvath too stopped playing. Then the Inquisitor spoke, and to her relief, the voice that came out was decidedly not her own.

“That face is mine. The so-called ‘painless sample’ they fooled me into letting them take hasn’t even healed yet, and yet here you are. I still wake up from the pain sometimes,” she said, voice shaking. “I wanted to kill you, justifying my hate by telling myself that your death might help undo the damage, that the piece of my soul would just return to me as if I didn’t know any better.”

For the first time, Zelsys was speechless. Faced with something so utterly surreal that all she could do was listen.

She let out a heavy sigh, continuing, “But… The dungeon has a way of putting things in perspective. It’s not that I need to kill you. I need to fight you. To beat you. To prove to myself that I’m not inferior to a copy, but I… I can’t. Not while you’re like this. It wouldn’t mean anything that way.”

“Why not? I’m only short an arm,” the homunculus grinned, despite her better judgment. “Take that armor off, tie your arm behind your back, and I’ll be happy to prove that I’m not just a copy. No weapons, no special techniques, clean and simple. Can’t risk beating each other into unconsciousness all the way out here.”

“That’s not-” began the Inquisitor, clearly caught off-guard by Zel’s willingness to take up the challenge.

“Either way you get what you want. You win, good job, you’re not inferior. You lose, it’ll be pretty obvious that I’m as far from identical to you as I could get with this face,” continued Zelsys, fully aware that if this wasn’t resolved here and now, her hazel-eyed counterpart would keep stewing in it and potentially go down a very bad path.

“But you’re missing-” Zefaris cut in, only for Zel to interrupt right back. “-an arm, I know, it’s hard to ignore. I haven’t collapsed from shock yet, and I don’t feel like I will anytime soon.”

Zel turned her attention back to the Inquisitor, and saw that she was already removing her armor. The gun-filled armored coat thudded to the ground with all the weight of a brick, revealing the full scope of her armor. It truly was a full suit of plate, emblazoned with eagle symbolism and gleaming in the orange-red light.

It took a good couple minutes before she’d removed the whole suit, arranging it on the ground in orderly fashion as she went. One could see its liner clinging to her clothes and releasing wisps of Fog as she pulled the armor off.

The longer it went on, the more it sunk in just how well equipped an Inquisitor was for practical combat compared to a normal soldier or even Zelsys herself. Between the eight guns, the gold-embroidered armored coat, the knight-like full plate, the flaming sword, the gas mask and officer’s cap… Zelsys hadn’t thought of it like this before, but from a normal person’s perspective, any organization that can consistently produce people like this would be just as mythical as any heroic family.

Under all that armor she wore a matte-black shirt and trousers, both exquisitely tailored. Even the blackened leather of her knee-high boots looked perfectly pristine despite the filth and muck they’d doubtlessly been through. While she went through the arduous process of unbuckling, pulling off, and arranging her armor on the ground, Zelsys looked through her Tablet in search of a rope to tie the Inquisitor’s arm behind her back. Once she found the listing, she handed the device off to Zef and went on to remove her own armor - that is to say, just her shin-plates.

Once Zefaris retrieved all ten or so meters of hempen rope, she went over to the Inquisitor and asked, “Which arm?”

The Inquisitor held out her left, and Zefaris tied it behind her back, securing it to her waist so that it couldn’t move, after which she cut off the excess rope. As the markswoman went about this, the Inquisitor continued to stare at Zelsys.

“What did you mean by ‘no special techniques’?” she asked.

“Nothing you can’t do without an outside object or an invocation. Alternatively, nothing beyond Fog-breathing,” Zel answered, slowly rising to her feet. “Take your pick.”

For a few moments, there was silence.

As Zefaris was cutting off the slack rope the Inquisitor finally answered, “The latter. This isn’t about techniques.”

She then looked to a still visibly surprised Strolvath, stating flatly, “When the music starts, we start fighting.”

He took a swig of Vitamax and grabbed his guitar, and the two women wordlessly walked away from the campfire,

The world painted in ominous reds and harsh shadows, the two women faced one another with barely four steps between them. Both had already taken up a combative stance, and both had begun Fog-breathing.

The Inquisitor took on a stable, boxer-like stance with her left foot forward and her right fist high to protect her face. Her breathing was controlled, stable, and near-continuous, built through meticulous method and years of training.

Zelsys dropped low and wide with her right foot forward, her fist held right by her side ready to lash out. She forced her lungs to work like the cylinders of an engine and her heart to beat so quickly it was a miracle the artificial scab didn’t burst right off, channeling power she had ripped from the heavens to assert dominion over flesh.

“One last thing,” Zelsys said. “Your name.”

She could see the desire to refuse flash across the Inquisitor’s face before she answered, “Alcerys.”

Then, the music started. A somber, march-like cadence.

In a single instant, the facade of self-control vanished from Alcerys. Rage and turmoil gripped her featured and she lashed out with a barrage of jabs and side kicks.

Zelsys didn’t counter. She breathed, she blocked the Inquisitor’s punches with her elbow, and her kicks with her own legs where she could. A punch to the gut slipped through and nearly knocked the wind out of her, swiftly followed by a kick to the side that sent pain cascading throughout her body.

But she didn’t give. She stood her ground and stared Alcerys in the face with a toothy grin. As long as an attack looked like it didn’t hurt, it might as well have never landed in the first place.

Alcerys tried to pull back her fist, but Zelsys trapped it in the pit of her elbow. She tried to rechamber her leg for another kick, but Zelsys swept the leg from under her with a low kick of her own.

Unsurprisingly, the moment Alcerys hit the ground she dragged Zelsys down with her, scrambling to her feet. A powerful kick sent Zel rolling across the dirt, and she just got back up with a well-humored laugh and an exclamation of, “Nice one, that fuckin’ hurt!”

Then she dropped the pretenses of martial arts and let her instincts take hold, taking off in a zig-zagging pattern towards Alcerys. To the Inquisitor’s credit, Zel could see that she only lost sight of her near the very end.

A full lung of Fog exhaled.

Fist met ribcage.

Something cracked under the force.

It wasn’t a finger.

Alcerys staggered in place for a moment, forced to let out a brief cough… Then Zelsys felt a right hook throw her to the ground. With the taste of her own blood filling her mouth, the beast-slayer got back up, already having to defend herself from another barrage of punches and kicks.

This was fun. Easily the most fun she’d had in a fistfight.

Block. Jab. Block. Dodge. Right hook. Left kick.

Punched in the gut. Took another right hook. Knocked down, grappled, got free and reset the board.

The dance of pain went on and on and on, and neither of them was truly trying to win.

This wasn’t about winning. It was about the fight itself.

When Alcerys headbutted Zelsys, she returned the favor only seconds later.

It was a miracle that neither of them lost any teeth.

Punch after punch, kick after kick, bruise after bruise, the fight went on, until… It didn’t.

Eventually, Alcerys didn’t get up for more. She just sat up, blood running from the mouth and nose.

Zelsys, too, was bloodied and beaten and near her limit, but it didn’t matter. She sat down right in front of the beaten Inquisitor.

“Now you see that I am not just a copy,” Zelsys said with a mouth full of blood, both her own and the Inquisitor’s. “The only thing we share is a face. You do not think like me, you do not speak like me, and in violence alone, you do not equal me.”

“You’re right. I don’t. Soon enough, more people will know that face as yours than as mine. They’ll say I look like you,” Alcerys said gravely, despair filling her voice. The light in her eyes flickered out… Then Zelsys struck her across the face with an open palm and spat a mouthful of blood off to the side.

“So if you hate me so much, get better than me. Spread your name and your image all across Ikesia, make the people remember you as a larger-than-life icon,” Zelsys said, spitting blood again, her chest heaving for breath. “Then, when the time comes, find me and beat me.”

“The Inquisition forbids-”

“Fuck what the Inquisition thinks! What’re they gonna do, break down the wall just to arrest a single missing agent?!”

“I can leave. I’ll only be burying over a decade of service, no big deal,” she spat with bitter sarcasm. “But… You’re right, much as I hate to admit that. An Inquisitor is a faceless, voiceless hand of the state.”

Zelsys and Alcerys walked back to the fire using their free arms to help each other stand. While Zefaris instantly began checking to see if Zel’s stump had begun bleeding again, Strolvath un-tied Alcerys’s arm

“I’m certain Estoras will have plenty of work for a renegade ex-Inquisitor,” he murmured as he undid the knots. His suggestion was met with a begrudging nod and a grumble, as Alcerys had pulled one of the skewers off the fire and begun chewing the meat.

“What’re you gonna do once we get back?” he turned his attention to Zelsys.

She briefly looked at Zefaris and the thought of a dirty joke flashed through her head, but she decided against it.

“Reattach my arm, rest a lil’ while, find someplace to train. Maybe find the home of some cultivator that died in the war, plunder the library, and incorporate what they knew into my own style. Could found my own family, but I’d need headquarters and a surname.”

“Any ideas?” the old soldier asked.

“Yeah. Newman.”