76 – Infestation
The gut feeling. He wasn’t exaggerating in the slightest. Zel maintained eye contact, but from her peripheral vision, she could make out the papers that covered Crovacus’s desk.
Photos. Documents. Letters. Some printed, others handwritten. One was written in panicked, shaky handwriting, stained with blood.
“Could you please explain, sir?” Zelsys asked.
Crovacus chuckled darkly, “You killed three of ‘em yesterday, my men found the corpses. One had passed for a normal person for weeks, walking our streets and eating our food. Let me tell you this - consider yourself lucky that they were just toll takers.”
“That... Still does not put things into context.”
He took another drag, his face slowly twisting into a grin of denial. Zelsys could almost see his mental state cracking before her very eyes. A deep breath, and the grin was gone, the governor briefly retook the reins of his mind. Derangement was replaced by unassailable mental exhaustion that would have doubtlessly broken a lesser man.
“Very well,” he sighed. “I’ll start from the beginning. When I first hired you, I intended to send you and perhaps one or two partners on a simple mission to wipe out a small cell, what was thought to be fourteen locust-men at most.”
She nodded in understanding, silently gesturing for him to continue. He reached into the pile of papers that was his desk and pulled out three tattered photographs, tossing them over to her side.
Left to right, they showed:
A far shot of a cave entrance, which was surrounded by a huge swathe of land utterly picked of any greenery.
A much darker shot, displaying a point where the cave’s natural wall suddenly transitioned to a solid wall of dark stone, a great glyph-etched door gaping open into a chamber at whose other side was something… Familiar. An outline identical to that of the actual door, surrounding an elaborate glyph etched into marble. It was a Fog Gate. This photo also showed a great deal of detritus covering the floor and walls of the cave and chamber in equal measure, with blood, feces, and other bodily fluids smeared over the ancient door’s surface and the chamber’s walls.
The third photo showed a swarm of nude locust-creatures emerging from the now-activated Fog Gate.
Zel looked up to meet the governor’s tired eyes, and he gave a slow nod, assuming that they were on the same page.
“Yeah,” he affirmed. “We thought they were just hiding in a cave, but they’ve made a nest of a Dungeon.”
Another long, long drag, and an equally long exhalation. Smoke pouring from his mouth with each word, he continued, “Good news is it’s still dormant, and will be for a good five years more. I can scarcely imagine what horrors an awakened Dungeon will produce, but soon we might not have to imagine.”
Another drag. The cigar was just a stub, so he tossed it into the tray and retrieved another from one of the drawers. He bit off the end and spat it into the trash can by his desk, and with a snap of his fingers produced a small flame above his thumb that he used to ignite the cigar. Her attention drawn by this small act of magic, Zelsys noticed that Crovacus’s fingers were tattooed on the inside with arcane glyphs, the one on his thumb glowing bright orange whilst he lit his cigar.
“The fully insectoid beasts you’ve encountered are not even human, but the result of a human woman’s reproductive tract mutating due to the consumption of Pateirian combat elixirs,” he continued, and the realization dawned on her.
“Oh. Oh that’s bad,” she thought, trying not to imagine what the mutated monstrosity might look like.
“I fear this one might be feeding off the dormant Dungeon Core. If it goes unchecked, the Queen might absorb the device and take over the whole damn Dungeon, and if that comes to pass… We’re all doomed. A very literal plague of locust-men, a catastrophe of such proportions even the pre-war beast-slayer guilds would have struggled to contain it.”
“I… I don’t see how I could stop that, sir,” Zelsys admitted.
“You can’t,” he agreed. “Not on your own. You’ve been to the E.Z., yes? Dealt with a rot-bear or two? Maybe even a Necrobeast?”
“I’ve killed both a rot-bear and the resulting Necrobeast, yes,” she admitted again. “Why is it relevant?”
“Splendid,” he smiled. “The Locust Queen won’t be much stronger than a Necrobeast, and neither as resilient nor as mobile. All you need is a means of dealing with the locusts.”
There came three slow, rhythmic knocks on the door. Crovacus looked from her to the door and exclaimed, “Come in!”
Zel turned her head just enough to see who it was, and… It was him.
The Singer.
“I believe it’s me you’re speaking of,” he said with a grin.
“How long’ve you been listening?” Crovacus asked, matching the grin with one of his own, speaking to the Singer as if he were an old friend. Perhaps he was.
“A couple minutes. One last job, eh? Bet you’re glad I owe you a favor, you Grek sack of shit,” the singer laughed in his sonorous boom of a voice, walking right up and taking a seat.
“That’s just fuckin’ rich coming from you,” Crovacus rebutted jokingly, shaking hands with the Singer. Clearly, they knew one another. The governor turned his eyes to her and explained, “Locust-men are vulnerable to sonic attacks. Noise that’ll make your ears ring will turn one of those bugs to mush inside its shell, if it’s the right frequency. Strolvath here used to pull exterminator duty in the later stages of the war.”
“An active hive of those fuckers was a cause for instant truce until it was dealt with,” Strolvath added.
Glossing over the two men’s friendly banter, Zelsys pushed for more information, “I take it you have more pertinent information than tattered pictures and stories from the war.”
Crovacus gave a nod, reached into the pile of papers on his desk, and without so much as a second look retrieved a folder from the mess. The briefing was, on the whole, short and to the point. A simple explanation of the path they would take to reach the mouth of the cave, with stopping points on the way to permit for rest and recovery.