Chapter 103: 103 – Rip and Tear

The scuttling stopped, only to resume seconds later - now swiftly approaching, two sets of heavy footfalls thumping from beyond the corner. Knowing there was no point to hurriedly trying to find a shank, Zel stood to her feet and breathed, filling one lung whilst emptying the other.

“Unarmed it is…” she sighed inwardly, channeling the lungfull of Fog she had to exhale in starting the Breath Engine to break into a sprint; speeding up her heartbeat and pushing her legs to their fullest capability. She ran around the corner even before any of the approaching locusts could reach it, leaping feet-first towards the opposing wall and using it as a springboard.

In the split-second she had between hitting the wall and jumping off, Zelsys saw the sources of those heavy footfalls and chose to strike at them first. The group was made up of five locust drones and two locusts nearly as tall as her, possessed of a top-heavy form with stubby, thick legs and huge arms that nearly reached the ground. Their heads were recessed into their upper bodies and their chitin glistened, flexing as they moved - still soft from whatever process they had undergone to take on this Warrior-like stature. 

Was it procedural growth and molting? A complete metamorphosis? It didn’t matter. 

Their armor was still weak. Even at a momentary glance, Zelsys knew where to pull and where to dig her fingers in to make their meatsuits come apart like wet paper.

At last she springboarded off the wall, barreling into the left Warrior. It raised its left arm to try and stop her surprisingly quickly, but she just took hold of it and let her momentum do the rest, hoping that the Warriors still had human skeletons, so that she might use their bones as weapons. Her hope was dashed when she felt the arm’s carapace rip away, with no hard resistance or dislocation felt. 

Hemolymph gushed for a moment before the Warrior’s stump shoulder sealed itself, and it took a swing with its good arm. Zelsys had already lunged for a drone, her grin flashing as she crushed the locust-man with sheer weight and ripped its mandibles from its head, stomping on its skull before she moved onto its compatriots.

Chitin-crusted pseudo-karambits in hand, she disemboweled the armless Warrior crotch to chin, pulling through on the momentum to bite into the other Warrior’s chest. The mandible began to cut, but then got stuck as the soft chitin bunched up under it. Before she could take a swing with her left the Warrior made a strike of its own, smashing down on her right shoulder with such prodigal force that it buckled even her knees.

It stared down at her, its vacant stare briefly lit up by recognition, immediately overtaken by all-consuming hate. Before it could do anything else, Zelsys let go of the stuck mandible and wrapped her arm around its arm, simultaneously shifting her weight to her right leg. In a moment she exhaled a full lung and used the Fog to fuel a crushing flex that severed the Warrior’s forearm and a violent side kick, so forceful it swept it off its stubby little feet.

Both of the remaining drones finally arrived at the decision to lunge at her, but they were too late. She’d already filled both her lungs and recovered from her kick, using her left foot as a pivot point for a roundhouse kick that smashed both the drone’s heads and ended with an axe kick to cave the Warrior’s skull even further into its torso, splattering hemolymph and mutated brain matter.

To her surprise, the disemboweled, armless other Warrior managed to rock itself to its feet, its stomach hollow while its vital organs were kept safe by a separate compartment in the upper torso. 

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“Clever,” she admitted, letting out a chuckle at the idea that had just crossed her mind. Would it work? She could only guess until she tried it.

She reared back, breathing in as the Warrior pulled back it's good arm for a punch. With an exhalation and a duck to the right, she thrust open hand into the locust-man’s gaping chest cavity, her fingers in a claw-like arrangement ready to grab and rip out, exclaiming, “Heartbreaker!”

A moment later, the Warrior’s stone-shattering jab had missed her head by mere centimeters and her seeking grasp had taken a sharp upward turn, her fingers ripping through muscle membrane and ligament alike to find the creature’s deceptively-placed heart - on the right side of its chest, near the very bottom of its organ-sac.

Zelsys had no way to know it was there, yet Heartbreaker still guided her hand towards it. With a yank and a kick that struck the inner back wall of its torso, she ripped the Warrior’s heart out and crushed it in her hand.

The foul-smelling viscera, sticky and slimy, came off with some effort after she rubbed her hand on her trousers, the fabric just barely coarse enough to get the filth off. Letting out a breath and willing her heartbeat back down to a more relaxed rate, Zel found the drone whose head was most intact and ripped off its mandibles before moving on.

There was still skittering and lurching to be heard down this branch of the chamber, evidenced by a tumorous dome made of solid hive material, its wall spilling out from beyond a left turn. It had a clear recess in the shape of an entryway, but there was a suspiciously familiar chitinous wall plugging it. 

Walking towards it, she ruminated on a method of elimination. Perhaps it would be a good idea to go around. Did the dungeon take all her weapons? It had taken the ammo belt, so grenades weren’t an option. She could spill some elixir to try and lure it out, but that felt wasteful and risky.

A realization. The dungeon hadn’t taken her supply of Compound P-T.

She cautiously took a vital and pulled the seal free, uncorking it in the process. The Compound instantaneously began to turn bright orange on contact with the air, and when she stuck her finger into the vial, it came out as a thick, oily jelly.

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