Chapter 111: 111 – Headpiercer Pitch

Whereas the drones were dead-eyed, twitching, and animalistic, their bulky superior had a glint of sentience in its eyes. It wasn’t quite human, but it could think. It clearly understood at least rudimentary tactics. The weight of seal-bottles in her backpack and paper cartridges in her pants pocket reminded her of an option.

Zefaris retreated a little ways and sat down on the ground, keeping hold of her bayonet. With her free hand, she firstly retrieved a seal-bottle of Vitamax from her backpack and secondly a handful of paper cartridges. The former would get used later, whilst the latter she had to prepare by tearing them open to get at the lead balls within.

She certainly didn’t have a throwing arm strong enough to match the fury of gunpowder and kinetic redirection glyphs, but she was confident in her ability to hit the Warrior’s head. In turn, she’d use the lead ball as a delivery vector and the Vitamax to supply the necessary essentia to trigger Bramble Shot.

Afterward, she could either just sprint past the drones and get her hands on Pentacle, or use the opportunity to take out the remaining members of the patrol, depending on whether or not any other factors were introduced. That was the plan, but Zefaris was more than aware of the fact that no plan survives first contact with the enemy.

Uncorking the bottle with her thumb she took a long swig, drinking down half its total volume just in case. Ethanol, herbs, and salty-minty Viriditas overwhelmed all sense of smell or taste. It reminded her of Zel.

Back in the backpack the bottle went and she stood, three lead balls in her left hand, one lead ball and the Stone-blessed Bayonet in her right.

With no particular hurry, she stepped past the corner and took up a stance with all her weight on the left foot. A breath of Fog as the locusts took note of her and twitched into motion, the drones running across the chamber whilst the Warrior stood resolute like a living wall.

She stepped forward, raised her left leg, then transitioned into a swing that translated her entire body into throwing strength, calling on her military grenade-throwing training and combining it with pitching techniques used in various sports. Zefaris had, in a manner of speaking, turned herself into a living trebuchet - and just as the real thing, all that kinetic energy sent the projectile careening at truly blistering velocity to its target.

A prolonged, nearly lungful exhalation of Fog, accompanied by a prolonged yet voiceless invocation, “Headpiercer Arts: Bramble Shot!”

When the lead ball left her grip glowing green and overgrown with brambles and she felt her heightened vitality fading, she knew the technique had triggered successfully. It arced over the drones’ heads, even as one leapt up and tried to catch it. There was a momentary realization in the Warrior’s beady little eyes accompanied by a stirring of its tremendous form, but its relatively slow reactions and lacking dexterity made any sort of dodging at this range functionally impossible.

It had the good judgment to try dropping down at the very last second, but the shape of its rock-solid carapace served as a funnel that led the speeding bullet right to its head. 

The bramble-wreathed bullet stopped dead the moment it hit what could be considered the Warrior’s head as vines began to aggressively grow out from it, enwreathing their victim as they dug into the gaps of its organic armor and moved down its arms to immobilize them. It thrashed about and struggled, its mandibles chattering and its huge ape-like arms moving, but wherever it tore open a thorny vine, two more sprouts grew and created an even thicker tangle.

Zefaris threw the remaining bullets at the approaching drones, embedding one of them in a drone’s forehead and visibly damaging another’s left arm with another, whilst the third one served to just slow a drone down. By the time she got around to tossing the fourth, the drones were just about nearing melee distance and the Warrior’s upper half had been entangled by vines. They wrapped and immobilized its left arm altogether, whilst its head was being painfully forced out of its socket and its other limbs remained mostly unimpeded. 

A breath. A step forward, right into the swiping claws of the locust drone whose arm she’d hit. The arm was slower, slower by a large enough margin for her to get rock-solid stab in right into its side. 

With an exhalation, she pushed the bayonet all the way through and pushed through the momentum to place a deep cut across a second drone’s chest, finishing it off with a kick to the torso forceful enough to send its organs spilling out when it hit the wall.

The third one came at her from the right surprisingly silently, having seemingly made the assumption that her lack of a left eye would limit her field of vision. Zefaris fully believed that the only real downside to only having a single Homunculus Eye was the fact that if it were obstructed, she couldn't just open the bad eye it was compensating for - necessitating alternative compensatory behavior such as leaning the entire head around a corner that the left eye could see around.

A steel-toed kick to the bug’s chest sent it stumbling back even without the assistance of Concussion Impact, and a swift stab through the head dispatched it altogether. She didn’t dally a moment longer than necessary, taking another breath and moving as quickly as she could towards the Warrior - or rather, towards the Warrior’s left side.

Leaping across obstacle after obstacle, compensating for uneven floor panel height as she ran, even simply trying to not trip over something cost her time and noise. All the while, the Warrior struggled against its restraints and sprayed pheromones so thickly they became a visible miasma. Even under the rather optimistic assumption that they wouldn’t alert the other locusts until the visible substance reached a hive, the cloud was moving quickly enough that she had no chance of dispatching the Warrior before more of its kind came scuttling.

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