Chapter 112: 112 – Draw Against the Reaper

A decision was made, a plan formed - Zefaris had no choice but to bet everything on the mere possibility of Pentacle’s presence at the end of the other path. Fully leveraging her Fog-breathing and even the superhuman strength in her right arm, she traversed the uneven terrain and crossed the main width of the chamber. The Warrior wound back its right arm and spun around on its heel in an attempt to strike her, but she was gone by the time its colossal bulk crossed through her path - thanks in part to her decision to exhale her full lung capacity to throw off the bug’s estimation of her speed.

Soon enough, Zef reached and turned the fateful corner, arriving at a similar scene to the one at the end of the other side path. There were two differences. 

The first was an eerie statue directly opposite the altar, depicting a skeletal soldier in Ikesian military uniform. His skeletal hand gripped an unsettlingly realistic sparklock with a very real hammer-firing mechanism - it even had an Ignis crystal sticking out the top. It seemed to follow her every movement, always aimed center-mass.

The second was the altar, for though it held Pentacle in a perfectly shaped cutout in the stone, the altar came alive in the worst way when she approached.

The glyph on its front lit up and the hole in the glyph’s center spewed Fog that arrayed into writing. Simultaneously, a ring of black stone as thin and as sharp as a razor began to rotate over her weapon, its circumference barely sufficient to avert collision with its grip.

The Fog-written words took form, and already she heard the skittering of insectoid feet in the distance as both the hive’s Doormen retreated inward to open a path.

A swift hand brings swift death,

dare you draw against the reaper?

A second, equally razor-thin ring came into motion around her gun, criss-crossing with the first, slightly slower such that they were never in sync. There came no second set of words, instead a pair of yellow-tinted lightgems came alive in the statue’s eye sockets and it locked eyes with her. The approaching footfalls numbered more than she could make out, but there were at least two Warriors among them - there was no question here, she had no choice but to get her gun or die trying.

Zefaris focused her mind not on the rings revolving, but on the grip of her weapon. It didn’t matter if she got cut, if the blades flayed the skin from her hand, as long as she pulled it free and shot the statue. As far as she was concerned, there were no blades. With a deep breath and a swift exhalation, she stepped forward and reached through the blades, pulling Pentacle free. With a sharp lean backward Zefaris tremendously sped up the time it took to bring her gun to bear, the light click of its trigger and the steady push of its recoil a reassuring sensation. When the smoke cleared the statue still stood, the lead ball splattered across its surface, but its eyes now shone blue. 

One of the drones that went ahead came around the corner at this point, lunging for Zefaris whilst she struggled against gravity to get her bearings, only for its head to explode into tiny pieces when met by the statue’s hand-cannon.

Her mind already raced with a need to secure her position and begin dealing with priority targets, but her eye’s fully-focused peripheral vision still caught the altar’s glyph lighting up as a new message sprayed out of it.

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To best the reaper is to befriend him,

share your friendship freely.

It was then that she finally felt her wound, not out of pain, but because of the warm stickiness that ran down her hand and into Pentacle’s workings. She couldn’t tell how deep or wide the wound was, but it couldn’t have been too serious if there was no gushing.

Leaning out past the corner, she fired a shot into the approaching horde and felt Pentacle shudder in her grip. This shot had very little recoil and the gun sang like a bell, the lance of fire that it spewed tinged by the redness of Rubedo. It punched clean through one, two, three locust drones, only to embed itself in the forehead of a Warrior.

Zefaris couldn’t help but grin - human sacrifice of even the smallest kind was generally frowned upon, but its efficacy in amplifying the effects of glyphs couldn’t be questioned. In this case, it didn’t bother her. A little blood and pain in exchange for her life, that was just a part of the day-to-day as a soldier.

The third shot rang out. Clang. Two more drones down, a second bullet right in that Warrior’s head, and this time it broke through. The sorry thing kept going even with its head splattered, however.

A breath of Fog. With an exhalation, she lined up a shot through its leg, hoping that it would ricochet off the floor into another insect. A spark of will, some Fog to burn, and a new technique could be born - perhaps she’d call it something like Rico-shot. 

The flaming lance of lead did indeed hobble the Warrior, ricochet off the dungeon’s indestructible floor, and eviscerated a drone before it went flying, but there was no moment in time. No epiphany, no sudden realization. A new technique wouldn’t just come into being at her behest, but she’d be keep trying until she made it work.

The idea of bouncing bullets off thrown coins had sparked in her mind, and she’d be damned if she didn’t achieve it. 

She directed her fourth short into the neck-seam of the hobbled Warrior, hoping its exoskeleton would pose enough resistance for the lead to rip its insides to shreds rather than over penetrating. Click. Boom. The Warrior slumped forward, its guts pouring from its blown-open neck.

All that was left were the drones. The swarming, massed drones, climbing over one another in their mad scramble to traverse the dungeon’s uneven terrain.

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