Chapter 117: 117 – Thundercannon

She’d already worked the bolt, but the giant thing’s swing interrupted her just as the empty shell clattered to the ground. Her immediate opponent had been nicked by her gun, its exoskeleton missing a small piece and showing cracks on the left side. 

Duck to the right. Right hook, exhaling.

Current surging, muscles cramping. Fist met chitin.

Crack. 

Punch after punch, breath after breath, she smashed apart the Warrior’s armor. She could feel the other one approaching, its footfalls reverberating ominously. Knowing that it had likely readied itself to pulverize her, Zelsys held the breath of one lung in preparation whilst using the other to fuel her strikes.

At last her fingers sunk into its flesh, current surging through and turning the struggling locust’s tremendous strength against it. It nearly doubled over on top of her before she managed to invoke Heartbreaker. Her arm sunk deeper through its wound and reached the heart.

Just as it popped like a balloon in her grip, Zelsys felt the air behind her shifting, a strike swiftly approaching. An exhalation, a hardening of her back, she felt the Warrior’s fist strike her only to be sent careening back. The timing wasn’t quite right, but it was good enough. 

Ripping her arm free and kicking the dead thing backward, she turned her wrath to the toppled-over ambusher. It wasn’t given even the honor of a thorough death - Zel pulled its head off and kicked its arms into pulp before she left it to die, turning to face the rest of its kin. Yet more Warriors had managed to reach close combat range by now, but she had at last taken the time to count them. Eleven that she could see approaching, likely more out of commission. Outnumbered, surrounded, and disarmed, the thought of reloading her gun didn’t even cross Zel’s mind. 

This would be a laborious, brutal endeavor. 

The perfect training environment.

Arms turned to loose-hanging sacs of meat under the pulverizing force of her steelshod legs, entire bodies crumpled to heaps of twitching muscle with no more than two fingers in a wound and some Fog to make the current flow.

She met many of their strikes head-on, countering their strikes with her left arm so that those she failed the return-to-sender would just knock her back a ways rather than pulverizing her arm. It still hurt, it still rattled the teeth and shook the bones, but she could take it. 

Zelsys knew these were just foot-soldiers, she knew she’d face more and more individuals like the Black Swordsman or the Sister the deeper into the dungeon she traveled. This was her opportunity to get a stronger grip on the wild power of Stormsurge, that she might properly utilize it when the Lightning Butcher was finally back in her hands. She could electrocute a foe by using her own fingers as prongs, that much was true - but that was where her natural ability to directly weaponize this imprisoned lightning ended.

Zelsys didn’t have the skill, the means to project it outward in a meaningful way, the way she’d seen Zefaris do. With each Warrior she felled, every head she ripped off an every heart she crushed, she grew more frustrated. “It’s my lackluster grasp of the Fog, has to be,” she thought, standing above a twitching, headless carcass, her right arm covered to the shoulder in yellow viscera. 

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Her victim blindsided her - in its dying throes lashing out with a blind swipe that she just barely managed to dodge. Frustration boiled over, and forgetting that she hadn’t reloaded, Zelsys took aim at its chest and worked the trigger lever over and over. Her heart was beating like a machine-gun and her engine breathing made ropes of Fog continuously pour through her snarling teeth. 

Click-clack.

There was a shower of sparks that burned pinhead-sized pits in the Warrior’s exoskeleton. She didn’t care, trying to brute-force something to happen with sheer force of will and breath of Fog. Why did she struggle so much with offensive techniques when they came so naturally to Zefaris? 

Click-click.

Another shower of sparks.

In the heat of the moment, Zelsys thoughtlessly worked the lever as hard as she could, even burning her exhalation to channel Stormsurge into the motion. She felt the muscles of her left hand twitching uncontrollably in a vice-grip, myriad tiny electric arcs crackling between her arm and the lever’s metal.

Click-click.

Instead of sparks, a burst of pea-sized white spheres issued forth, bounding into the locust-man’s chest in zig-zagging patterns, crackling with electric charge and chittering as they went. Upon impact there issued forth a series of loud cracks, the spheres exploding as they ripped holes into the dying bug’s exoskeleton. The smell of sulphur filled Zel’s nose as she felt her world come to a stop, her frustrated rage broken by this sudden discovery. It was so simple - her arm-cannon could already produce a prodigal amount of sparks, she just had to add some lightning.

Zel knew it would be harder to produce such effects without the assistance of a Fog-infused arm harness and a handheld spark machine, but that didn’t matter. The biggest flaw of her ranged weapon was the ammunition - extremely powerful, but limited. This would bridge the gap.

The entire anger-induced episode spanned only a few seconds, but they were seconds in which she had been a sitting duck. She was already surrounded, three Warriors arrayed around her and readying to crush her from all sides. Having never seen her jump unassisted, they didn’t take into account what she did - ducking down as they charged, then exploding upward with half a lungful exhaled and half burned for Stormsurge.

As she rose up Zel watched the three locusts slam their arms down all in the same spot, each successive one’s smash crushing the arms of those who hit before it. 

Click-clack. Click-clack. Click-clack. 

Reaching the apex and beginning the descent, Zelsys fired off three shotgun bursts of miniature ball lightning, perfectly timed to her breathing rhythm so that as much Fog could be burned to fuel it as possible. The staccato of gunshot-like cracks was made all the sweeter by pained chattering and screeching, the final payoff being her being able to land right atop one Warrior and just plunging her arm into its exposed flesh to crush its heart.

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