Chapter 131: 131 – More Than a Soldier

She took a hushed breath and scuttled towards the warrior, changing her grip on the bayonet to the upright orientation. A small hop onto its back gave her all the clearance she needed to bury her fingers in its eyes and her bayonet in its back, stabbing its spine at as many points as she could before she ripped the blade free and drove it back down into the bug’s head. Were she able, she would’ve carved it open, killed it properly, but Zefaris had neither the means nor the time to do so. This way its still-living body would sit inert in the trench, with no animal mind to command it, slowly bleeding out and withering away.

Clambering over its corpse and continuing through the trench, she came upon a group of drones. One after the other, they fell, their throats slit and heads run through. It wasn’t about killing them, or disposing of a threat. The more drones she felled, the more she realized they weren’t even worth the consideration to hate them. They were just parts of the hive, eyes and hands for the Queen. Right now, her reason to kill them was to silence them. To blind and deafen the hive to her presence.

Deeper into the trenches, deeper into the labyrinth. More drones, heading her way. She ducked back behind a corner and waited, waited until they were near, just long enough. 

Inhale.

Step out, stab the leftmost one in the eye. Exhale, ripping the blade to the right and cutting right through the middle one’s head, then finish by plunging the point into the right one’s temple. 

Further in. She had to be getting close to the exit of this chamber, she could feel it. Another warrior, this one facing her head-on. It roared the moment it spotted her, its vacant gaze turning to sharp, focused hatred as it charged down the trench. 

“Damnit,” she blurted out, swapping the bayonet to her left hand before she instinctively reached for Pentacle. Its gunshot rang out with all the noise of a divine anvil, the blazing spear of lead piercing right through the insectoid gorilla’s head and out the back of its torso. It echoed a dozen times over throughout the trench, the sound of myriad chittering and thumping footfalls echoing well before it faded out.

So much for stealth, but by the sound of it, forcing her way through wouldn’t be much of an option either. Zefaris decided to retreat into the maze, listening for the sound of her pursuers and navigating the myriad intertwined, zigzagging trenches so as to both evade them and move closer in the direction she thought led to her way out of this chamber. 

Left. Right. Left. Left. Left. Right. Right. Left. Right. 

Both real trenches and these reproductions were built in a zigzagging pattern skewed heavily in favor of the defenders, so that no one enemy could drop into a trench and unleash hell down its full length. It was no wonder, then, that this faux-trench chamber even had foxholes and bunkers. The former, side chambers filled to bursting with small hives, their entrances plugged not by Doormen, but by the heavily-plated, oversized heads of deformed drones.

She didn’t even bother to try breaching them, only passing them by as she continued her escape. Slowly, the noise was dying down. While her boots click-clacked against the hard floor, it was far easier to conceal her footsteps than in the squelching muck of a waterlogged trench. Thus it was that Zefaris managed to evade some of her pursuers, many most likely having stayed behind in order to block off a path or wait behind a corner.

Sneaking about, taking weird turns to confuse the enemy, making noises and then slipping away, the whole charade stretched on for uncounted minutes. At times, she ran for her life as fast as her legs could carry her before diving into one of the rare uninfested side chambers. At others she moved through the trenches at a snail’s pace, and in these quiet moments Zefaris had time to think about her situation.

All of this, all of these close calls with death, this was normal. Zefaris not only knew how to evade a pursuer with superior numbers in the trenches, she’d gone out of her way to select specific training for it during her time at the academy. Running for her life through the trenches, looking for either a way out or an opportunity to thin out the enemy numbers - it was familiar. Never did she think that delving into the legendary dungeon would face her with situations that nearly perfectly reflected her military service, only mixed up with different variables. 

Only… The familiarity felt wrong. She wasn’t the same as she'd been back then, this place wasn’t that familiar trench network, and these foes weren’t a mix of undertrained foot soldiers and ill-prepared Grekurian nobles. Back then, she was well-trained, that much was true, but she was inexperienced. It was in the trenches where she had faced death, where she had first killed, where she had witnessed the horrors of war and steeled her heart against them. 

It was in the trenches where she had lost her eye, yet that lost eye was proof of her luck - it wasn’t a piece of shrapnel, or an unlucky ricochet. 

It was luck that let her pay an eye for her life, when the bright flash of a Grekurian hero’s flashy technique caused light glare on another hero’s ridiculously gilded wheellock rifle.

However, she couldn’t be satisfied escaping with her life, not anymore. A hunger gnawed at the back of her mind, something she had only started to feel since that time with the rot-bear. It was the same defiant urge that made her dive into the crater and rip from Ubul’s stone skin the very bayonet that had saved her life. Zefaris couldn’t help herself, wanting to assert her will over these murderous things in the only way they could understand - violence. 

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