Chapter 135: 135 – Stone Exterminator

Wherever she looked she saw corpses or pieces of them, and yet she also saw more locusts than she had bullets. Some were wading over their fallen brethren, whilst others struggled to move after having had limbs ripped out of their sockets. 

“What the fuck?” she muttered, utterly bewildered at the scene. So bewildered, that the first thing to come to mind was activating the Homunculus Eye, though doing as much didn’t exactly answer many questions on its own. Entering into the long, long killing field that this chamber would have doubtlessly been under any other circumstances,  Zefaris quickly realized one thing.

Were it not for whoever inflicted this slaughter, she would’ve had no chance to go through this chamber. There were too many vantage points and too few hiding spots for her to sneak through, and unless she somehow manifested all the unfettered violence of a hero-noble, she wouldn’t have been able to force a path through. Indeed, as she advanced, the foes she saw were very much manageable. A drone or two here, a desperately charging warrior there. The drones, she dispatched without even considering a gunshot.

The warriors, they were a coin toss. Those that she managed to get from behind, she was able to eliminate with just the bayonet. Those that charged her, she treated as the huge animals they were - with a gunshot powerful enough to drop them dead before they could trample her. Advancing through the chamber led her closer to the source of the noise, as if whatever was causing it was always a solid distance ahead. By the time she reached what she thought to be the halfway point, she had already emptied and reloaded Pentacle twice over, had locust blood caked all over her clothes, and the noises had stopped… For a few moments.

No more did she hear carnage - only the occasional stirring of what few locusts still lived, as well as… Footsteps. Disconcerting, inhuman footsteps.

It wasn’t the sound of boots or bare feet, but the click-clack of stone against stone.

Then, there came the voices. There was a masculine one, howling words in Pateirian that she didn’t understand. SShe could, however, pick out how it sounded - it was angry. Angry and very, very afraid. Another voice joined in. Then another, and another. Gunshots rang out, as did the sound of several people running, the sound of flesh being rent asunder and the pained screams that arose from such violence. Soon, only one human voice remained - the very first one, the one that struggled most audibly of them all. 

More yelling. More struggle.

The first voice broke through the silence again, now in Grekurian. 

“We had an agreement!” he barked, accusingly. “One of them dies either way, whether it is by Fog Gate or by our hands!”

There came a laugh, one that resounded like the dungeon’s own clockworks and grinding stone stuffed into a shell and made to reproduce speech. It was a hollow sound, with no underlying emotion - not malice, not surprise, not anger or hate. Nothing. 

“You Parasites presume too much,” the machine-voice said. “The Core has no obligation to tell you the truth. You were sent here to die, that I might give the one-eyed challenger a proper opponent. A fair one.”

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“B-but the core-” the struggling voice stuttered, audibly stumbling over something and falling over before he could finish. There came the loud crunch of chitin being chopped through, then a pained grunt.

“The Core has no obligation to tell you the truth,” the machine-voice reiterated what it had said. 

“H-how…” 

“It cannot lie to challengers. You are not challengers,” it spat, a true sense of hatred building behind those artificial words. ”You are Parasites.”

There was a yell from the struggling voice, snuffed out by a loud crunch. 

So closely did Zefaris listen, that her perception of her own surroundings slipped when she most needed it. A hitherto unseen artillery locust clambered atop a pillar. It let loose a glob of its vile liquid, which Zefaris just barely managed to duck under before she ended the creature with a swift gunshot to center-mass, so as to ensure that even if it somehow survived its arm-cannon-thing would be destroyed.

Strangely enough, it wasn’t the head that Zefaris found difficult to pick out, but other specific body parts. In her military career she’d focused on exploiting the tendency of Grekurian nobles to forego protective headgear even if they wore armor that could shrug off cannons, to the point that her first instinct was to go for the head.

Once she was certain it was safe to advance Zefaris moved ahead, striking down a few more drones before she finally reached the other end of the killing ground. Never before had she walked on so many corpses, passing through a door that she didn’t even know was there before it closed shut behind her. She found herself in a triangular chamber, whose shape the door that had just shut behind her completed. Even the floor panels were triangular, at least those that she could make out among the corpses. At the center of the chamber was… A statue? It looked like one of those spindly statues that were occasionally peppered throughout the chambers, sitting atop a raised-up floor pillar in a forward-leaning position, arms rested on its legs.

The humanoid form was there, but it was angular and sleek. The head was no more than a rectangle split down the middle, with a circular hollow at the center. She could pick out individual joints, its legs ended in flat surfaces rather than feet, and the rest of its body was so simplified and doll-like in design that its fully articulated hands actually stood out from the rest of the statue. No, it wasn’t the hands themselves that stood out. It was all the blood. Both its forearms and forelegs were utterly covered in a mixture of red and yellow, with flecks of both human blood and locust hemolymph streaked across its otherwise matte-black surface.

Holding her weapons at the ready and pointed straight at its head, Zefaris began circling it whilst maintaining enough distance that she thought it wouldn’t activate. She couldn’t help noticing the mutilated bodies strewn about, some drones, some Locust Nobles.

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