Chapter 162: 162 – 40:1

They harmlessly brushed across her skin. It was like wearing the maneater’s skin, sewed into a skin-tight coat by the dungeon’s black thread. A moment later, she smashed its head with her gun’s barrel.

In that moment, she felt what she knew to be the Retributive Battery charging. It was a tenuous pressure building behind her right eye, the same one she had felt for a split-second when the statue’s talons pierced her skin. Her vision remained unclouded, yet Zelsys could feel a diminutive jet of Fog gushing from her eye. 

She was using her left arm as a bludgeon, hefting her cleaver as if it were a near-weightless stick, cutting swathes through two, three locusts at a time. Chopping off limbs without so much as a lapse in momentum as the blade’s blood-red glow burned the stumps and evaporated their fetid blood, and shouting taunts that they couldn’t understand all the while. It was moments like these when Zelsys felt the most alive, when any small mistake could bring death. 

All throughout, she learned to not fear their assaults, but rather see them coming, to exploit them. What did it matter if they swiped their claws or warriors swung their fists, when she could make it slip off with a bit of Fog and draw on the attack to fuel her own assault? With Beast Style’s version of Retributive Battery, there was no need to burn her breath to fuel Stormsurge.

In fact, she realized she could fire off Thundercannon without the risk of burning her full lung capacity and thus stopping the Breath Engine. This sole fact instantly skewed her planned tactics sharply towards the side of unrelenting butchery. A belly laugh echoed forth as she swung the butcher and witnessed it grow in length by nearly half a meter so that it cleaved a swathe through at least seven locusts at once. They were turned to a pile of writhing bodyparts and gushing hemolyph, and as she twisted around to recover from the swing, she counted the fourth of Zef’s gunshots ring out. One more and she’d need to reload.

Though Zelsys was confident in her ability to dispatch Warriors and Locust Nobles, she couldn’t do so at range nearly as quickly or precisely as Zefaris. Even to her battle-addled mind, it only made sense that she would clear out the front liners and leave the commanders to the one with a cold-iron five-shooter. It was thanks to this tactic that they progressively spun around as they fought back to back, advancing a little at a time towards the other side of the chamber over a floor paved with dead bugs.

Recovering from a wide, chaff-clearing cleave, she roused the sawteeth and directed their screaming wrath at a careless Locust Noble with a diagonal upward swing. He gurgled something in Pateirian as the screeching metal chewed through his hardened chitin and shredded his organs to bits. A slurry of blood, flesh, and shredded parasites poured forth.

Using the upswing for momentum, Zelsys drove the cleaver down again to cleave through an approaching Warrior’s head. The Butcher’s blade shifted its point to a beak, splitting the Warrior’s carapace down the middle with ease. 

With each swathe cleft through the drones, the tougher locusts grew more aggressive; aggressive enough for the drones to get a few hits in whilst Zelsys was busy butchering their superiors. She had the situational awareness and reaction time to channel Graze Pulse as appropriate, though they managed to get a scratch in here and there. If they kept coming, she’d be overwhelmed at this rate, and she knew that Zefaris had it no easier.

She heard the sound of a coin flying through the air, a ringing sound echoing alongside a flash of light. Pentacle’s fifth shot resounded, and two lances of blazing metal soared overhead to annihilate a pair of Locust Nobles. One was the bullet, but the other looked like… A silver coin. 

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Zefaris felled rows upon rows of locusts with each gunshot, but she knew well that it was a doomed endeavor. There were too many, and they were too aggressive. She had been on the brink of tossing a grenade into the advancing horde and hoping that the corpses would shield her from the blast. Even with the rampaging violence of Zel’s new combat style, there were simply too many of them to realistically deal with. There was also the creeping dread of knowing that she would soon need to reload and, no matter how fast she was, they would exploit the gap.

Still, she was a professional who knew how to keep calm even under the pressure of impending death. There were two Locust Nobles still left within her field of view, both of them weaving about in an obvious effort to make her waste that last shot without killing either of them. Zefaris decided she wouldn’t leave it up to chance, pulling a silver coin and exhaling Fog on it. 

In her mind sparked the idea of somehow turning the coin itself into a projectile, of distributing the technique’s total kinetic energy between the bullet and the coin.

“Can’t hurt to try,” she thought as she flipped the Fog-shrouded coin into the air.

It spun round and round on the way up, then flashed for a split-second. She was more than ready, having fired at where she had estimated it would stop by its trajectory. The bullet struck the coin, and Zefaris witnessed the bullet bounce at full velocity into the head of one Locust Noble whilst the coin flew off into the head of the other with a supersonic crack. 

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Zel laughed at the unexpected technique, just about ready to break a path through the encirclement so that Zef could have time to reload. Swinging the cleaver once more to clear away a few all too eager bugs, she slammed it into the seam between floor panels and pulled a CP-T phial from the belt, ripping off the seal with her teeth and shoving the whole thing down her arm-cannon’s barrel. 

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