Chapter 188: 188 – Re:Butchery

With the stone eye still open she could even see what Zelsys was doing at that very moment, and it was… Well, it was something.

The silver-eyed slayer had sawed a hole into the Black Swordsman’s neck, causing hemolymph to curtain the bug’s entire front end. She used the cleaver’s massive width to force the bug’s head to tilt back and wrench the wound open and stuck her left arm down the wound into his esophagus, her eye-trail burning away at his face all the while. 

“Beast-butchering Arts!” she roared with barely-contained laughter and the trail suddenly vanished as huge arcs of white lightning jumped from her body and scorched trails into the Black Swordsman’s armor. 

“Thundercannon!” she finished. There was a muted boom, and an avalanche of chitin sloughed off the black bug. Armor beetles and even his own plating burst right off him, like the bark of a tree struck by lightning. Only the massive centipedes that held him together seemed exempt, for when the current killed them their legs just dug in even harder. The bugman’s stomach bulged outward and burst open accompanied by bright light. A flood of protein slurry, parasites, and CP-T came forth from the head-sized hole, leaving a hole into his cavernous stomach cavity - it was now a shredded hole of meat and liquid, its remaining tissues being cooked by the charged lead ball and burned through by globs of CP-T. The black bug’s body locked up where it stood, his ruined left arm twitching uncontrollably and ripping itself apart even further. His right, on the other hand, went from being halfway through a chopping motion to dropping the axe and impotently knife handing the air. 

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Zelsys felt the giant’s body cooking alive, felt his pulse go from a steady thump to an erratic machine-gun rhythm, but it didn’t stop. By some freak occurrence, one of his lungs seemed to have remained intact as well, and she wasn’t going to risk having this monstrosity get back up later. 

Her arm already halfway up the elbow down the wound, she sunk it even further in.

“Heartbreaker!” she invoked with the bare minimum amount of Fog burned. It helped get her arm in there, guiding her hand out through the ripped-apart esophagus towards his heart, all that she needed. After that, she just started firing off Thundercannon after Thundercannon. 

If a shotgun-spread of pea-sized ball lightning could ablate armor chitin, it could rupture a heart. With the first shot, his heartbeat became even more erratic, losing all rhythm. 

The second caused no perceptible change.

With the third there came a flood of vile lifeblood pouring out around her fingers, washing over her forearm, filling the gaunt-cannon’s barrel, simply everywhere. She could’ve sworn the black bug let out a relieved sigh when his heart burst, sinking to his knees just as Zel pulled her arm free.

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While Zelsys butchered the Black Swordsman, Strolvath struggled to even stay alive in the face of the Sister’s blind onslaught. He had given up on clearing out the other hives until she could be dealt with, forced to focus on not getting minced up and splattered across the floor. 

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As the Sister chased him near the surviving hives, her pheromones made their Doormen step back to allow the half-berserk locusts within the flood forth. These lesser bugs couldn’t effectively assault Strolvath if he just played the right frequency to batter most of them into submission, but there was a problem. The Sister was unaffected by the frequencies that harmed the drones, and vice versa. 

Surprisingly enough, what affected the Sister seemed to also affect the relatively small number of beetle-boars and gunner drones included amongst the dozens of generic drones, probably because the same armor bugs and parasites were used on the animals.

So it was that Strolvath continued to struggle, forced to rapidly switch between frequencies as he whittled away at the general group and picked them off one-by-one with his stake, all the while trying to cripple the Sister. He didn’t think he could kill her, but if he could just… Get at her legs…

It wasn’t working. Whenever he got close, she’d just stomp and kick and swing her sword in low arcs, her blindness damn-near nullified by Strolvath’s reliance on sound. He came within inches of dying no fewer than thrice over the course of a half-minute’s time, only saved by his liberal usage of directed sonic shockwaves and the Inquisitor’s dead-eye fire support.

But that wouldn’t last long. Already she’d spent two-thirds of her ammunition, and at this rate she’d be through it all before they even saw the Queen. Even specialized in locust extermination and using Victory Echoes, he couldn’t properly do his job. It frustrated him, drove a burning stake into the heart of his pride and set the whole thing ablaze.

An opportunity presented itself. He had entered one of the hives to get a moment of respite and to funnel the drones through a small opening. Its black-stone rod reinforced structure was tough enough to stand even the Sister’s incessant pounding, at least for the time being. More importantly, the great many drones that flooded through didn’t just vanish once they died. After the twentieth man-shaped thing, the doorway had been clogged shut. 

Sure, he could blast it open, but he wouldn’t. Not just yet. Strolvath would take this moment to use his ace in the hole, to take a serum he had hoped he wouldn’t need to take. In part because it was tremendously difficult to obtain now, and in part because describing its side-effects as unpleasant was an understatement at best. But it couldn’t be helped now.

Crovacus had asked him to take this job as a safeguard. To make sure that there was someone the governor fully trusted on the extermination team. To balance out the Inquisitor’s potential conflict of interests and the two new slayers’ lack of previous credentials. Strolvath was the safeguard, and he would play his role.

He pulled up his pants leg, opened his leg, and pulled out the puzzle box. From the puzzle box he pulled a phial no larger than his pinky finger, and put the box back in its place. It was wrapped entirely in a green-blue containment seal, and there was only one other phial like it in the box.

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