Chapter 194: 194 – Just a Flesh Wound

The big issue was landing. With her left arm out of commission, she couldn’t effectively use the harness to soften the sudden stop. But then, she felt herself slowing mid-fall, her descent softened by pulses of rumbling noise so deep that it turned the air to molasses wherever they came. 

It was Strolvath. Of course.

She didn’t even bother trying to land. Her gut told her she wouldn’t need to, and she didn’t - a strong arm gripping a bayonet caught her and helped her stand on her feet, accompanied by an equal expression of concern and cold, killing rage towards the perpetrator. 

The horribly mangled, partially hollowed-out, yet somehow living perpetrator, whose crystal-laden, bulbous head shone with shades beyond visual perception and gave off rainbow-coloured Fog in those very same colours. Her mutilated visage could scarcely be seen through the quickly-forming cloud, only perceptible as a bizarre impression of itself within the fog. 

“Nice catch,” chuckled the beast-slayer, her face twisted into a truly beast-like expression. She stepped forward on her own, her stance solid and her eyes focused despite the curtains of blood that spilled forth from her arm. She allowed the Butcher to slip from her grip, reaching up to her stump arm and jamming her fingers into the open veins to staunch the torrent. The audible grinding of her teeth was the only evidence of how much it hurt.

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From the steel-barreled maw there had issued forth the grapeshot-laden inferno of a Type-2 Anti-Cultivator Shell, shredding and mulching the mother-bug’s internal organs without recourse. 

Muscle, soft tissue, bone, all gave way to a ballistic onslaught that dwarfed the firepower of many old-model field cannons. 

Yet, she lived. 

Just like the Sister, the Queen too had survived bodily harm that long passed the point of instant death through the power of the crystals burgeoning from her head.

Then, there came a second detonation in her gut - it was the grenade which she’d unwillingly swallowed, and it had just annihilated what little remained of the Arch-Parasite’s internal organs. What CP-T it had contained splashed all throughout the cavernous pupa of the Queen’s form, burning holes wherever it landed and stripping bare the quintessence of what she was.

An oversized head attached to a black-stone reinforced spine.

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What had just transpired above didn’t fall on deaf ears to Alcerys.

She was close to breaching through the abdomen and into the thoracic cavity, only a few good hacks away. If only the organs that formed the eggs weren’t so impossibly though, if only…

A second detonation.

The force of it somehow didn’t annihilate the tissue between her and the queen’s torax, even as rivers of organic mulch ran around her boots and screeching larvae squirmed all around. No, it blew a wave of fat and tissue right past Alcerys, exposing the reason why she was struggling to move further.

It wasn’t an entirely organic apparatus that formed the eggs within the queen’s body. 

Rather, it was an utterly alien cavity laden with prismatic shards of that rainbow-coloured, azoth-like stone, protruding from the meat and threaded all throughout it just as sinew and far would be otherwise. The tissues surrounding this bug-womb proved impervious to heat when she tried to slash through them, and so Alcerys resorted to cutting around them.

She’d wanted to avoid the detour, but the grenade’s detonation had done most of the legwork. 

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After a good four flame-wreathed cuts and some unpleasant squeezing, the Inquisitor found herself in a cavernous chimney of dying, burning meat, held aloft by chitinous plates and a near-indestructible spine.

For the first time in a long while, she was stumped.

“How the fuck am I supposed to kill something that just keeps going without any organs?” 

Sheathing her blade Alcerys stared upward, blood and viscera dripping down her mask and armored coat.

There was a spot between the skull and the spine, a tiny little gap nary an inch across, where vital arteries had once entered the brainstem. Through this hole, she would have to shoot to injure the mother-bug.

Four shots.

She aimed her pepperbox and, compensating for the barrel offset, fired. 

Thwack. Everything shook, and the bug let out a chattering noise that would’ve doubtlessly been accompanied by screaming, had the bug-mother lungs to scream with. They were tattered meat that hanged overhead, now.

The second shot bounced.

Alcerys managed to turn the barrel assembly and even aim, but found no reason to fire a third shot.

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Strolvath had stopped trying to find a resonant frequency with which to directly harm the queen, and was now directing concussive bursts of sound in the mother-bug’s general direction. Even still, these vibrations were so forceful they made her bleed from every facial orifice imaginable and shattered the odd chitin plate here and there.

Zefaris scrounged around in her pocket for coins. Despite her meticulous collecting of used coins for re-use she’d lost the vast majority of them. She now had only three coppers and a silver. She took these four and breathed on each in turn, holding no expectations for what would come next. For all she knew, Zelsys would burn all her built-up Fulgur and smite the Queen with a lightning bolt.

The Beast-slayer stared up at the Locust Queen, both of them mutilated and stripped of their most potent weapons. At this range, the Lightning Butcher was all but a glorified toothpick, even though it had carved a sizable crevice into the bug-mother’s skull.

Driven by a mixture of Fog intoxication and brain-splitting pain into a state of rapturous, devil-may-care invincibility complex, Zelsys roared freely the first words that came to her mind.

“A lil’ too gamey for ya? A little too dense? Huh, you subhuman whore?! You’ve done nothing but put a ring on the reaper’s finger with that stupid bite.”

There came forth a cackling laughter from the beast-slayer. It went on for only a few seconds, yet was somehow still just a little too long for comfort. 

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