Chapter 196: 196 – Inner Hive

Alcerys hadn’t just seen the Queen’s skull get blown wide open, she had very clearly heard Zelsys invoking a three-line incantation while she tried to aim her third shot. By the time the so-called “Dance of the Fireflies” first struck, she’d given up on finishing the mother-bug off and moved onto trying to carve her way into the rest of the mega-hive. 

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A few minutes passed. 

Strolvath, still maintaining his Hellfire Mantle, followed in the Inquisitor’s stead. Even with his sheer concussive power and the Aquila Calibur, it still took them a while to breach the Queen’s corpse from the inside to enter the hive, as the structure had no other obvious entryway.

In this time, Zelsys and Zefaris just sat down on a relatively clear patch of the floor, firstly taking off the kinetic dispersion harness and with it the severed left arm. Zefaris placed the limb as it was into Fog Storage and retrieved a medical kit, using the supplies contained therein to treat Zel’s stump. 

First came disinfectant that, according to the beast-slayer’s gritted teeth and hisses of pain, burned more than actually having her arm bitten off. Then it was a wound sealant powder that sucked up liquid and quickly formed an artificial scab. It was universally one of the first components to go in a medical kit to the point of them being stolen before the kits were even issued to a unit, so Zefaris was very much surprised when she found an untouched one in the first kit pulled from storage.

With the artificial, weirdly smooth scab formed, the stump was then bandaged just tightly enough to not cause permanent tissue damage, though Zefaris doubted even a tourniquet would prevent reattachment in Zel’s case. All in all, the loss of an arm was rendered far less traumatic than expected. 

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With a word of thanks and a kiss on the cheek, Zel got up to go pick up her cleaver while Zef packed up the medical kit and put it back in storage. It thrummed reassuringly in her hand, its weight seeming even lighter than before. Just as she slipped it back into its holster she saw a man-sized section of the mega-hive’s front wall collapse, falling into dust under the relentless pounding of sonic shockwaves. In the hole stood, of course, Strolvath, and his gaze quickly found Zel’s.

He looked at her, then at Zefaris, then back at her. 

“You two might uh… You might want to come take a look at this. There’s so much shit in here that I couldn’t describe it even if I tried,” thundered the musician. The sheer gravity and volume of his voice almost came across as comical when he talked with a normal, if confused inflection.

Zel and Zef exchanged looks and strode into the mega-hive together. They stopped for a brief moment right after they passed the makeshift entryway, briefly taking a look around the interior of the Queen’s corpse. A moment later, they followed through the carved path into the hive. Ducking through a tunnel of cauterized meat was a strange experience to say the least, but far from the strangest they’d been through.

They emerged to a surprisingly spacious tunnel, filled with a strange mixture of the worldly and the otherworldly. Black cables and organic tubes hung all over the place from the ceiling and the walls, black-stone mingled with chitin and hive matter so smoothly it became indistinguishable at points.

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It was easily large enough to accommodate the Queen’s sizable form, with a great deal of frivolities lined up against the walls. Paintings of various opulently-dressed Pateirians lined the walls, some actually nailed into the hive matter whilst others were just squished into it. There were even red-tinted lightgems embedded into the hive matter right above the paintings to illuminate them.

Walking even deeper and past a bend, they came upon what Strolvath had likely referred to when he mentioned not being able to describe what was back here. There were two matters of interest back here.

The first was a nook with a strange machine surrounded by an even stranger shrine. It was a bulky thing with a vast round-buttoned mechanical keyboard and a great many brass tubes tipped by nozzles arranged in rows at its back. The device seemed to be the chief of Strolvath’s interests, as he went right up to it and started fiddling with its typewriter-like keyboard. 

The second was a doorway to the left, which led to a smaller sub-chamber of the hive, containing an impressive deal of goods alongside another doorway at its other end. Some were things clearly brought here by the locusts - mostly boxes, some of which had been breached, spilling their contents of coinage, glass phials, makeup, and jewelry. The rest of the man made stuff was… Elixir. Huge glass growler bottles of the sweet-smelling carmine liquid, labeled with nothing more than the containment seals that kept the liquid stable.

All of these man made goods took up the left side of the sub-chamber.

The other side contained some man made things, sure, but it was largely vastly more interesting loot. Iridescent gemstones, golem cores, huge slabs of black-stone, piles and piles of lightgems, plumes of damascened gold and iron. There were metal basins of gold-coloured paste and black-stone molds that looked strangely similar to the Red Mantis’s blades, even crystalline flasks of mercurial liquid - perhaps just regular mercury, but Zel’s first thought was pure Azoth. She wagered most of what was on the right had been taken from the dungeon - perhaps looted from some actual physical storage chamber, or forcibly extracted by the Queen from Fog Storage.

Near the other end of the sub-chamber, the Inquisitor was squatted down looking at a painting whose subject was well out of sight.

“What’s past there?” Zel asked, pointing at the doorway at the back.

“The dungeon core,” Strolvath grumbled as he selectively pressed keys, very obviously doing his best to keep his voice down. “Go talk to it if you want, it just sounds tired and apologetic. Told me we can take anything from here and that it’s sorry it can’t give us proper end of dungeon rewards.”

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