Chapter 93: 93 – Assault Combat

Strolvath knew by heart the tones to resonate a locust drone’s carapace, but he also knew they weren’t the greater threat here. It was that gigantic beast of a warrior he needed to put out of commission. To start with, he murmured his prayer to the dead gods and began throat-singing, and from there started tuning his voice in an attempt to find the frequency that would affect the Black Swordsman. 

It didn’t matter how, whether it resonated his chitin to weaken it or made his hemolymph boil. Invocation after invocation, lyrics sung in such deep tones that none other than he could hear them. No. It wouldn’t work. Not quickly enough.

All he could do was try to render the drones a non-threat whilst the others dealt with the two mutants. If the mindless, near-identical members of the hive were Drones, what were the unique individuals? Warriors, perhaps? No, too narrow. Locust Nobles fit better.

A thunderous expulsion of unfettered force sent his train of thought off a metaphorical cliff.

---

Outside of Zel’s self-centered slice of the battlefield, the Inquisitor took a breath and pulled her blade free of its sheath. A slender, double-edge blade of cold-iron, barely a meter long. Its center of mass sat squarely below the crossguard, for that was where its power source was set into the metal - an Ignis crystal caged in brass, a minute of burn time before it turned grey and became inert quartz. 

An unheard utterance to invoke well-rehearsed combat techniques. A calm advance along the outer edges of combat, picking off targets that made the mistake of directing their attention towards her. The few locusts who managed to strike her did no more than score the Fog-infused fabric of her coat, and even these small marks vanished in mere seconds when the living threads knitted themselves back together. 

There was no reason for her to dive headfirst into the line of fire. Her purpose here was to pick off stragglers, to weaken the enemy’s strongest. A limb here, a kill there. A Fog-empowered jump, a flaming sword driven into the Black Swordsman’s wide-open back, just as he raised his weapon to bring it smashing down so he’d slip up and fail to properly translate his strength into a swing.

Before her influence could be felt, the Inquisitor delved yet deeper into enemy lines, cutting down locust after locust while the bulk of the drones’ swarm-minded attention remained directed towards Zelsys. 

She just barely avoided the wave of fire, shrapnel, and insectoid viscera that was sent flying at the barrier dome.

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Though she was confident in her own ability to kill with a bayonet and reload quickly under duress, Zefaris knew that it was in her best interest to maintain range. The bayonet would come out when it was needed, and not a moment sooner. 

Besides, this was a situation she was very familiar with and very fond of. She’d seen many a soldier witness a charging battle-line and despair in the face of superior numbers, but to her? This was a target-rich environment. Three shots rang out, and with each out, she let out a little bit of breath, partly to mitigate recoil, partly to sharpen her aim, and partly in an attempt to produce a practical technique. They were small increments - little enough to replenish with a quick inhalation while she re-cocked the cylinder.

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Each shot, a spearpoint of flaming lead that rode atop sparks and smoke. Each shot, forceful enough to go through a drone and kill another, sometimes even wound a third if she lined up the weak points in their chitin just right.

All the while, she kept much of her attention directed towards the twitching freak with those outlandish forearms. That stance, those tiny steps to either side, that indecisive tilt of the head. Even with black beads for eyes, Zefaris could tell that he was trying to find a good firing angle. What he would fire and what it would do was a quite a bit harder to discern.

Finally. Twitcher’s mandibles clicked to the sound of an insectoid equivalent to manic cackling. He raised his arms, slamming them together as their protective digits opened up and locked together on impact. Zefaris wasn’t willing to wait and see for what his arm-cannons did, considering the fact that they were pointed squarely at Zelsys.

Were she wielding any other weapon, she would’ve been too late. There would’ve been too long a delay between the trigger pull and the ball leaving the barrel, or it wouldn’t have been imparted with enough kinetic energy to strike on time, even infused with Fog. 

Pentacle suffered from no such shortcomings.

“Move!” she unconsciously exclaimed as she aimed, fired, forcing every ounce of Fog present in her lungs to come bursting out. Hammer struck glyph to the melodious ring of cold iron, and a lance of blazing lead and Fog came rocketing out of the barrel. Her world came to a crawl and froze for an imperceptibly short moment, marking the birth of a new technique. 

The bullet struck Twitcher’s left arm-shield just as a torrent of superheated gasses erupted from the nozzles on his arms. At the very moment of impact, a dozen tendrils of Fog spread out from the bullet, spreading out its amplified kinetic energy across his entire arm.

He lost balance, struggling to fight the colossal recoil of the veritable rocket engines that were his arms at this very moment, unable to stop once he’d started firing. His pillars of alchemic fire tilted sharply sideways and down, barely nicking the Black Swordsman before Twitcher went flying.

Zefaris still had a shot left in the cylinder, and she made it count. A small tilt of her arm, a slight lead, and hot lead ripped into one of his essentia sacs, spilling an off-color mixture of bodily fluids and volatile essentia all over him. He screeched bloody murder as he careened into the treeline, trailing smoke. Her immediate instinct was to get behind a tree and start reloading.

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