She’d already figured out that it was faster to place a cartridge in each chamber and then simply ram them all down in sequence, but it still took precious seconds - an eternity in the blazing inferno of combat.

Just as she reached a tree and ducked behind it her ears filled with the mighty roar of a high-powered shell being fired, the ground trembling underfoot from the vibration as the dying screams of drones who didn’t die instantly echoed.

Zelsys exhaled her full lung capacity as she fired the arm-cannon in anticipation of its colossal recoil, even stabbing her cleaver into the ground with its flat facing her, intending to use it as an anchor.

Click. Click. Boom.

One moment, her sight was full of locusts and her own exhaled Fog. The next, it was all fire. As great as the recoil was, it was not enough to make her let go of the Lightning Butcher’s handle. No, that was achieved by the sudden presence of an overhead shadow and a gust of wind.

Zelsys let go of her cleaver, leaping backwards as part of the recoil propelled her out of the way of the Black Swordsman’s downward swing. His blade once more scored the earth, an ironclad wall between Zelsys and her sword. He didn’t even bother to try pulling his sword free, instead pulling back his chitin-plated fist to smash her into pulp.

With her lungs empty of Fog, Zelsys didn’t have the time to restart the Breath Engine. “This better fuckin’ work…” she thought as she took as big a breath as she dared, exhaling some of it as Fog and burning some of it to fuel Stormsurge. With all the speed her body could muster, she forced herself to perform the motions of reloading in painful, jittering snaps as electric arcs of pure silver leapt across her skin whenever a muscle was forced to contract at full force.

A shotshell in the chamber and her hand on the lever, she faced the unstoppable force of his fist as if to meet it head-on. She’d set a precedent, now she bet on the giant’s trust in her repeating the same approach. He either fell for it, or just didn’t know how to deal with a problem that raw overwhelming force couldn’t defeat. Zelsys herself would’ve been more than happy to fight him head-on, were it not even more suicidal than butchering a lightning-bolt.

She finally saw his punch cross the point of no recovery and grinned. A step to the side, exhaling all the Fog she had - barely a fifth of her lung capacity, but enough. It wasn’t her strength that was necessary here. As she stepped aside, she used this moment to push the trigger-lever until it was on a hair trigger. Two clicks, lost amidst the noise of combat.

The giant’s fist struck the ground, and unlike his sword, he had no issue pulling it out - but it was still stuck in the soil, for but a moment, a moment enough for Zelsys to execute her gambit. A shallow breath in and an equally shallow breath out, slamming her arm-cannon’s muzzle into one of the weak points in the Black Swordsman’s armor, a proportionally small patch of exposed soft tissue in the pit of his elbow.

A tiny move of her wrist, a thunderous noise and blinding light, an almighty recoil impulse that threw her into the air due to the downward angle at which she had fired. Zel landed and regained her balance, ready to continue fighting, but… The Black Swordsman was staring her in the eyes, unmoving.

His stump arm gushed blood, but… It wasn’t hemolymph. Where even the less-mutated pistoleer’s blood was contaminated, the giant’s blood was entirely normal. It even smelled exactly like human blood. His tired, bloodshot eyes drifted to his stump, then back to her. With a slow nod, he stood and began to simply stomp into the treeline, leaving both his severed forearm and his weapon behind.

“...What?” Zelsys blurted out, flabbergasted by what she’d just witnessed. A screeching locust drone pulled her back into the present, for some reason having taken the care to walk around the giant blade rather than climb over it. Its talons sunk into her skin and ripped her flesh, but that was where her external injuries ended - Zelsys just punched through its head, once more using her arm-cannon as a force multiplier.

Finally free to take a breath and direct her attention towards the rest of the battlefield, she saw that it was all but won. There were considerably more than twenty-five dead locusts littering the ground and spreading their stench, with some seven more still skittering about and trying to lash out. Strolvath’s voice had fallen silent at some point between the last time she paid attention to it and now, with only the occasional whoosh of the Inquisitor’s sword or the death-screech of a drone to liven up the soundscape.

The last two drones approached her after having eluded the Inquisitor’s blade, only for both their heads to explode to the melodious sound of Pentacle’s gunshots, Zefaris having just finished reloading.

Strolvath could’ve maintained his voice for the entire short duration of the battle, but he saw no need to exert himself any more than he absolutely had to. Not yet. More importantly he couldn’t focus both on singing and channelling the Brass Eye simultaneously, though it was the latter’s functionality even in the absence of complete focus that made him go silent.

The moment Zelsys fired her arm-cannon a second time to sever the Black Swordsman’s left arm had pulled Strol’s gaze towards the giant man, and what his Brass Eye saw inside that man was not the soul of a locust. It wasn’t an animalistic, feral swarm creature as the drones were, and it wasn’t quite like the souls of the other Locust Nobles. Of course, the souls of Locust Nobles were just human souls - but they were universally guarded, they were universally the souls of hardened soldiers with spiritual walls twice as tall and twice as thick as those of most civilians.

But this man - this man didn’t just not have walls. His soul was actively spilling out, screaming to be heard in the absence of a means to do so physically, to the point that he could catch glimpses of the man’s surface thoughts. Only children were less mentally guarded than this.