Bacon Macleod
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B3 Chapter 373: Fog, pt. 4
🕑 Added 2025-08-11 21:30:02 +0000 UTCA chitin monstrosity with swords for legs rocketed towards him, kicking out so fast it looked like a silver half-moon blinked in and out of existence.
Kaius had swung his own blade to intercept before it had even moved, reacting the instant Uncanny Dodge fed him a premonition of danger.
Truesight called them butcher locusts. Grasshoppers the size of his thigh, mottled brown — though their legs shone with a steely glint. Gods scorn were they fast. They moved like lightning, bursting from spot to spot in straightline leaps that he could barely track. Without his Intelligence, his aforementioned precognition, and the speed his own Skills granted him, he would have been helpless to react to them.
Reborn to new weight and severing fury, A Father’s Gift crunched straight through the beast’s mandibles. Yellow-brown ichor burst as he twisted into the cut — bisecting it clean.
*Ding! You have defeated Butcher Locust - Steel Legionaire: Level 242 - Experience Denied, Tier Limit reached!*
Another hot lance of danger shot from behind. Kaius dropped his heel and spun, whirling his blade from low to high, before he cleaved down. It was a movement without thought, driven through instinct forged in the mindless violence of his first trial. His mind may have slept, but his body remembered.
Where came death, so went his blade — wavering like a mirage as it brought a severing end of its own.
Sparks flew as he bound the beast’s slash. Fragile as their bodies were, their sharpened legs were not; any injuries he did inflict on the toughened limbs healed quickly as their health burned.
He twisted — turning in the direction of the locust’s charge to direct its path away from him.
Another lunged, he cut before it moved — meeting it in the air. Two more tried to pincer them. Decisive, Kaius reached for Eirnith and reached for the twisted form of Compel Obsession. Faster than he could blink, he reached for the furthest attacker’s primitive mind.
And directed its fury towards its fellow.
Ichor splashed against his back as the creatures met in mid air — tearing each other apart. Kaius ignored it, focused on two more flashes of danger from his front and his left.
Transitioning to a one-handed grip, he cast Stormlash with the other. White lightning flashed as a peal of thunder filled the dirt path he’d chosen as his battle ground. The first locust smashed into his guard — the weapon shuddering in his grip. The second smashed into his hip — a smoking corpse. Cracked from reverberant force, it splattered, saturating him in more filth.
Kaius scowled in disgust. The runes on his blade flaring with internal fire as he activated Initiate’s Glyphic Bladerite mid-swing — already moving to intercept the first locust’s follow up attack.
Its legs split in half, screeching with the sound of tortured steel. It hit the ground hard — tumbling uselessly as its main mode of locomotion was severed. Before it could scuttle away, Kaius blew a hole in its head with a nail.
He held his blade tight — searching the grass around them for more threats. More rustles and wavers that would herald another wave of butcher locusts.
Right as he was about to relax, he spotted what he was looking for. A burst of motion, right at the edge of the fog; a rustle of grass that seemed to blip around him in a circle. Another wave.
Porkchop hooted behind him, nestled safely behind a double layered warhaven.
“I bet you can’t cut one in three this time!”
Kaius groaned. It was one thing to fight through a horde of deadly enemies — especially when they were a reasonable match up — but it was entirely another to sit through a running commentary at the same time.
It was never ‘gee, Kaius, thank you for getting covered in ichor and saving me from beasts that move too quick for me to hit or block’, and always ‘bet your aim’s too crap to hit one with a Nail mid air’.
Of course, he’d immediately proven Porkchop wrong — but was that good enough? No! Apparently predicting their trajectory with Uncanny Dodge was cheating. Utterly ridiculous!
Still — good fun, or no, the butcher locusts represented a growing problem. He could handle them fine, but it was not with the same ease as which they passed earlier trials. The bastards were seemingly endless, and even if he could handle any given one of them just fine, if too many attacked at once he always took a wound.
They were vicious too — punching straight through scalemail and bone to leave weeping rents in his flesh. It was only thanks to the Titan’s Marrow of his Corporus aspect, and the endurance granted from Lesser Regeneration that let him keep fighting while muscle and organs reknit back together.
One thing loomed heavier than everything else; the resonance he’d felt with Animus had long since plateaued.
It had come quick at first — a boiling pressure that had slowly built upon itself with every crossroads they passed. Yet that growth had tapered off quickly, and his resonance had been static for the last dozen challenges they had faced.
He didn’t know what they were doing wrong. They’d tried lengthy breaks of meditation and introspection before each crossroads. He’d delved deep into the feelings of weight that suffused him from his other aspects — searching for an answer in the gaps left between their fires. Even diving deep into what their bond meant to each of them — how they thought they might complement each other's strengths and support each other's weaknesses hadn’t helped.
It was a problem. The growing trend of difficulty was consistent — eventually something had to give. It would only be so long before they grew too weak to deal with the threats they needed to face to progress further through the trial.
Worse, the difficulty seemed to be increasing far slower for the alternate paths that lay on either side of the crossroads — at least from what they could tell without actually crossing them.
It…didn’t make sense. They were a pair — with a literal tunnel between their soulspaces. Clearly that should tie in somehow to Animus. Yet they had stalled all the same, and they grew more weary by the day. Not from carrying the other’s weight, but from watching — from being sidelined to witness the other sacrifice and strive for both their benefits.
For him, it was an itch that went deeper than the marrow — a wrongness. It wasn’t who he was, to sit out. To wait. He wanted to fight, to hear the song in his heart and the heat in his breath. To live fully, and struggle.
Not to suffer, but to strive — to enjoy those heartfelt moments where he was fully grounded in the moment. To push himself, aid his friends and forward his goals. Sitting back while Porkchop got battered, no matter how much it was the right choice, simply irritated him.
He knew it wore on Porkchop too. Even now, he could hear the way his brother’s armour clanked as his shoulders knotted with tension, and how the dirt beneath his feet rasped as his claws cut deep.
For all Porkchop teased and gave him hell, he cared. Ached when Kaius took wounds that he could have shrugged off, and burned when he couldn’t rail against the bindings that tried to keep him from moving forward.
Kaius didn’t know why it bothered them so, just that it did — and for all their reasons were different from each other, the end result was similar. They were both getting cranky.
Right as poison tipped intent thrust at him from three different angles, Kaius found clarity in a moment that stretched long.
Perhaps, there was an insight to be found there. In their differences.
As if to spite him, he felt Animus pulse.
Groaning in disgust, Kaius drove his weight into his back heel and slashed out in a rising crescent — right towards a threat that had yet to materialise. His form flickered as Slipstep took hold, and the air around him wavered with Zone of Discombobulation.
He turned into his blow, attention already shifting as his glassy blade ripped through a leaping locust length wise. Fluid in motion, he cut through the next beast in the same movement — releasing with his off hand to whip a crackling Lash horizontally through the grass. Lightning cracked, arching between the metallic legs of the butcher locust as his spell fried the beast from the inside out.
*Ding! You have defeated Butcher Locust - Steel Legionaire: Level 244 - Experience Denied, Tier Limit reached!*
…
*Ding! You have defeated Butcher Locust - Steel Legionaire: Level 243 - Experience Denied, Tier Limit reached!*
The looming feeling of danger fled, and Kaius slid into a mid-guard. He refused to relax — not yet. The cycles of attacks had been unpredictable — sometimes coming multiple times in a minute, and other waves taking a quarter-hour to arrive.
Neither him nor Porkchop spoke; fully focused on their surroundings. Half an hour later, when nothing had changed, and the only noise was the slow rustle of long grass in the breeze, Kaius dropped out of his stance and lowered his blade.
“Smell anything?”
His senses might have been reinforced by the system to be ten times stronger to Porkchop’s five, but a meles nose was incredibly sensitive. Double the enhancement wasn’t nearly enough to close that gap.
“Just spilled ichor.”
It was over — for now. Their path ahead to rejoin the sea of fog was clear. Kaius sighed and resheathed his sword.
“I think we might have gotten a little over-focused on what we assumed was the answer to this trial.”
Porkchop raised his brow.
“Was it our complete lack of progress that tipped you off?”
“Yes,” Kaius snorted. “But it still feels weird. Why emphasise our bond, that Animus could be found in our union, if it wants us to go our separate ways?”
“Who knows. The Crucible is strange — none of our trials have been immediately obvious. Perhaps there is something there; some sort of Truth we can only find without each other. It’s not like we’re the same person — we don’t have to have the same aspect.”
“I still don’t like it,” Kaius grumbled as they continued along their path, plunging back into the endless fog. “There’s only ever one road that leads into the crossroads. What if we never meet back up after we separate? I don’t want to be alone again after so short of a time — the last few trials have been hard.”
Porkchop stepped into him, bumping him gently with his shoulder. “Don’t be silly — it’s not like we’re dying. Our bond is still there — just deafened for now. Even if we don’t see each other for the rest of our time in the Crucible, it won't stop us from reuniting afterwards. If we’re stronger for it, it’ll be worth it.”
Kaius nodded slowly, though even if he could see the wisdom in his brother’s words, it made them no less bitter.
“Okay. Just…can we take a break before the next crossroads? There’s no need to rush into it, or anything, right?”
“Of course.”
Porkchop leaned in, and they kept walking.
Comments
Joshua Little
Thanks for the chapter.
Mr R
Seeing Kauis and Porkchop bonding and bantering, just the two of them, feels refreshing after the grind they've been through. And I'm not just talking about the crucible, or even the delver after they broke out of prison.
Mr R
I'm liking this more than the previous two crucible challenges. Frankly, I skipped past nearly all of those two.
