The Collector peered at the decapitated head in one of its arms with mild interest, its four glowing red eyes flickering as they scanned and analyzed, green magical energy enveloping them.

Haze.

This was what the Collector found from its mana scanning. The flow of mana from the specimen itself was clear, almost unnaturally clear.

All living specimens' bodies formed a natural dampener for the expression of their magical energy. Their skin and flesh encased their hearts, their core, and flowed mana within them, and thus insulated them from outward observation somewhat.

This was part of the principle of why it was difficult to directly affect an individual's mana core from within. The rest of the body formed a protective barrier.

However, this 'Undead' specimen flared out its magical energy constantly and with such clarity that it almost seemed as if it was just a walking core, lacking any dampening inherent to every magic capable living being.

Yet, when the Collector attempted to sense where exactly this specimen was drawing its infinite supply of mana, it could find only haze. A faint black haze that emanated all around the specimen's form, but one that granted zero discernible information.

The Collector clicked its mandibles in further risk analysis. The black haze had no ill effect to the Collector, but its anomalous, unknown nature still made it questionable to deal with.

At the least, though the Collector's external form seemed immune, it was possible that consuming this specimen could create complications.

The Collector suddenly felt the decapitated specimen's body violently move backwards with a jerking motion, this time utilizing its water blade in such a way that the rotational flow of water around the sword shunted it backwards with a slippery surface, allowing the body to break from the Collector's grasp.

"So you are capable of high function without a processing unit," said the Collector. It peered at the head in its hand and watched as it dissolved into black particles. Then, those particles gathered around the headless body's neck and reformed a new head.

This time, the head was slightly paler, a few more sunken wrinkles setting in its face, causing it to look even more wild, even more unhinged.

Regardless, the specimen snarled and fought again. This time, the specimen took a small leap backwards and sheathed his blade while leaning forwards.

Yellow magical energy surged violently around the specimen before heavily condensing into his body like a spring-loaded coil, ready to explosively shoot out.

The Collector analyzed this technique.

A stance meant to quickly withdraw the blade at heavily enhanced speeds with empowered physicals to deal a single devastating strike.

At maximum capacity, it was enough to even slice through the Collector's carapace, though not much more than that.

Then, the specimen altered its attack. It took in a visible breath and adjusted the thumb on the sword handle such that it stuck out.

The specimen exhaled, and then cut the air in front of it in a horizontal, sweeping arc. From this slash, a crescent of highly pressurized water shot forwards at beyond supersonic speeds.

The Collector predicted this and put one of its carapaced hands forward and condensed it with a moderated [Guard]. The crescent blade of water crashed against the Collector's hand and broke apart against the hard surface into spatters of ordinary water.

"No true higher intelligence, and yet you retain all combat sense and readiness," said the Collector. "Anomalous. The mechanisms by which you replenish your mana reserves further maintain your bodily functions and processing to some degree, it would seem."

The Collector took slow steps forward, further analyzing the specimen for anomalies and to see whether this would be a battle worth anything.

The specimen took in an even deeper breath now, his chest heaving out, and then his mana spiked considerably. A temporary burst of triple capacity manifesting in a raging golden aura of flowing currents rising all around the specimen's form.

The Collector clicked its mandibles in interest. The specimen was overloading its own body with mana capacity, breaking apart its flesh and cracking its bones, and ordinarily, this would have been a highly self-destructive technique, but with its unending regeneration, it had no real downsides.

The specimen took his blade out and circled it around himself in a sort of preparatory ritual before holding it above his head, the tip of the blue blade still pointed at the Collector.

The immense amounts of magical energy around the specimen funneled towards the blade, and it glowed bright blue, huge swells of water emerging from it and coiling around to form the head of a reptilian specimen similar in appearance to the Collector's own head.

A 'dragon', the Collector presumed.

The specimen then took a single heavy step forwards and swung down. Snow blasted away from around it as power and mana surged outwards in one cataclysmic expulsion, all of it funneling into shooting out a torrent of serpentine, coiling water with the dragon's visage at its head.

The Collector crossed its four arms in front of itself and pumped them full of chaos mana in a heavy [Guard]. The water dragon slammed into the Collector with an enormous impact akin to the crashing of a waterfall.

The attack was both slicing and concussive in damage, and the Collector skidded backwards several meters, a fairly deep cut sliced into its arm carapace. Water that froze into hail fell all around it from the geyser it had erupted into when it crashed against the Collector.

The Collector beheld its sliced carapace and then used the draconid's explosive regeneration to simply heal it.

"Amusing," said the Collector. It unsheathed two purifying light blades from its upper forearms. "Then like this?"

The Collector then took in a deep breath, stimulating its core to draw in vast amounts of magical energy.

Then, it braced its abdominal muscles while forcing its heart to pump into overdrive, heavily accelerating bloodflow and manaflow temporarily, massively enhancing its capacity to output magical energy in one burst attack.

The Collector mimicked the sword wielding undead perfectly, drawing out a circle around itself with its light blades first, using that movement to focus the flow of its heavily enhanced magical energy, and then when it raised its blades overhead, the charged mana flowed into the blades.

Unlike the undead specimen, the Collector did not overcharge its mana to the degree it damaged its own body. Just enough to replicate the technique itself.

Even so, the amount of mana that raged around the Collector far eclipsed that which the undead had mustered, shaking the earth and parting the snow around the Collector.

The Collector's red mana coalesced around the blades into the visage not of a drake, but of the Collector itself, as a shade of its blade toothed, four eyed head.

The Collector struck downwards, ejecting forwards a beam of mana shaped as the Collector.

The size of this strike completely dwarfed the water dragon that the undead specimen had shot against the Collector by a factor of three, and when the Collector's projection of mana crashed against the specimen, it caused an explosion that rattled the air, shattering the ground beneath the specimen in sizable crater while its body blew apart into countless small chunks.

The Collector used Sapia to recover the many shattered chunks of the specimen's blue blade, hovering them into its maw for sample collection.

>>>

*Metalloglottic Ossifier sample obtained [1/5]*

-Aqualite

>>>

The Collector observed as the undead specimen began to bring itself together even from near complete bodily destruction. Black particulates gathered around first a core, and the core formed the specimen's heart, and from there, everything else was built around.

The Collector aimed its Superacid Bilespitter at the core and fired a burst of acid.

Would the specimen recover from complete molecular degradation?

The green liquid doused the heart, searing it before completely eating it away in a a tenth of a second.

The Collector clicked its mandibles.

The heart started to form again from nothing.

It was then that the Collector decided stop observing the specimen for data regarding its condition and further techniques.

Because the specimen outputted so much magical energy that it did not hide, it would be a lightningrod to attract any investigative tinkerers, especially here where the Grainfall was low and becoming lower by the moment.

The Collector flew into the air, out of sight, and if its prior analyses of the specimen was correct, it would just forget about the Collector and move aimlessly forwards. The tinkerers would deal with it. The Collector had no obligation to destroy it.

In the air, however, the Collector noted an interesting anomaly. Two hundred or so meters from the undead specimen, there was a small protrusion in the snow that the Collector's advanced sensory systems gleaned.

From the way the snow gathered around it, the Collector assessed that something had been buried by the heavy snowfall.

The Collector allocated a minor amount of time to investigate this.