His brow furrowed, he looked up at the homunculus in the jar, then at the homunculus that stood before him. Zel bent down to get a close look at the liquid, tracing the individual strands of blackness within the elixir. Transferring it from container to container had severed a great many of them, yet the pieces were shifting within the solution, reconnecting into elaborate patterns.

“But how’d it recognize…” murmured the alchemist.

“Maybe it inherited some sensory trait from the original? Doubt it’d willingly answer, or survive you trying to find out for that matter,” she wondered aloud, still closely observing the solution.

Makhus looked up at the malformed fetus-thing in the jar once again, while Zel stood up straight and took the flask from its stand, taking a sniff of its contents first and foremost. A slightly strange meaty, bloody scent, something suggesting wet fur, a slight sulphurous funk. No point holding off on it. The beast-slayer took a deep breath, kicking back the flask as she focused on suppressing any gag reflex the weird syrupy consistency might trigger. It had a funky taste that slightly suggested rotting meat, but it was much closer to what one would expect from dry-aged meat. Somehow the liquid evoked the fungal, meaty funk inherent to the bark-like exterior of such aged meats. Zelsys had no memory of ever eating or even encountering dry-aged meat in any form, yet the memory of what it was like rang clearly in her mind.

A third of the way through the process the bulk of the elixir was gone from the flask, what was coming through was now slowly sliding off the vessel’s walls. It felt like her esophagus was filled by one long semi-liquid tendril, and it burned like the seven hells the entire way down. This circumstance was certainly not one she had expected to get use out of her newly-prehensile tongue, but then, mundane expectations were rarely met by the arcane at face value.

She couldn’t even exhale in any meaningful fashion, so dense was the elixir as it made its way down. Zelsys burned what Fog she had in her lungs to force the elixir down, contracting her esophagus in a manner that made her feel like a snake trying to swallow prey beyond its own size. In a manner of speaking, it wasn’t wrong. The Necrobeast had already been a tremendous threat to multiple people who had had every conceivable advantage over it, and now she was devouring its distilled essence. It was only appropriate that even the first step of the process would be difficult.

Had it been a minute? Two? Three? She couldn’t tell.

Finally, the flask was empty and the elixir’s syrupy mass had all gone down. Zel put the flask back on its stand, taking a deep breath as she held her stomach. There was still a residual burn in her throat as she began to feel a radiating heat spread out from her stomach, slowly all throughout her torso and into her limbs. She was too preoccupied with the elixir’s consumption and the effects of its subsequent absorption to notice Makhus staring at her with a wide-eyed expression, at least until he piped up.

“...I-I was going to dilute it with ethanol into a drinkable solution, y’know,” he stuttered out.

Zel laughed, hopping up to sit on the edge of the table, “You should’ve said that earlier. Well, it went down easy enough… Now we wait. It’ll probably take a little longer to take effect than the maneater one, since that one got shot up right into my veins.”

“...You mean the dungeon did it, or did you use a syringe from one of the medical kits stored in your tablet?”

“Oh no, the dungeon did it. It was this big ol’ wendigo-shaped statue with thick needles for fingers. Had me sort-of lean back on it and secured me in place with the statue’s ribs, knocked me out for a little bit… Y’know, in retrospect, it was quite strange. The Locust Queen took the statue over right as I woke up and I ended up snapping its ribs and sawing it apart, though the claws nicked me right...”

She raised her arm and pulled at her chest-wraps. They obeyed and let go of her skin where she wanted them to, but it was still a weird feeling. The adhesion was much stronger than that of her trousers, it was almost like the wraps were perpetually covered in a thin layer of isinglass on the inside. The series of holes between her ribs had long been plugged by scab and scar tissue, but they were still quite visible amidst the bruising from her broken ribs and the smaller cuts that hadn’t healed yet.

Then, she froze in place. It felt like her blood suddenly froze solid in her veins, she couldn’t move, she couldn’t do anything. Pressure built in her chest and in her head as the heat continued to spread out through her body. After what felt like minutes of nothing, minutes of this breathless stasis wherein she could neither move nor suffocate, Makhus’s face poked into her field of vision, at which point she realized that her perception of time had dilated to a snail’s pace.

Her instincts rumbled in the back of her head as intrusive thoughts began flashing before her mind’s eye. The urge to eat decayed things. The stench of composting wood, that of a corpse pulled from a peat bog, the itching sensation of skin sloughing off her face without so much as a speck of pain. An overwhelming desire to survive, in defiance of odds or injuries or even nature itself.

That just wouldn’t do. She’d bested this beast twice already, and now it had no reprieve but to assault her with its own being. What was left of the Necrobeast’s raw instinctual nature was trying to thrash free of its shackles before her body could unravel it, that the threads of its being could be woven into and strengthen her own. Zelsys called on her own memories of defeating the beast, her own will to survive, her own ego.

She willed her body to do two simple things: Subsume that which comprised the beast’s actual traits and expunge all else.