A part of her wished it could’ve just been empty bodies animated by parasites, or something akin to Pateirian control centipedes or the like. The hairs on the back of her neck stood on end at the sheer wrongness of that thing, hearkening back to the ambulatory tumors she had fought moments after first emerging into the world; the Failures. They had been little more than congealed Viriditas and other essentia in the shapes of fleshy blobs with the odd face or limb. This human hydra was a whole different kind of unpleasant.

The basement did, indeed, hold the promised substance. It was a translucent, syrupy liquid contained in huge seal-plastered flasks of glyphic glass, clearly labeled. Zel cracked one open and poured a small amount out onto the stone floor to make sure it truly was alkahest, the rock already hissing and dissolving. One-fifth segment of a golden 10-gelt coin was her confirmation - it dissolved instantly and turned the liquid a pale red, confirming that it was a true alkahest, a noble solvent fit for high alchemy. She took several flasks for herself without a second thought, each being half a meter across and barely able to fit into her Tablet’s Fog vortex, before hauling two of them upstairs. The Husband’s eyes instantly locked onto hers when she came into view, and, as much as the vague fleshy mass was capable of, it nodded. Or, rather, it bobbed up and down in her general direction by squatting with two of its legs.

The Black Rope put up a bit of a fight before she managed to subdue the parasite, but not enough to be notable. There was nothing when she poured the liquid over the human hydra.

No screams, no smoke. Half-rotten human flesh melted under the alkahest like butter on a hot pan. Soon there was only a puddle of decoherent flesh and grease that instantly seeped into the bedding underneath, leaving only the half-molten skeletons of the family that had been assimilated by the abomination. Two golden rings were amidst the mess, but she left them. They had already been partially dissolved, anyhow.

She left the house behind, making her way towards the barn. The Impelling Arm had a Type-1 shell loaded, and her belt was full of Type-1s and Type-2s in equal measure. A strange gurgling sound could be heard from the barn, followed by a crash. Wood splintered beneath a gigantic, strobing flail made of flesh, soon followed by a second flail and the originator of them both, lurching forward entirely too quickly for a snail of that size.

There it was. The Alkasnail, as the bounty had named it.

“It must’ve heard the human chimera yelling at me to kill it or feed it earlier…” she thought. In the throne room of her mind, the Thinking Self gave a stern nod, and the Primordial Self flipped hundreds of switches in sequence with the sweep of a hand before turning a metaphorical ignition key. The brief skip of her breathing pattern changing was immediately followed by an ecstatic wave of warmth and strength, muscles tightening and everything all at once coming into focus.

A mad locust queen, desperately trying to turn her prison and tomb into a seat of power.

A divine general who had reforged his body into a gigantic golem.

A hollow, power-obsessed psychopath without the mental capacity to process the idea of ever being wrong or guilty.

A giant piece of livestock infested by a parasite, itself engineered by an ancient empire for some petty civil war.

In the end, the most primal part of her didn’t really care what or who her opponent was, only that there was a justification for this. The exhilaration of a roused killing instinct, the logic puzzle of working out an enemy’s weaknesses, or the simple satisfaction of exterminating vermin. Any reason for violence was good… But there had to be a reason. Always.

The Alkasnail didn’t seem in any hurry to charge at her. It emerged fully from the barn, and in its wake, there came two male bodies, voicelessly sprinting as black tendrils writhed about from their mouths and the ends of their limbs, puppeting them from the inside. Their eyes were milky-white, their flesh decayed to the likeness of an old corpse. Two more bodies followed, women this time, their jaws gaping open as hundreds of black worms poured out of them, trailing their paths. bodies were visibly bloated. Going by the more advanced decay of these bodies, Zel wagered they were the first victims.

It was the Black Rope doing all the movement, at this point. Their muscles were all torn and bunched up under the skin, doubtlessly due to the parasite moving the corpses around after rigor mortis had set in. Moreover, they moved rather more like puppets than people, their movements stilted and unagile. Putting them down was no challenge, but it was an opportunity for some amusement. The Broken Butcher’s state didn’t prevent her from using it to perform its usual techniques, including a favorite that she had been trying to polish into true practicality since its inception.

She waited, rousing the Butcher’s sawteeth into a screaming blur while stockpiling a moderate quantity of Fulgur and Pneuma in her second stomach. Once all four hosts were within fifty meters, she mentally invoked the technique, dumping a surge of power into the weapon.

“Formless Butchery: Flying Thundersaw!”

With an upward swing, the entirety of its back edge detached, a crescent of oscillating sawteeth flying off at the speed of a bullet, trailing lightning as it went.

Again.

“Thundersaw!”

And again.

“Thundersaw!”

And again.

“Thundersaw!”

It took a few seconds between each swing, the time to grow new sawteeth being the technique’s biggest weakness. The separate saws each ripped through one host before gathering in a swirling maelstrom behind them and returning in a zigzagging path, shredding each body into mulch as they passed before gathering at the point of the Broken Butcher. With only a few seconds of lifetime left before these constructs crumbled, she swung again and sent all four saws alongside a fresh fifth right at the snail. It attempted to swat the gestalt projectile out of the air with one of its nauseatingly-strobing eyestalks, an effort which succeeded, but left the tip of the eyestalk shredded to ribbons and the head of the controlling parasite dangling out.

Lurching closer, it undulated and reared up, opening wide its beaked maw. A veritable flood of acid came pouring out, full of writhing parasites. Avoiding this wasn’t difficult, but the flood soon became a high-pressure hose that Zelsys had to keep an eye out for. Soil, wood, plants, stone, all melted under the downpour, and its sheer pressure allowed it to both smash things apart and sprayed it all over the place around the point of impact.

“It’s more resistant to cutting than I’d expected,” a thought shot through her head. In moments, Zelsys formed a theory on the Alkasnail’s combat capabilities and crafted a tactic for defeating it. “Its skin is extremely elastic and the mucus coating means that even the Butcher’s Teeth struggle to bite in, piercing attacks will likely struggle as well unless I apply overwhelming force or somehow mitigate the slime coating… ”

A simple test: She shot at it. This Type-1 had a ball of hardened steel for a projectile, and it struck true as expected, sinking into the Alkasnail’s flesh… Only for a tendril of Black Rope to push it out, and for the glossy, pallid surface to close up with only a sphincter-like surface wound to show for it. Another spray of alkahest was the response she received, the beast now charging her in earnest as it smashed its eyestalks about. This outcome caused not an iota of surprise.

“A Type-2 shell won’t work either, it’ll cause superficial damage at most. A Type-1 won’t penetrate deep enough to cause a severe injury even with Thundercannon, and those all-over-the-place flail attacks aren’t exactly ideal for charging my kinetic battery, I’d better just cut the eyestalks…”

Combined with the Broken Butcher’s short length, there was no way to efficiently defeat the Alkasnail using the blade. Even an extension formed of pure lightning wouldn’t last long enough to cause significant injury, and the elastic mass of the body would be able to absorb the shock of Thunderclap Sting in a way solid targets couldn’t.

The obvious answer was to simply use a Type-1a shell for its higher velocity and vastly superior penetrative abilities, but spending such a precious limited resource on a giant snail felt a waste. Her reserve of Type-1a shells was in the single digits, and unlike standard Type-1s and Type-2s, she couldn’t just reload them herself; the Atrine-enriched gunpowder wasn’t an issue, but the composite projectile required special machinery unlike the simple metal ball projectiles of its counterparts, and the shell casing rarely survived firing in a reloadable state.

She still had one ace up her sleeve, or rather, in her Tablet. It was a good number of mundane swords. Most were military-issue war-knives, long sabres wrought of good-enough metal, and a few were Dragon Knight blades that they hadn’t been able to sell. After sheathing the Butcher she pulled them from storage one after the other, stabbing them into the ground until she had none left. Then, one after the other, she animated her braids and had them pick the swords up, charging each with as much Fulgur as the metal could hold one after the next. There was no chance in hell that they could wound this thing on their own. Then, grasping one by the blade as one would a spear, she ignited the charge within it into a coat of lightning, throwing it at the snail with all her might. Slime evaporated, flesh ripped and burned, and the sword embedded itself in the beast’s flesh up to the crossguard before discharging its remaining energy, the terrible stresses within the metal causing it to explode into shrapnel inside its target. She knew it had worked when she saw the snail recoil and a Black Rope eject what was left of that first sword, now just a broken stump. It came out alongside a deluge of milky slime as well as chunks of pallid flesh and black parasite-threads.

This tactic was, in truth, not her own idea. It was inspired by a common historical portrayal of storm deities: A many-armed humanoid wielding a lightning bolt, spear, or other weapon in each of its hands. Zel hadn’t considered it refined enough to make it a proper technique, since she hadn’t gotten any real use out of it in combat before now, but with each sword she threw, her opinion shifted.

Unfortunately, or rather, fortunately, given Zel’s own thirst for fame, a curious pair of eyes had followed her tracks, her investigation and initial engagement with the Alkasnail having taken long enough for someone on foot to catch up.

Lydia was old enough to have avoided the draft, old enough to have snuck by pretending to be a normal woman in the eve of her middle age. In truth, she was a martial artist, a retired mercenary by trade. She’d aspired to be a cultivator, once, to join one of Ikesia’s great cultivator families: The Sangers, or the Black Horses. Though the former took her, the disparity between commoners and noblemen was still a true chasm, not just due to the echoes of the feudal caste system, but because noblemen tended to have vastly superior foundations to work with as well as the attitude of stepping on others to further their own ascent. There were, or at least had been, successful cultivators of low birth, certainly, but they too had near universally taken on that cutthroat, inhuman attitude.

It was because of this that she had left cultivation behind to become a normal mercenary; a high-born disciple had taken a sparring match all too far, breaking several of her bones and intentionally inflicting wounds the scars of which still pained her.

“A commoner has no chance in the world of cultivation. Give it up, before you get yourself killed. Or don’t, I’ll enjoy crushing you again,” he told her that time. The memory still burned in her mind. She had done as told, if only to save herself the suffering. In the world of normal people, she could at least be considered strong.

Truly, Lydia had distanced herself from anything to do with cultivation, even fleeing to the mountain-kingdoms to escape the worst of the war. And yet, she couldn’t help herself; when that woman took off she ran after her, seeing her take off. Knowing that the livestead wasn’t in that direction at all, she waited outside Fort 57. She’d heard of this woman in recent months. It was impossible to mistake an appearance as distinct as this. Tales spread quickly, especially tales of a person who supposedly resurrected a sect and struck down one of the Divine Generals.

When she rode by on that monstrous, howling machine, Lydia let out a sigh and began running. It was only a few kilometers, at the absolute worst she would arrive in time to see the beast die, knowing how impossibly tenacious an Alkasnail was. Lydia arrived to the livestead just in time to behold a sight that didn’t fit into her conception of what a cultivator was, what they could do. In her few years in the world of cultivation, she’d seen all sorts of methods. Simple body hardening, mutagens, elixirs, drugs. Weapons from the normal to the outlandish, from spears and maces to flying swords and meteor hammers. Magicks of all kinds, too; glyphs, fireballs, incantations and rituals, curses, talismans, even an elemental transformation and the blinding speed of a Kargarian Storm-soul Cultivator.

Nothing like this. Nothing remotely like this.

It was an image straight out of an ancient myth, something one would see etched on the wall of a long-abandoned temple. Without thinking, she drew closer.

That woman with her huge braids, a sword grasped in each hand as if it were a spear, and at least two-dozen more swords stabbed into the ground all around her. Each braid was tipped by the ghostly head of a monster made of pure lightning, and each grasped in its jaws yet another sword. Each sword was shrouded in arcs of lightning, the snapping and buzzing drowning out all other sound, as did the stench of ozone drown out all other smells. She just stood there seemingly unconcerned even as a burst of alkahest sprayed right by her head, stepping aside to the left before just jumping out of the way of the creature’s eyestalk-flail, the serpents which sprouted from her head grabbing more blades from the ground. A laugh full of amusement emanated from the woman, ringing with a bell-like purity. She made this dance of ultraviolence seem whimsical and gracious, in no small part because of the impossible coordination with which she moved, with nary one wasted twitch of a single muscle.

Another sword thrown. It smashed into the creature with the force of a true lightning bolt, a slurry of pulverized flesh gushing out of the wound alongside the shattered remains of the weapon.

There was no cultivator, nobleman or otherwise, that Lydia had known to be capable of such a thing. She had, of course, only ever met the lower and lower-middle echelons of a single sect, but that didn’t change how earth-shaking this image was for her. It seared itself into her mind with a brilliant clarity, one which she would go on to render out upon canvas.

With each sword she threw, Zelsys felt herself gaining a better grasp of the process, growing closer to a comprehensive understanding. As it had been many times before, applying techniques in real combat was what it took for her to solidify a new technique. It was also a plainly entertaining change of pace, fundamentally different from her usual close-in tactics.

The snail’s left eyestalk came crashing down, and taking a Dragon Knight sword from one of her braids, she met it with an upward cut. It was another imitation Aquila Calibur, its rudimentary pyromantic circuits overwhelmed by the deluge of Fulgur she poured into it, causing it to burn with tongues of lightning and the fuel gem in its pommel to turn blue. The fuel gem’s Ignis was simply subsumed by the flood of Fulgur, as the latter was a composite of Ignis and Aer and its quantity by far surpassed the gem’s remaining charge. Snail and parasite flesh alike gave in easily under the blade, wreathed in flames and lightning as it was, the shredded bulb falling limply behind her. It was easily the size of her torso. Out of interest in examining it later, she handed the blade back to one of her braids and took another Dragon Knight sword in hand.

Already the right-hand eyestalk was pulling back for a much faster whip strike, so she changed her grip and put her entire body into this one throw. Being made of good cold-iron and to a higher standard, the swords of Dragon Knights didn’t so much as crack under the charge she placed into them.

This one ripped straight through the air and struck the very root of the Alkasnail’s right eyestalk. There came a sudden discharge, and the eyestalk suddenly burst, splitting down the middle from the base to the tip much like a lightning-struck tree, only backwards. The multi-colored, gigantic specimen of Black Rope lurched out onto the ground, only for Zelsys to pin it with a thrown blade. The discharge was grounded and thus didn’t cause meaningful harm to the gigantic worm, but that made little difference when it was washed away by a blind outpouring of Alkahest from its former host.

It only took a few more throws before the Alkasnail ceased moving in any meaningful way, and it was then that she felt the technique finally settling into something concrete, the world stopping for but a moment. It lay there, blind and immobile, dying as tens of meters of Black Rope erupted out through its mouth and wounds, many of the parasites clearly split at points. They writhed about on the ground, tangling into a huge ball and rolling away in an apparent attempt to escape. A couple more thrown blades put a stop to that attempt, shredding the mass apart before it could make it onto the right-hand field. Next was only the matter of harvesting the snail’s beak, and for this purpose she took up the Fulgur-burned faux-Aquila Calibur again. Even with the snail seemingly disabled, she took care to stay clear of the opening and didn’t risk letting her guard down.

This choice turned out to be correct when a particularly thick specimen of Black Rope lunged out of the beast’s maw halfway through Zelsys cutting the beak out. A thick, keratinous ovipositor erupted from the creature’s lamprey-like mouth as it emerged, attempting to stab her and doubtlessly inject its young, but she caught the thing mere centimeters before it would’ve had a chance to pierce her skin, sharply turning it away from her just as hair-thin black worms sprayed out of the horrendous thing. She fried it alive, dumping Fulgur into the giant worm until it dried out and stiffened in her grip.

Throwing aside the blade in her hand, she pulled out the Butcher and used it to excise the beak in full. While doing this she felt a presence, approaching from the rear. Not a threat, or at least not malicious. Jumping off of the slimy corpse, her observer didn’t precisely turn out to be what she had expected by the feel of the presence: An old woman, looking to be in her early fifties. Her face bore crow's feet and her eyes spoke her age freely, but the quality of her skin, hair, and personal presence spoke not a word of aging; youth had left her, but she had escaped the grasp of old age for now. She was dressed in the mismatched armor of a mercenary, and carried herself with a semblance of a mercenary’s combat-capable demeanor. Indeed, only a semblance, because the woman was damn near kowtowing in front of Zelsys, a fact that pleased and confused her in equal measure. She recognized her.

“Who- What are you?! That power, it is the likeness of a Fierce Deity, unlike any magic I have seen!” the woman exclaimed, stumbling over her own words as she tried to coherently express her bewilderment. A part of Zelsys wanted to lean into that and to simply claim that she had, in fact, usurped part of a dead storm deity. It wouldn’t have been entirely untrue, as the nature-spirits which fuelled her magic were often deified, but the idea of such a deception left a bad taste in her mouth.

She relaxed and stopped Fog-breathing, her braids falling limp all at once, the blades in their grips sticking into the ground in a semicircle.

“Just a beast-slayer. I go where I will, and slay beasts that need slaying, regardless of how many legs they walk on-” she began.

“-or what honeyed words they speak, yes, I’ve heard of your feats, Lady Newman…” the old woman interrupted, having gotten her bearings enough to speak coherently, though the awe was still thoroughly present. “But… Never have I seen something like that, nor have I heard or read of such things being possible through cultivation.”

“Let me guess, Black Horses?” Zel smugly raised an eyebrow, pulling out her Tablet to store the beak for now. Already having determined that she liked the aura of this benign stalker, she also retrieved a copy of Sturmblitz Kunst 0.

Hesitating a bit, the woman answered, “Sanger Family…”

“Uh-huh. Sure doesn’t feel like you’re a cultivator. Y’quit or get kicked out?” the beast-slayer questioned.

“A nobleman forced me out.” Lydia answered.

“Alright, one more question. You followed me from Fort 57. Why?”

“I don’t… I don’t know. Curiosity, I suppose.”

“Well take a sword and don’t get in my way, ‘cause I’m not done here yet. Need to retrieve the ones that didn’t break and make sure all the Black Rope is gone. Oh, and take this, too,” Zel said, tossing the pamphlet over to Lydia before turning around, beginning to pick unbroken swords from the ground. The mercenary caught it on reflex, taking only moments to examine it before she figured out what it was.

“Any of these swords?” came a question from behind soon enough. Zel grinned to herself, knowing the meaning.

“Sure, just take one,” she gestured vaguely in the direction of the Fulgur-burned Dragon Knight blade. There came a voltaic sound, and a cry of surprised pain, as the sword released its proportionately tiny lingering charge into Lydia. When she turned to look, Zel saw, to her satisfaction in her own ability to judge others, that the woman was still holding the blade without issue. She asked: “Sure about that? It’ll eat Ignis gems by the handful to work.”

“Why would that matter-”

“It’s yours now, what did you think I meant when I told you to take a sword?” Zel asked smugly. “Just don’t use it to become a beast for me to clean up later on… And come to Willowdale if you ever want to try your hand at cultivation again. The Newman Family could use as many competent disciples as we can get.”

“But this must be the price of a small-” Lydia began to object, but bit her tongue halfway through and just accepted a cultivator’s generosity, not wishing to seem ungrateful, as she still had little reason to believe Zelsys to be any saner than a typical Azoth Stone Cultivator. It wasn’t as if the beast-slayer was listening, as she had finished recovering the remaining blades and was now halfway towards the barn entrance. Inside, she expected to find something akin to a locust-man hive, egg sacs and hive material all over the place, but no such thing came to be. The barn’s interior, save for a number of smaller parasites and a great deal of general filth, was clean, or so she thought.

There was a hole in the back wall, just barely big enough for a human to fit through, a trail of dried blood running from it up to the ladder onto the loft. She found a body up there, splayed out right next to the edge.

“There’s our suspect…” she sighed through the stench of a rotting corpse, which had been hidden by the smell of the grandparents’ bodies. It was an Ikesian, wearing superficially Ikesian clothes, but she knew better. There were subtle details that betrayed this dress as the disguise of a Pateirian collaborator. However, the corpse’s other possessions were better evidence still. The first was an undeniably Pateirian-styled dagger, crusted with dried venom, which she recognized immediately: It was akin to the dagger which a failed assassin had used to kill himself rather than be interrogated. The venom, too, had an unmistakable scent - Heartstopper Venom, the venom of choice for the aforementioned assassin.

The second object explained the infestation: A seal-jar in the Pateirian style, its cork having been removed, and dead Black Rope worms still floating at the bottom.