Rikke’s right arm by this point had turned into a fully-fledged giant serpent which somehow split off from her and left behind a scale-covered arm with hollow fangs instead of the index and ring fingers’ nails. The left arm mercifully did not turn into a full sized razorflayer, merely gaining feline claws. Not yet finished, Rikke’s legs transformed in perhaps the most gruesome manner of her entire body, also taking the forms of a razorflayer’s mighty digitigrade limbs, but an order of magnitude bulkier and partly armored in thick serpent scales.

While this took place Zel finalized her own metamorphosis, taking seriously Rikke’s previous claim that she couldn’t control herself once transformed. She briefly wondered what Rikke’s third Beast Self was. One could see her trousers stretching slightly to accommodate the growth of her musculature, lightning flashing beneath her skin. A fifth Thundergod manifested.

She seized in place, throwing her head back, teeth gritted while her muscles twitched out of control. Arm-thick serpents of blue-white lightning arced down her arms, her legs, across her head and even between her horns as she pushed through with the sixth, and at last, seventh Thundergod. It manifested subtly; pinpricks of light, alighting in the hollows of the skull atop her head.

Rather than wait for an external initiator, they simply commenced. The bell-like ring of a stone drum resounded right after all three of them broke into an utterly inhuman forward surge. The White Snake from the left, and Rikke from the right, as if to circle in for a pincer attack, but… It was too obvious, something was clearly afoot.

They met in the middle; not Zelsys and Rikke, but Zelsys and the white snake. Its maw snapped open and its fangs shot out right as it lunged at her, but Zel had taken note of its likely poisonous nature based on Rikke’s weird finger-fangs. She also had no qualms about putting her hands in very dangerous places, especially not in her current state, and so grabbed it by the teeth. Flowing along with the serpent’s line of motion, she flipped its several-hundred kilo mass over her own head, only holding on for a moment while she leveraged her foot against it and ripped its teeth out.

Not a moment later she realized she’d been had; a liquid geysered forth from the snake’s bleeding venom canals, but it was not poison. While a fair amount of it evaporated in her fulguric aura, some fell upon her skin, violently reacting against her flesh and eating away at it as it boiled away, exposing raw muscle as well as her most surface-level silver conduits.

“Acid of some sort…” she realized, directing more metallum to the burned areas as she leapt out of range of the creature’s spray. Had they not been reinforced to begin with, she could imagine it eating into her with severity comparable to CP-T.

Asgeir wasn’t a warrior, but his eye was sharp enough to make perfect sense of what was transpiring in the arena. At this high of a level, he was among the few able to keep track of the fight even during the most intense exchanges. He grinned in satisfaction when he saw her skin burning.

“What will you do now, Zelsys Newman? Your so-called Metabolic Alkahest can’t act faster than a Springspitter’s acid, and its composition is specifically suited to dissolving minerals! There is nothing your kineticism can do against it, even if you evaporate a fraction of it!” he thought.

Zel felt something; a disturbance in the fulgurmagnetic field wreathing her body, something she hadn’t been able to do in the past. It fed into her Slayer’s Instinct, allowing her to sense an incoming attack that she wouldn’t have noticed at all otherwise. Despite having felt it coming, it was too late to dodge fully. She just about managed to turn to face her opponent before an inhumanly-distended arm whipped itself around her, fingers curled with the obvious intent to stick into her and inject that acid. She hardened her skin, instantly grabbing the hand, twisting it so that the fingers faced away from her while her braids bit the arm. The force it took to overpower was impressive, she had to admit, but… She bent Rikke’s fingers backwards nonetheless, and sent a tremendous electric surge through her arm to boot. To her surprise, the arm just split off at a point out of her reach with a small splash of blood, retracting as a new hand grew in. The flesh that had wrapped her began rotting just as Rikke herself closed the distance, sprinting at a speed befitting her legs. It was… Weirdly stiff. Her serpent, meanwhile, had righted itself and grown new fangs.

“Alright, enough games!” Zel bellowed as she began zigzagging about the arena, fully using her own mobility to its absolute maximum to meet Rikke in riotous clashes, feeling out the nature of her other arm while adapting to her right. The razorflayer arm’s blade-tendrils were markedly less precise than the serpent-arm, and from what she could tell, could only extend by a small amount; moreover, their blades could only inflict surface-level wounds even if Zel took them head-on, as Rikke lacked the means to metallize them. The blades were secondary, almost; the same strengthening applied to Rikke’s legs also affected her arm, making it able to lash out with such inhuman speed that Zel struggled to defend against it combined with everything else. As if to add salt to the wound, the mutations to Rikke’s head progressed such that it now had a discernible snout, snake-like fangs poking out, and from her mouth the beast-woman sprayed more of that accursed acid.

Zel quickly found that where Rikke lacked the most was mobility. Her upsized razorflayer legs allowed her to sprint short distances in straight lines quickly enough to just about keep up with Zelsys, and she could jump with similarly impressive speed and distance, but that was where her advantages ended. She could barely turn while sprinting at full tilt, and, possessing rudimentary-at-best Fog Breathing, she couldn’t keep up in stamina. By contrast, Zelsys could move at her maximum possible speed for as long as her legs physically held out.