Then, there was that White Snake. Zel saw it as a vastly more mobile and melee-capable Alkasnail, although one lacking that beast’s slime armor and sheer mass, instead possessing surface-level scale armor and regeneration only possible for a construct. It was nevertheless far more dangerous than the Alkasnail. Rikke’s situational awareness made her think that the berserker might also share her senses with the beast, or at least be able to see through its eyes.

It was abundantly clear that Rikke was a mid-range fighter, able to outrange melee but lacking true ranged attacks, which was a non-issue in the overarching ecosystem of Borean arena-combat.

Where Rikke wanted to stay just out of melee range, Zelsys wanted to be either in melee range or well outside even Rikke’s reach. Thus went on a hyperviolent game of cat and mouse, punctuated by clashes filled with thunderclaps and impossibly-fast motion, gusts of Fog spraying from Zelsys whenever she made a blow just slide off when it should’ve hit. When Rikke did land a strike, and it wasn’t rare at all, by the Dead Ones did she hit hard. Zelsys could feel her own ribs bending out of shape and had to force them back with surges of metallum and strategic flexes, but it was by far preferable to the bones just breaking.

“I’ll be beaten halfway to hell by the end of this,” she thought. The notion of a fight that good excited her far more than the prospect of her upcoming climb, and it absolutely showed. She could hear herself unconsciously cackling as the two fought.

The White Snake wasn’t easy to account for, but Zel had more than enough experience fighting outnumbered to make-do. As for the acid spit, Zel figured out that Rikke and the snake both tensed up certain muscle groups just before spraying. Watching for them made her able to dodge it consistently by just predicting the trajectory. She used the occasional predictable blow to stack up kinetic charge whilst also building up and refining Fulgur in her second stomach.

Asgeir quietly seethed in his seat at the implausible effectiveness of that foreigner’s defensive techniques, combined with her apparent ability to just dodge the one thing that could nullify those same techniques.

“That’s ridiculous, it hit her damn near straight on! How did it slide off at that angle?! She’s a thrice-damned Storm-soul Cultivator, aren’t they supposed to be crippled without a weapon?!”

Even when Rikke’s strikes landed, they either didn’t cut nearly as deeply as they should’ve, or they didn’t break bone like they should’ve.

“Just you wait, any moment now the First Beast will awake and you will be crushed beneath the Ramdall clan’s strongest…” he thought, inwardly grinning like a maniac, but outwardly he just smiled. Asgeir had, after all, taken part in the very Spiritgrafting Rite that gave rise to Svend and Rikke. He himself was the first to possess the same spiritual abnormality as those two, his own Beast Selves being a Crescent-tail and a Raven, though he preferred to conjure them in spirit rather than embody them due to the pain of it. It was due to his own experience with the Path of Many Beasts that he understood why Rikke hadn’t called forth her full strength from the get-go. Grafted-on Beast Selves were both weaker and more subservient; the Springspitter and Razorflayer were Rikke’s Secondary and Tertiary, comparatively less intense and far easier to bring out than the First; the Invincible Brambleback. A warren-dwelling loner comparable in size to a Tundra Bear, but possessing such viciousness and fortitude that even the weaker among the sapdragons preferred to avoid its territory. Being Rikke’s natural Beast Self, it was not just a literal Brambleback, but a monstrous, humanized form of the creature with articulated quills that could be launched at near-supersonic velocities and re-grew instantaneously. The few times it had manifested throughout her lifetime, its emergence had worked to combine the traits of all her Beast Selves, magnifying her capabilities by an order of magnitude.

Its terrible power was only matched by the toll it took on her, both physically and mentally, in part due to requiring her to first be badly injured or under threat of impending death to awaken. Rikke’s permanent mutations had all resulted from the First Beast’s previous manifestations, and he wagered this time would have the same consequence. Asgeir didn’t care. He just wanted Newman gone.

Zel was, indeed, crippled without a weapon. She was crippled in the sense that she couldn’t fight at anywhere near her peak capability, but just as Victor could cast without his staff and just as Zefaris could unzip a locust’s head with a regular sparklock, so too could Zelsys beat Rikke into submission without the Butcher.

She also wasn’t just relying on Graze Pulse alone, but subtly turning into strikes specifically to make them slip off. Yet another flaw of Rikke’s bestial state, this one shared with Von Wickten’s armored form; she always struck at full power with full violent intent.

Whence Rikke threw about her right arm and spat acid with it, her mouth, and her snake all at once, Zelsys leapt well over the deluge and in turn spat right back with a spray of her own blood. With a sweeping arc of Retributive Battery-fuelled lightning from her tongue she turned it to a swarm of seething lightning-balls that zipped right after the chimera, chasing her so relentlessly that she placed her own snake in their path, allowing its body to be blasted-through rather than face the full barrage. Even the three fireflies that struck home left gaping, bleeding wounds; two on her back and one on her left arm. Skin and fur grew back in quickly, but real flesh had been destroyed, and that didn’t grow back so quickly as meat-constructs.

Zelsys gave chase, burning what kinetic charge she’d stored up to propel herself into Rikke’s path. In an attempt to evade her opponent, the chimera buried her snake arm in a crater and used it as a pivot, skidding barefoot over the dirt. To her credit, the trick allowed her to flank Zelsys; at the cost of sanding away at the pads of her feet down to raw meat, though it healed quickly. The flanking advantage was instantly lost with a skidding spin across the ground, following through the momentum into a sprint all the way across the arena while Rikke recovered from her maneuver.