A kick to the chest to knock its confused, headless form even further back, to give her enough time to take another breath.

She had enough time to align the cleaver’s cutting edge for an upward swing, but by then it was already at her throat again, swiping and stabbing with its claws as blood gushed from its stump neck in a pattern of frantic pulses.

A left side kick, empowered only by a small exhalation. Its freakishly long arms allowed its talons to dig deeply into her back just as her ironclad boot connected, and she felt the fingers of its right hand snap off in her back when it flew to the ground. The wrenching pain that came with every breath did little to slow her down, but it did more than enough to rile her up.

The creature struggled to its feet, but it was exsanguinated, blinded, and deafened. Its body - covered in its own blood - glistened under the midday sun. It stumbled towards her with its freakish hands held out in a blind attempt to strike, broken ribs protruding from its chest where her side kick hit.

Zel kept her distance, stepping aside as it came at her and severing both its arms above the elbows with a clean upswing. When the cleaver reached the apex of its swing, she used the brief moment of weightlessness to flip it around, once more intending to make use of the push-saw side. “Heartbreaker,” she uttered, exhaling all at once. The technique’s unseen force guided her hands into a diagonal downward stab, the cleaver’s teeth chewing through the creature’s very human flesh and bones as if they were gelatin and soft wood.

A sharp yank freed her blade and allowed the beast’s form to slump to its knees. The upper half of its torso folded forward under its own weight, barely held on by connective tissues and the intact portions of its ribcage.

This didn’t feel like a fight. This felt like putting down a sick animal. Every breath brought with it a jolt of pain. Zelsys lifted her cleaver once again, unenthusiastically chopping at its chest until the top half fell to the ground, then holstered it. The Heartbreaker technique had indeed guided her hand in shredding the creature’s heart, but it brought little satisfaction - there was no Azoth inside.

Zel reached to her back, forcefully yanking out the beast’s broken finger bones as she looked about, thinking where the Azoth on a formerly-human beast could be. Her eyes fell upon its antler-crowned head, eyes already milky-white and empty. Perhaps the brain.

“Only one way to find out,” she thought aloud.

Its skull gave under her bootheel after two good stomps. The brain inside was half-mush, half-pristine, but it wasn’t exactly easy to distinguish which parts were intact with the grey matter smeared on the ground. It wasn’t as if she had the scientific curiosity to care.

She did, however, care for the bulbous, foggy-red gemstone that glimmered amidst the pink slime, nestled between what were at one point the brain’s hemispheres.