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.