If Laru was a lunatic, then Quelina was a madwoman through and through.
In her eyes, everything in the world probably fell into just two categories: what she could eat right now, and what she couldn't eat yet.
The parasitic monster cut a straight line through the dense forest; everything it passed along the way, everything but the dirt itself, was swallowed up by its bottomless maw.
"Hee hee hee, little darling, faster, go faster—I can't wait to see that interesting fellow. I wonder what he tastes like?" Quelina said, slipping her fingers into her mouth and biting down on them without noticing, her gaze hazy.
The parasitic monster suddenly reared up, and scales sprouted all at once over its hideous head. As it surged forward they rose and fell, the scales opening and closing, and each one was packed with eyeballs. Quelina bit her own finger until it bled and smeared the purple blood over the top of the monster's head; the countless eyes snapped open at the same moment, and the monster threw back its head and let out a soundless roar. The shock wave flattened every tree nearby.
"Found you!" Adam and Quelina said at the same moment.
"What's that?" Adam asked.
Adam and Quelina discovered each other at the same instant, and at the same instant charged toward where the other stood. Ten-odd seconds later, they met.
Quelina's gaze grew more and more hazy. She drew a deep, enraptured breath over the abyssal creature's egg. "Oh, heavens, what a wonderful scent. You must be delicious. Don't resist—just be a good boy and let big sister eat you up, hmm?"
Adam paid no attention to her raving. From the monster in front of him he felt an oppressive pressure far beyond Laru's, and his curiosity was so great that he actually asked Quelina, "What is this?"
Quelina dropped lightly from the top of the parasitic monster's head and stroked its body. "Want to know? Then become one with me!" With that she slapped the monster, and it plunged straight down into the ground, leaving a large hole behind before vanishing from sight.
The moment Adam felt the ground tremble he floated up. The very next instant the earth split open and the monster burst out beneath his feet, rising into the sky with him, its mouth opening wide, layered rows of fangs bared, trying to swallow Adam whole.
The parasitic monster had no power of flight; it could launch itself into the air only on the strength of its body and its momentum. Adam, though, could fly freely through the sky, and dodged the attack with ease.
"Is that all it can do? Then what's the point of a thing like this? Any apprentice who's mastered flight magic could toy with it, couldn't he?"
Quelina leaned limply against a tree, her finger still in her mouth. "Why resist? Wouldn't it be nicer to just let me eat you?"
Just as the monster began to fall, its body contracted. Adam sensed a high-energy reaction in its mouth, then a red light flared and a blast of fire shot toward him.
The flame in the monster's mouth burned at an extreme temperature; a touch of it burned straight through the defense Adam had built with psychokinesis, and the fierce heat brought him searing pain. An attack it spat out so casually could reach a power of over fifteen.
Adam was startled. Magic? No—this has to be bloodline power.
Adam twisted and dodged through the air, but the monster stayed glued to him, using the recoil of its fire jets to hold itself aloft for long stretches. A moment later Adam held both palms out flat before him; thick torrents of water appeared out of thin air and shot furiously at the flames. Water and fire met in a violent reaction, and dense steam billowed up in an instant.
Under cover of the steam Adam rushed at Quelina. The monster's enormous body meant astonishing vitality, and a thing like that would clearly be very hard to kill. He fixed his target on its master instead.
Adam stabbed one finger forward at the space in front of Quelina, and a High-Pressure Water Line appeared. If it struck her, the result would be no different from what had happened to Laru.
"Naive little thing," Quelina said with a foolish laugh, not stirring at all, still leaning against the tree.
At her words the parasitic monster's huge body burst up out of the ground and blocked the High-Pressure Water Line. A jet that could slice an apprentice's body open with ease couldn't even pierce the monster's hide—it only opened a single wound. The monster roared in pain and twisted back around to bite at Adam.
Quelina hooked her fingers into the wound and tore it wide open. The monster's purple blood sprayed out, fiercely corrosive, eating pits and holes in every direction. Adam hurriedly turned wind pressure on himself and used the crushing force to shoot up into the sky.
"Troublesome," Adam said, frowning. Quelina was the most troublesome enemy he had met so far. The parasitic monster was not much of a threat to him, but in the short term he had no way to threaten it either. He could leave if he liked, but he was intensely interested in this kind of monster, and couldn't bear to just fly away.
Adam flipped over and dropped to the ground. The monster's body was still racing beneath the earth. He crouched and pressed both palms to the ground, triggering the earth elemental magic Hardening: within a radius of thirty meters from Adam, all the soil was crushed into rock by the immense pressure.
The monster was locked in place underground. The part of it above the surface thrashed madly, struggling to break free. Adam immediately cast his second spell, Stone Blades; the monster was savaged from every direction, spewing all kinds of energy from its mouth and flailing wildly at everything around it.
A look of agony crossed Quelina's face. "Does it hurt, my baby? Don't be afraid, I'll help you," she murmured. She drew out a little knife covered in rust and, without a moment's hesitation, stabbed it into her own arm, then dragged it down hard, slashing the arm open until the flesh gaped. Then she softly began to chant, and her arm began to change, until at last it burst apart and flew toward the monster.
At the same time the monster split in two, abandoning the body trapped underground entirely. It let out a shrill roar, and the fierce shock waves became a terrifying attack. Adam stacked five psychokinetic barriers in a row before he could hold it off—and then, before his eyes, something astounding happened.
The monster swallowed Quelina's severed arm in one gulp, and from the stump new body tissue grew at a furious rate; in an instant the monster was whole and unblemished again.
"Just what kind of magic is this?" Adam was truly shocked. With all he knew at present, he simply could not understand the principle behind it. Sacrificing parts of herself to strengthen the monster? But how could one arm—so small compared to the monster's body—supply such enormous nourishment?
Clutching her wound, Quelina slowly sank down. "Baby, it hurts so much," she murmured, and her voice gradually turned hysterical. "It hurts! It really hurts!" She drove the little knife into the ground; the rust on it suddenly broke apart, and the blade bloomed with a blackish-red radiance. At the same time purple blood began welling up out of the earth, and a rank, sickening stench spread all around. Then scraps of flesh oozed up from underground as well—every shred of it shockingly aggressive—and they devoured one another and kept growing larger.
"Kill him, eat him, avenge me!" Quelina screamed.
Then another thing happened that Adam had no way to understand: those lumps of flesh and blood became 'life' in an instant, each one a miniature version of the parasitic monster, squirming over the ground in countless numbers, surging toward Adam to drown him.
Words could not express how horrifying the sight was. Miniature parasitic monsters came swarming over the ground, through the air, from every corner within sight; countless tiny shrieks merged into a noise that felt like it would burst his mind, and countless faint traces of elements gathered into astonishing 'magic.'
The parasitic monster's true body slid along on top of its clones, using them to achieve the effect of flight. Adam was completely surrounded, with no way to flee and nowhere to dodge.
A powerful sense of danger swept over him, and Adam no longer dared to be complacent. His strength gave him no overwhelming advantage over Quelina; there was no longer any chance of taking her alive to study. He had only one option: kill her.
"What a waste," Adam sighed, unwilling to accept it.
Quelina kept cutting away pieces of her own body—everything except the arm the parasitic monster had come from—and sacrificed them to it through some bizarre means. The evil aura around the monster grew thicker and thicker, and Quelina seemed not in the least afraid that she might die of it, giving a shrill, wild laugh: "Hee hee, ha ha, yes—what a waste. You're about to die right here."
Adam shook his head. "I'm lamenting the waste—having to destroy such an excellent test specimen."
Hardly had he spoken when a violent blast of wind pressure blew the monsters away. Streaming fire appeared, blotting out sky and sun: Adam used most of his threads to repeatedly construct the rune group for streaming fire, driving this apprentice-level advanced fire spell to astonishing power. At a temperature of thousands of degrees the miniature monsters turned to cooked meat in an instant, while the parasitic monster's true body recoiled in fear, trying to escape the heat.
The streaming fire fell like meteors, blanketing everything, and it wasn't over yet. Adam pointed one hand at the sky; lightning gathered above, part of it crashing down in bolts, part of it clinging to the streaming fire like ball lightning.
The monster's clones turned to ash in whole swaths. The true body was battered and torn by the spells, huge patches of its tissue gone, its earlier arrogance nowhere to be seen.
Some mysterious link bound Quelina to the monster, and its losses brought her enormous pain—yet she was tougher than Laru. Even as her body kept collapsing, she did not wail; only purple tears of blood ran from her eyes. "My child, my child..."
Adam swept one hand forward, and a jet of high-pressure water shot out. The energies collided and detonated; a blinding light blazed and Adam had to fly clear of the blast. When the light faded he looked down from the sky: a huge crater had been torn into the dense forest, and Quelina and the parasitic monster alike had been blown into nothing.
At the sight of that crater even Adam, who had caused it, was stunned. He had never imagined that the mere stacking of a few apprentice spells could produce a blast close to five hundred kilograms of TNT!
Adam landed on the ground. The residual energy still raged, tearing at his psychokinetic barrier. He walked to where Quelina had been standing and found the little knife there, its radiance gone, back to its rust-spotted look, lying quietly where it had fallen.