The sound barrier didn't just break; it fractured repeatedly in a continuous, deafening sequence of sonic cracks. The moment the Beastress launched herself from the edge of the transport ship's hull,
She was different, her bones, flesh and instincts
She was now a beast.
Liora barely had time to reset her stance before the elite was upon her. In her fully unleashed Beast Mode, Beastress's movements were no longer bound by the laws of physics.
She arrived in Liora's immediate space not as a single body, but as a multi-directional tempest of flashing claws and bared fangs.
The first strike was a horizontal crescent slash from the Beastress's left hand. The elongated, four-inch serrated blades of bone and keratin hissed through the air, carving white vacuum lines in their wake. Liora, reacting with the instinctual spatial awareness of a king cobra, coiled her torso backward by a fraction of an inch. The tips of the claws grazed the front of her uniform, shredding the thick fabric down to the base tactical layer, leaving clean, shallow cuts across her chest plate.
But the Beastress didn't overextend. Utilizing her thickened tail as a heavy balancing rudder, she violently pivoted her hips mid-stride, reversing her momentum to unleash a spinning, downward diagonal tear with her right hand.
Liora met the assault head-on, but the nature of the fight had changed.
Liora started fighting like an animal. Like a beast.
She lunged forward from her low crouch, utilizing the low-to-the-ground, explosive bounding mechanics of an leopard. Instead of a clean martial arts punch, she drove her fingers forward like rigid talons, aiming directly for Beastress's exposed throat.
The shift in style was sudden and jarring; Liora's movements became erratic, twitching with the savage, unpredictable rhythm of a wild apex hunter.
The Beastress let out a thrilled, guttural roar, her ears flattening against her skull as she welcomed the savagery. She didn't dodge Liora's lunging hand. Instead, she leaned into the attack, tilted her head sideways so Liora's fingers scraped violently against her collarbone, and brought her own heavy knee straight up into Liora's ribs.
BANG!
The impact rattled the frame of the entire transport ship. Liora, instantly adapting to the trauma, simulated the dense, thick muscle-layering of a grizzly bear to minimize the internal bleeding, using the very momentum of the knee strike to pivot and snap her teeth toward the Beastress's face with the savage aggression of a cornered wolf.
The battle was a blur of teeth, claws, and raw muscle compression.
But as the seconds ground on, the brutal reality of the matchup began to tilt. Liora possessed the vast, adaptable database of every living creature on Earth, but she was still a human cycling through these traits via her consciousness. The Beastress, in her fully awakened state, was an absolute biological anomaly whose base physical stats had spiked entirely beyond the limits of comprehension. She didn't need to cycle through traits; her entire body was the apex baseline.
The Beastress was winning. She was systematically out-powering and beating Liora at her own game.
Liora attempted to lock the elite in a crushing grapple, utilizing the overwhelming, constrictive pressure of an anaconda. Her arms wrapped around the Beastress's torso, her muscles tightening with thousands of pounds of mechanical force per square inch, attempting to shatter the elite's spine from the inside out.
The Beastress merely gritted her sharpened teeth, her expanded shoulder muscles flaring as she dug her boots into the iron deck. With a surge of pure, unchecked physical supremacy, the elite simply expanded her chest, forcing Liora's locked fingers to strain and slip. Before Liora could transition to a different animal trait, the Beastress brought both of her elbows down symmetrically onto Liora's shoulders.
The double blow landed with the force of twin meteors. The sheer weight of the impact overrode Liora's structural density, forcing her knees to violently crack against the metal deck, fracturing the alloy plates beneath her.
"Is this all you can offer?!" the Beastress screamed, her voice a terrifying mix of a human yell and a predatory howl.
Without giving Liora a millisecond to recover, the elite seized her by the front of her uniform and unleashed a rapid-fire barrage of close-range headbutts. CRACK! CRACK! CRACK! The impacts were catastrophic. Liora's vision blurred, blood instantly pouring from her nose and forehead as her mind struggled to maintain the mental focus required to hold her animal traits together.
Liora tried to swing a counter-hook using the explosive, high-speed velocity of a mantis shrimp, but the Beastress saw the muscle twitch before the punch could even form. Moving with a frightening, erratic speed that left three distinct afterimages in the dust, the elite slipped inside the trajectory, grabbed Liora's outstretched arm, and violently twisted it backward.
The joint popped out of its socket with a sickening sound. Liora let out a sharp, breathless gasp, her body leaning heavily to the side as the Beastress delivered a sweeping, low kickoff that completely shattered Liora's left ankle.
Liora fell to one knee, her chest heaving as blood dripped from her chin onto the ruined deck. .
Beastress stood above the kneeling captain, her chest rising and falling in ragged, ecstatic breaths. Her long claws were covered in a mixture of dark dust and Liora's blood, her cat-like tail twitching with a triumphant, unhinged rhythm. The air around her was thick with heat and the iron scent of violence.
"You fought beautifully, Liora," the Beastress whispered, her crimson eyes locking onto the captain with a final, unyielding respect. "But a predator must always finish the hunt."
Liora forced her eyes open through the swelling and the blood, her remaining good arm bracing herself against the metal deck. She tried to trigger the cell-regeneration and adrenaline output of a honey badger to force her body back into an upright position, but her nervous system was short-circuiting from the absolute trauma she had just endured and the continuous use of her ability. Her focus was slipping away.
The Beastress didn't hesitate. She didn't give a long speech, She shifted her weight, her entire body contouring into a single, streamlined point of execution. Her right hand contracted, the four-inch serrated bone claws aligning perfectly until they formed a rigid, spear-like wedge of absolute piercing force.
SHUCK.
The movement was too fast for the eye to track. There was no grand explosion, only the wet, horrifying sound of biological tissue tearing apart under extreme velocity.
The Beastress had struck. Her hand had driven straight through the center of Liora's chest as if they were nothing more than wet paper. The elite's arm was buried up to the elbow inside the captain's chest.
Liora's body stiffened completely, her eyes widening to their absolute limits as the light within her irises began to rapidly flicker. With a slow, deliberate movement, the Beastress retracted her hand.
Clutched firmly within her blood-drenched fingers was a pulsing, crimson mass—Liora's heart, still twitching with the final, desperate electrical impulses of a dying vanguard commander. The elite held it aloft, the steam rising from the vital organ in the cool atmosphere of the moving planet.
Liora's body collapsed forward, hitting the fractured metal deck with a dull, hollow thud. Her arms sprawled out uselessly, her blood quickly pooling around her unmoving form as the silence of the void reclaimed the clearing.
"Good bye liora" beastress said as she dropped liora's heart on the ground.