"As expected of the Bowel Hunter. Even after taking my move and getting hit by a carrier-class turn, you can still stand up."
Grin flexed his slashed right hand, blood slipping between his fingers.
Where the fresh blood dripped onto the ground, a magnificent golden rose bloomed almost instantly.
Unfortunately, most of the life force was spent in the blooming itself and could not be reabsorbed afterward.
The Blessing of the Forest activated soundlessly once again, and the surrounding greenery began to wither.
A surge of life rushed back into Grin's body.
The wounds in his hand healed at a visible speed, severed tendons and bone reconnecting until strength returned in an instant.
Elsa's eyes lit up with manic excitement.
"Amazing… it really has this kind of regenerative power? If I cut you a hundred times… a thousand times… what would happen then?"
To kill the fully transformed Beast Prince, there were really only two methods:
blow him to ashes with overwhelming destructive force, or keep fighting until all the nearby vegetation had been drained dry.
"Can your knife survive a thousand blows?"
Grin narrowed his enormous vertical pupils, and a dangerous pressure swept through the clearing.
Hearing that, Elsa lifted her kukri and inspected it.
Sure enough, a faint crack had already appeared in the blade.
"Damn it, Mr. Beast~ If I lose my fangs, I'll use my claws. If I lose my claws, I'll use my bones. If I lose my bones, I'll use my life. That's the Bowel Hunter's way."
"Alright then~ Let's begin the real battle~"
"Until one of us becomes fertilizer for the soil!"
With a light twist of her wrist, the kukri drew a cold silver arc through the air.
Before the afterimage had even faded, Elsa had already become a black streak lunging straight for Grin's throat—the most vulnerable point on that gigantic body.
"Courting death!"
Grin roared, jaws snapping wide open, white fangs flashing.
He did not retreat.
Instead, he met the strike head-on.
His thick forearm whipped across with overwhelming force, claws crashing down toward Elsa's waist like ten unsheathed kukris at once.
It was a savage trade—injury for injury, death for death.
Man and beast collided at terrifying speed through the forest.
To the naked eye, there were only flashes of crossing claws and blades.
Grin's beast body held overwhelming brute strength.
Every swing of his claws could split a giant tree thick as a man's embrace straight in half.
Where those claws passed, stone shattered, dirt exploded, and the ground was carved into deep furrows.
Finally, Elsa seized the smallest gap—the instant Grin turned and the massive body shifted.
Bang!
She kicked off a broken trunk like an arrow and shot upward, landing nimbly on Grin's broad shoulder.
Then her elbow drove brutally into one of his beast eyes.
Against monsters, striking the weak point was always the most efficient answer.
A sharp burst of pain exploded through Grin's skull.
One eye bulged and burst, and his massive body staggered back two steps, half-blinded for the moment.
That brief hesitation was all Elsa needed.
She flipped again and landed on Grin's neck, both hands gripping one of his giant fangs so hard her knuckles whitened.
Her smile was tinged with madness as she jammed her fingers into the gap between fang and gum and wrenched.
A section of the sharp beast tooth tore free.
"Damn it!"
Enraged, Grin lunged with his jaws wide open.
It happened so fast that Elsa could not dodge in time.
One of her legs disappeared straight into his mouth.
Crunch!
His fangs, like a massive hydraulic shear, pulverized her thigh effortlessly.
The thick metallic taste of blood filled his mouth.
"Ptooey!"
Grin spat the severed limb aside.
"This tastes even worse than Rem's cooking."
Elsa retreated on one leg to a safer distance, but not a trace of pain showed on her face.
Instead, her cheeks were flushed as she stroked the fang as if admiring a priceless relic.
"Splendid~ What a wonderful trophy. Losing a leg was a bargain for something this precious."
Rustle—
The moment the fang was separated from Grin's body, it began to crack.
Tiny roots and shoots burst from the fissures.
Then, once all the life in it had been spent, a golden rose bloomed from the tooth.
That was part of the balance of the Blessing of the Forest:
once flesh left the body, the life inside it returned to nature and transformed into flowers that could no longer be reclaimed.
Elsa was not disappointed at all.
If anything, she only grew more intoxicated.
She bent down, inhaled the scent of the golden rose, and smiled almost dreamily.
"Ah… how beautiful, Mr. Beast. If you were to die completely, this whole place might become a field of flowers."
Then she leaned forward, compressing her single remaining leg like a spring and leveling her blade toward Grin's heart.
In the next instant, she launched forward like black lightning.
Grin's huge tail flicked—
and whipped Meili up as a shield.
Elsa's movement faltered exactly as he expected.
She twisted her waist mid-charge, changing the thrust into a horizontal slash and redirecting it toward Grin's abdomen.
Pfft!
The blade slid smoothly into flesh.
Just as Elsa thought she had broken through, Grin suddenly stepped forward and locked his muscles tight.
Teeth clenched, body tensed, he trapped the blade inside himself.
"Got you!"
Boom!
Grin's right fist smashed down with a sonic crack, his enormous arm no different from a charging locomotive.
"If you can't even understand the gap in strength, what right do you have to challenge a Gold Saint? Taste my lion fang fist!"
The pressure of the blow alone cut through the air like a blade.
Elsa twisted her body into an angle no normal human should have been able to achieve, trying to slip past the impact.
But with one leg gone, she could not complete the movement.
She reacted instantly, drawing her second kukri and slashing at Grin's tail even as she took the hit.
Bang!
Grin's punch landed squarely across her upper body.
Her spine shattered at once, and her whole body folded backward grotesquely.
The force launched her more than ten meters, sending her crashing through several large trees before she finally stopped.
When she came to rest, her body was twisted so badly it barely looked human anymore.
Grin ripped the embedded kukri out of his abdomen, and a heavy gush of dark blood spilled down.
One glance told him the cut had gone deep enough to sever his intestines.
"That was a pretty precise slice…"
Under the effect of the Blessing of the Forest, the wounds all over his body were healing rapidly, and the missing fang in his mouth had already begun to regrow.
But healing did not dull the agony.
The pain from the damaged organs still left him cold with sweat.
Then Grin looked around—
and immediately realized something was wrong.
During the constant cycle of injury and regeneration, the forest within his effective range had almost been exhausted.
If the vegetation density dropped too low, he might not be able to sustain a visible beast form at all.
"I'm turning you into paste right now. I refuse to believe you can come back from that."
This was the best answer Grin had managed to think of.
If he had been even a little more familiar with this giant body, he felt he could already have crushed Elsa by now.