Liora's left hand was clamped around Valdor's neck like a steel vise, her fingers digging deep into his pale flesh. But before her fingernails could tear into his throat, Valdor's red eyes flared with a sickening, manic glee.
With a horrific screech of grinding bone, a cluster of thick, jagged ivory spikes erupted directly out from his throat, tearing through his own skin to impale Liora's clamping hand. The bone spikes pierced clean through her palm and wrist, locking her fingers in place so she couldn't tear his throat out.
"Too slow," Valdor hissed, his voice bubbling through the blood leaking from his neck.
In a single, fluid motion, Valdor whipped his right arm upward. The jagged bone blade extending from his wrist flashed through the air with supersonic velocity.
SLASH.
The blade sheared clean through Liora's left shoulder joint. Her severed arm, still pinned to Valdor's neck by the throat spikes, went completely limp.
Blood sprayed across the multicolored sand as Liora stumbled backward, her balance broken.
Valdor didn't give her a single microsecond to recover. He took an aggressive step forward, cocking his left arm back. He tore his own humerus bone free once more, molding it into a longer, sharper lance of dense skeletal matter. With a feral roar, he thrust the lance forward, driving it straight through Liora's chest, piercing her heart directly.
The entire battlefield seemed to freeze. The continuous roar of Mikasa's rotary plasma cannon sputtered to a sudden halt. The shadows writhing under Cryo's command snapped back into the earth, and the remaining ten infantry soldiers stopped their firing lines in absolute shock. Dr. D stared over the hood of the cruiser, his jaw tightening as the dust settled around the two combatants. To the troops, it looked like the absolute end.
Liora hung suspended on the bone lance, her head dropping forward, her wild hair veiling her face. The rainbow sand beneath her feet drank the steady torrent of crimson fluid pouring from her chest and her empty shoulder socket.
Valdor let out a loud, mocking laugh, ready to tear the spear out and watch her corpse collapse. "You see? You can't win, you are too weak."
But the corpse didn't fall.
A low, vibrating rumble started deep in Liora's throat. Slowly, the remaining muscles in her legs tightened, her boots anchoring firmly into the desert floor. She lifted her head, and through the tangled strands of her hair, Valdor saw a terrifying sight. She was smiling.
Blood was actively rushing from her head, her punctured chest, and the ragged stump of her left shoulder .
The severed arm at her side was already bubbling with raw cellular energy, beginning the slow, agonizing process of rebuilding bone, muscle tissue, and skin from scratch. Because the entire limb had been removed and her heart had taken a direct hit, the massive regeneration was drawing immense energy—it was going to take hours to fully regrow the arm—but she was standing. She was alive.
Suddenly, Liora threw her head back toward the sky.
"Hahahahahahaha!"
Her laughter was loud, unhinged, and echoing across the entire desert valley, completely drowning out the ambient sounds of distant plasma fire. It wasn't a laugh of pain or desperation; it was the laugh of a predator that had finally been let off its leash.
Valdor's smile vanished, his red eyes widening as he took a half-step back, keeping his grip on the lance protruding from her chest. "Looks like you've gone mad."
Liora stopped laughing, her piercing gaze snapping directly down onto Valdor's face. The sheer intensity of her aura tripled, kicking up a localized dust storm of colored sand around their boots.
"Mad, of Course I am , this is the real me I'm finally free, do you know how hard it is to be a captain I have to set up an example, so I never fight like I mean it, but now I can go all out, I'm gonna savour this battle."
Liora grabbed the bone lance protruding from her chest with her remaining right hand. With a brutal display of raw physical power, she snapped the thick bone shaft in half, leaving the tip lodged inside her torso while she used the broken piece in her right hand as a makeshift club.
Before Valdor could react to her sudden movement, Liora swung the heavy bone shaft chunk straight into the side of his head.
BANG!
The impact was so violent it shattered the bone club into splinters and sent Valdor spinning sideways through the air. He crashed hard into one of his own generated bone pillars, snapping the thick structure in half.
Liora didn't wait. Activating the predatory instincts and speed of a cheetah, she closed the distance in a fraction of a second. She appeared right over Valdor as he was getting up, driving her right knee straight into his jaw. Valdor's head snapped back, but his instinctual defenses took over. A massive wave of sharp, needle-like bone quills erupted from his face and neck, shooting outward to blind her.
Liora didn't even try to dodge. She let the bone quills pierce through her cheeks and shoulders, using the close proximity to loop her single right arm around Valdor's waist. Channelling the immense, crushing weight of a subterranean behemoth, she slammed him violently into the desert floor with a devastating suplex.
The sand exploded upward in a hundred-foot wave. Valdor coughed up dark fluid, his external rib cage cracking heavily against the impacted bedrock beneath the sand. Realizing his physical durability wasn't enough to keep her off him, Valdor unleashed his core power at maximum capacity.
"Get off me! Skeletal Eruption!"
From the ground beneath them, thousands of jagged, rib-like bone blades shot upward out of the sand like a massive, closing jaw, attempting to mince Liora's body into pieces. Liora spun her body with the fluid agility of a serpent, dodging the majority of the rising blades, though several spikes tore deep gashes along her thighs and midsection. She ignored the tearing of her flesh completely, her star fish traits instantly sealing the wounds behind the blades as she kept moving forward.
Valdor scrambled backward, his flesh tearing open as he grew a massive, curved bone scythe out of his right arm, using his left hand to reinforce the handle with secondary layers of dense calcium. He swung the scythe in a wide, horizontal arc designed to decapitate her.
Liora ducked beneath the swinging blade, the wind pressure from the attack parting her hair. She stepped inside his guard, using her single right fist to deliver a barrage of punches to Valdor's stomach and ribs. Each punch landed with a rhythmic, deafening thud-thud-thud, her knuckles breaking against his hardened bone armor and instantly regenerating with every single strike.
Valdor grimaced under the pressure, his red eyes burning with frustration. He shifted his weight, using the blunt end of his scythe to strike Liora across the face, shattering her cheekbone. Liora didn't even blink. She absorbed the hit, leaned into the pain, and delivered a brutal headbutt right into the bridge of Valdor's nose.
The sound of their skulls colliding echoed across the clearing. Valdor stumbled backward, his vision blurring as blood poured from his broken nose. For the first time in his life, the Elite was feeling genuine panic. He was fighting an unhinged monster that grew stronger and more aggressive the more she bled.
Liora stood in the center of the clearing, her single arm dripping with blood, her chest still holding the broken fragment of his lance, and a massive, terrifying grin stretched across her bloody face. She took a deep breath of the battlefield air, her aura flaring into a dark, predatory shape behind her.
"Come on, Elite!" Liora shouted, her voice echoing with pure adrenaline. "Show me what else those bones can do before I break every single one of them!"