her that said, "So what?" Maybe the Sand Queen had suffered more damage than Alice had accounted for. Perhaps that was all there was to it. The problem was, that child really, truly wanted for everyone to all die together. Would a girl that driven really overestimate her toy soldier by such a degree? Elisabeth found that hard to imagine. On the other hand, she had no means to convey her misgivings to the Three Kings of the Forest, nor would she have even had time to. The gross humiliation continued playing out before her eyes. Scales and claws went flying. Flesh tore. Blood was shed. Viscera was spilled. The Three Kings of the Forest were tearing the Sand Queen apart piece by piece. It was horrible to look at. However, it was also logical. If you wanted to put down someone who was already dead, you needed to destroy their body to the point where it could no longer move. Elisabeth coolly observed the scene before her. As she did, she was reminded of a battle she'd fought once before. This wasn't Elisabeth's first time going up against someone who had been broken. For example, there was her final battle against the demons. By having their egos destroyed, they had attained a whole different sort of power than usual. Aguina Elephabred was a studious man. I've little doubt he knew about the demonic flesh mass and its attack on the Capital. An ominous premonition came over her as she mused on that fact. However, there was no reason to believe that, even if faced with defeat, the Sand Queen would be able to transform herself the way they did. The incident at the Capital came about due to the rare confluence of demonic contracts being mixed with ego death. In the Sand Queen's case, that didn't apply. It had no reason to. Yet for some reason, Elisabeth's sense of foreboding refused to go away. Then the ancient wolf's gargantuan arm sank into the Sand Queen's body. Her skin should have been elastic, but all of a sudden, it lost that quality. Elisabeth's eyes went wide at the impossible turn of events. The transformation was starting. "What's going on?" "The Sand Queen's...falling apart?" The beastfolk let out cries of confusion, and Elisabeth couldn't help but stare as well. However, out of the blue, her instincts as the Torture Princess screamed the answer to her, and all at once, she realized what was going on. Ah, so that's it! The Sand Queen's a corpse! She isn't alive! In other words, that meant that her entire body was nothing more than raw magical material. The demi-humans were poorly versed in the ways of magic. However, they had learned of the beastfolk technique of using corpses as raw material to perform magic with during their joint battle at Ragnarok, and while they thought of the beastfolk as old friends, the possibility of eventually finding themselves as enemies had always been at the back of the demi-humans' minds. It stood to reason that Aguina would have researched the technique in more depth later on. He made a choice based on that knowledge, and the material writhed in accordance. Scales melted, flesh crumbled and commingled with blood, bones faded away, everything swelled up, and, with a pop, it all burst. Ahrasa Aina, o'er Dragons' Graveyard the sun rises and flashes Ahrasa ArÃ©na, blistering sands wash over her cold silver ashes Deep within an eternal sleep, her ever-closed eyes watch over her sheep Ensuring all her descendants are honest and true and good and resplendent Please, my queen, know it is true, believe in us as we believe in you Elisabeth thought back to those lines from the epigraph to the Sand Queen's legend. When she first read the passage, a question had sprung to her mind. Wouldn't an entity that watched over her sheep and ensured that everyone was honest and true and good and resplendentâ€”and with "ever-closed eyes," no lessâ€”be terrifying? she thought. It seemed to her that the song could be taken as something like an aphorism for those children. There wasn't a demi-human pureblood in the world who hadn't heard that legend, and in all likelihood, Aguina had taken away the same impression from it that Elisabeth had. By the looks of things, the song had played a key role in shaping the Queen's transformation. By now, her entire body had crumbled. Her scales had melted away in their entirety, and her flesh and blood were all merged together. She no longer had any sort of defined silhouette. Instead, her whole body from top to bottom had become a soft, flabby blob. And that blob was covered in eyes. Eyes, innumerable eyes, swiveling every which way. That thing wasn't the Sand Queen anymore. It was just an entity that judged everyone and determined if they were honest and true and good and resplendent. It was a monster that saw everything. It was hideous. It was evil. It was wise. It was broken beyond repair. "What the hell is thatâ€”ack, gack, GAH!" "Don't breathe in if you can help it!" Elisabeth shouted as she covered her mouth. "It might well be the last thing you do!" Pungent poisonous fumes were rising up from the fleshy blob at an alarming rate. It was because all the Sand Queen's blood had gotten compressed at once. Soldiers fell to the ground where they stood and started vomiting. Beastfolk had a strong sense of smell. They wouldn't be able to endure it for long. Elisabeth snapped her fingers. Crimson petals and black darkness whirled up and blew as a powerful gust. As she did, the colossal hawk gently flapped its wings as well, protecting its people by blowing away the stagnant air. Meanwhile, the flesh blob began wriggling. Its surface extended outward with terrifying speed, and it turned a bizarre "arm" on its avian foe. The glutinous tentacle grabbed one of the colossal hawk's wings. The inside of the arm was lined with teeth. The blob bit down with them and ripped the wing clean off. Blood splattered the ground. A shrill screech rose up, as did a bellowing roar. The ancient wolf wrenched its arm free from the flesh blob and used its tremendous claws to grab the blob once more. It pulled with all its might and tore the blob in half. However, the halves simply sprang back. They rejoined all on their own and stuck fast to each other. The whole army collectively stared, dumbfounded. The flesh blob had done the impossible, and it had done so in the most ridiculous manner imaginable. It all kind of felt like a bad joke. "Nail Gun." Elisabeth shot some stakes at it to test the waters. A muffled bwoinnnng echoed sadly through the air. All the nails had hit their target. However, that was all they had done. It made sense, in a way. The Sand Queen's body had already degraded as much as it could. There was no point trying to damage it further. Her blood was all blended into her flesh, and her mana reactor had moved inside her body. All her vulnerabilities were gone. At the end of the day, the Sand Queen was nothing more than a walking corpse, and now she was taking full advantage of that fact. For all the efficiency her transformation boasted, though, it was also as blasphemous as blasphemy could be. This wasn't a choice any normal man would have made. In short, that speaks to the sheer degree Aguina has been broken, Elisabeth mused bitterly. Meanwhile, the Three Kings' bewilderment was shaking the air itself. Never could they have imagined their old friend's corpse losing everything down to its very form. In the Sand Queen's current state, it was impossible to even grieve for her anymore. All that existed now was a comedically unidentifiable blob of flesh. A sad realization started dawning on those assembled there. The curtain had closed early on the battle of legend they'd been expecting. All they had to look forward to now was a sad, honorless brawl that would go on until the flesh blob's tank ran dry. Hooves smashed eyes. Claws tore flesh. Poisonous blood went spraying in every direction. The Three Kings of the Forest continued their melee, and the flesh blob took their fierce onslaught head-on. Suddenly, though, it began writhing again. The moment before the next kick made contact, the blob's eyes turned into mouths. It chomped down on the King's leg, hoof and all. The white deer hurriedly wrenched its leg free, but its entire ankle had already been eaten. White bone peeked out from inside the wound. And the ancient wolf's paw met the same fate. Just like its royal brethren, all the flesh on its fingers was gnawed off. The way the flesh blob was fighting was too bizarre for words. The Three Kings of the Forest were getting played for fools. However, the blob's new body did make it considerably more vulnerable to long-range attacks. "Ah, aah, ah, AH, ahh, AAAAAAaaaaaaAaAaAaAAAAAA!" The saints renewed their bombardment. Blinding light smashed into the blob over and over, burning away chunks of it and shaving it down. Compared to before her transformation, fire-based attacks seemed to be far more effective against the Queen. However, there was still a problem. The saints no longer had anyone who could gather and coordinate their attacks or alleviate their burden, and individually, they weren't cut out for protracted battles. Many of them were already vomiting up blood, and it wouldn't be long before they'd all reached their limits. "I had hoped to be able to preserve my mana, but I can see that isn't an option. I'd best be prepared to drain my reserves dry." Elisabeth clapped her hands against the crimson ground and conjured a pair of small stakes. With them, she pierced her own hands through. Her blood poured out, mixing in with the Three Kings' blood that had been spilled across the ground. Elisabeth then used the mixture to draw a magic circle she would normally never use. With it, she carefully called forth the entity she deemed best suited for the job. "Wicker Man!" Darkness and petals burst and scattered, and a dry, snapping sound emanated as dark boughs reached out. A massive, birdcage-like figure knit itself together with the flesh blob at its center. It was far larger than any other time Elisabeth had deployed it, and it was shaped differently as well. This time, it had stumpy limbs and a long, protracted torso. It almost resembled a jail cell that had been locked up tight. Furthermore, its boughs were tightly interlaced. The flesh blob struggled and raged, but the figure obstinately refused to release it. Instead, it burst into tempestuous flames. Dainty, feminine screams rose up from within as a chorus of mouths all cried in minutely varied pitches. However, the person controlling those flamesâ€”Elisabethâ€”clicked her tongue. "'Tis insufficient. I haven't the power to burn her through. Abandoning the Sand Queen's form has made her hardy, I'll give her that." The blob was soft and vulnerable. However, burning it down to charcoal would have required a truly prodigious amount of thermal power. Plus, the mass of eyeballs had begun crying, drenching the flames and weakening them before Elisabeth's eyes. "That Aguina, always a clever one," she muttered, chagrined. Despite the Sand Queen's mind being broken, the finesse with which she was manipulating her body was downright scary. And unlike how fervent her impulse to wreak destruction to protect her race was, she seemed to have no such compulsion to preserve her own form. That alone made her a formidable foe. At this point, it comes to a matter of how much the Three Kings can crush on top of the amount I already burned away. That was the ultimate verdict Elisabeth settled on. The flesh blob's very existence lay outside mankind's ability to fully