Chapter 201

                                    

                                          

A huge hand rose from the sand, lifting the unmoving victim aloft in its grasp. The victim, whose body and armor had time to recover in the ten seconds that she had been left alone, along with her steed. Sadly, no armor could stop what happens next. With a forceful clasp, the hand made of sand, clenched, and with a disgusting sound, the steed and its rider disappear in a spray of blood and viscera.
In all directions, blood, bone fragments, bits of meat and other torn and minced body parts, like a liquid-filled juice packet sharply squeezed in the hand of a child, decorated the desert surface.
You could not even call such a picture terrifying. Everything happened so quickly and violently that an observer's mind could not even fathom that the minced meat splattered in all directions was a human being and not a mosquito crushed on the wall, leaving behind an ugly red stain. It was more like a strange, absurd delirium than a battle scene. And the fact that the huge arm, which looked like it belonged to a titan buried under the desert suddenly determined to move, vanished into thin air a moment later, without movement or sound, vanishing like a mirage before the observer's inflamed mind, only strengthened the image.
With the thing holding it aloft gone, what remains of the crushed body, fell from a great height in free-fall, no longer supported by the giant's arm. It was also fitting into this narrative.
Medb watched this scene with some interest, trying to determine whether her armor-clad opponent was dead. She also deftly ignored Sita's arrows and Nitocris' spells flying past her face, crashing into the much still able to move and not fully destroyed followers of the crushed Servant, trying to reach them.
The mutilated pile of meat lay motionless on the sand for a few moments, crumbling into the yellow sand, now stained crimson red, the body of the Servant motionless. Before, with a more sickening crunch than the one that had accompanied its crushing by Medb's illusionary arm, the torn pile of meat began to jerk, moving in defiance of the laws of nature.
The shards of shattered bones rose momentarily. As if in mockery of all humanity's knowledge of biology, they began clinging to one another, splicing again and again. The metal armor of the knight's armor then also began gnashing in the embedded flesh, rising with a bone-chewing sound in an attempt to return the body to its previous form.
The mutilated lump of flesh in no way represented the 'normal' state of the Servant's body, but her current actions represented an even more unnatural abomination to human nature.
"How interesting..." Medb looked with interest at the rising pile of flesh, quickly regaining its previous features. Medb began analyzing the power and information of the Servant opposite her, she could clearly judge, swear on it even, that her blow had killed her opponent. The huge hand possessed no other ability than its physical strength, every drop of which it used in this one single attack.
The fact that the Servant was reduced to nothing more than a lump of flesh and a pool of blood and viscera, proof to that claim. And yet, here it is, before her eyes, the viscera reforming into the figure of the Servant she had just killed. Even her armor were returning into its previously pristine from
Certainly, there were all sorts of creatures capable of amazing feats of regeneration, but this regeneration was no such trick. After all, one has to be alive, for regeneration to even be capable of saving a life – and the Servant was definitely dead for several moments before it began to regenerate again.
Resurrection, then? No, the creatures of this world have not demonstrated any such ability – and besides, Medb did not sense any magic activating the moment the Servant 'died'.
Her body was dead for a few seconds, but not herself – her soul, her mind, her... What did the 'players' call it? Her 'expi' had not left the confines of her body.