With his eyes, Hide saw the core of the Calamity beast.
It was perfectly transparent, completely camouflaged within the golden liquid, about the size of a human heart. It was rolling smoothly around inside her liquid body, retreating up toward her shoulder to avoid the space Hide's arm was currently occupying.
Time seemed to slow to an absolute crawl as Hide's mind raced, piecing the puzzle together with razor-sharp clarity.
'She's a Calamity Lord, but she's still a beast,' Hide thought rapidly. 'Every beast has a core. Every awakened human has a core. The core is the engine. It's the source of the mana, the source of the abilities we use and the transformation. Her body is just a liquid vessel projected by that core.'
He had been approaching this all wrong. They had been trying to kill a liquid body, swinging swords and throwing rocks at water. But a liquid body doesn't have a heart to pierce or a brain to crush.
