Quick as a Sliverbeam Rabbit fell the night and rose the moon, again the Star Spawn billowed in numbers, and again the Greedy Bulls and the Banshee Boars were born anew.

  “I’ll give you a count to ten to either die by sword or die in my belly!” Kenny shouted at the Star Spawn in his yard.

  The audacity of the man drew the attention of every Star Spawn in his yard while Alexandra hung her head and rested her face in her hands. The problem was that his taunting was effective, and the Hens had taken only a second to get by his side and used their razor blades to disembowel Kenny. Well, assuming that Kenny had bowels at this moment, but the first Hen to impact him got their blade stuck in his torso.

  “Ooh,” Kenny said to the Hen between his legs. “Bad place to be.”

  Then the wound’s edge burst open into Threads and wrapped around the blade, instantly crushing the blade into oblivion as Kenny’s thighs ruptured into a spider web of lethality. The Threads that were Kenny’s thighs eagerly absorbed the Hen before all of the threads sank back into his body, resuming his prior form.

  He then yelped as the two Curs tackled him to the ground and spewed their flames as many more Hens were thrown at him by their powerful legs. Alexandra saw a small pillar of biomass spike into the dirt from Kenny’s back as she lunged at the Greedy Bulls to stop their tendrils from impacting Kenny.

  “Well, that’s confirmation that they don’t have a Hivemind!” Alexandra yelled. “If they did, they wouldn’t touch you.”

  The ground around Kenny rose and crushed the Curs and Hens that had trapped Kenny in a massive mouth. Before it crumbled and reformed into Kenny’s human body, though he had massive wings on his back, he crouched down as his hands formed into his claws and he grew a long, serrated tail for balance.

  “Alright!” Kenny yelled at the closest Greedy Bull. “It seems like you want some!”

  Whatever mockery of intelligence inhabited the Starspawn made the beast shake its head before the Bull bellowed and lashed its tendrils at him. Before Alexandra’s sword sliced the tendrils in half as her sword swung downwards, cutting off the rear left leg of the beast. As the Bull fell, Alexandra leaped and kicked it on the chest, propelling the dying beast to Kenny’s feet.

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  “Ugh, remind me tomorrow to gather bonfire supplies so that we can cook these bastards right away,” Alexandra asked.

  Kenny nodded as he was shoulder deep in the Greedy Bull that was steadily dissolving into his Threads.

  Unfortunately, and thankfully, most of the Greedy Bulls and the Banshee Boar had moved on to assault the town. Which left only two more Greedy Bulls and the hundreds of Curs and Hens to deal with. Kenny took the Bull on the right, and Alexandra took the Bull on the left. Kenny gripped his spear as he plunged it into the left front leg of his Bull before its tendrils slapped the haft of his weapon. The Bull ripped the spear from his hands and slapped the spear against his head hard enough to force Kenny into the ground, leaving an outline of his body in the dirt.

  “Ow,” Kenny muttered from his prison.

  Kenny dissolved himself and reformed his body outside the impact outline as his arms grew into thick blades, his waist mutated into a swivel joint, and his calves exploded with a burst of air, propelling Kenny's blades first into the Bull. The Bull groaned as its remaining tendrils reached down and slapped Kenny to the ground once more, inadvertently ripping much of the Bull’s flesh from its body. Two of the four bovine stomachs landed on Kenny’s head.

  He was lucky enough not to be drenched with stomach acid and had dissolved his hair into threads that consumed the flesh around him. The Threads that were his hair found their way into the corpse of the Bull and rapidly spread around the organs and hollowed out the bovine. The skin broke away as he reformed himself where the Bull had stood and glanced over to Alexandra.

  The woman had been carving a hole in the horde of Curs and Hens, and had kicked the canine corpses into the air where they harmlessly detonated like fireworks.

  “Wait, do firework rockets still work?” Alexandra hummed as she rubbed her chin. “Maybe we could do something with candy, like that explosive sorbitol thing.”

  As she pondered, her sword cleaved through three of the Nens that lunged towards her throat, bisecting them from head to crotch in one swing per Hen. The sword swung over her right shoulder, dragging its hilt around her back, down to her left hip, and sliced through the Hen that tried to sneak up behind her. Alexandra pulled her left hand upwards as her palm sparked with Lightning Qi, which darted over to a group of Curs, rupturing their flame sacks and charring the grass below them as they detonated.

  Alexandra’s sword finished its orbit of her body, briefly paused at her right shoulder, before it angled itself at a Bull and launched itself at its throat.