Maybe it was because it had training, maybe it was how it was built, or maybe it was just that its opponent was terrible, but the human with the sword was incredibly slow to the experiment. They spent like five seconds charging up their weapon with whatever energy they were using before swinging it forward to release a single blade beam toward its center of mass. Somehow they had managed to make light itself slow. Unarmed, it raises its left arm to meet the wave’s trajectory, taking hold of the negligible mass with telekinesis.

“Weak,” it comments, holding the photons in a loose enough grip that the wavelength equivalent didn’t collapse into nothingness with a cession of motion, instead turning it slowly. “And slow. Do you think your meager instruments are a match for the end of everything?”

Behind it, the not-dead human makes some sort of human noise and presses its hands against the ground, which sprouts up into a pillar of stone, swiftly spreading to fill the whole of the space between itself and the experiment. Fair. This was going to get violent, and at the moment it couldn’t bring itself to care about the potential collateral damage it might inflict on the potentially compromised asset. Self preservation was a decidedly human trait, hence its creation and the safeguards implemented upon it, so unfortunately that didn’t really give it any new information to determine whether that particular human was now too much of a threat to allow a continued existence or not.

This new human, the pathetic specimen that had cost its newly assigned subordinates their introductory cuisine, charged toward it. A simple and ubiquitous meal from a generic local inhabitant would have been an excellent method for artificially inducing a quick and easy sense of belonging with this new area, but now it was going to have to invest time and energy into planning and executing some other extracurricular activity before it could start spending morale on necessary tasks. Almost a full second later, it remembers what was happening, and starts paying attention to the human again. Adequate speed, what one would generally expect from a human. Lazily, the experiment sweeps its tail toward the oncoming flesh creature, only for them to leap over the appendage and slash downward.

Quickly, the experiment interposes its arm between the descending sword and itself. Without the leverage one gains by using the ground as a base, physical strikes tend to lose the majority of their power. Bracing against something to push against is a necessary part of using a tool to hit things, and without the leverage this human was giving up by jumping into the air, it was confident that its ulna would be more than enough to stop this attack right in its tracks long enough to retract its tail.

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Glowing with destructive energy, the sword cuts entirely through the experiment’s forearm, continues downward, and severs the rest of the arm off directly through the scapula.

Well, that changed matters. It was no secret to their enemy exactly what the experiments were vulnerable to, and that ordinary, primitive looking weapon had that property. Complete disintegration. No more playing around, it would actually die if it let that thing hit it in a part of the body that wasn’t non-essential. Winding its remaining half of its tail around the human, it steps toward the center of the room as it lifts the sword-wielder off the ground.

No mercy. It slams the human into the ground, picks it up, and repeats. The sword breaks free after the second slam, but it makes sure to keep going for another seven seconds. It wasn’t like a typical human had the ability to survive that kind of physical impact even the one time, but when objects that had no business existing in a setting just so happen to show up right in the exact place to start working against their interests, it didn’t pay to take chances.

Tossing the limp body out of the way, generating a burst of dust as it collides with the wall above the balcony, the experiment stalks toward the handler-less sword. It picks it up with its telekinetic ability, suppressing any sort of externalization it might attempt to use to strike out against it. Just as it reaches with its remaining hand to grab the weapon, it devours itself with light, disintegrating out of its grip.

Balefully, the experiments glances around the room. Cracks spreading out from where it had slammed repeatedly, sealed wall behind it, and doorways going deeper. There was no reason to go deeper into a place obviously prepared by the enemy, not without preparation. Depending on how far back the ground was seeded, the number of traps and other methods of complete eradication lurking in the darkness was utterly limitless. It was a shame to do so to an entire civilization of humanity, but this entire city might need to be purged.

That had definitely been disintegration. Not even ash or any other remnant of its arm or tail remained in the empty room. With a moment’s focus, it forced new flesh to grow from the cut sections, black ichor flowing outward from the stumps and forming into the base of a new arm and the newly elongated tail before the covering spreads to conceal the fact that it was a horrible amalgamation of slime and actual creature. It flexes the limbs, and strikes at the stone wall, smashing a hole through the magically generated rock.

It retracts its tail back to the size it had been before the modifications, and climbs the stairway out of the mausoleum.

Ham continues not moving, pretty sure he’s still going to die, next to the corpse.