In the hours that he spent waiting for the mist to clear, Vance learned a few things about his new surroundings. Rust Lake was one of several havens in Middlerift—places where the Headbound awakened after their journey from the mortal world. And from the existence of such havens, which prevented the creatures of this realm from preying on the unconscious Headbound, Vance inferred that the rest of Middlerift was as dangerous as the battle ring of an ancient colosseum. He expected to be the target of unprovoked hostility, and he prepared himself accordingly.
As for the three monkeys, despite their unpredictable behavior, despite their vulgarity and irrationality, they claimed to be the guardians of Rust Lake. How or why they were chosen for this duty was beyond comprehension. But as Vance played with them a little game to pass time—as he stabbed them and watched them pretend to lose their frustrating immortality—he was able to ask them a few questions and learned that they had been “hired to repay their debt to their mistress.” More than that they did not reveal, and most of his other questions, related or unrelated to this topic, were either mocked or ignored.
The mist eventually cleared, and the games came to an end, with the proud Japheth achieving the highest number of meaningless deaths. The monkeys told Vance that he could now leave the haven and attend to his business. They asked him to follow the path that “winds like a pubic hair,” and they assured him that he would miss their jokes when he reached its shaven end. Guided by their instructions, he traversed the forest, avoided unsightly fungi, and arrived at the described end. But he didn’t feel any particular longing for petty simian comedy. He crossed a transparent barrier, and Rust Lake disappeared behind him like a mirage to give way for a desert.
Gray dunes extended to the horizon, and cold gusts formed sandy vortices, which spun twice or thrice before they subsided. Although Vance was relieved to leave the monkey-infested haven, he didn’t know where to start or where to go, whether to search for the Middlerift Beast that he had to slay or the head that he had to reattach to his neck. In the end, he decided to seek guidance from Thurvik, who could easily resolve the dilemma, so he closed his Mental Eye and cleared his mind. In the deep calm of his concentration, he discovered a trail of bloody footprints and chose to follow them wherever they may lead.
His feet sank into the sand as he ascended the dunes, and they slid, like rocks tumbling down a precipice, as he descended. It was exhausting to walk in such an environment with his type of shoes, which were soon filled with pebbles and sand, and he imagined that he would find ugly bruises when he took them off. He trekked and advanced through the desert, relocating the persistent foot pain to the background of his mind. He made progress, which was visible in the long trail he left behind, but every step filled him with anxiety, because even now he couldn’t see a destination in these unmarked expanses.
I don’t think I need to worry about hunger or thirst, but what if the guidance of Thurvik is wrong? How can I know that I’m going in the right direction? He reached the top of a dune and scouted the area. The monkeys gave me some general info about Rust Lake, but they refused to answer any of my important questions. They didn’t even tell me where I’m supposed to go or how I can get my head back. He felt more frustrated than ever before in his life. Is this some sort of test? Wasn’t I supposed to slay a beast and go back home?
At that exact moment, as the word beast crossed his mind, he heard a gush of monstrous throating. There was a harsh bestial neigh behind him, and when he turned around in alarm, he saw a black three-headed horse racing toward him. It had a wild mane of silver snakes and hooves of green glass. And each of its heads looked different from the other. The first had six horns along its long nasal bridge. The second had teeth that curved out of its lips like claws. And the third had eyes that resembled two will-o’-the-wisps—floating within a ghostly cloud without physical connection to the rest of the head.
Finally. Vance smiled inly. I guess this is the Middlerift Beast I was told about. It galloped toward him, and his heart raced at almost the same speed. This won’t be easy. There were many factors to consider in such a fight, especially because his enemy was faster and freer on the sandy terrain. It also didn’t help that he had already been detected. But I can do it. He started to put together a battle plan to guide his next moves. Equip Spectre. A rough outline was soon complete, but as he worked out its details, suddenly, the silhouette of a rider appeared on the beast’s back and threw his thoughts into complete disarray.
It’s not a beast. It’s a mount. He waited for it to gallop closer so that he could discern the rider better. After a few seconds, the characterless silhouette of the equestrian began to develop three-dimensional features. She was a Headbound, an Adventurer Slayer like him. A dark flame was burning atop her neck. It was strong and steady, even as the desert gusts blew against it. And the rest of her body seemed just as vigorous as this flame. She wore heavy armor that curved along her physique, carried a black spear in her right hand, and had a bow and quiver on her back. All dressed-up for battle.
Vance tightened his grip on his spectral dagger. He didn’t have enough time to tell whether this female rider was friend or foe, so he defaulted to the latter. She was charging at him without warning or explanation, and it would’ve been foolish to wait until she dealt the first blow. I’ll deal with her like any other threat. He waited for her to be within stabbing distance, and his muscles throbbed and twitched as if they were craving enemy blood. I’ll dodge and stab the mount. He watched her black spear, waiting for the lunge, wary of a surprise swing. But she didn’t attack and galloped past him as if he were nothing.
He looked behind him after she passed, and she looked behind her. The first sign of mutual recognition came: she began to decelerate. Then she pulled hard on the mane, and her mount turned its three heads around and galloped toward Vance again. Perhaps she had miscalculated the distance between them on her first charge; perhaps she had been testing his defenses and reactions, probing them with a clever feint. Either way, her second charge seemed more serious than the first. She raised her spear and rotated it above her with both hands.
She’s using a Skill. Vance braced himself.
There was no telling what attack would follow, and there wasn't enough time to preview its range or quirks. The glass hooves battered the sand; the snaky mane hissed; the three heads neighed deafeningly. But as the spear descended into its attack motion, on the verge of the decisive moment, a different noise came from behind Vance. It was a mixture of the soft whisper of trickling sand and the jarring crepitation of moving bones. It sent shivers down his spine, and an ominous shadow overhung him.
“Out of my way!” the rider shouted.
Vance jumped out of her way, and with his body lying prone on the ground, he witnessed the unforeseeable. A two-meter-long fin had emerged from the gray sand, and a purple-eyed skeleton was clinging to it with one hand and brandishing a cross-hilted saber with the other. But it wasn’t this skeleton that the rider confronted with her Skill. No sooner had she gotten close than the osseous enemy pulled the fin back, signaling for an undead shark to surface from underneath the sand.
A mouth opened that could swallow a human with one bite, and tens of rows of sharpened teeth led through it into a gastric graveyard. The hideous shark, commanded by the skeleton, pounced on the rider and her three-headed mount. But she thrust her spear forward, after its last rotation in the air, and sunk it into the gaping mouth before the deadly crunch. The spear blossomed like a rose. From its shaft, new spearheads emerged like the petals of a flower, and each inflicted a grisly wound—piercing flesh and shattering teeth.
The elegant spear Skill was called Warmaiden’s Rose. It had enough power to cripple the undead shark, but it didn’t deal the damage needed to kill it. As the purple-eyed skeleton waved its sword in futile anger, the rider galloped toward Vance, who was now on his feet again. She stopped next to him and said, “Hop on behind me! We don’t have much time!”
Vance looked at the crippled shark, which was starting to wiggle in the sand, encouraged by friendly pokes from the skeleton’s saber. Why didn’t she just kill it with a second attack? He was about to ask, but then he noticed in the distance several other fins of the same sharkskin variety. As they approached from afar, they grew taller, and the skeleton riders who clung on to them began to appear from inside the sand. There were twenty sand sharks and twenty skeletons. And Vance reached the simple conclusion that two Headbound couldn’t fight this crowd on their own.
Banish Spectre. He grabbed the rider’s hand and jumped behind her on the back of her mount. The two galloped away, and the undead followed in pursuit.
“Eleanor. Your name?”
“Vance.”
“What are you doing in the Witch’s Lands without a mount?”
“It’s my first Class Ascension.”
“Your first ascension?”
“Yes.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes.”
“Where did you wake up?”
“Rust Lake.”
“But no one wakes up there.”
“I did.”
Some of the pursuing skeletons raised bone bows and started firing bone arrows, which resembled miniscule tridents—the weapons of a dwarfed and desiccated god of the sea.
“Hold on tight!” Eleanor said. Then she steered her mount right and left, drawing curved lines to avoid the drizzle of enemy projectiles. “They can’t keep shooting forever. They’ll give up soon.”
Stolen story; please report.
But the arrows kept coming. Vance equipped his steel dagger and started to snipe those that got too close. With well-timed slashes and precise cuts, he intercepted them before they could deal damage, and it was only thanks to him that the mount wasn’t lost with a tragic tumble.
“Take over,” Eleanor said, after she had had enough of the enemy fire.
“Take over what?”
“Grab the mane, and keep us going in a straight line.”
“Mane? You mean the snakes?”
“Yes, the snakes. Hurry!”
Vance sheathed his steel dagger, extended his arms along Eleanor’s armored waist, and grabbed the snakes wriggling out of the mount’s neck. They hissed but didn’t bite.
“That’s it. Keep it steady.”
While Vance steered the mount, Eleanor put her black spear inside one of the snakes’ mouths, which closed on it and held it in a horizontal position. Then she equipped her bow, a wood-steel hybrid with a silky string, and pulled an arrow out of her quiver. Turning around, she pushed her breastplate against Vance’s chest, entrenched her left arm on his right shoulder blade (to hold the bow upright), and pulled back the bowstring parallel to his left shoulder. It was a very uncomfortable maneuver, but the situation called for it. She aimed for the closest skeleton and fired an arrow in haste, knocking it off the back of the shark that it was riding.
“Keep it steady.”
She grabbed another arrow and drew her bow. She had more time now, and it seemed that she was activating one of her Skills—Markswoman’s Blaze. Upon release, the arrow burst into smokeless flames and traveled with a fiery spin. It flew above the dunes and struck an enemy skeleton right in the sternum, which shattered into scorched shards and crumbled along with the rest of the bones. The other skeletons fired back at Eleanor, but their arrows hit the shallow hoof marks in the sand; Vance was leading the mount up an acclivitous dune, and the strong wind made it hard to hit an upper target, especially while it was still ascending at a fast pace.
“How long do I have to stay like this?” Vance said, as the breastplate chafed his chest and as he struggled to control the beastly mount. “I can’t even see or tell what’s happening.”
Eleanor fired another arrow and said, “I shot down three of them.”
“Not a single miss?”
“Not with targets this big,” she quipped, before she fired another arrow.
“Are they still firing back at us?”
“Yes … No, wait … They’re lowering their bows.”
Simultaneously with this reversed answer, the skeletons put away their bows and embraced the shark fins, which began a gradual descent and ultimately disappeared underground. The lines in the sand came to dotted ends, and the pursuing undead, who had been so determined to catch their prey, vanished without a trace. It seemed like a welcome development. Eleanor turned to face the front again. She put her bow on her back and reclaimed her spear from the snakes. Then she took back control of the mount.
“Did they give up?” Vance said, looking behind him at the empty desert.
“On firing arrows,” Eleanor said. “Skull Jaws are much faster underground. They’re planning to surface in front of us and cut off our way out of the desert.”
“We’ll fight?”
“No, we’ll lose. Our best chance right now is to cross Dunaliathan.”
***
After the Skull Jaws burrowed underground, as Vance and Eleanor galloped for safety, the massive dunes in the distance ahead of them began to slither and undulate. It was as if the desert itself had become a living creature, with its own will and its own devices; but getting closer, Vance could tell that such wasn’t quite the case. The slate-gray sands weren’t moving out of their own volition; they were being pushed and mixed and stirred like the granular ingredients of a potion. And the alchemist who worked so diligently to produce the concoction was another dweller of the desertic depths—flesh at parts, bone at others.
“What’s that thing?” Vance said.
“Dunaliathan,” Eleanor replied.
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
“An undead Leviathan. Its body forms a ring around most of the desert.”
“And you said we’ll cross it?”
“Yes, we will.”
“You mean we’ll jump on its back and gallop to the other side?”
“It’s the only way to escape the Skull Jaws.”
“Can’t you see the way it’s moving? We’ll get knocked off.”
“Don’t worry.” Eleanor petted her mount. “Agatha won’t fail us.”
The gray-skinned Dunaliathan continued to undulate, raising mountains and carving valleys as if in a speedy time-lapse of geological activity. And Eleanor rushed toward its massive body with unwavering determination—or perhaps irresponsible recklessness, for in such a context, it was impossible to tell the former from the latter. Before she could reach this serpentine churn, however, the shark fins began to surface from the sand, and the purple-eyed skeletons began to rattle and crepitate. The Skull Jaws had finally returned. They cut off the way out of the desert, just as Eleanor had predicted, and their teeth, bows, swords, maces, and spears were lusting for blood.
“We’ll break through their lines in one dash,” Eleanor said. “Are you ready?”
“You can count on me.” Vance equipped his steel dagger.
Eleanor squeezed with her calves and heels, and Agatha, the three-headed mount, accelerated into maximum speed.
“Incoming arrows!” Vance warned.
“I got this!”
The skeletal archers took aim and fired a round of arrows, but Eleanor thrust her black spear forward and activated Warmaiden’s Rose. The dark petals—the budding spearheads—formed a spiky barrier that blocked the enemy fire and mitigated its potential damage. Upon contact, the bone arrows shattered into a cloud of dust and splinters. The sharp fragments scattered in all directions and rained down on the two riders. Eleanor had her heavy armor to protect her, but Vance was wearing plain clothes that offered him no shielding. And his body jolted back as he felt a sudden sting.
“Are you hurt?” Eleanor said.
“No, I’m fine,” Vance said, pulling a bone shard out of his chest. “Just keep going! Don’t slow down!”
With a tri-thunderous battle cry, Agatha emerged from inside the dust cloud and continued to gallop forward. Realizing that their ranged attack had failed, the skeletal archers turned around and started retreating to a position from which they could fire again. The threat of the bone arrows was gone for now. But Vance and Eleanor still had no breathing space: the many Skull Jaws that wielded melee weapons were advancing to fill the void left by the archers. And although these close-range fighters had no real tactician among them, they still managed to launch an offensive much similar to a phased cavalry charge.
“Focus on defense!” Eleanor said. “And don’t retaliate!”
“Got it!”
A skeleton attacked from the left, steering its sand shark with its right hand and swinging a mace vertically with its left. So close was its sharp weapon to decapitating one of Agatha’s heads, but Eleanor reacted with experienced poise and split-second timing. Her spear struck the skeleton’s skull and knocked it back into the sand before it could even finish its attack. No sooner had the first skeleton fallen, however, than another appeared. It raised a shiny basket-hilted rapier and thrust it forward with an elegant motion. Eleanor didn’t have time to react, but Vance was there. He raised his dagger. The rapier slid along the sharp steel edge, but before it could reach the blunt ricasso, Vance had swung his arm up and deflected it to the side. This deflection was enough to disrupt the skeleton’s balance, and it fell off its shark and into the sand.
“Good job,” Eleanor said. “Keep it up!”
Using speed to their advantage, Vance and Eleanor continued to repel the skeletal attackers and avoid the shark bites. They knocked down one skeleton after the other, but they never stopped to deliver a finishing blow, because even the briefest pause would’ve given the Skull Jaws a chance to crowd around them and overwhelm them. They were winning because they chose to remain on the move. And it wasn’t long before they had gone past the last charging enemy. Defying another round of arrows, they broke through the backward line of archers, and the final obstacle between them and Dunaliathan appeared.
There it was—a Skull Jaw twice the size of the others. The fin was four meters tall, and the enormous skeleton that clung to it was once not a human but a giant, who wore a bull-horn helmet and wielded a broadsword. It wasn’t only intimidating: it exuded the unmistakable aura of a predator, and it discharged a mysterious cloud of Mana, which filled the air with a pervasive miasma. Both Vance and Eleanor could feel this dark influence, and the latter tried to steer Agatha away from the path of this enemy. But it was too late.
Status Alert
You have been enmeshed in your enemy’s Ensnare.
You can no longer escape.
HP decreases by 5 points per second until direct confrontation.
Endurance and Magic Resistance drop by 20% during the confrontation.
“Take over!” Eleanor said quickly.
Vance put away his steel dagger and grabbed Agatha’s mane.
“Keep it steady.” Eleanor drew her bow.
The giant skeleton yanked at the four-meter-long fin, and an oversized sand shark appeared from underground, opening a bloodsoaked mouth, with fresh ligaments stuck among its teeth. If a normal shark could swallow a human in one bite, this one could swallow horse and rider with as little effort.
“Keep it steady,” Eleanor repeated, with a hushed voice, as if she was talking to herself. “Keep it steady … Keep it steady … Keep it steady.” When the right moment came, she activated Markswoman’s Blaze, released her taut bowstring, and let three sharp arrows fly simultaneously. Fiery spirals formed in the air as the arrows traveled toward their targets. The first hit the giant skeleton in the sternum; the second struck the upper jaw of the shark; and the third continued into the shark belly and kindled an internal inferno. The execution of the attack had been impeccable, and the results were devastating.
As the shark closed its mouth in pain, Eleanor switched to her black spear and galloped forward at full speed. With a kick of her heels, she gave her mount a signal, and Agatha jumped higher than any ordinary horse. The glass hooves landed on the shark’s closed mouth. Seeing its enemy within its reach, the giant skeleton attacked with a sweep of its two-handed broadsword, even while its bones were burning; but Eleanor activated Warmaiden’s Rose and thrust her spear at the flaming bones. Unable to block her Skill, the skeleton shattered into a thousand pieces, and she emerged from among the scattering fragments, like a victorious knight after a challenging joust.
Battle Result
You gained a reduced 0 EXP.
The Witch of Decay speaks through her defeated conduit:
“Abandon your ignoble cause, Adventurer Slayer. Seek the truth. Seek me.”
“Hang on tight! We’ll make the leap for Dunaliathan!”
Having lost its commanding skeleton, the oversized sand shark began to dive underground. Without losing any momentum, Agatha continued to run on its sinking back. Then Eleanor kicked with her heels again, and the mount jumped for a second time.
“You miscalculated!” Vance shouted.
“I didn’t! Trust me!”
For a few seconds, the two were flying above a deep gorge. Then they began to fall into the darkness, into the valleys that Dunaliathan carved in the gray sand. But they didn’t plummet to their doom; they didn’t end up trapped in the gory serpentine blender. Soon after they began to fall, the undulating body of the undead Leviathan rose from the darkness and welcomed them on board. As the glass hooves sparkled, Agatha touched down with unmatched grace and then continued to gallop across the dead flesh of the serpentine back. Vance and Eleanor were finally on their way to safety.