He sailed down the river, and the sky continued to tantrum, the Hermit Goliath flying overheard bearing most of the assault. As the night grew darker, the river spilt into ever-larger rivers, and these carried him and his cargo through woodlands and meadows and rolling hills. They sailed past the silhouettes of beasts that howled from the banks, and down into fertile valleys, onto which the pioneer's eye might project wheat fields and fenced-off pens. There were aquatic attacks to his barge, but they rarely came, for, with the Starhunter's preparedness, he'd cleared out most of the dens on the previous upriver journey.
The first Starhunter had been an equally fastidious loner.
One day an army had forayed out into the Parani Barrens tracking the trail of a beast that'd destroyed their city. When they found the monster, it was laid out on the ground, an Earthfriend rummaging inside its eviscerated belly with a knife. The army's commander had questioned this butcher about the identity of the monster that'd slain their quarry. The butcher didn't provide an answer; packing the monster's liver on a cart, he rode away.
That was The Starhunter's first appearance in the record.
In time, people recognised the mute's spectacular kills. Fanatical Earthfriends ventured out to observe him and mimic his ways, The Starhunter ignoring them so long as they didn't interfere. The imitators founded a sect, naming it after his epithet.
Then, as the wind that blows through the dry grasses of the savannah, The Starhunter vanished without a trace, devoured perhaps like his disciples by a stronger beast, or maybe having Ascended to the Cosmos to hunt more fearsome quarry amongst the stars.
Volefan historians had hypothesised that he'd been the son of two exiled Odayakans. In both hunting and butchering, he'd possessed a meticulousness congruent with those obsessive Alignment-pursuers. Moreover, Odayakans, their island situated next to the Parani Barrens, had a tradition of tossing their criminals out into the wilds. Most exiles soon perished, the culture's over-specialisation leaving people ill-equipped to survive alone. If there'd been two exiles, however, one a Floating Leaf, the other a Motionless Knife, the Carcassworker equivalent, then they might have eked out a livelihood. While the former hunted game using their scouting skills, the latter could convert the catch to armour and tools and food. Their child would've had a brilliant schooling in both.
Henry, who'd become somewhat of an expert on Floating Leaf, could confirm the connection. Although Starhunting's offence consisted of Celestial spells in adaptation to the colossal prey, signatures of Floating Leaf were present in the evasive manoeuvres and the methods of evaluating a monster's might.
The next morning of his journey, pushing a little past daybreak, he reached his destination.
The river paused at a lake overlooked by a solitary hill. At the hill's base was a comforting sight, a cottage he'd sculpted from dirt. Out of a chimney, a trail of white hearth smoke was climbing out, and it seemed to billow in the Autumn sleet like a flag of surrender flapping in a storm. A fire had been sustained using a Constructionist contraption that spat out logs at regular intervals. There would also be warm water for a bath and a bed with a mountain of down-stuffed pillows and a clean blanket folded at one corner for him to slide inside easier. Behind the front door, a pair of fluffy slippers would greet him and invite him to shed his mud-stained boots.
When Henry'd been a kid, his mother used to close down the family restaurant after big events like exam season and force his father to help install similar preparations for welcoming Henry and his little sister home. His mother had always gone much further, hanging up tacky decorations and stuffing their stomachs with pastries from the oven. This practice had continued well into his teens, which Henry'd thought ridiculous. They weren't kids anymore, it'd been a needless fuss, a waste of energy that could have been directed into the struggling family business.
Now, he was finally old enough to appreciate the charm of such silly rituals.
Remembering the taste of his mother's trash baking, he trotted past the cottage, transporting the carcass to the laboratory where he still had Starhunting's last step to perform.
The place had been built by hollowing out the hill, and it contained thousands of tons of supplies for Alchemy and Carcasswork and Farming shipped in from his main laboratory back at his farmstead. The Hermit Goliath glided through the entranceway, which had been enlarged previously for an even more massive beast. Henry lay the carcass out on the floor and used Constructionist magic to enclose it in a dome of scaffolding.
Sealing the lab off against monster intrusion and, in turn, blocking all natural light, he rigged up a system of lamps, suspending them from the scaffolding and stringing them on the inside surface of the Hermit Goliath's shell. This armour would need days to split in half - too long. Thankfully, he could work fairly comfortably inside the shell, within a two-metre air gap between it and the monster's real body. Like their namesake, the hermit crab, Hermit Goliaths didn't produce their home but salvaged it from another deep-water denizen - the Goliath itself was a Walrus-Turtle.
Next, he retrieved several chests of Arcane Compressors and summoned from them a set of Carcassworking equipment.
One notable tool was a hacksaw with a translucent, ruby-coloured blade. Enchanted with magic to hone its sharpness, this saw, if dropped from the wrong angle, could amputate a limb with the mere force of gravity. The teeth lining its razor edge had been pulled from the mouths of Piranha Slugs that infested the sea/ocean along this continent's north-eastern coast.
The Piranha Slugs were an example of a Starhunt without glory.
Henry'd trapped them using a simple fishing weir. In the intertidal zone of a bay the slugs frequented, he lay a wall of boulders about a third the water's depth at full-tide. Each boulder was the width of a car and formed from a Tier-4 mineral. Henry'd chosen a rock that was soft-ish to minimise damage to the Piranha Slugs' teeth, but sturdy and thick enough to prevent a timely escape. He also buried boulders under the bay's sand to thwart attempts to tunnel beneath the weir.
When the tide rose high, he then dropped a carcass from another hunt into the bay, placing it inside the perimeter of the weir. This bait soon attracted a school of Piranha Slugs who, lacking brains, swam unsuspectingly over the top of the boulders. Distracted by their feasting, the slug school ignored the receding tide until it had sunken well below the weir's walls and trapped them inside. At low tide, the razor-teethed creatures squirming and wriggling on the open sand, Henry strolled amongst them stabbing one at a time.
Stab, stab, stab, stab, stab, stab, stab, stab...
Another tool was a spiked mallet enchanted to concentrate the power of its swing precisely at the point of impact, the force not dissipating along the X-, Y-, OR Z-axis. Using it, one could puncture a stubborn carapace without damaging the delicate parts behind. Henry'd crafted this from the stinger of a jet-sized dragonfly.
There were hundreds of other pieces of equipment, each with their own backstory, and he would use them all today in the Hermit Goliath's dismantlement.
Grabbing the hacksaw, he went to confront the monster for the finale.
The head protruding from the shell was the height of a giraffe, and the loose, soft skin resembled a walrus's, blubbery folds seeping between the gaps of a cradle structure placed under the chin to prop the head up. Hairs, the length and girth of mammoth tusks, hung in a limp tangle from its face; when the beast had been alive, they'd had the strength to squeeze a man small enough to fit into a toothpaste tube.
Its stillness in death downplayed the extent of the challenge it'd posed alive.
A man might never be able to truly comprehend the terror of a colossus for himself until he has stood under one's shadow on two puny feet, held in place by the preposterous goal of destroying this mobile mountain. Expanding a monster to this size had a way of making every bit of it monumental. The weight of the feet snapped the edges off cliffs, the huge eyeballs and towering height extended its view for miles, its exhalations could lift a person and send them flying like dandelion seeds blown by a child's playful breath.
The task of whittling down its monstrous health pool, alone, was a nightmare. Words couldn't convey the torture of casting the same spells thousands of times for days on end while so many guillotines converged upon you from above, below, from the sides, from everywhere. So many magical abilities that randomly slapped you out of existence. Many of these were insurmountable for the solitary hunter because they'd been designed for groups of thousands of coordinated people. However, one couldn't identify the impossibilities without weeks of investment, trial and error.
The original Starhunters, who'd lacked Henry's blessing of immortality, had been madmen.
In terms of ecological niche, the Hermit Goliaths were amphibious herbivores. They swapped between arctic waters during the colder months, eating seaweed, and broadleaf forests the rest of the year near the coast, where they munched on trees, bark and all. Before taking on this Tier-4, 5000-man specimen, Henry'd prepared by collecting and examining dozens of species in the same biological order. Its cousins ranged from fully terrestrial to aquatic, the latter type being a common nuisance during his surfing trips.
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At this exact time, after Henry'd arrived back at this lab, the other Hermit Goliaths, having devoured the forests of their territories, would have finished trekking back to the sea/ocean for winter. The one splayed out before him, however, would not see another spring, its fate being sealed when it'd been chosen for the hunt.
On its last night of peace, the Hermit Goliath, having grown accustomed to the short, exoskeleton-less biped observing from a distance, had slept in a coastal lagoon. Floating around it had been a clutch of fertilised eggs. In the morning, after it'd frozen the lagoon's surface to protect its brood, an arrow bounced off its shell, triggering a Bloodlust that forced the beast to give chase to the archer.
Henry lured the monster to a canyon and, for the first phase of battle, started by killing thirteen minions that resided in its shell. These minions dealt with small parasites in a mutualistic relationship akin to that between sharks and suckerfish - although, due to the scale involved, the minions were themselves bigger than sharks. Until all of them were killed, the Goliath kept its head and tail guarded within its shell.
His first target had been an aquatic ape that flung Wind-based projectiles which negated his spells. The other minions and the Hermit Goliath didn't stand by passively. Chasing him through an obstacle course he'd carved into the canyon, they pelted him with a volley of abilities, stomping and shooting and stabbing and spitting to try to turn him into a meaty smudge, Henry firing back spells whenever he could slip one through the chaos.
After 97 minutes, the aquatic ape's throwing arm was severed by a whirring
Henry, breaking the Starhunter tenet of maintaining distance out of necessity, then jumped on his skeleton steed and rode through the deadly minion spell volley towards one the Goliath's building-thick legs.
As he neared, a storm cloud of motes gathered around the foot, the Goliath charging up a lethal stomp. Simultaneously, a cow-shaped glob of mucous dribbled from a gap in the hole of the shell for the Goliath's leg.
While the minions scattered, he used
The remaining minions took 12.8 hours, Henry dealing with globs after each death.
The Goliath then entered a second phase. All around this armoured carapace, holes appeared, out of which wriggled hairs that fired blue beams. Upon touching anything or anyone, the beams caused them to freeze and, if then struck by a hair, shatter. The only points of vulnerability were the Goliath's legs. While evading hundreds of ice beams, Henry tirelessly assaulted the ankles, chunks of flesh and fat being hacked off by his weapon swarm and scorched by his spells.
The legs had separate health pools to the Goliath, and whenever they were all destroyed, the monster entered a third phase, finally extending its head and tail to vomit and crap a flood of mucus globs that rushed to repair its wounded limbs. Only during this third phase could Henry inflict significant damage on the Goliath itself, pouring his attacks into the thin film of its eyeballs. To extend this vulnerable phase, he positioned the monster with its front and back hanging over crevasses. Into these, the mucous glob vomit crap spilt several hundred metres down, from which it needed to climb back up.
These crevasses had been natural land features that he'd needed to scout out. Against an earlier Goliath, he'd tried digging crevasses himself that reached down into the subterranean Lake-Stealer rivers, which would have carried the mucous globs far away. However, the game system had deemed these preparations to be over-tampering and therefore granted the monster Sentience, breaking the predictable ability patterns and causing him to get squeezed small enough to fit inside a toothpaste tube.
Also, the mucous globs spat acid arrows.
Following almost four days of alternating between phase two and three, the Goliath enraged. The number of ice-beams doubled, and the mucous glob vomit poop that'd been healing the legs now also revived the slain minions - which one had to contend with in addition to phases 2 and 3. Against another Hermit Goliath, Henry'd died at this transition point, having lured the monster too far from its minions' corpses for the revival to work and thereby triggering Sentience again.
Finally, after this specimen kicked the bucket, an exhausted Henry shovelled out a grove worth of faecal matter from its intestines to reduce spoiling, packed the Goliath on ice, slept 33-hours straight, then began the multi-day ride with it back to this lab.
Now, he used Carcassworker telekinesis to lift the hair tangle sprouting from the slain Hermit Goliath's face to open up a path to its neck.
Approaching it and beginning the other half of Starhunting, pressing his Piranha Slug hacksaw to the skin, he felt a resurgence of that guilt he'd been wrestling with.
It was unlike chopping up a supermarket chicken, where the meat had already been purged of its identity by the removal of its plumage and head. There was an intimate connection that swelled up as one braced their hand against a titan they've slain themself, felt the bristles and wrinkles and the missing heat, and willed the arm to draw the saw back. It wasn't merely a thing that one was cutting into.
His hippy pal peaceloveharmony was fond of citing his repulsion as proof of carnivorism's evils, of the necessity to embrace passivism and treat monsters like friends. "Listen to the heart," he'd lecture, "the heart tells all."
Henry'd never agreed with this simplistic reductionism. Starhunting had added more evidence to confirm his stance, giving him a precise sense of the strength of sentiment invoked for a prey by absurd factors like the litres of sweat shed during the hunt and the prey's visual resemblance to humans. This Hermit Goliath into which he was sawing invoked a much more intense emotion than yesterday's dinner of Geese-Crabs, but did that reflect it having more intrinsic value?
No, the heart was a flawed, outdated instrument. It'd been calibrated to an age when humans were hunter-gathering chimps living in family bands without calendars. But in the world of today, it was no longer correct to speak of 'the heart' - there were hearts, plural, billions of them, which thumped at different paces for different causes. Even within one person, after man had developed his keen sense of time, there were the hearts in future, awaiting beyond tomorrow's unfelt horizons. Because the singular heart of the present lacked the complexity to communicate with all of these, man had to transcend his stirring pulse. He had to seek guidance from many sources: from norms and principles, philosophies, hypotheticals and data, the criticisms of his peers, from the battles that rage between these things, from his doubts and guilt.
Henry wasn't advocating to ignore feelings either. The suppression of emotions was idealised in much of the classic literature he'd been studying these past decades. To him, though, that seemed the foul ethic of slavemasters trying to convince their property to stop resisting. No, man, to the degree that he wasn't alone anymore, had to be a moral omnivore, be heart and mind and society, be in this world and of this world. He must be prepared and able to withstand the occasional stab in the chest, yet never trick himself that it isn't a stab, nor, even worse, that he desires it. He must be capable of dealing out stabs himself, yet always do so with a reluctant thrust.
But these were only his current thoughts. He would still test a decade of passivism during his scheduled climb of moral philosophy.
The blood that'd once been pumped by the Goliath's hearts had coagulated in its veins. The carcass's head separating without spillage, Henry sawed through the neck skin and blubber and muscle and vertebra and spinal cord and vertebra and muscle and blubber and skin.
Rendering the carcass took him about seven hours.
He started with the squishy stuff, beginning with the organs calculated to be most valuable based on the Goliath's lifestyle and prior investigations into related species. Decay had made most of them inedible, but they should be testable for the development of the Nature Energy Grass. The creature's main arteries were wide enough for him to stand upright. To work inside tighter spaces, he inflated Lake-Eater bladder bags, which pushed the sticky tissues away from him and created room to swing and tap his tools. The stomach alone weighed over four thousand tonnes empty. For storing the colossal organs, he excised slab samples from various sites, which he stashed in refrigerated Arcaneworker chests of Mammoth-Lobster bone that would preserve them in perpetuity for later dissection, and the rest he dumped into crude ice pits. Whatever proved useful after analysis would be shipped to his farmstead, and whatever didn't would be released back to the wild very slowly. Disposing of it all at once would cause an ecological disaster, the scavengers gaining unbalanced power from consuming the high-Tier meat - a unique quirk of being in a video game world.
For a job of this magnitude, Henry's speed was impressive. Guided by a pre-planned map and route through the Hermit Goliath's guts, he maintained the frantic but efficient pace of the Starhunters, who'd butchered their prey while racing against the Parani Barren's relentless sun. They hadn't had his luxury of ice. If their territory'd had water to freeze, it wouldn't have been a barren. And if it hadn't been a barren, it probably wouldn't have given birth to those madmen.
The Starhunter hermits, like their mute founder, had been no slouches. Due to their prodigious hunting skills, the beasts of the savannah developed a new appreciation for the danger of man. Over a history spanning many centuries, the sect produced three minor deities. Their greatest Starhuntress, Iyana of The Fifth Light, challenged Central Continent's deadliest monster, a Tier-9 cousin of the Imbahalala, and managed the respectable feat of blowing a hole in its cheek before it psychically exploded her heart.
After the organs, Henry vacuumed out the carcass's fat with a Roach-Leviathan intestine hose, peeled the layers of skin from the muscle with a Lesser Badger-Lobster claw Knife, then hacked and pried the muscle off the bone with an axe made from a Coral Demon Prince's horn. After extracting a couple swimming pools of marrow with a Giant Mosquito-Crab's needle, he dismantled the skeleton using dozens of hammers and pickaxes and pulled it out of the shell piece by piece through the head and tail openings. From the shell, he used a Mega Gopher-Ant's tooth to chisel off a couple tonnes of plates. Whatever marine species had created this armour was unknown, but, from the material's durability, the original occupant had likely been stronger than the Hermit Goliath, which would have stolen the shell after a death by other causes.
As for how the star-shooting, gut-exploring nimrods met their demise, there were two versions of the tale.
The romanticised one told to drowsy children was that the Starhunters had gone extinct alongside the quarry they'd hunted into oblivion. From this, one could take an important lesson about the brittle relationship of interdependence between man and nature. Tamper too much, and you might bring about your own doom.
However, anyone who glanced out on the Parani Barrens today would still spot plenty of colossi roaming its grassy expanse. The sect's true end had been much less poetic. A few bottlenecks occurred over the centuries when core masters perished. Due to the sect's tiny membership numbers, vital skills were lost with each passing. This created a cycle of devolution in Starhunting techniques, of ever-increasing casualty rates until no new practitioners survived their first hunt.
Thus, the savannah was returned to its indigenous beasts.
When Henry emerged from the hermit monster's shell, done for now with the part of the Starhunter, he washed himself off, shuttered up the lab, and went to his cottage to rest until the next one.