Like the wolves with their one-shot bite, the old monkey's mouth stretched several metres wide, wrapped around the trunk, and swallowed the entire base.

This time, however, the tree didn't fall.

After the severed top section landed with a crash, the side it began leaning towards was stopped by a support structure built rapidly from planks pulled out of the lumber swarm. This structure continued to evolve into a cradle that provided even more stability.

Around the old monkey, dozens of other structures were forming to stop the destruction of its next bite. There were pyramidal contraptions for mending ground-level breaks and box-like structures for mid-air.

The old monkey laughed, the human's preparations so amusing.

Henry, mastering this technique against The Wolf Empress, used the Constructionist skill . Despite the supportive structures being much smaller, they were able to bear the palm tree's weight because the lumber had been harvested from a higher-tier plant, which had been grown through selective breeding using skills from the Farmer Civilian class.

This versatility was a benefit of having the cash to level up every skill he could.

On the downside, the type of repairs he could make were much more limited than they seemed. The box structures designed for mid-air breakages - these were a total bluff. Without using the ground to bear the weight at first, it was not possible to attach them before the tree would tip over. Another issue was that a ritual was needed to give constructions a quality called ‘Permanency’. Without this, the monster could unsummon them using its Spatial Bracelet, assuming the thought to do so occurred to it.

Nevertheless, Henry had good reason to believe the monster would be deceived. For one, magic happened to be much stronger during The Redeemer's era, prior to it wiping out knowledge of the old techniques. More critically, though, it was already falling for another bluff: the arrows.

With these trees being hundreds of metres tall, the Skeleton Archers were so far away that the empowerment of their attacks was fading before reaching the monster, reducing most of their damage. Yet this hadn’t stopped the senile monster from dodging as though its life were on the line.

The old monkey ducked an arrow, right in the nick of time. "I am confused, human. This form of mine was born in the branches. Up there, you put yourself at a disadvantage."

"Obviously, that’s not true," replied Henry, "or I wouldn’t be bothering to do this."

"Indeed. But the Why of your actions, this age-worn mind struggles to conjure it. Could you tell me?"

"Sure, if you can reach me. But be quick with it. I’ve got a hairdresser’s appointment soon, and, once I’m gone, I won’t be able to schedule another chit-chat until tomorrow."

Henry lied - the next encounter wouldn’t be tomorrow but rather tonight while the old monkey was trying to sleep. NPCs, even God NPCs, needed regular rest or their mental functioning would degrade, well below the monkey's present senility. This rule had also been imposed upon Henry during his time in these separated worlds, a fact used against him by The Wolf Empress, who'd had her minions hunt him at all hours. Inspired by that special torture, he’d devised his own methods.

"Very well." The old monkey jumped over the support structure, latched to the tree, and began to climb, the optimal hand holds popping out by pure animal instinct.

Henry, faster than the Commander calculations, could tell from the markings carved into the tree trunk that the monster’s standing vertical jump was 1.8 metres, unremarkable, while its climbing speed was 5.1 metres per second. Given that his current altitude was 416 metres, a bit over a minute remained before he would be within the danger zone.

He hoped it would transition to the vulnerable Yin-phase by then. The longer this hyperspeed Yang-phase lasted, the fewer his options for retaliation. For a normal Yin-Yang Monkey, the Yang-phase would have ended sometime before bypassing the river. Alas, this monster seemed to have surpassed the limit.

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For the next test, Henry pulled some lumber from the swarm to build a circular disc below him that hugged the tree on all sides, then he relinquished control of it.

The old monkey stared up at the disc dropping towards it, quickly accelerating. Is disc-design left no inside gaps against the trunk to slip through. With the old monkey's hyper-perception, however, it could scramble along the underside but the width of the structure meant it would lose height doing so.

However, the old monkey didn't need to dodge anything. The universe had furnished this form with a better gift than avoidance.

When the disc was about to collide with it, the old monkey used its bite attack to create a gaping hole.

Passing through this unscathed, it was met with the sight of another disc.

The old monkey patted its stomach joyfully. "A stubborn Tarnak Bison challenged me to a competition eating the wild wheat that covered the Xhozi plains. For weeks on end, we filled our stomachs with mountains of the dry stuff."

Biting another hole, it slipped through that one, too, only to find yet another disc.

Its attempt to bite through this third one failed.

With a sickening crunch, the old monkey’s face crumbled in, the weight of the lumber shattering its skull and snapping its neck.

The disc that had struck it immediately split apart, providing a clear line of sight for Henry to observe the damage.

There was an eerie moment of silence as the wind ceased whipping through the heinous robes, and the old monkey’s body free-fell towards the earth.

Soon, though, due to the regeneration from its health, the shattered bones of its face thrust back into shape, its muscles swelled again, and the wind restarted.

"Nceda," one of the robe's infant-mouths begged, "ndiya kunika nantoni na! Natoni na! Naton—“

The plea was cut short by the sound of vomiting.

Henry ignored the noise and stared at the health bar that popped over the monster’s head.

When it dropped an imperceptible fraction, his heart sank low, pulled the lowest pits of despair by the gravity of his opponent's power.

This monster's healthpool was enormous, over a thousand times the size of the wolf bosses'.

Saana's insane game developers had actually done it. They’d created a 5-million-man boss encounter...for a beginner's tutorial quest.

Lunatics...

Then again, some would view Henry as a million-man boss monster who had no rights being here either.

Aside from showing its health, that single move had revealed two others critical facts. The first, which Henry’d gleaned by adjusting the intervals between the falling platforms, was that the one-shot bite had the same cooldown as that of the wolves – 3 seconds on the dot. The second, from the monster allowing itself to be struck, was that its senility may have stunted its cooldown management.

With this information, many plans for defeating it sprouted, while others were pruned away, never to be used.

The old monkey, coming back from bodily death, its reformed body racked with pain, caught sight of a human dissecting it with his eyes. "Monster!"

Henry, hearing the accusation, analysed it, too.

The click language of the Imbahalaalas they were using had a unique property in addition to being able to compose, transmit, and comprehend large messages instantly. If desired, the speaker could project an emotional state with a degree of subtlety that regular vocal tone alone could not capture. One could make the hearer not only feel one's delight, but the exact degree of delight, the exact flavour. This emotional-transmission property was how Henry'd first recognised the booming thumps he’d heard during the Floppy-Eared Rabbit vision as a language, from the sense of rage it'd induced in him.

Throughout the present exchange with this monster, it'd been projecting its emotions in full. Each of its anecdotes were accompanied by a total shift in its underlying mood, as if the self that had existed in that memory were temporarily possessing its body, until the one summoned by the next anecdote replaced it. Now, when the monster accused him of being a monster, Henry felt a childlike mixture of terror, hopelessness, defiance - the monster’d been like an infant confronting a poacher who'd butchered its family, the bloody cleaver still in their grip.

The child-like emotion created an uncanny juxtaposition against what lay in the monster's future, its ruthless massacre of billions.

This innocent state, Henry realised, could be exploited to bait out the ability it was hiding.

Henry, playing into its fears, raised an open hand towards his trembling opponent, as if reaching for a mosquito buzzing in his face, and squeezed. "Die."

The terrified monkey noticed dozens of logs speed at it from all sides to crush it between their centre.

They were layered too dense to bite through.

The sole opening was above, an increasingly-narrow hallway that would funnel the old monkey straight into the human's menacing clutches.

It couldn't go to him. It couldn't. It couldn't! It COULDN'T!

Its panic summoned from out of the depths of itself something that it had not used for many lifetimes. Its body began to glow, energy collecting from the air, and the wind whipping through its robes condensed around its fists, forming gloves which each seemed to carry the destructive force of a tornado.