“Oof!” exhaled Glenn as he took a blow from the four-armed monster’s mace on his tower shield. Despite how he already braced for the impact, the blow from the hefty mace still had enough force to send him crashing to the stone floor of the cavern, as it carried the monster’s entire massive weight behind it as well.

“Glenn! You okay!?” yelled Bronwen as she squeezed herself between the monster and Glenn’s prone form in time to intercept its next full-power blow. She actually made use of one of her skills as a luminescent shield of light formed in front of her tower shield and took the brunt of the blow, which allowed her to block it while only taking a couple of steps back.

“I think it bloody broke my arm!” replied Glenn back as he tried to rise to his feet with some difficulty. The monster at the end of the third dungeon had proven itself to be a greater challenge than what the party expected. While the strikes from its spear or greatsword were absurdly fast and powerful, they were still tolerable. On the other hand, Ethan was the only one who could take on a blow from its heavy mace without having to make use of a skill to alleviate the impact.

“Hold still, it shouldn’t take long,” muttered Leda quietly as she rushed to the injured Glenn’s side and laid her hands on his shield-arm, where the tell-tale glow of her healing skill started to emanate. Leda’s healing was the main reason the group managed to hold on despite the monster’s overpowering might. They knew it, and the monster also seemed to know it.

“Remember to take cover in the back once you’re done,” said Bronwen as she blocked a spear thrust that was aimed towards Leda. “This thing always aims for you anytime you’re in range. I don’t think the [Heroes] can keep it occupied too well, unlike the previous ones,” she added with a huff. “It’s a damned tough one too, at that.”

Bronwen’s worry was well-placed, as the monster they faced was extremely tough that it pretty much ignored most of the party’s offense, though it did pay attention to Alissa and Joshua in particular as they had managed to land some more damaging blows to it. Most of its weapon strikes were aimed at the two, which was why Ethan focused on defending them, while everyone else mostly had to watch out for the monster’s four clawed legs and its tail.

As it was, the party had mostly failed to do any notable damage to the beast despite all their efforts in a vicious ten minutes. They had to act fast, as it was their buff skills that allowed them to mostly keep up with the monster in the first place, and those generally only lasted around fifteen minutes, which inadvertently placed the party on a timer that constantly ticked down.

“Smith! Think you can do what you did with the beast back in the first cavern!?” asked Alissa as she narrowly avoided a swipe from the monster’s greatblade. She had expended most of her active skills by that time, and had landed several telling blows on the monster, but none of them seemed to be particularly serious. “Its core should be around where its torsos meet!”

“I can try, but are you confident in getting me close enough to this thing? If I focus my skills the way I did last time, it’d be a one and done deal, I won’t be able to pull off another without a long rest first!” replied Joshua, who kept his distance from the monster even as he contributed to the fight with the occasional bolt of lightning. “I’ll need to either be close to it, or you would somehow need to keep the damn thing stationary for a few seconds!”

“I still got [Moment of Truth], but I don’t think that’d be enough to do what we did back then with this one. It’s far too fast and agile,” replied Alissa as Ethan blocked a blow from the monster’s mace and allowed her a breather. “We got to do something fast, though, our buffs are going to start expiring in a few minutes, and then it would just run roughshod all over us.”

“Any other ideas- Ugh! Then!?” asked Ethan as he took another heavy blow that sent him reeling backwards with a cracked shield. His shield had taken a lot of punishment over the dungeon delve, and it was on the verge of failure, with cracks all over its surface, though admittedly this final boss was the source of most of that damage. “I don’t think we would be able to hold on for too much longer, and trying to take it on once more after some rest doesn’t seem like it’d do it much good either!”

If the party retreated to rest, they would be able to enter the battle refreshed, with their skills mostly usable once more. On the other hand, the monster would also take that time to recover its injuries, as it were, and they’d be back at square one, but with their equipment already in worse condition. As such, it was not the most palatable approach, even if it sounded like a logical one.

None of them wanted to fail things so badly to the point that their chaperones needed to raise a hand to help them out, as they knew how much the feats meant to the rest of the party, and besides it would also mean that they had failed. Everyone might have had their own reasons for not wanting to fail, but they were united in that desire to succeed under their own power.

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“Wait…” muttered Alissa as she deflected a thrust from the monster’s spear with her shield and scored a glancing blow of her own on the beast’s stone-scaled arm in return. Her blow did little but to break a couple of the stone scales and leave scratches on several others, which showed just how durable the beast was. “I think we’ve been approaching this the wrong way all along.”

“What do you mean?” asked Ethan even as he parried the monster’s artifact greatsword with his pollaxe. It was not an easy thing to do one-handed, but he also used his shield to help support the weapon in order to withstand the force of the blow. “If going all-out at it has been the wrong way, then what would you suggest instead?”

“That’s the issue. We haven’t been really going all-out on it yet. Us three, especially,” replied Alissa even as she avoided a downward smash from the creature’s mace that left a small crater on the stone floor where the blow landed heavily. “We cannot die. Even if we die we’d just [Respawn] in a while, so I think it’s about time we act like it.”

“Come to think of it… you’re right,” admitted Ethan after a moment of thought. He tried to whack the creature’s arm with his weapon but much like Alissa’s blow, other than breaking a few of its stone scales, his blow did little damage overall. “We’ve been fighting with care all along because Ol’ Henri wanted us to get used to fighting that way, so we don’t get over our heads and get captured by the demons… but this isn’t such a situation, isn’t it?”

“Exactly! If we don’t take this thing down fast it might hurt one of the others, and they can’t come back like we do, so we need to bring it down, pronto! Even if that costs our lives,” said Alissa with some vehemence behind her voice as she saw how Bronwen struggled to stay standing after the woman blocked a particularly vicious blow from the creature’s tail. “Smith! Do you think you can launch your spell fast enough to have it out before this thing gets what’s going on and kills us!?”

“Once the spell has been executed, it’s pretty much fire and forget,” explained Joshua in response to Alissa’s rather unexpected question. “I take it you want to pull off a suicidal charge against it, then?”

“Ethan will distract it while we make the run,” replied Alissa with a nod. “Just let me warn the others first so they don’t do something silly when we pull it off,” she added.

Most of the [Companions] and [Associates] protested when they heard what Alissa had in mind, but could only acquiesce to her decision when they noticed how neither Sir Inolet nor Magus Drummond objected to it. In the end, they pulled an orchestrated assault on the beast’s sides and rear just before Alissa made her foolhardy attempt, in order to give them the best chance at success.

The beast looked as if it was about to strike at the annoying things that were harrying it for a moment, but its attention was soon drawn back towards Ethan, who slammed his pollax in a vicious two-handed blow against the side of the beast’s left foreleg. In turn, the beast swung its greatsword towards Ethan in a vicious blow.

Ethan did not dodge the blow.

Instead, he braced himself behind his shield and took the blow head-on, the blade of the greatsword cutting deep into his mostly broken shield, only stopping barely inches away from his hand. Before the beast could react, Ethan twisted the broken remains of his shield to wedge the blade in place, making it difficult for the monster to withdraw the blade.

That left him open to the spear thrust the monster followed the blow with, but that was within his expectations. The spear pierced through Ethan’s armor, into his abdomen, and out from his back, but he just gritted his teeth and clenched the spear with his muscles, using his other hand to hold on to the shaft and his body weight to prevent the monster from making use of the two weapons.

Right around that time, Alissa activated [Moment of Truth] and rushed in close towards the beast with Joshua in tow. She deposited him close to the beast even as she turned and used both her shield and spear to deflect away a blow from the beast’s mace, something she managed only by the barest margin, as she lacked the strength to do it forcefully like Ethan did.

Alissa then threw herself in front of a clawed leg that moved towards Joshua who was in the midst of activating his many skills and took the blow meant for him. Part of the blow she took on her shield, which was left with deep gouges. The rest of it fell against her chestplate, which similarly withstood the strike with only marks to show where the blow landed.

The chainmail that covered her abdomen was less resilient, though, and the rivets failed under the beast’s forceful clawing, the claws itself piercing deeper into the layers of the gambeson she wore and into her flesh behind it. As a result she was left with four deep gashes across her abdomen that bled profusely, and had to drape one of her arms over it to prevent her innards from spilling out from the open wound.

Even so, she bought enough time as she heard Joshua behind her activate the final skill and let loose with a full-power blast of his magic from close range, aimed right at where [A Critical Eye] had identified the monster’s weak spot. The blast gouged deep into the creature’s body, leaving a charred cavity where it passed as the thigh-thick bolt of lightning burnt through everything in its way.

Before their eyes, the creature began to unravel, its limbs began to droop and started to part from its main body as it lost the coordination that made it so dangerous. Many of the stone scales fell off its body, no longer held properly by the colony of threads that comprised the creature’s body, and they all were certain that the beast would break apart into more manageable pieces before long.

Unfortunately, the beast still managed a last counterattack before it broke apart. Its shield-arm lashed out at Joshua, who was already half-unconscious after exhausting just about all of his mana in one go, and the shield smashed into his side edge-first. The blow caused Joshua’s body to bend over like a shrimp as he was hurled several meters away by the impact.

Alissa saw it happen and was about to cry out but never had the chance to as the creature’s mace slammed into her midriff and pressed her into the ground, the impact likely turning most of her organs into paste on the spot. As if the creature wanted to take her down with it using its last moments, however, she was then stamped down repeatedly by a clawed leg that was in the midst of unraveling.

At least this time death took her quickly so she did not have to suffer for long.