The Seven-Fingered Starbeast screeched in agony, its bellowing voice somehow like a crying baby and a howling wolf and a she-goat all at once.

Archmund’s Ruby floated above him, Mercy, and the four soldiers, emitting a eerie drone. An awfully familiar one, that sounded like a—

“Microwave,” he muttered. This spell wasn’t a ‘lance’, by any means, but an ongoing pulse, his magic thrumming and ebbing and thrumming. A channeled spell.

Mercy’s face was gravely neutral, which Archmund was starting to suspect was a result of a focused effort to suppress emotions. The soldiers were muttering.

This was probably a very disturbing sight. Microwaves were invisible, so from their perspective he was twirling his Ruby in the air and causing a Monster unimaginable pain.

“What are you doing, Granavale?” Mercy asked, voice honeyed. Now that Archmund thought about it, at no point had Mercy introduced himself as male. Not that it mattered.

“I think I’m boiling it from within?”

Mercy blinked very deliberately. The soldiers blanched and started backing away.

“That won’t hit us, will it?” Yald said.

“It shouldn’t,” Archmund said with a frown. “As long as you don’t stand between the Gem and the Starbeast.”

The soldiers adjusted themselves so Archmund was a little more exposed to the danger of the tentacles, and they were less exposed to his death ray.

With every passing moment, the Starbeast’s tentacles shrank visibly as it drew its power towards its core to regenerate itself. Soon they were nothing more than stubs, and then, gone.

Mercy let out a puff of breath. It seemed he really had wanted to harvest those tentacles.

And still Archmund kept his attack going.

There were ways to shield against microwaves, of course. Otherwise microwave ovens couldn’t exist because their emitted waves wouldn’t remain contained in one space. Metal could trap the waves, concentrate them, and block them entirely. A sufficiently large reservoir of water could absorb the energy, blunting its impact, though it would heat and boil if the power was great enough.

But as he watched the beast thrash to and fro, now reduced to a stubby point of a head and seven nubby tendrils, he doubted it could ever imagine such possibilities.

You could stop electricity and heat from coursing your skin by turning them to an insulating substance. Physical blows you stopped by regenerating, or becoming durable, or becoming flexible, or — if you were confident — becoming immune to pain.

But pain was a valuable signal. It told you that something was wrong. How did you stop an invisible beam that caused you pain you could not understand, that seared your flesh right below your skin and boiled your organs? What instinct, what reflex could possibly make a pain so deep and profound it could only be a curse go away?

The Starbeast gave one final, whining keen — and kept giving it. Screaming in pain, like lobsters being boiled. But it had expended so much of its power on useless adaptive defense that it could no longer move.

“Granavale, stop casting your spell,” Mercy said. “I don’t want that to happen to my men.”

Archmund did so, and his Ruby dropped into his palm. It wasn’t at all warm to the touch.

Mercy nodded, and the soldiers strode forward. Together, they raised their mighty Gemstone swords and sliced the Starbeast apart.

The sundered pieces twitched one last time before falling still forever. At their core was a Gem.

The adrenaline faded, and Archmund suddenly became very aware of his blood roaring in his ears, the shakiness of his knees, and the dryness of his mouth.

The air smelled like microwaved shrimp. Was it odd that was why he wanted to throw up?

“If you can help it,” Mercy said, nose wrinkled, “Don’t use that skill for Monster hunting.”

----------------------------------------

They had broken the Starbeast in two, but now they had to butcher it and make use of its corpse.

More precisely, the soldiers did the grisly work — Wrest took the lead — while Mercy and Archmund assessed the spoils.

“So… a ‘Seven-Fingered Starbeast’,” said Archmund. “I don’t think I’ve heard of one of those before. They’re not in the Holy Books, nor in Ardur’s Fables.”

“I made the name up,” said Mercy, matter-of-factly.

“Are there Five-Fingered Starbeasts or Eight-Fingered Starbeasts?”

“There could be. It depends on how common the impulse is in Monsters.”

Archmund frowned. This was very unsatisfying.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

“This is one of the amorphous-types,” Mercy said. “We get a lot of those in Tier 1 Mid Subtier. Beasts driven on instinct. Once you get to the Lower Tier, the Monsters start mimicking beasts of myth and legend. Dragons. Chimeras. Cerberoses.”

“And… do those beasts actually exist, or are they always being mimicked by Monsters?”

“What would the difference be?”

What would the difference be, between a dragon that hatched from an egg and grew up to fly, breath fire, and hoard treasure, against a restless spirit mimicking a dragon in that it flew, breathed fire, and hoarded treasure? Other than the origin, if a dragon broke out of a Dungeon and terrorized the countryside, who could know the difference?

But where did the myths and legends come from, then? Were there true dragons once, or were there only ever stories being played out by restless ghosts?

His thoughts were interrupted by a cry from the soldiers.

“Milord!” Zankto said.

The butchery was halfway done. They had dug out the Starbeast’s Gem; now, they were dissecting its carapace, which fell apart in layers. Zankto presented the Starbeast’s Gem to them.

Mercy raised it to his eye, squeezed with his black-gloved hand, and gave a long, disappointed sigh. “You can have this one, Granavale.”

“You don’t want it? It looks perfectly round to me.”

The soldiers were picking apart the Starbeast’s corpse. Strictly speaking, the kill had been a team effort, which in practice meant that the final distribution was up to Mercy and Archmund.

“It’s… flaccid, is the word I would use.”

“Flaccid.”

“Lacking in volume of spirit. Empty. Deflated—”

“I know what flaccid means… for things that aren’t Gems.”

Mercy’s face scrunched up.

“It’s hard to explain to someone who’s only ever used one Gem,” he said. “You corrupted it.”

“I corrupted it?”

“You remember the basic rule of how big the Gems are.”

“The faster you kill a Monster, the less power it uses on adapting, and the larger its Gem is.”

“Right. And you saw how those skeletons manifested their Gem as daggers.”

“And you can’t melt down Gem gear because…”

“It’s horribly wasteful. Why bother melting and recasting, when a dropped piece of Gem gear—”

“Can catapult a peasant to a hero without needing modifications. Right, right.”

There was probably a similar reason why you couldn’t melt down many small gems to forge or cast a larger Gem that could actually be useful. But then again maybe it was possible, and this was just a marker of status. In his old life, diamonds had a status as the most valuable gemstones. It was possible to make synthetic diamonds in laboratories, but because of massive propagandized advertisement campaigns from the natural diamond industry, the masses preferred to buy diamonds mined from the earth using slave labor. This was just like that.

“Well, anyways,” Mercy said, dropping the Starbeast’s Gem into Archmund’s outstretched hand, “This is closer to Gem gear than a raw Gem. Your magic should be strong enough to know what I mean.”

The instant the Starbeast Gem touched his skin, he felt its foreign magic. It wasn’t a blank slate, an untapped well of power that he could pour his own over and shape and be shaped by. There was an indelible essence, wisps of instinct and memory and feeling, but more prominently was an echo of a searing, boiling pain, that wormed beneath the skin and heated it, just below, just below, just below, and no matter how much armor, how much thickness, how much shield grew, how much the skin went to shadow and was remade anew, the pain wouldn’t go away—

He dropped the Gem.

“You felt it.”

“Its death throes?”

“I haven’t heard it described like that before,” Mercy said, “but it fits. That Gem isn’t raw, despite how it looks. It’s changed to push back against whatever you did to it. If it has any power now, it’ll be related to that.”

Archmund was surprised that his microwaves hadn’t penetrated deeper. Immense, debilitating pain at the skin level was one thing, but honestly he’d hoped to boil the Starbeast from within entirely. The damage had been skin-deep, and the only reason it had worked—

“It was an animal,” Archmund said, “and its primary instinct was to avoid pain.”

He’d read a novel about this once. “An animal caught in a trap would gnaw its own leg off to avoid pain.” A human being transcended. Then later on in the novel the protagonist became a messiah, killed billions of people across a vast and unknowable universe, and died ignobly as a vagrant in the desert. He didn’t want to do that part.

The Starbeast had killed itself, cannibalizing its power to try to make the pain stop. A smarter creature wouldn’t be nearly as susceptible to pure pain.

“That Gem will only be good for whatever that Monster tried to do to save its life. It’s useless to me.”

“Milord,” said Wrest in frustration. “Nothing of use.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing recognizable.”

Archmund turned his gaze towards the butchered corpse of the Starbeast. It was a boneless creature. It struck him that by the time it died, it had become just ineffective protective shell — a thick carapace and barely anything that could be described as flesh.

“Is it safe to touch?” he asked.

“Should be, milord,” said Wrest.

Zantko smacked him on the back, and Wrest straightened up.

“I mean yes, milord. Definitely safe.”

Archmund touched the shredded carapace. It was an odd mixture of ceramic and rubber, somehow. Sticky and flexible like rubber, yet cool and durable like ceramic. Not too heavy to the touch. He pointed his Ruby at a flat spot and fired an Infrared Lance at it; it didn’t burn, and the heat didn’t conduct far.

“Could I make clothes out of this?” he wondered out loud, mostly to himself.

“Clothes. Well. Goddess, who knows?” Mercy said. “I would’ve thought it was useless.”

Archmund gathered as much as he could hold, and the soldiers helpfully grabbed it for their own packs. Hopefully, it would be enough for at least a cape, which would protect him from electricity and heat. He lightly probed it with his magic and found it rebuffed; the Monster had permanently transmuted the material from Gemstuff.

“I guess that’s a silver lining. You can use it,” Mercy said, with a fair amount of grumbling. “You have to kill Monsters that don’t die easily in specific ways. Hit them with ice magic and they’ll grow heat glands. Hit them with strong physical strikes and they’ll make very strong armor plating. And if you can shock them hard enough with electricity, you can get rubber out of them. It’s a very rare resource.”

“I thought it literally grew on trees.”

“Where under heaven would you get that idea from?”

In his old world, rubber literally had grown on trees.

----------------------------------------

The rest of their journey through the Middle Subtier was uneventful. This time, they didn’t bicker, and so they avoided drawing the attention of any Monsters. Archmund was hopeful that if he practiced a bit more and came down with one or two allies as backup, he could take out the rest himself.

“Is this how it usually goes?”

“It always depends on the Dungeon. Your Granavale lands have always been peaceful. True danger is in the depths.”

And soon enough, they came to a clearing.

“Shhhh.” Mercy held up a fist to stop.

Beyond the opening, there was a grand hall, with twin staircases running up to a balcony. It looked much like Granavale Manor.

“That’s the threshold,” Mercy said. “When we go from the middle subtier to the lower subtier. The instant we cross into that room, there will be Monsters. I hope you’re ready.”