Chapter 63 Surren-
The massive, seventeen foot tall, fishman shaped abomination leaned forwards and dug its clawed lizard-like feet into the ground as it prepared to charge. “Shy, acid knives!” Esk yelled and the rogue did as she was directed. With a quick hop her feet were five feet into the air. Her cloak expanded as she seemed to levitate in midair for a moment. Her hands found the two sets of three throwing knives with a pair of yellow and green ribbons on each of them. The half dozen knives flew towards the monster in a long arc. The knives bit into the hard musculature of the monstrosity even though they weren’t traveling very fast.
The monster began its sprint towards the group right as the knives impacted. It had barely taken one step when all the magic stored inside the knives erupted in a directed geyser of magically corrosive acid. The acid was made and fired out of the tip of the daggers which only served to increase the depth of the damage that they would bring.
“Scatter!” Isaac ordered. There was no stopping the monster’s charge but they could bait it around and trip it up from the sides.
The group scattered like mice as the thundering giant ate up the distance between them. Lenna and Fable held their ground however and Isaac immediately knew what they were planning. Isaac moved a dozen feet behind the unlikely pair in an instant and waited for the mushroomancer turned mushroomonstrocity.
“Shy!” Esk called from just out of the path of the charging monster right before it got to Lenna and Fable. “Everything but ice!” He ordered.
Lenna stepped to one side and Fable turned in place so he was watching the incoming massive foot sidelong. Esk slashed across the leg the duo were aiming for but his attack only managed to dig a few inches into the monster’s ankle. The monster took another step. The magic knight and the paladin moved simultaneously to cut the monstrosity’s leg off at the ankle. Two swords tried to cut through the wood-like ropey tendrils that made up the form of their enemy. Lenna’s aura covered sword cut half a foot into the ankle but Fable was long out of mana. Fable only managed three inches. The three spellblades cursed whether silently or aloud as they failed to cut off the monster’s foot. They did manage to cause it to trip however.
The monstrous Ori-Masa stumbled but one of its massive hands reached up and gouged a trio of grooves across the cavern ceiling to keep it from falling on its face. At the same time its other hand reached for Isaac. While the monster was trying to not fall over and also trying to turn Isaac into a take-away snack Shy was hard at work. Shy threw knife after knife into the monster. She threw them three at a time without a single one missing. Another half dozen acid knives followed by another half dozen poison ones. The damage was stacking up but it would take a while for the acid and poison to truly do their work.
Isaac teleported behind the monster and started running away from it as fast as he could. It took him a while to reach full boosted speed and he knew the cavern wasn’t long enough. His boots didn’t have good enough traction. A small spike of fire shot out from Fina, who was making sure to stay out of the way, and hit the monstrosity’s eye. The impact site steamed a bit but there was no other noticeable damage or reaction from the target. Kahtesh’s following lightning bolt hit the same eye to much the same effect only there was a bit more steam and a small amount of the wood-like substance splintered and fell away.
The monster whirled on Shy who had done the most damage to it. It could wait to get Isaac. It knew that if Shy was left alone she would kill it eventually. Her acid and poison was top quality. The consumables alone were probably worth hundreds of gold each. There was a reason she hadn’t really been participating. She was her team’s safety net, scout, and sometimes an extra stab on an enemy here and there. This was one of those times when she fulfilled her role as the safety net.
The monster swung towards Shy to try and grab her. It’s hand was open wide so she would have trouble dodging. It didn’t matter to Shy. The rogue hopped ever so gracefully and rose half a dozen feet into the air only to rest the tip of one of her boots on the top of the monster’s thumb. She twisted in mid air shoved off the monster with only the singular square inch of contact she had made. She almost seemed to fly a dozen feet away from the monster towards the nearest wall as five tendrils unraveled from the monster’s hand and reached out towards her. She was already gone however and they got nothing but air. Shy punctuated the monster’s failure by hitting its hand with a singular throwing knife. The knife glowed a soft green and passed right through the monster’s hand as if it wasn’t even there. The knife’s momentum had been preserved from the time of throwing until it reached the full distance of thirty feet away where it finally dropped and skipped across the ground.
Stolen story; please report.
Isaac hadn’t been idle. He was forced to teleport himself back to his starting point in order to give himself enough space to reach top speed. He was moving so quickly that wind resistance was his limiting factor. His boots couldn’t get enough traction while he was sprinting to overcome the wind pressure he was experiencing. He was now ready to make his move.
Lenna hacked at the monster’s ankle even as she saw it start to regrow. Fable did the same while Esk and Mark took the other one. Fina and Kahtesh continued their focused bombardment on the monster’s right eye. The monster took another swing at Shy but she met its hand with a different throwing knife. This time as soon as the knife hit the monster’s hand both were robbed of all of their momentum. The monster’s body jolted from its hand being suddenly arrested before the entire thing was hit by what might as well have been a catapult.
Isaac teleported with all of his built up momentum while twisting his entire body into the most powerful spinning back kick he had ever done. His boot impacted the side of the monster’s face at such a great speed nothing involved survived unscathed. The laces on Isaac’s boot snapped, his ankle shattered and reformed in an instant, as did his knee and hip. His spine compressed hard enough that his entire body spasmed in pain immediately after impact. Isaac was barely coherent enough through the pain to teleport himself to the ground before he fell. The monster toppled as if punched in the head by an even bigger monster. As the monster fell Lenna and Fable finished chopping through its ankle and it left one of its feet behind before crashing into the ground hard enough to knock stone dust free from the ceiling.
Isaac’s mind cleared nearly instantly as his body was returned to normal in less than a second. The lingering feeling of immense pain was still there however, even with his magic trying its best to cleanse away any remnants of the damage he had suffered. The human mind was not designed to handle so much pain being pulsed through its pain receptors. Isaac shook his head to clear it as he got up.
Before any of the melee combatants could get to the falling, and then fallen, monstrosity Shy was already stacking up more damage on it. Half a dozen daggers with soft yellow ribbons flew across the distance and impacted the monster right before it hit the ground. All six of them detonated and released an electric shock equivalent to half of one of Kahtesh’s lightning bolts. The main difference was that the knives’ magic was designed to spread out throughout the target instead of punching through them. Right after the monster hit the ground and before any of the melee combatants could reach it Shy hit it with the other six of her lightning knives. The twin pulses of one and half lightning bolts worth of electricity shot through the monster causing it to burst in multiple places as the bloody sap inside vaporized.
An inhuman scream was heard from inside of the monster while it was receiving the most shocking attack of its life. Kahtesh added to it with a lightning bolt of his own. The monster’s body started to writhe and the hyphae started to unravel and lash out. Everyone backed away save for Lenna and Esk. The two of them held their ground while carving through the lashing hyphae with their flaming swords. A large bundle of a few dozen hyphae shot towards Isaac but he easily danced back and away while it chased after him. After almost twenty feet the hyphae stopped dead while jolting the rest of the body. They had run out of reach and flopped to the ground before snapping out in random directions looking for food.
“Now what?!” Esk yelled while carving through three more hyphae that reached towards him to devour his nutrients.
“It’ll run out of biomass eventually!” Isaac called from halfway across the cavern. “Unless Shy has more fire to throw around?!”
Shy shook her head. Her hood was still up and her face was still covered by her scarf. Even with all of her midair gymnastics no one had seen her eyes or hair. Her gloved hands had barely even been visible. Her black leather armor was so generic that no one would remember it even if they did see it. Everything about the woman seemed to be geared towards drawing and holding as little attention as possible.
All of the remaining hyphae stopped moving for a second before returning to the main body. The hyphae started roiling and rolling around themselves like a ball of snakes with assumedly the mushroomancer in the middle. As they did so, dead and poisoned mushroom bits were expelled and shed around them. The ball got smaller and smaller as the true work of Shy’s poison and acid was shown. The ball got smaller and smaller until finally it was barely the size of the mushroomancer if he was standing straight. The hyphae started to pull and move like they were trying to form armor over the mushroomancer only for a lightning bolt to punch through the center and fizzle a few inches out the back.
The monster stopped and spasmed before trying to complete the armor again. More bits of mushroom fell and then another lightning bolt hit, repeating the process, then again, and again, and again. Finally there was only an Ori-Masa with only a few hyphae loosely wrapped around him. “Surren-” The fishman began before another bolt from Kahtesh punched through him. He dropped to the ground surrounded by hundreds of pounds of discarded mushroom material and a band of merry adventurers who were just happy the battle was finally over.
Isaac felt the monster’s life finally come to end. The last dregs of its power drifted away in the never ending flow of mana through the world. He let out a sigh of relief and turned to look at his companions before his eyes caught their silent observer. ‘Oh yeah, not out of the woods yet.’ Isaac thought to himself.