The Sarpa moved in slow, lurchy steps, swaying side to side as it scythed through the camp in a devastating arc. Everywhere it stepped, it brought ruin with it, trampling beneath pointed limbs everything that the YellowFolk held dear.

Tents snapped and bent beneath its great heft, and its many legs left deep pockmarks in the sand. As it moved, it clicked its mandibles together in an eerie, clacking warning of its impending approach.

Bo rushed through the wreckage towards the beast, hurrying to intercept it before it got to the Elder's tent and crushed more than just fabric. As he did so, he tried to come up with some sort of strategy. Any way of impeding the Sarpa's movements was better than attacking the monstrosity head-on.

But he didn't have ten men to pin it down or a rope to throw over the wicked stinger that gleamed with black venom that dripped down its cruel point.

That's right… he fumbled in his pockets before eventually finding the dragon's tooth he had gotten from the Sarpa that attacked the Karak's camp what felt like years ago.

Now that he was holding it in his hand, he had to admit that the hook looked far less intimidating than the one on the end of a curved, chitinous tail. That one looked decidedly more venomous, at the very least. An image of the Sarpa spearing that very hook through his chest, hoisting his corpse and waving it like some sort of gruesome flag flashed through his head.

Bo ground his teeth and pressed on, pushing such thoughts to the regions of his mind uninvolved in fighting. He flitted through the darkness like an ownerless shadow, skimming across the sand and closing in on the Sarpa in seconds.

As he grew closer, the beast filled his vision, and he jumped, acrobatically dodging a flailing pincer and stabbing the dragon's tooth into the Sarpa's claw. It skittered off uselessly, sliding away without even a scratch.

Bo cursed and landed hard, rolling and diving to the side as the stinger disappeared from behind the Sarpa and reappeared where he had just been, gouging a deep trough in the sand. The hook moved so fast that he felt the rush of air as it blurred past his head before he saw it.

"Well, that didn't work…" Bo glanced down at the dragon's tooth and back at the Sarpa, frowning.

He knew that if he wanted to cause the thing any serious damage, getting past the almost indestructible armour was his first port of call.

Its exoskeleton was thick and scaly. Thick enough that people used it to make shields that could stop spears like a stone stops raindrops. It was blacker than the night sky and had a slick, oily sheen that seemed to cause anything sharp to slip right off the armour's surface.

But it wasn't indestructible.

The bits that were tough were really tough. But that the bits that were weak…

Bo glanced at the many joints in the scaled armour, chinks he might drive his dragon's tooth through.

Now they were weak.

In the distance, he heard a commotion as someone seemed to have noticed the destruction. He could hear footsteps and shouts, but they were only a distraction.

He ignored the noise and started trying to compartmentalise what needed to be done. First-

Not one to wait for Bo to devise a plan, the Sarpa lunged at him, its pincer swinging around like a mighty hammer and swiping through the air where he had just been.

First, he needed to deal with those pincers, Bo decided.

He regained his balance quickly and dived in, sticking close to the gnawing mandibles and snapping claws so that the hooked tail couldn't get him. He slid in, sending a small wave of sand into the air from his sudden stop and swinging his dragon's tooth around.

The curved white hook flashed like priceless ivory, catching on one of the pincer's joints and holding. Bo wrenched on the hook as the Sarpa's other pincer came flying. He felt something begin to tear before he was forced to duck away, just barely avoiding the looming limb.

Two pincers collided in a loud clatter, smacking each other out of the way and exposing the creature's mouth. It was all mandibles and flailing appendages that seemed to be trying to drag the very air into its maw.

Bo darted in and kicked up another wave of sand, this time intentionally spraying it in the creature's eyes. With its vision obscured, he was free to move in and slam the hook into the Sarpa's compound eye.

It screamed bloody murder, flailing with all of its many limbs in crazed unison as blue blood poured from its ruined eye socket like a gory fountain. A pincer flew one way and a tail the other, everything desperately trying to intercept Bo's hasty retreat.

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He had just barely managed to avoid the tail and claws when one of the Sarpa's tapered legs scraped down his calf in a line of white-hot agony. For a brief moment, his leg almost faltered, but Bo wouldn't let it. He threw himself out of the way of another pincer and rolled under the tattered remains of a tent to catch his breath.

Out of sight, he fumbled in his pocket before finding his leather pouch full of Horus shoots, quickly removing one and stuffing it in his mouth. As the warmth began to spread throughout his body and Bo felt his leg heal, he started to wonder why he hadn't been using Mi in his attacks.

He felt out, and sure enough, it was there, floating just on the edges of his perception in ghostly streams. Although the Mi did seem to be far less abundant than it had been at the Rift.

After catching his breath briefly, he crawled out from under the ruined tent and immediately jumped sideways as the Sarpa's stinger buried itself in the ground where he had just been standing.

His heart was racing as he tried to focus on dodging and manipulating Mi, a task that proved far more difficult than he had imagined.

The issue was that a certain level of concentration was needed to accurately intercept and divert the streams, and he didn't have much to spare mid-fight. Not in a fight this close quarters anyway.

Finally, he decided that if he was first able to disable the Sarpa's pincers, he would then have the space to blast it with fire and end the fight in one go. Which brought him back to square one as the pincers remained decidedly intact.

However, he did notice that the one he had damaged earlier was slower to react to his advances, moving rather sluggishly and sometimes even jerking in the wrong direction.

He decided to focus on that one first and closed in on the Sarpa. His leg burned, but he ignored the pain and concentrated entirely on the task at hand.

As Bo moved in on the creature, harrying its pincer with as many attacks as he could manage, more and more people were noticing the skirmish. While most of the tribe's fighters had died in the Racten's raid, there were still a few that lived, such as Heftor and Bruw - the two old men Bo had taken to find the Borealis.

They hurried to find their swords and rushed towards the Sarpa in militaristic unison, moving with the practised efficiency that comes with surviving for years in the desert as a hunter. Their bone swords flashed in bolts of white, digging hungrily into the Sarpa's joints and drawing little spurts of blue blood with every slash.

Diatra soon joined them, carrying a heavy rope. The rope had a loop at one end, and she threw this over the Sarpa's tail, grunting as she held back the creature's venomous strikes.

Bo moved in and firmly wedged the tip of his dragon's tooth into a joint in the creature's pincer. He tensed every muscle as he pulled, his tendons straining against the monster's immense strength.

Slowly, there was a sound like cracking glass, and the exoskeleton started to bend and warp under Bo's prying. Then, suddenly, there was a thunderous crack, and a deep divide split down the Sarpa's pincer.

The limb went limp, crashing to the sand and dragging there like an anchor.

The Sarpa screeched and strained against the rope on its tail, lifting Diatra a full meter off the ground and throwing her to the side. She strained to keep hold of the rope, but it slid through her fingers and whipped up into the air.

The stinger blurred and smashed down towards Bo, who - rather than jumping backwards or sideways - threw himself underneath the Sarpa.

He looked up to see its underbelly and realised that the armour there was far thinner and the joints more pronounced. It was a lighter shade of black, and perhaps spurred on by a new opening, Bo didn't think much as he drove the dragon's tooth up into the creature's undercarriage.

There was a sound like someone in heavy boots stamping on broken pottery, a sickening crunch that seemed to ring through the night and travel for miles.

Above him, the creature froze, its limbs stiffening.

Blue blood started to pour out of the hole Bo had just carved, and as the Sarpa began to sway unsteadily above him, it occurred to him that he might need to get out of the way.

As Bo started to scramble out from under the Sarpa, it swayed unsteadily, threatening to crush him at any moment. He could sense it beginning to collapse and watched breathlessly as the gap he was trying to escape through narrowed.

It fell to the ground in a cloud of golden dust right as Bo wormed his way out, sending tremors from the sheer weight of its fall.

But far from being dead, the stinger flashed like black lightning and almost speared through Bo's leg. He was just barely able to deflect the almost identical dragon's tooth with his own, but the impact sent him sprawling to the ground.

His heart raced in his chest, beating so fast he thought it might be trying to escape.

And as it raced, he noticed his connection to the surrounding Mi deepen as though the adrenaline were strengthening it. Bo reached out with one hand and brushed against the stream, feeling heat.

He looked around, seeing Bruw and Heftor nearby.

No. Fire wouldn't work; they'd get hurt. He needed something else, something more flexible.

A cool wind swept past his hand in invisible eddies, and he carefully coaxed it towards him. The sand started to swirl around Bo like a small tornado, and he gathered himself, sitting up into a crouch.

He could still remember telling Yvet about the hunter who had jumped on the Sand Shark's back. That hunter had died trying to do the same thing to a Sarpa, and now…

Bo leapt forward, rocketing straight up into the air. The Sarpa shrank below him as he flew above it and then expanded to fill his vision as he cannoned back down towards it. He gripped the dragon's tooth with both hands and held on tight as the wind whipped through his hair.

He hit the Sarpa in a blur, knocking the wind out of his chest and jarring just about every bone in his body. The hook in his hand found its way deep into the back of the creature's head, piercing straight through even the strongest part of its armour.

Its tail twitched like it was about to attack, but suddenly, the monster shuddered and went limp, collapsing entirely. Blue blood began to dye the sand a dark, sickly greenish colour, quickly absorbed by the yellow desert as though the very place was hungry for life.

Bo sprawled to the ground, his arms still trembling from the impact. His leg throbbed, but it was healing fast enough, and he couldn't help but look at the creature's corpse with pride.

He had actually done it. Sure, he'd had help, and it hadn't been pretty, but he had done it.

Bo had killed a Sarpa.

Now all he had to do was deliver his spoils to Yvet.