As many scorplings as he’d killed, Velik didn’t have much trouble keeping up with the waves chasing him down. He was nimble enough to keep them from reaching him in groups larger than two or three, but there were some issues avoiding the champion elite. It still hadn’t focused its attention on him, and it was still bleeding profusely from the single wound he’d dealt it. If that was enough to kill it, it’d be the easiest champion he’d fought so far.

He wasn’t betting on it, though. So, while he dealt with the smaller scorplings that kept tearing their way up through rents in the floor, he was on the lookout for another good opening. The problem with that was that the damn thing never stopped moving, and it was so unpredictable that even approaching it was a good way to get swatted across the cavern again.

And then it did something so unexpected, Velik wasn’t sure he’d actually seen what he thought he’d seen. The champion staggered drunkenly to the left, bringing its mouth in line with the corpse of one of the smaller scorplings seemingly through sheer coincidence. When it finished the pass, the body was gone.

Did it… Did it just eat that monster?

If so, he was dead certain that no good could come from that. Champions always had weird, unique skills, and consuming corpses sounded exactly like one of those. The only question in his mind was how many it needed to eat and what exactly it would do with them once it reached that number.

Not killing the scorplings wasn’t really an option, however. If he didn’t keep their numbers under control, they’d overwhelm him. That meant he needed to be more proactive in attacking the champion before it could do whatever it was it was building up to. Just standing back and letting it slowly bleed out was no longer an option.

Velik quickly slew the scorpling in front of him with a [Kinetic Charge] to split it down the center, then turned and sprinted toward the brood mother. It was scooping up another body in its mouth and swallowing it whole—Is this thing immune to their venom, too? I guess that makes sense, maybe?—just as he reached the monster.

Rather than try to dance his way through its scrambling legs and flailing pincers, Velik jumped for the monster’s back. Normally, he wouldn’t even have considered that idea, not with that stinger the size of a broad sword looming overhead, but he liked his odds of dodging that better than the rest of its limbs.

A new problem reared its hand once he regained his balance. Scorplings were tough, even for him. He’d learned to find the weak spots in their exoskeletons and could rely on [Kinetic Charge] to muscle through if needed, but punching through their carapaces without a care wasn’t an option. Against the giant champion version, even the weak spots were hard to do more than just scratch.

[Kinetic Charge] took some time to build up, and he’d just used the last of the skill’s reserves on the scorpling he’d killed before charging the brood mother. In an effort to hurry it up, he pushed the skill as hard as he could while putting his spear through a simple routine, which wasn’t as easy as it sounded when he had to do it on the back of a giant, squirming bug monster.

Something started growing out of the monster’s exoskeleton, like a massive flesh sac big enough for him to crawl into that had seeped out from between the joints in its armor. Whatever that was, it looked soft and squishy, and Velik immediately darted forward to skewer it. Before he got there, the champion’s stinger flashed down in front of him. Forced to dodge to one side, he was too late to stop it from rupturing on its own.

A fresh scorpling crouched on the brood mother’s back, easily the largest one he’d ever seen aside from the champion itself. It didn’t hesitate to scuttle toward Velik, who was busy dodging the brood mother’s tail stinger coming down at him again. It wasn’t terribly accurate, but he supposed when it was that big, it didn’t much need to be.

A second flesh sac started to swell up behind the scorpling, and a third one near that. Is that all this thing does, make more monsters? That’s not terrible, I guess, but it’s going to make for a long, tedious fight.

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Just as Velik was thinking that, the first scorpling opened its mouth. Immediately, a high-speed stream of acid arced through the air. Velik’s eyes widened for half a second as the startlingly accurate shot sped right at his face. Frantically, he ducked and shielded his face with one arm. Fiery pinpricks of pain dotted the exposed skin, but being burnt was nothing new down here.

Before the scorpling could fry him, he lunged forward and stabbed his spear into its body. It didn’t penetrate far, certainly not enough to kill the monster, but that was more than enough to grab the spear’s haft with both hands and lift. The scorpling rose into the air, its legs kicking and flailing wildly, and he whipped the spear into an overhead slash that saw the monster flying free to smash into the wall of the cavern fifty feet away.

The brood mother’s tail came down again, not slamming into its own back, but in a sweeping motion that threatened to scoop him up and, if not bisect him cleanly, at least throw him back to the ground where he’d be in range of its legs and pincers. Luckily for Velik, it was trying not to knock the monsters it had spawned off, too, so the sweep was high enough for him to duck under.

He let the blade of his spear drag across the tail as it swished by, but that was just as heavily armored as the rest of the monster. He might have left a scratch across its length; it was there and gone too fast for him to tell. Then the two scorplings that had grown out of the sacs on its back tore their way free and focused on Velik.

Okay, I need to find some way to go on the offensive. Other than that opening strike to the mouth, I haven’t hurt this thing yet. There’s got to be another weak point that doesn’t involve getting trampled or sliced in two trying to reach it. Fuck. Why do these champions always have such heavy armor?

He knew the reason, of course. It was because monsters like these weren’t supposed to be fought solo. Whole teams went at champions, including people with specialized builds to tie up a monster’s attention or to blow it to pieces with magic. All he had for magic was [Phalanx], and that was even less useful than his normal attacks.

Less useful, but not useless entirely. New sacs were already ballooning up, six of them now, while the two scorplings clicked and hissed at him. Unwilling to take a chance at getting shot with a stream of acid, he summoned all four spears and used them to harry the monsters while he closed the distance.

This was a losing strategy for him, not because it didn’t work, but because the brood mother had half a dozen more ready to go with even more of those strange sacs growing out of the joints in its armored back. Though he wasn’t sure how the ability worked, exactly, he thought it must have something to do with the bodies it had already consumed. Even if it could create a new scorpling for each one it ate, it was amazing that it did the work so fast.

This thing has got to be cheating somehow.

It couldn’t just recycle its minions forever. There had to be some sort of inefficiency in the process somewhere, but if it was small enough, that could leave Velik killing the same monsters a thousand times just to defeat this one ability. There had to be some way to kill the brood mother directly, but his spear wasn’t cutting it. Even with its boost to legendary quality, he didn’t have the physical needed to actually hurt the damn thing.

[Kinetic Charge] was finally ready to use again, but just before he could activate it, he saw something interesting. The flesh sacs containing the regrown scorplings would grow, then they’d tear themselves free. The sacs would fall off, and in the spot where they’d been attached to the champion, there was no armor plating. Finally, a weakness.

The next three minutes were among the most chaotic of Velik’s life. He put every single point of his stats to work controlling not only his own body, but the four spears of [Phalanx] to keep the scorpling swarm from tearing him apart. It wasn’t worth the effort to try to kill them, so he settled for knocking them back and pinning them down until he was past.

Scorplings came at him from every direction, some big, others small. Lines of acid shot through the air, the monsters uncaring if they hit each other. Two of the tiniest ones had oversized pincers that produced sharp blades of wind each time they snapped them at him. Those were dangerous enough that Velik had to kill them rather than try to ignore them.

Eventually, he made it through the wave of monsters to where new ones were growing. With a vicious kick, Velik separated one of the sacs from the brood mother, then he drove his spear straight down into the open hole in its back. The result was immediate.

The champion let out a chittering screech of what Velik assumed was pain and spun in place so fast that better than half the scorplings went flying. Velik himself only held his position by using the spear still anchored in the monster’s body as a handhold.

Now we’re getting somewhere! he thought with a savage grin.