Despite having seen a couple of leshies in action, I’d never actually fought one before. They were creatures made of rocks, vines and dirt, fuelled and held together by anima. The ones under Balaur’s influence in Romania had burning green anima running through them. This Mistbegotten Leshy didn’t. The eyes twinkled with fading green light, sure, but it wasn’t pure Balaran anima. Was the energy that flowed through this one some simulacrum devised by the Alarendei Empire?

The bushels of flora on the leshy’s back sucked in the mist as it rose from the ground, and I swore at myself internally. I really should have figured out my skills, my stat points, and used my upgrade tokens before facing a boss, but I’d make sure that happened once we defeated this one.

“We’ve seen these before,” I said to Spook. “Never fought one, but I’ve seen them. Anima or mana or whatever the Empire calls it holds their components together, but I can suck anima right out of enemies as long as I can get close enough.”

The Mistbegotten Leshy slammed a fist into the stone floor, which sent a wave of force rocketing towards us. I crossed my arms across my chest and tried to weather the blow, but the strength of the attack sent me stumbling backwards. Spook and Kaiser tumbled away from the force of the blow too.

Spook grunted as she got back to her feet. “A slam attack. As long as we sidestep that whenever it happens we should be able to avoid it. Kaiser, your new ability will come in handy in this fight. Just wait until the right time to use it.”

“New ability?” I asked.

Kaiser: It’s pretty sweet, but I won’t ruin the surprise. Let’s spread out so it can only attack us one at a time.

“No, I’ll take its focus,” I said. I didn’t like the idea of Kaiser or Spook taking a hit from this thing if I could stop it from happening.

Kaiser: Don’t be stupid. Spook is strong, and so am I. We were all chosen as warriors for this, not just you.

“Okay,” I said reluctantly.

Kaiser was right. I wasn’t the only one chosen for this contest. Kaiser grinned a big goofy dog smile at me, then he ran around the side of the Leshy as it pulled its hand free of the stone, sending dirt and debris flying.

The monster immediately went on the attack. It swiped that same massive arm at me, which left a trail of mist in its wake. The mist billowed out, cutting off my visibility. The leshy had sucked up all the mist from the room at the start of the encounter, but now it was using it as a weapon against us. I rolled out of the way of the attack, and right into the lingering mist it left behind. My vision was obscured, but I heard the massive footfalls crunching on stone as the leshy moved. Was it heading towards me or away from me?

I ran in the opposite direction and emerged from the mist just in time to see the leshy form a massive fist and swing it at Spook. She held her hands up in front of herself as though she meant to block the attack with her bare hands.

Spook screamed and a pulse of energy radiated out from her hands. The leshy’s fist struck the energy and to my shock, Spook caught the punch in mid-air before it hit her. Spook panted hard as though the ability took a huge toll on her, so I jumped into the fray again with my bone hatchet in hand. The leshy’s limbs were held together by the vines. Without those, it had to lose some of its power. I focused on hacking through as many vines as I could, while also ducking out of the way of any blows it tried to land on me.

Bits of dirt and rocks came free of the leshy’s right arm as I severed an important vine. One of its fingers crumbled and fell to the floor as well. I felt something moving over my feet and looked down a second too late. Vines grew out of the cracks in the floor and took hold of me.

I reached down and tried to sever the vines around my feet, but the leshy wound up for another strike. Its glowing eyes settled on me as it struck. I tried to send a wave of anima through my Balaran Amour to bolster it, but I didn’t have any anima left in my tank.

The blow took me square in the chest, shattering the plates of armour which protected my sternum and ribs. The blow flattened me against the ground, but my legs were still held in place by the vines which made it almost impossible to get enough leverage to rise to my feet once more.

Kaiser arrived and pulled the vines from the ground with his teeth. Spook screamed at the leshy and threw a punch at the massive creature from a distance. A wave of force flew out of Spook’s fist and slammed into the leshy’s chest, causing dirt and rocks to go flying.

Damn, this kid really was strong.

I let my bone hatchet clatter to the floor as I energised my clawed gauntlets and stabbed them into the vines around my feet. I drew on the anima inside them, which caused the vines to wither and die. It also deposited a nice bit of anima into my tank.

The leshy wouldn’t do well against an anima grenade. I had enough anima now to fuel a small one, but even a low-powered anima grenade would turn the tide of this fight. I sent a message to Kaiser and Spook in chat.

Hatchet: I’m free. I’m going to throw an anima grenade at this big bastard, but I need some time to charge the grenade up. Give me half a minute and we should be able to end this.

Kaiser: Time to show you what I’ve learned. You ready to do that thing we talked about, Spook?

Spook: You know it.

Kaiser launched himself away from me and into the mist. I channelled anima into my palm, which burned as I did so. This ability was powerful, maybe even a little too powerful. As long as I had enough time to charge it up there wasn’t much that stood a chance against me. Having a good team take the boss’s focus away from me was a game changer.

Somewhere beyond the curtain of mist, Spook yelled. While I tried to look through the mist, it shuddered in a wave as another pulse of force radiated out from Spook. When the mist flowed around me, I swear I felt it landing and sinking into my skin. I lifted the gauntleted hand that wasn’t currently channelling a grenade and tried to draw on the mist. To my surprise, wisps of mist started to suck inwards towards my clawed gauntlet!

My anima tank total didn’t rise as quickly as when I drew anima directly from an enemy, but the small refill was most definitely welcome. One hand felt cool as the mist flowed into it, and my other hand burned with the force of the anima grenade swelling with power.

That’s when I saw that Spook had both of her arms stretched out to her sides, and the leshy’s limbs were stretched wide in the same manner. It struggled against whatever Spook did to it, scrambling its stumpy stone and vine legs on the ground.

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

Suddenly Kaiser zoomed in at incredible speed. He shot forward like a hound possessed. His shadow was followed by a purple echo, and a second after he passed by the leshy’s leg the vines snapped. Rocks and dirt tumbled onto the ground as the leg crumbled from beneath the leshy. It immediately broke free of Spook’s grip as her focus faltered, then slammed the ground.

Spook went spinning like a ragdoll and slammed into the far wall of the chamber.

My anima grenade wasn’t as large as I would have liked to guarantee a victory, but it was big enough. As the leshy tried to get upright again I threw the grenade, which landed on its back. The grenade bounced and rolled before coming to rest in a knot of vines and dirt. The leshy tried to cross the room towards Spook, but Kaiser grabbed her by the white collar of her jacket and pulled her out of harm’s way.

Seven seconds after I threw the grenade, it exploded.

Bit of dirt, stones, and plant matter scattered all throughout the chamber. A victory message appeared.

Congratulations! You’ve located and defeated the secret boss of the Mistbegotten Crypt!

You have received 300 experience points.

That second line suddenly flickered, and the total jumped by 25% to 375 experience points.

You have received a Secret Boss Prize Box!

Enjoy the spoils of your victory, champions.

This message was accompanied by a contest-wide announcement.

[EDGE Force] members Hatchet, Kaiser, and Spook, have killed a secret boss enemy in the Mistbegotten Crypt dungeon in the Festergut Swamp. Team [EDGE Force] have earned 250 points, and are now the number 1 squad on the leaderboard!

“Hell yeah!” I said. “Damn, it feels good to be back on top.”

Kaiser lifted a paw and we gave each other an obnoxious high five.

Spook just rolled her eyes at us. “We might have killed a secret boss, but that means that the actual final boss of this dungeon is still in here somewhere. We're nowhere near finished yet. Come on, we need to loot this boss and sort out your stats and tokens.”

Spook and Kaiser approached the corpse of the leshy and looted it. There were some good things on the loot table without even opening our prize box yet. We each got a piece of gear from the boss, but they didn’t have any special effects or attributes – just an increased armour score and a boost to some attributes. The new piece of chest armour I received gave me a +2 to my strength score, which was markedly better than the statless chest armour the Empire had clothed me in to start the contest.

Kaiser: Did you like my awesome ability?

“I’m not sure what happened, but it’s pretty awesome,” I said.

Kaiser: It’s called [Sic ‘Em], and it lets me attack once every five minutes for a massive five hundred percent damage boost. But it’s only one attack, so I need to use it carefully.

“I was teaching Kaiser about DOTs, burst damage, damage mitigation and all that stuff before,” Spook said.

“Oh yeah? That’s good stuff to know,” I said, but I didn’t want to admit that I probably needed a refresher on that too. Damn, getting old sucked. I sighed. “Righto, remind me what that stuff is again, but don’t give me a lot of shit about it okay?”

Spook’s lopsided grin was irrepressible. “A DOT is an acronym – dee-oh-tee – it means damage-over-time. If you’ve got abilities which let you stack lots of DOTs abilities like poisons, bleeds, curses, hexes and all that stuff, you will have a totally different combat style to someone who can mitigate damage. That’s when you have abilities or passives that increase your defences, which stops incoming damage from ever hitting you. If you’re like Kaiser, you’re a burst damage fighter. His mobility is crazy good, and he can pick and choose when he attacks for greatest effect.”

“I have a dot attack. I can poison stuff with my claws,” I said.

“Why didn’t you poison the leshy?” Spook asked.

“I… I didn’t think of it,” I admitted.

“We need to start really thinking about this like it’s a game. Combat encounters will play out like puzzles. Threats will come that slip past our defences, and we need to be able to figure out how to attack them when we figure out what they’re weak to, okay? Experimentation will be key.”

“Got it,” I said.

Kaiser: Loot time now. Stop talking.

I grinned, then opened my inventory and activated my secret boss prize box, which appeared in the shape of a fanged skull with a keyhole in the middle of its forehead. Images of exploding fireworks were accompanied by a tiny musical fanfare as the skull’s head flipped open.

New Skill: Leshy Stomp

Rank: 1

Cost 50+ mana

Stomping your foot into the ground will send a shockwave out in front of you, possibly interrupting channelled skills and spellcasting. The chance to interrupt channelled skills and spellcasting increases with your strength score.

That was pretty cool and gave a little insight into what the attribute scores actually did for me practically. But instead of relying on my almost middle-aged brain trying to figure all this stuff out I just straight up asked Spook to explain it to me.

She rolled her eyes when I asked, but that was pretty much par for the course. My daughter did the exact same thing when I asked her a question that I obviously should have known the answer to.

‘Like, seriously dad, aren’t you the adult? You should know everything.’

I never had the heart to tell Lorelei that it doesn't get easier as you get older. A lot of adults are just making it all up as they go along, and the authority that kids think adults have is utter bullshit. I’d always thought that she was a little bit too young to hear that, but after this, if we somehow managed to fight back the Empire and stop them from destroying our species, maybe it was time to have that talk.

You deal with teenage belligerence long enough and you realise that it's not actually the kid’s fault. They've got so many hormones and stresses and insecurities bouncing around in their still-developing brains that it's no wonder they’re a bit shitty most of the time.

Thankfully, Spook got over her grumps to explain the whole thing to this old bastard. Basically, the attribute scores meant that the higher your score was, the better you were at that particular thing. The lower your score, the more shithouse you were. Some abilities like my Leshy Stomp scaled with a particular attribute. The higher your score, the more powerful the ability.

It also worked the opposite way. Someone who had a higher constitution score would be less affected by my Rancid Claws ability. Someone with a higher wisdom score had less of a chance to be interrupted by my new Leshy Stomp ability. Our strengths and weaknesses made it so that no single one of us could be an all-powerful wrecking ball. There would be a weakness somewhere to exploit.

Spook also mentioned that she had found a piece of gear in a chest in the ruins that had a specific attribute requirement before it could be equipped. Spook said that she was holding onto this particular item because it was a spellstaff, which would eventually allow her to cast magical spells. It required an Intelligence attribute of 21, but hers hadn’t reached that milestone yet.

Initially I laughed when she mentioned magic as though it was real, but then I reflected and realised that I could summon a suit of armour from an interdimensional dragon, so maybe her being able to cast a spell using a staff wasn't that crazy after all.

Spook got an awesome new ability from her secret boss prize box called [Mist Blink]. It had a hefty cost but allowed spook to move around the battlefield in a way that I could only dream of. She evaporated into a puff of mist, moved through any obstacle between her and where she needed to travel in a straight line, and then reformed again. It sounded damn powerful and might even give Marilyn a run for her money when it came to surviving against impossible odds. I didn’t want to think about the physics involved in breaking a body down into mist particles then putting them back together again.

Kaiser received a passive ability called [Vibe Check]. This wasn't an active ability like the ones that myself and Spook had received from the Mistbegotten Leshy, this one was a passive. Kaiser already had an incredible sense of smell, as well as heightened hearing compared to humans, but now he could also detect vibrations in the ground. I secretly hoped that by the end of this contest, after we kicked the Alarendei Empire’s arse back to the other end of space, that Kaiser wouldn't keep this ability. It would just encourage him to dig more holes in my backyard.

After we'd gone through all of the new abilities and gear we'd received, it was time for me to sit down and really have a look at my attribute points and tokens that I needed to spend.