The creature's head shatters into splinters, it groans, its dried-up body falls to the floor and crumbles to dust... Sadly, only in my imagination.

Immediately after my attack, all the chandeliers in the room, which served as the only source of light, burst. A chill runs down my spine.

I jump off the chair to the side—at the same second, Zara launches shards at the creature. At the last moment, I managed to land one more sword strike.

Finding myself at a distance, I look at the result of the attack. To put it mildly, it wasn't impressive: "Selena's" head is covered in cuts and wounds, but they're very small. Also, there's not a drop of blood.

"Ah... Uh..." "Selena's" head begins to spin around with a crunch. "Granddaughter, your friends have betrayed my trust and tried to kill me in order to get all the Elixir of Youth for themselves. They must be destroyed."

"DIE, MONSTER!!!" Julia yells rather amusingly, splashing a huge teapot of hot water on "grandma". Surprisingly, this works better than our attacks, and the creature's skin melts, changing to gray.

"How ugly you are behaving, granddaughter," the creature's voice no longer resembles a human's, now it's a nasty, hoarse bass. "Such treatment of elderly relatives is unacceptable. I will destroy you along with these miserable bastards."

The creature's head turns forward very quickly. We're instantly hit by a powerful shockwave emanating from its body. Zara and I barely keep our footing, but Julia flies into the wall with a squeal. On the plus side, the prepared food and the basket with pies somehow remained untouched... not bad either.

I look at the creature again and notice that it has lost its false appearance. Instead of "Selena", the very large gray creature with tentacles Julia described is standing in front of the table. It looks much worse than those words, resembling mostly a blind, large octopus impaled on a pillar of pulsating flesh from which all kinds of slime and dark smoke ooze.

Oh, what realistic nastiness.

Zara shoots another charge of shards at it... and for some reason a goblin. It's very unlikely that their little knives will help somehow. Along with this, the System manifests:

Faceless Manipulator (level 10).

Phew, at least not higher than quest level. But still, its HP bar is just GIGANTIC, we didn't take off even a tenth of it.

[Quest] "Delivery of Pies" updated!

Escort Little Red to her grandmother.

Something strange is coming from grandma. Watch her and make sure Little Red is safe.

- Defeat the Faceless Manipulator.

- Little Red MUST survive.

The point about Little Red's survival returned, I can praise myself for foresight. If I hadn't warned Julia, she would have been vulnerable and the boss would have easily taken her down. But how do we take it down ourselves?

The Faceless Manipulator floats slightly in the air and rushes towards us, or rather towards me. About seven tentacles move towards me. I don't lose my cool and roll off the wall, Zara fires shards and runs to Julia.

Despite the third level of the spell, it barely does anything to it. It turns out, I dealt the main damage.

What if after transformation it's more vulnerable to physical attacks? Its body doesn't look sturdy.

It slams into the wall. I don't waste any time—with my ability activated, I jump up from behind and start delivering blows. The assumption is confirmed—there's a lot more damage, even though my sword isn't designed for tenth level.

The good news is that now it's clear how to take it down. But this reduces the impact of Zara, the main work is on Julia and me.

"Zara, magic doesn't work well on it. Don't try to deal damage, but distract it in any way possible," I shout.

She nods and throws a new goblin at the creature. Suddenly I realize that she's aiming at the area where the boss should have had eyes. Not a bad way of disorientation, Zara is very smart after all.

Need to conduct the fight extremely carefully. With all the bonuses to regeneration, I'm unlikely to survive even three hits.

The boss tears away from the wall and sends a bunch of tentacles at me. I dodge and fend them off under the ability. The damage is less than to the body.

At this moment, Julia quickly flies up and pierces the boss's side with a knife. And the knife isn't trash, it damages more than my sword.

Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

The Manipulator switches to her, but thanks to agility and a well-launched goblin, Julia easily jumps to the left. She runs around the creature in a semicircle, dealing small knife blows and only then finally jumps away, flying under the table. Now that's what I call a fighting Little Red.

I catch the moment and under the ability try to repeat her move. At first it works, but then I remember the difference in agility and try to jump back, but don't notice a tentacle from above. It pierces my shoulder and throws me into the wall, taking away a fifth of my health.

It could have been worse, but it's still unpleasant and painful. And that was a small tentacle, which means a big one can take about half.

In the worst case, there's still the option of using this mysterious Archmage's Box. But it literally has an unpredictable effect, more suitable for a situation when absolutely everything is lost.

The plus is that the boss has no magical attacks. Otherwise, we would have died.

Shaking off, I dodge the attack and activate the ability, while Julia runs under its "legs" and cuts under Zara's cover.

Following this silently established tactic, in twenty minutes we... didn't take even a quarter of its HP, and I missed a couple more hits and drank the second regeneration potion.

No, that way we'll run out of steam due to small stats, and it'll chop us up if we make a serious mistake. Need to come up with something.

Seeing the serene face of a flying goblin, a primitive but ingenious idea comes to my mind. I don't understand why I didn't think of it before.

The guards! There's a ton of them here. Why limit ourselves to goblins?

Because of the Faceless Manipulator's appearance, no one will think it was Selena. And judging by their weapons, the guards themselves are no lower than level 10.

"Zara, break the window. We're finishing this attack, getting out to the street and aggro the boss onto the guards, otherwise we'll be jerking off with it for half a day," I command.

"I'll roll you into one big pie and devour you, fucking bitches!" the boss squealed, swinging at me.

From Zara's face—she liked the idea. The neighboring window shatters, she grabs the carried away Julia and they jump out of the room. After hitting under the ability, I masterfully jump over the table and grab a pie from the basket with my left hand. The Goddess of Luck helped me, there was no other way.

Mmm, excellent. Turns out they're with strawberries!

"My pies!!! Don't you dare touch them, fucking piece of shit!!!" is heard from the boss, who gets a goblin in the face just in time.

In general, you can turn off profanity in the settings, but it's much more fun this way. I also noticed that in its true form, the Faceless Manipulator... significantly dumbed down. I'll know that mobs with such mechanics are highly dependent on the assumed form.

I jump out the window, barely avoiding sitting on a tentacle. The landing isn't particularly soft—I fall head first and roll on the ground. However, this is no longer important.

"GUARDS, HELP!!!" I yell at the top of my lungs. "A HORRIBLE CREATURE ATTACKED THE ESTATE!!!"

Julia runs up to me and helps me to my feet. The tentacle flying at us is deflected by ice shards, we run to the entrance in threes—

—and halfway we meet those two guards. Seeing the thing chasing us, they understand everything without unnecessary words.

"Marcus, alarm!" one says to the other. He takes a white horn from his belt and blows into it.

The sound is hellish, I'm sure it can be heard in the neighboring houses. But that is probably the point.

The guards draw their swords and stand with us. I explain where it's better to attack and we rush into battle.

The first guard's strike deals more damage than Julia and I did on average in a minute. My morale rises.

Soon we're joined by eight more swordsmen, six archers, and that spearman Bram. He turns out to be the strongest here—the spear that went through completely did three times more damage than the guard's sword.

With a reinforced squad, we quickly mow down its health. How good that they won't claim experience.

Didn't I rejoice too soon? flashes through my mind after I personally take its HP down to half. And in the same second, I get an answer in the form of an extremely powerful shockwave that scatters us all to the side. It turns out to be incomparably stronger than the first one, I crash into a tree and lose half of my HP. Not a pleasant feeling, in real life I would have broken something.

What the?!

I noticed that the boss was rapidly changing shape and growing in size. The color of its skin changes to a dark purple, and its tentacles strangely turn inside out, turning into something like cannons. This lasts about fifteen seconds, then the Faceless Manipulator roars and fires from the tentacles at an archer. He is pierced by viscous goo mixed with solid fragments and falls dead.

Fuck! I didn't know that level 10 bosses have a second phase.

Now it's literally a long-range unit, at least low in the air. Its damage has also increased significantly, you can't even get caught under this volley once, so...

"Cut off all tentacles!" I order, standing up and uncorking the third potion.

The swordsman closest to the boss nods, dodges a small charge of slime and jumps to cut off a tentacle... Should have cut off. What the hell?

The sword hits the tentacle as if it were stone, the man cries out and drops the sword. The boss notices this, quickly wraps him with other tentacles and absorbs him with slime. The second guard died. I check its HP bar—almost no damage went through.

Fuck, fuck, we can't lose people. But what the hell?! Did it increase resistance to physical attacks? What to do?! I hope we won't have to lead it through the whole village...

"Its skin has hardened, now it's much harder to wound. Dodge!" I inform everyone.

Think, think, think! We can't afford to pound it literally for half a day. Hmm, before this phase physical damage went through well on it, but magical poorly. Now we're not dealing more than Zara. Is a swap possible?...

I look for Zara, she's dodging massive slime charges, using goblins as shields. She hasn't had time to attack with magic in the new phase.

"Zara, try to hit its body with shards, maybe it's become susceptible to magic," I say, approaching her.

"In a moment, I can't get away."

I grab her hand and we rush to the lantern. Part of the slime crashes into it and part of the tentacles re-aggro on me.

"Now!"

She aims and fires shards right where she previously sent goblins. They brightly explode, the Manipulator recoils to the side and slightly loses balance. Judging by the HP bar, it took off the equivalent of two swordsman strikes. Even better than could be assumed, there was no micro-stun before.

"Hell yeah, I'm finally damaging it!" Zara rejoiced. "But you guys—"

"Yes, and now you're the only one doing it normally," I grinned. "Keep hitting it, we'll divert its attention."

"This will take a long time..." she smiled nervously. "I'm afraid to imagine what would have happened if I had stumbled upon this quest alone."

"I didn't expect this either. Well, we knew what shit we were getting into for the sake of XP."

She nods and fires new shards. I wait for more tentacles aggro on me, jump away from the lantern and run to Julia, she should be checked as well.

Sorry, Patrick, you'll have to wait much longer.