If you weren’t standing right next to it or flying directly over, the pit that led down to the Temple of the Worm was indistinguishable from the desert around it. But once you were at the lip, you could peer down into an ever-pouring cauldron of sand with a terracotta platform in the center and a mosaic of mythological scenes.

There were scenes of the Scytheworm tilling soil and showing al-Nuwbans how to cultivate crops along the flood plains that ran through al-Nuwba City or how to build molds for casting bronze tools. Gazing down at it, Shuixing once again got the uncomfortable “history-less history” feeling that made her own life experience feel somehow shallow or false. Forming her theory of the world required her to confront exactly this discomfort, but it did nothing to ease it. Only raw inquisitiveness could overcome the visceral repulsion from questioning the depth of the world around her.

Natsuko, however, couldn’t care in the slightest. She had a much more immediate and important task in front of her: begging Sofiane for his sword.

“Please?”

“No.”

“Please!?”

“No!”

“Please!?!?”

“Add as much punctuation as you want, Natsu, I’m not giving you Xiuquan’s sword! You’re gonna do something stupid and die with it and then I’m gonna be unarmed for hours waiting for you to be re-summoned,” Sofiane replied, folding his arms.

“How the hell else am I supposed to fight it?” she asked.

“Use that stupid fire sword ability you have.”

“I didn’t prepare it today.”

“What? Why?”

“Because I planned to guilt you into giving me the emerald sword.”

“Wha— you— gods-dammit Natsuko, you can’t have the sword!”

If Natsuko was going to fight this worm, she had to start thinking tactically. Sofiane was merely her mental warm-up.

“Daisy, can you push Sofiane kinda hard for me?” Natsuko asked.

“What, like this?” Daisy said, giving Sofiane a light shove which, with Daisy’s enormous Force stat, blew him straight into a sand dune. The sword was jarred loose from his hands.

Natsuko sprinted the other way as Sofiane coughed and spat sand out of his mouth and reached for the sword. All of a sudden he was thirty feet away and Natsuko was right next to the sword. She picked it up and gave it a few swishes.

“Haha! Get Swapped, dumbass!”

Sofiane stomped back over, slapping sand off of his sensitive skin like it was a swarm of mosquitoes.

“Daisy?” he said.

“Yeah?” Daisy replied.

“Can you push Natsuko kinda hard for me?”

Natsuko and Daisy shared a look; Natsuko’s one of fear, Daisy’s one of apology.

“Sorry, Natsu, but fair’s fair,” Daisy said.

“Wait! Daisy d—!”

Natsuko was launched into the sand. Sofiane turned into Ball Lightning to scoop up the sword, which didn’t turn out to be necessary because Natsuko needed at least a minute for the world to stop spinning.

“You’re lucky unarmed attacks don’t deal damage,” Pechorin said.

Natsuko wheezed and croaked out, “I don’t feel lucky.”

Shuixing walked back over to the group from the lip of the sandpit and put her hand on Sofiane’s shoulder. “Could you please let Natsuko borrow the sword?

Unlike in his dealings with Natsuko, Sofiane hesitated and then hemmed and then hawed and finally said, “beautiful women telling me to do things are my weakness, mademoiselle, and on it you have struck true.”

Shuixing blushed at that and fixed her glasses.

“Hey, I told you to give me the sword too!” Natsuko said.

“Hmm, something else must’ve been off in that equation then,” Sofiane said, spinning the emerald sword around and handing it to Natsuko.

Pechorin hummed. The thought of flirting like that with someone else when nothing was intended by it sat uneasily with him. Words like “beautiful” and “weakness” must be used sparingly to ensure they did not lose their weight. If one said something like that, it had to mean something beyond pointless frivolity.

Daisy smacked Sofiane upside the head. “Quit bein’ a goofus, they got a quest to complete.”

With the silliness ended. Natsuko walked to the edge of the pit with the emerald sword and stared down. Her heart pounded. She looked back at the other two.

“Final ready check. Ready?” she said.

“As I will ever be, I suppose,” Shui replied.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

“Come high water or hell or both,” Pechorin said.

Natsuko took a few more practice swings with the unfamiliar sword and said, “by the way, Shui, focus on healing yourself first. There’s no way to avoid the earthquakes so if we’re gonna take the hit, we need you to keep yourself up.”

“Huh?” Sofiane said. “Do you seriously not know how to avoid the tremor attack?”

The three of them stared blankly at Sofiane. He slapped his palm to his forehead.

“Didn’t you notice it has to plant itself halfway into the sand to use the seismic drum the Entropic Axis gave it? If you run up on its back the earthquake won’t hit you.”

Natsuko coughed. “Oh… I— we didn’t know that.”

Sofiane exhaled and his shoulders drooped. “Please tell me you know about the spine missile thing at least?”

“What spine missile thing?” Shuixing asked.

“Ugh. When it fires the spine missiles, you run right next to it so the missiles bounce off of its armor.”

Natsuko’s jaw dropped. “You mean this whole time we could’ve…”

Shuixing frowned and her voice got harder and harsher. “We did what we could for the time, Natsu. These are things Heroes learned over years of fighting it. We were the first, and we were blinded by focusing too much on working hard instead of smart, but we can’t be blamed for not having the complete knowledge of the fight that Sofiane has from coming later. So, we thank you for the advice, but you can keep the condescension to yourself.”

With that, Shui spun on her heels and made for the edge of the pit. Sofiane looked stunned by the assertiveness directed his way. Counting it as a victory for herself, Natsuko stuck a tongue out at Sofi and joined Shuixing and Pechorin.

“Okay, now we’re ready,” Shuixing said, being the first one to step onto the sand flow and ride it down.

Natsu nodded approvingly. “Alright, Shui. Alright. Save some of that sass for the worm.”

She and Pechorin rode the sand to the bottom, stepping off onto the terracotta platform behind Shuixing. The second their feet were on solid ground, the world shook.

“It’s gonna come out there,” Natsuko said, pointing at a non-descript wall of sand but knowing instinctively she was correct.

The other two trusted her and sprinted towards the opposite wall. A second later, the worm burst out from where she’d been pointing. Chitinous armor ran its 50 foot length and sprouted bits of machinery and technology for inducing earthquakes. Its flesh ended in a writhing mass of spike protrusions that resembled the spines in its circular maw. Upon sensing them, it gave a gurgling roar.

Natsuko bolted for its mouth, striking it with a Fire Gale roundhouse kick followed up with a slash from Xiuquan’s sword. She could immediately feel the difference in power. Her sword years ago had been nowhere near as powerful as this. Even with the mismatched bonus to Wood Elemental damage, she was cutting respectable chunks out of its health pool.

While she did so, Pechorin was rotating his abilities with close to 100% efficiency, a trick he’d picked up while traveling alone after their team broke up. The sequence when he could guarantee his attacks were on weak points went Flak Cannon, two regular attacks, vampiric bullet, one attack, back to Flak Cannon. Without meaning to, this accidentally synced up to the timing on triggering Molten reactions with Natsuko’s Fire Gale.

Soon enough, the worm was writhing its way into one side of the sandpit.

“Go, go, go!” Natsuko yelled.

Shuixing ran for a hanging exhaust-pipe sticking out of the worm’s tail and clung on. But as Natsuko watched Pechorin, she could tell he was moving too slow.

“Don’t trip!” she yelled to him.

By the time Pechorin looked up, he had zoomed hundreds of feet ahead to where Natsuko had been standing next to the worm. This left Natsuko a few seconds to cross that same distance.

She ran, conscious of needing her Fire Gale off cooldown for the last few seconds. The ground quaked under her feet. Two more seconds before the tremors would slam her for a chunk of damage. At the final tick down, Natsuko leapt. Fire erupted out of her hands and feet. But there was no windmilling this time. The alignment on the thrust had been perfect, sending her soaring through the air over the convulsing ground and down onto the writhing Scytheworm, driving her sword between two of its chitinous plates to form a handhold.

The three of them jumped from the worm right as it pulled its maw from the sand and flailed its body around. It hovered its maw over Shuixing, a tell-tale sign of an impending bite. With a half-second to spare, Swap came off cooldown and Natsuko replaced Shuixing to take the hit. And once she was in its mouth, she detonated Spontaneous Combustion.

The worm chittered angrily and reared its 50-foot length directly into the air. Its maw was a giant smoke stack. Underneath it was Natsuko, wreathed by white hot fire that obscured the blood dripping into her eyes and grinning mouth. All with 300 health to spare.

“Let’s fucking go!”

She launched herself at the worm’s undulating stomach. The Hothead bonus damage kicked in and with only two more hits, the worm dipped back down, spasmed, and ran for the wall again.

“He’s already at half-health?” Shuixing called out.

“You’re gods-damned right he is! Get on!” Natsuko yelled back.

The three of them were all close this time and rode the giant worm’s bucking body as it pounded out another earthquake.

Above, the tremors sent sand over the ledge, spilling into the pit. Daisy and Sofiane took a step back from the edge.

Natsuko, Pechorin, and Shuixing tumbled off the worm, this time less gracefully as it picked up its new speed. Shuixing’s Bubble Storm descended and popped against the worm, doing almost nothing to slow it.

The Scytheworm raised its spiny tail over itself like a giant, fleshy “J.” Instinctually, they all prepared to dodge before Shuixing remembered to scream for them to run to the worm. She and Pechorin made it to the worm, but Natsuko was stationary.

“Natsuko what are you doing!?” Shui said.

Natsuko flashed her a thumbs up sign without taking her eyes off the spiny tail. “Keep me healed up, Shui, I got a plan!”

With a whistling sound, the spine missiles launched into the air. The ones targeting Pechorin and Shuixing plinked impotently off the worm’s own armor like hail on a tin roof. But the ones curling through the air towards Natsuko made contact.

Around half of them she was able to parry, using the emerald sword to swat the spines out of the air and regain health from them. The rest impaled her directly, forcing Shuixing to shake her bell-rod like she was ringing in the end times, casting Healing Waters over and over. When the barrage ended, Natsuko was at a quarter health, but the Fuel Injection parries had reduced all of her cooldowns to nothing. Her Desperation Art was back up.

Reaching into the pockets of her shorts, Natsuko produced the saddest, limpest, rice-shedding roll of fatty tuna Po-Lin had ever seen and stuffed it in her mouth to get herself just barely above half-health.

Recognizing what she was doing, Pechorin prepared his own Desperation Art. The second Natsuko plowed under the worm and exploded herself like a human IED and rocked the worm onto its side, exposing its weak stomach, Pechorin let loose his Concentrated Fire, triggering molten reactions at rapid fire pace as each lick of Natsuko’s flame planted the seeds for the next reaction.

As the Scytheworm dropped into its last quarter of health, it entered its fourth phase, which was to thrash madly and expose its weak points to finish out the fight. It was a victory lap phase, not a combat one.

Natsuko was dumbfounded as she landed the last couple blows. “We were so close… All those years ago we were so close!”

“We couldn’t have known,” Shuixing said, adding a few water bolt attacks to the anti-climactic finale.

Pechorin’s lips curled into a grin. “How deliciously ironic. I would not have had it any other way.”

With one more thrust of the emerald sword, the worm flopped limp on the platform with one last earthshaking tremble and dissolved, finally completing the three year old quest.