I resumed my human shape somewhat reluctantly. With as spread out as I’d gotten, it was difficult to fight as a scattered pile of sand, and besides, I needed hands to hold my staff. The worm, somewhat surprisingly, noticed me immediately. I wasn’t entirely sure what kind of senses it had, but I’d assumed flying into the air would go a long way towards hiding myself from it.

Apparently, just getting off the ground wasn’t going to be enough to keep me safe. Also apparently, and somewhat unsurprisingly, this particular sand worm had extremely powerful terrakinesis. Pillars of sand exploded into the air as I slipped around them, the sheer weight of it all outstripping anything I could manage through telekinesis. Even specialized sand-moving spells wouldn’t come close, no matter how much mana put into them.

Well, it was no surprise. For something that big to move underground, it would almost have to have these kinds of capabilities. I’d expected to be dealing with something like this, though I’d hoped it would let go of the moon core long enough for me to stuff it into my phantom space. That hadn’t gone as planned.

As powerful as the sand worm was, it had its limits. Its terrakinesis could only throw sand so high, and I could fly much, much higher than that. My shield ward was protecting me from loose sand for now, though it was a steady drain on my mana reserves, and I used that time to pepper the worm with a few more rupture core spells as I ascended into the sky.

Mana bled out of it in immense waves, infusing the ground and air so thickly that it pained me to let it all go to waste. I reminded myself that the moon core was the real prize, not whatever I could scavenge from the corpse of this titanic beast. Those would be one-time gains; I needed a power source that would deliver for the next few decades.

Between the sand worm’s massive size and the amount of mana it was bleeding out, I couldn’t actually sense the moon core down there. I wasn’t seeing it through any of my scrying spells, either, which meant I was likely in for a long clean up and excavation once I killed this thing.

Once I was out of the immediate threat range, I switched to more offensive attacks. The worm had no mind to speak of, so mental attacks were out. I hit it with a variety of force spells, but its hide was so thick that those did nothing but scratch it. Master-tier spells like inferno and Chill of the Infinite Void scarred its hide, but the damn thing’s size protected it.

The whole time, the sand worm thrashed around either in pain or rage, or maybe both, and did its best to kill me. Whatever instincts drove it were good enough for it to switch tactics once I got outside the range of its explosive sand pillars, and I soon found myself dodging rocks being launched from the ground at massive speeds. Some of them were thrown so hard that I couldn’t see where they landed miles away.

The image of some poor farmer looking up just in time to be crushed under a massive quarter-ton stone came to mind. It was a distinct possibility, too. The sand worm had surfaced out in the middle of the wastes, but from my vantage point, I could see no less than three villages within thirty miles of here. No doubt, those people were staring back at us, probably wondering what in the hell that monster was, and whether they were all about to die.

However tough it might have been, the worm wasn’t immortal. Blood dripped from its many wounds, just not enough for this fight to end any time soon. I needed to switch tactics again, this time to a style of conjurations that worked particularly well against armored opponents.

While I was putting the spell together, the worm’s mouth swung around to face me. I was treated to the view of circular rings of teeth all bigger than I was and the black cavern that was its undulating throat behind them. Then something flexed, and greenish-brown fluids shot out.

It was an unbelievably fast attack, easily traversing the thousand feet that separated us. Acid splashed against my shield ward, eating away at it almost instantly. Desperate, I flooded it with more mana to try to stabilize my defense, but it was a losing game. The acid dribbled down through the air, fast enough that I mentally calculated I’d only need to hold the shield ward for another few seconds before it fell away.

I had to revise those calculations a moment later when another stream of acid shot out of the worm’s open mouth.

This time, I got a force wall up between me and the attack, though it cost me the master-tier spell I’d been building to keep my shield ward up while the acid from the first blast rolled off of me. I’d underestimated this worm, thinking of it as nothing but a scaled-up version of the ones I’d been slaughtering with ease – something that I’d have to put a bit more mana into to kill, but not a real challenge.

Maybe all sand worms had been like this a thousand years ago, but this one was the only one that had survived the entire time. It was possible the younger sand worms had lost the ability to spit acid at their enemies because it hadn’t been necessary after all the other monsters had starved. I’d seen more unusual changes between generations in monsters before.

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Whatever the reason, this thing was a true monstrosity. I restarted the spell I’d need to kill it, weaving it together as fast as I could while flying evasive patterns and occasionally tossing out other spells to repel the sand worm’s attacks.

Hopefully, it wouldn’t unveil any new tricks in the next sixty seconds. Hopefully, it would die shortly after that. Hopefully, the moon core would be close to the surface and wouldn’t have a giant worm land on top of it.

I never had been all that lucky, so three hopes in a row seemed like too much to bank on.

One last force wall appeared between me and another acid shot, then I completed the spell. An orb of phantasmal energy twenty feet across appeared between us and immediately launched itself at the worm. Somehow—and I still hadn’t figured out this thing’s suite of sensory organs yet—the monster knew something was coming. Four different boulders were flung through the air to pass through it, one of which came close enough to me that I had to dodge out of the way to avoid being clipped.

And then the orb passed into the worm, about two hundred feet below its head and right near what I was mentally thinking of as its throat, though really just about the entire thing was a throat. It pulsed brightly in my mana sense, just once, before triggering.

The spell was called phantasmal shrapnel bomb, and it was what most archmages casually referred to as a siege breaker. Its primary purpose was to murder several hundred to a thousand tightly-packed and heavily-armored individuals. It did exactly what the name implied.

Huge shards of phantasmal energy exploded out of the orb in every direction, not just once, but in repeated waves as the spell slowly expended its energy over the next ten seconds. The effect on the sand worm was instantaneous, starting with the ground shaking for miles in every direction as a kind of localized earthquake.

That was quickly followed by an eruption of blood and viscera through the worm’s mouth, and finally by the yard-thick leather skin in the area I’d detonated the bomb ripping to pieces, and the top few hundred feet of the worm being ripped off the body to fly through the air. It landed with a crash powerful enough to knock a house down and flung sand a mile into the sky.

The rest of the worm toppled over, all but burying itself in the sand just from the sheer weight of its body. I watched it warily for a moment – not because I expected it to start moving again, but because I wasn’t going to get anywhere near it until I was absolutely sure that it wouldn’t.

While I waited, I did my best to harvest as much of the monster’s mana as I could. I’d used more in this fight than I had in my spell duel against Ammun himself a few years ago, and it’d be irresponsible not to salvage as much as I could from the sand worm.

‘We’re under attack!’ a voice screamed into my head.

I blinked in surprise and spun to face New Alkerist a few hundred miles in the distance. As I was doing that, a second voice yelled, ‘Enemy mages have launched some sort of unknown spell on the town.’

Both were members of the town’s council, though I struggled to put names to their voices. Before I could think to answer either, my father’s voice came through. ‘Gravin, something is happening. The ground started shaking for a few seconds, but it’s stopped now. Also, a boulder flew through the air and smacked into the mountains about a minute ago, but we weren’t able to figure out the source of it.’

I almost started laughing right there. ‘It’s fine,’ I replied. ‘I know what happened. It’s not an attack from Ammun’s mages. I can explain it all later if you want.’

‘You’re certain?’ Father asked.

‘Positive. Will you tell the rest of the council to stop bothering me?’

‘I’ll try to phrase it a bit more politely.’

‘Thanks,’ I projected.

I’d gotten lucky twice, first in not having to fend off any more surprises, and second in completing a lethal spell to kill the monster. Unfortunately, my luck had run out there. The sand worm’s residual mana was rapidly fading—though the fact that it took whole minutes to disperse was astounding in and of itself—and without its interference, I should have been able to feel the moon core.

But I couldn’t, which almost certainly meant I needed to go digging for it. If it was just sand, I wouldn’t have minded, but excavating the corpse on top of it was going to be more difficult, more expensive, more time consuming, and definitely far, far messier. The worst part of it was that I didn’t know how far down I needed to go. I didn’t even know how big the moon core was, though I was hoping it was a decent size.

The sand worm’s sheer size supported that hypothesis, but even a small shard of moon core could grow something massive given an entire millennium to do so. I spent a few minutes making and discarding plans before I decided the best approach was to dig out thin scrying tunnels next to the worm in the hopes that the moon core’s mana output would be detectable if I got a divination within ten or twenty feet of it.

If that didn’t work, I’d open a new portal to the gestalt and see if I could convince it to help me look. Such a creature was far more suited to finding something buried in the sand than I was, anyway. I gave myself three hours of digging to see if I could locate it, with my plans to be reassessed at that point if I turned up nothing.

Before I could even get started, the first scavenger showed up. I regarded the monster, some sort of hyena or jackal, blandly for a moment. Seeing that it had no interest in me and that it was content to stay a thousand feet away where it could tear at the exposed meat from the decapitation I’d given the worm, I ignored it and hoped that any other scavengers would be equally inclined to gravitate toward that part of the corpse.

But, as I already knew, I wasn’t that lucky. I’d barely gotten started before a monster interrupted my progress, requiring me to scour it off the face of the planet. I was already reconsidering my timetable.