They sat there, shaking and panting, fighting to regain what little strength they could during the minutes they had won through their struggles. But this moment of respite was not fated to last. Nick had just drained the last of the water from his canteen and clipped it back onto his belt when Size Up unleashed a resounding ping of danger, the most intense response he had gotten from the skill to date.
He wouldn’t have even realized there was a problem if he hadn’t fallen into the habit of evaluating the terrain ahead before he walked across it.
At first, he couldn’t see what the trouble was. But when he followed the rise and surveyed the trail ahead, Nick came to grasp with crystal clarity the reason why his danger-sensing skill was going absolutely ape shit. “Fuck me.” The words escaped his lips as he stared up at the lethal obstacle looming over his head. It was the last thing that he wanted to see.
Fifteen feet above the trail he walked, the lurk was standing on what appeared to be a dead-end section of pass. If the unexpected arrival of the apex predator wasn’t problematic enough, the multi-ton behemoth was staring straight at him with what could only be described as a cold, calculating stare.
He would never have noticed the stealthy creature’s presence without the feedback from his skill. Nick would have walked blindly into the beast’s ambush if he hadn’t gotten into the habit of sizing up any suspicious terrain that he came across. It was a lucky break. Not that being trapped between the lurk and the rising sea was a cause for celebration. Seeming to relish his dilemma, the beast simply stared down at him, giving Nick a chance to inspect the shaggy gray creature at his leisure.
The lurk had undergone some dramatic changes since the last time he had laid eyes on the beast—when Nick had lured it into a fight with the gigantic, carnivorous mushroom that ruled one corner of the woodlands. It appeared that the battle that had continued in his absence had been hard fought. The lurk’s once pristine coat was now a mottled patchwork of scars, although most of the wounds appeared to have healed during the interim. Most shocking of all, one of the lurk’s eyes was missing, its skull engulfed in a ragged scar that ran across its head and down one hulking shoulder.
The beast’s impairment did nothing to assuage the electric terror flooding his chest. If anything, its new look was even more menacing than before. Even more so than the last, this version of the monstrous lurk was metal as fuck.
Maybe everything will be fine, Nick reasoned in a desperate bid to quell his mounting panic. We are all in a hurry, and there’s plenty of room for it to move past. Even if the lurk remembers me, there is no way that it’s smart enough to hold a grudge. Even if it did, this crisis should trump any desire it feels to settle the score. It will hop down and head right up the mountain… any second now.
Most unfortunately for Nick, in this matter, he was wrong on nearly all accounts. To his abject horror, the lurk leapt effortlessly down to the trail below, cutting off any hope of retreat. Staring him down all the while, it soon became appallingly obvious that the lurk did in fact remember him. It rightly blamed him for the indignity of its maiming and was only too happy to set aside a few minutes to balance the scales. Staring up into its pitiless, split-pupil eyes, it was clear as day that the lurk was ready to enact its revenge.
Every crook of its posture told the same story. The lurk was the type to hold a grudge, and the lurk was pissed.
The lurk savored the moment as it sauntered up to them. It began closing the distance with a gleam in its big, dinosaur eyes that Nick could only describe as immense satisfaction. While the lemurs cowered in terror, he fired a Mana Dart, hoping that the spell would be sufficient to drive the lurk back.
Five seconds later, he discovered that he wasn’t the only one who had leveled up over the past two weeks. The lurk didn’t even try to dodge his spell. It let out a growl, tanking the dart head-on, and kept right on coming. The big bastard didn’t so much as twitch, implying that Nick’s attack wasn’t worth the effort of moving out of the way. He was so focused on the impending conflict that he barely noticed the sound of something massive emerging from the water behind him.
Despite the lurk’s apparent nonchalance, Nick was certain that it would grow bored with intimidating him and strike at any moment, exacting its vengeance before climbing the final stretch of mountainside leading to the summit. Before he could come up with anything that might get him out of this mess, the decisive moment arrived.
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While this was a bad situation, he wasn’t going down without a fight. Though the lurk was a fearsome foe, he had come a long way since the start of the tutorial. More than any other time in his ordeal, it was time to lean on every attribute point he had gained; every insight he had obtained into the nature of battle and conflict. Nick reached into his pack and pulled out his sword, edge flashing silver in the light of the sun.
He took a deep breath and assumed a battle stance, holding his blade in front of him, ready to attack the instant that the lurk entered range. His odds were poor, but Nick shut out his thundering heartbeat, the wild surge of adrenaline crackling in his veins. I need to strike a critical point without getting eviscerated in the exchange. Taking out its good eye is my best shot. A heartbeat later, all time for preparation vanished like smoke on the breeze, and he steeled himself for the most dangerous battle of his life, his prayers rising to ride the mountain breeze.
Still looking straight into Nick’s eyes, the lurk lunged so fast that its body was reduced to a liquid blur of tooth and scale. He shifted his stance a fraction of a degree, ready to meet fate head-on, the odds be damned.
The lurk’s jaws opened wide, streaking down to bisect Nick in a single chomp. He focused with everything that he had, shutting out the screams of the lemurs and the splashes coming from behind his back. At the last possible moment, he leapt out of the way and lashed out with his blade, carving a gouge that ran all the way down one side of the lurk’s skull, missing its eye by the width of his thumb. The massive beast roared in fury and reoriented on his position, ready to lunge for him again.
Nick knew with absolute certainty that this time, the lurk wouldn’t miss. For a fleeting moment, time slowed to a crawl, giving him an opportunity to fully appreciate the chaos that ensued half a heartbeat later, when help arrived from a most unexpected quarter.
Before the lurk struck out again, the ocean next to the pass exploded. Faster than thought, eight colossal tentacles whipped through the air and wrapped tight around the lurk’s body, catching the shaggy dinosaur and holding it aloft.
Rising from the depths while the lurk was distracted by terrorizing Nick, the thing in the sea arrived on scene.
Unlike the shark that had been devoured by the thing during his early days on the island, the lurk was not fated to go down without a fight. He could see the beast thrashing behind the elastic bands of flesh constricting its body, straining to break free from the crushing prison of tentacles. It was incredible that the lurk was able to hold its own in a contest of strength against the vastly bigger beast, even for a short while.
Nick didn’t have time to be impressed or to watch what happened next, as much as he would have wanted to witness the outcome of the struggle under other circumstances. He only had time to run.
He had been granted an opportunity to escape from what had seemed like certain death, and he intended to take it. Tugging on the lemurs’ hands to get them moving, he wove his way through the quivering appendages, each thicker than the full span of his arms. He could smell a salty musk emanating from the nightmarish squid monster, feel the vibration of its limbs as they strained to crush the life from the lurk’s body. He could see the thing watching him with dozens of eyes covering its alien head, clustered around a serrated yellow beak that looked powerful enough to snap redwoods like dry twigs.
The thing tracked Nick’s progress as he moved along the trail, but fortunately, it didn’t have the luxury of devouring him at the moment. It was terrifying ducking beneath and, at times, climbing over the appendages of a beast that could swallow him whole as a light snack and almost certainly would under any other circumstances. But he would have to process the surreal encounter later.
He shut out his fear and other distracting sensations, focusing solely on moving past without being crushed by the thrashing coils or flung into the sea. With the overbearing tension of the situation, it felt like hours crept by as Nick fought to escape the battling beasts, although his trek past the struggling titans could not actually have taken longer than a minute.
Even still, the delay almost let the rising swells catch him again. But at last, Nick and the lemurs squeezed past the final tentacle, running up the pass as fast as their legs would carry them. He eventually gave into the temptation to look back over his shoulder when a scream of primal rage shook the air hard enough to vibrate his teeth within his jaw.
He turned in time to watch the writhing mass of tentacles erupt in a storm of inky blood. From the curtain of falling fluid, the profile of the lurk was revealed to his gaze. The beast had somehow managed to shear off an entire tentacle and was poised to move on to the next.
With an ear-piercing scream, the thing threw the lurk away from its body before diving into the sea. The lurk was hurled a good thirty feet before it landed on a mountain trail, higher than the one it had been following. Unsurprisingly, despite its remarkable feat, the lurk had not escaped from the thing’s ambush unscathed. Half of its talons had been shattered, and one arm dangled at its side, the bone broken in multiple places. It cast a baleful glare at Nick, then turned to scale the mountain.
Somehow, he was certain that the lurk wasn't done with him yet; that the thing's intervention had bought him a reprieve but not an end to their rivalry. The realization filled him with rising dread, fear gripping his guts and squeezing tight.
This time, Bandit was the one to pull on Nick’s arm to get him moving. He snapped out of his daze and kept on running. At last, thirty minutes later, they rounded a final switchback and stepped onto the summit, ready to face the final moments of the tutorial’s climax.