Before the flying beast could reduce Nick to paste, another massive form leapt in front of him, moving so fast that it was reduced to a solid black streak before his eyes.

A humanoid blur that came into focus as it braced itself for impact, taloned feet digging into the bedrock like the stone was soft clay. As the colossal centipede came crashing down, the newly arrived creature spread its spindly arms wide.

Then, to Nick’s utter astonishment, the unknown lifeform reached out and caught the flesh-render matriarch by its razored mandibles.

While he struggled to process this unprecedented series of events, the force of the impact broke over him, slamming into his body like he’d shot himself with his own wand.

He went flying through the air before landing in a tangled jumble of limbs, narrowly avoiding impaling himself on the end of his sword in the process. Shocked and stunned, Nick looked out from where he lay, taking in the battle of titans playing out in the spacious cavern.

The rest of the fight only lasted ninety seconds. But in that time, his eyes beheld a gore-splattered miracle.

Standing ten feet in front of him, matching the immense matriarch in a contest of raw strength, was a creature that looked like it had walked here from out of a fever dream.

Its form was sleek and alien. All sharp angles and midnight plates, surfaces that seemed to absorb the surrounding light. It looked like someone had taken the skeleton of the strongest man ever born and pulled sheets of flexible plastic armor tight over the bones, which were clearly visible beneath the creature’s armor.

Its legs were long and slender, built for agility despite the obvious strength they exhibited. Nick wouldn’t be surprised if the creature could leap far enough to clear the sandpit in a single bound. Its hands looked almost human, although they were twice the size of his own. Each finger ended in a wicked claw, and jutting out from the end of both wrists were a pair of black blades that extended two feet past its arms.

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Judging by appearance alone, it was the scariest entity that Nick had ever seen, exuding a sense of wrongness even greater than that of the chittering swarm.

Despite the creature’s incredible power and fearsome visage, it was struggling to contend with the matriarch’s superior mass. That was the moment when size up released a resounding ping of danger. This time, he was able to get a sense of what form the threat would take.

Although he still wasn’t sure what was happening, Nick needed to do whatever he could to help turn the fight in his favor.

“Watch out,” he cried. “The matriarch is about to spit out a cloud of acid. You need to turn its head and keep it pointed away from you.” He wasn’t sure if the summon, which he had decided to call the bonefiend for now, would be able to understand his words.

But if Sophia heard his warning, she might be able to direct its actions. Either way, it seemed to work. The fiend shoved the beast’s head up… just in time to avoid taking a cloud of acid to its face.

A stream of murky green gas shot out from the render’s maw, and Nick hastily scrambled back to avoid being caught in the crossfire. Although the angle was off, the periphery of the aerosolized solvent washed over the fiend’s body a few seconds later. The acid caused its jet-black armor to bubble and hiss, but it wasn’t enough to penetrate its exoskeleton and inflict a serious wound.

Up to this point, the juvenile flesh-renders had been cowering in the far corner of the cavern. They were terrified of the bonefiend, which had proven itself to be a match for their mother. But then the matriarch let out a furious hiss, still struggling to break free from the fiend’s grasp. It must have been a command, since the lesser beasts started streaking back toward the battlefield, ignoring Nick in favor of converging upon the fiend.

“Look out! The other bugs are coming at you from the sides.” Nick didn’t dare get any closer to the clash between titans. One wrong move would leave him smeared across the cavern’s floor. But he wasn’t just going to stand there either.

Although he was still winded, he rolled back onto his feet and started throwing rocks, doing whatever he could to delay the centipedes’ advance. Meanwhile, the matriarch whipped her body around to one side, curling in to engulf the fiend within her endless, blade-tipped appendages.

Before the beast could complete the maneuver, the bonefiend threw the matriarch’s head up and released its mandibles, arresting its momentum in the process.

Half a heartbeat before the behemoth bug could recover, the fiend gathered its strength and unleashed a ferocious roundhouse kick. It completed one full revolution before a taloned foot came lashing out in a jaw-dropping display of power.

With an incredible crunch that Nick felt in his bones, the matriarch went sailing back toward the sandpit with a deep cut carved into one flank.