He would have been well and truly fucked at this point if the beast had been his intended victim. Fortunately for Nick, his true target was the creature behind it. Its view of the darts had been obstructed by the other’s body, leaving the beast with no time to dodge out of harm’s way.

With immense satisfaction, he watched both silvery projectiles sink into its chitin a heartbeat apart. One dart struck the render near the middle of its body, and the second landed right between its eyes, vanishing in a flash of light.

The centipede must have really felt the bite of his spell. It began hissing and screaming, writhing like one end was plugged into an electrical socket, taken out of the fight for at least a few minutes.

But Nick had no time to admire the results of his plans. No time to do anything other than run while bringing his weapon to bear. His ordeal was still underway.

By now, he had finished closing the distance and was halfway through swinging his sword. He brought the heavy blade down in a vicious arc, aiming for the last uninjured beast.

Everything is riding on this move. Please, please let it work, he prayed as his blade cleaved the air with a roar of displaced air. He had done well to draw things out this long already, and this was the last trick he had up his sleeve to buy Sophia time.

In the end, his luck held out. At least for a little longer.

As Nick had hoped, like the first flesh-render he’d fought, the beast tried to block the blow with the side of its mandible, trusting its chitin armor to stop his swing cold. It was treating his sword like a mundane weapon, unaware of the magic it contained.

That was the reason why he had put everything that he had into the swing. The weight of his sword, the strength in his body, and the momentum accumulated during his reckless charge. He was gambling everything on the sharpness of his mysterious weapon, and now it was time to see how the cards came down.

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Thanks to the extra force, this time, instead of making it halfway through, the blade sank deep into the reinforced chitin shielding the render’s mandible… and kept right on going, cutting straight through both bladed appendages before emerging out the other side in a plume of gore-studded ichor.

Unlike the other blows he’d struck, this was a critical wound. Enough to take the juvenile out of the fight for good. The injured beast threw itself back and skittered away, racing for the sandpit and retreating from the combat.

Although the beast didn’t know it, he had no intention of following up the attack. By the time that it dove into the sand, Nick was already sprinting back toward his barrier, adrenaline singing in his veins.

Another few heartbeats would see him to the small measure of safety it provided. Better still, Sophia should be done any second with… whatever it was she was up to.

Holy shit. It all went according to plan. I think I’m going to make… Nick’s optimism was fated to die a bare instant after it was born. Because that was the moment when the ground started to shake, the sand in the immense pit heaving like waves upon a storm-wracked sea.

Of course, he sighed at his inevitable reversal of fortune, having known that this would happen sooner rather than later.

There was no doubt that all the shaking heralded the imminent reemergence of the flesh-render matriarch. Nick had been hoping to take at least two of the juveniles out of the fight, but only one of them was down and he had run out of time.

Sure enough, at that very moment, the matriarch’s sinuous form emerged from the surface of the sand, like leviathan rising from the deep.

Nick dove for cover and ducked behind the closest cart, hoping to buy a few final seconds before the colossal creature was able to pin down his exact position.

Only half a heartbeat later, he learned that his effort was in vain. Before he could hope to leap out of the way, the matriarch’s body contracted, her serpentine form coiling around itself like a spring.

In the same moment that he realized his luck had just taken a dramatic turn for the worse, the colossal beast erupted into motion, sending great spews of sand flying into the air. Before he had time to blink, she closed the distance in a flash, her swordlike mandibles spread wide to cut him in twain.

In less than a heartbeat, the airborne matriarch would crash into Nick with the force of a freight train, ending his life as surely as if he had stepped onto the tracks.