Cal ground his feet hard into the stone floor, coming to a stop directly in front of the large plant man who had been watching his approach with a puzzled look.

“What’s wrong?” His father asked, the look on Cal’s face making it obvious to anyone looking that things hadn’t gone as planned, and if it wasn’t enough, the thundering sound of something charging after him could still easily be heard in the distance.

“I don’t know how long, but one of the Gryalth has been watching us, or just me, not really clear yet. They set up a trap here. I think I stopped the Gryalth spy, but I’m not a hundred percent sure there, either. The much more pressing issue is the patchwork squirrel golem coming after me and whatever is coming with it. So get ready to fight,” Cal said. His words spilled forth at breakneck speed, followed by some noticeably hard breathing due to the speed of his escape.

“Frank has smashed a dragon. No puny squirrel can cause him to quake with fear. Bring it on, squirrel!” Frank yelled down the tunnel.

In answer to his call, a half-rotting monstrosity of squirrel parts came into view. Cal had no idea how this thing managed to hold itself together, let alone look ready to rip them all to shreds. He guessed some sort of magic, but he hadn’t encountered anything so necromantic yet. Behind it were several battlemages, each one holding a glowing ball of energy.

Before the creature itself entered their cavern, its smell did. Cal clamped down hard on his stomach, hoping to keep the nausea from overwhelming him. From the sounds around him, not everyone was nearly so successful. Frank was at least was still standing tall.

“Frank, rip it apart. I’m going after the mages!” Cal called as he started charging the air around him. His mana channels were still painfully stretched after the shadow Gryalth encounter, which meant every bit of lightning mana he pushed out of his core made his arms feel like he had dipped them in acid. He kept the charged air localized to around him this time. The highly precise control needed taxed his channels even further, but he didn’t have much of a choice as risking everyone else crashing into a floating ball of electricity would be a disaster they didn’t need.

Several balls of energy crashed into Frank at the exact moment the squirrel monstrosity did. Frank crashed backward to the rocky floor. The sound of several cracks came from his body as a scream escaped his mouth.

“Fuck,” Cal cursed as this had managed to go from bad to worse. “Dad, get vomiting and start fighting, or we are all going to die!”

No response came from his father, but much to Cal’s surprise, a mushroom appeared between himself and the Gryalth mages. It was there for less than a second before they shot off several more energy balls into it, which turned out to have been precisely what its creator had hoped for. It exploded into a cloud of spores that clung to their forms, each one a burning bright red on the spot it attached it. Within seconds, the mages were reduced to screaming piles of Swiss cheese.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Cal turned his head away, not wanting to look at just how horrible their fate, deserved or not, was. He did manage to give Albert a thumbs up and caught a glimpse of the capybara collapsing forward, having spent all his mana on the effort of one singular, albeit extremely potent and well-timed attack. He couldn’t spare a moment to check on his friend, though, as he needed his full attention on the frankensquirrel.

To Frank’s credit, despite the pain he had to have been in judging from continued cracks as he grappled with the creature on the ground, he had managed to hold him down there, keeping the monster from attacking anyone else. As Cal got closer, he realized just how bad of shape Frank was in. The poor giant’s arms were both bent backward at angles that signified some bad breaks. He was pinning the horror with only his legs, leaving its arms free to bash Frank’s face repeatedly.

Cal quickly tried putting an end to this, hitting the monster in the face with several weak lightning bolts. He kept them low-powered to prevent any discharge of energy into Frank. The mauler had been through plenty already. It didn’t work; the frankensquirrel seemed to have only one purpose in whatever was left of its brain, and that was killing Frank.

Having zero intention of letting it continue that goal, Cal moved onto a new tactic. He raised the stone floor, covering Frank's broken parts. Soon, the top half of his torso was entirely engulfed in a rocky shield, blocking the repeated hammer blows from above. Cal’s efforts didn’t go unnoticed by the pummeled Frank, either, as his legs locked down harder on the monster, pulling it down against the newly erected defense.

Cal seized the opportunity and placed his hands over both of its ears, and started channeling void mana directly into whatever was left of its brain. The head slowly started to compress on itself before finally collapsing inward in a horrible crunching sound. The rest of the body squirmed briefly and then went totally limp in Frank’s leglock. It was dead again.

Breathing hard, Cal stumbled away from the mangled corpse, trying to distance himself from the smell while working out how to get everyone up and out of the chamber. A bright light engulfed the room, rapidly changing his thoughts to worry momentarily before Cal realized the source. Excalibur was emanating a solid flow of mana that spread across the chamber and washed over all of them. Cal quickly understood what it was doing. The nausea was passing, and not just in him; the others were able to regain their footing as well.

“My apologies, whatever the necrotic aura that was coming off that unholy beast was interfering with my ability to access any of my stored mana. It was likely the same effect that had incapacitated Stan and Jen so badly. I will continue to examine the magical remnants and work on a countermeasure for future encounters,” the sword said.

“You can do that?” Cal asked as he worked to remove the stone holding Frank to the ground.

“Yes, I was not originally conceived as a weapon, but as is often the case, tools of knowledge become needed in war,” Excalibur responded.