The beast roared again, and all of us, even the three fighters in the front, turned for a moment to watch it soar over us, tilting to turn toward the mountain’s edge and loop back around. I tagged it:

Burning Spirefiend – Level 7

My entire body tensed with a kind of animal terror that no video game had ever inspired in me before, just as with the Bladed Tombworm, but worse. This thing was real, a massive creature that, if killing weren’t governed by HP bars, could end me in a moment. My mind knew it no matter how much I wanted to tell myself otherwise.

“They’ve taken a wyvern!” the healer called out. I had a moment to reflect that, no, this wasn’t a dragon, before I noticed our fighters still attacking the weblings and remembered to do something.

I didn’t focus on the weblings as I had before. Instead I began to cast the Elemental Aegis spell, intending to buff everyone—starting with the two level 4s, our lowest levels—with the fire resistance that I suspected would be a strong help against, well, the burning spirefiend. As I did this, I tagged the spirefiend with my demonology skill, sharing the pane for any of my allies to see.

Lore – Demonology – Burning Spirefiend

A burning spirefiend is an adult spire wyvern that has been corrupted by a demonstone and haphazardly fused with metal scraps. It attacks its prey by dropping them from great heights or by coating them in poisonous fire.

A burning spirefiend has low psychic and frost resistance and high fire and physical resistance. It is fairly unintelligent, and will follow the commands of more powerful demons without regard for self-preservation.

I read this all as the spirefiend came back around, lower now, and my eyes widened. Dropping them from great heights? Not good.

But I had a powerful spell saved, and my current elemental attunement was psymagick, which was at least half-composed of this thing’s weakness.

The spirefiend loosed another cry, spitting a sickly yellow glob of fire from its mouth that sped through the air toward us. At first I thought it was aimed at me, but it was the healer who was enveloped by the fire in a blast that took off more than 40% of her hit points—which continued to tick down as she burned.

But the spirefiend wasn’t done. The melee fighters were handling the last two low-health weblings, and the spirefiend spread its wings, slowing its flight and giving me a glimpse of a two-legged body that was impaled in many places by jagged metal shards. Its talons dipped, easily grabbing one of the level 4s, who struggled as it beats its wings several more times to lift him into the air.

I finished casting my Elemental Aegis on the second level 4—the one who hadn’t been grabbed. Then, with little thought or hesitation, and with the hope that I might somehow knock our struggling, screaming dwarf out of the thing’s talons before he was dropped to his death, I expended my Moment of Mastery buff to increase my precision and spoke the final command word of my Implosive Missile, finishing the nine-second cast time and loosing the spell at my enemy.

Time quite literally slowed down as I aimed the spell, and for a moment I felt like I was in tune with everything—wind from its wings passing in a wave over the battlefield to stir my hair and buffet my ears, the liquid-like fire of its first attack burning in slow motion on the healer beside me, the silhouette of its warped and twisted body outlined by the glowing orange rune above, its eye….

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

Its eye. That was where I aimed the spell, automatically in the way of the system, but with perfect confidence.

The Moment of Mastery ended—the world moved again at frightening, normal speed as a bright purple missile streaked through the air, struck the demonic wyvern in the glowing eye at the center of its twisted face, and imploded in a shock of rippling air and warped purple light.

It did 428 damage.

I cheered as I watched the thing’s health drop by almost exactly 30%—but my heart fell when I saw that it hadn’t dropped the dwarf—Oderion. Of course it hadn’t, I realized—all I’d done was hit point damage, and this wasn’t real life where that would stagger someone.

Beside me the flames went out on our healer, who was too busy casting to speak. One of the melee fighters let out an incredulous sound at the damage of my implosive missile, but I was barely hearing him, watching the struggling dwarf recede as the wyvern turned midair, flying low toward the edge of the mountain—and the drop to his death.

A part of my brain, the terrified part that was very human and concerned with survival, seemed to whisper: don’t do it.

But another part, the part that liked colorful text, glowing weapons, and batman said:

Do it.

I’m not sure why I listened to the part that I did.

I was sprinting toward the edge of the mountain before the spirefiend had even reached it, desperate to get within range fast enough. I didn’t have to wait—as soon as the monster had our dwarf past the sheer drop, it beat its wings once, powerfully, while thrashing its legs forward to dislodge its captive and send the dwarf flailing into the open air.

I jumped, using my Mighty Leap, unsure if the system would allow me to make a jump as precise as the one I intended… but the air soared by me and my inner ear lurched as the ground came out from under me, hundreds of feet of distance opening up between me and the slope below….

I collided with Oderion, hooked one arm under his shoulder, tried to shout at him to hold on but found the words either lost on the wind or lost in my throat, spun in the air as I hoped desperately to catch sight of—there!

The grappled gun hissed and clacked as the grapnel launched forward and buried itself into a cliffside pine, the cord going taut a moment later, the dwarf’s weight suddenly heavy on my arm as we swung downward toward the cliff, the gun’s prime mover struggling to generate the force required to lift our weight.

But my increased video-game strength was more than enough for me to hold on, both to the dwarf and the gun, even after we collided with the cliff face, bouncing against it hard but not taking any damage.

I looked down at Oderion. He looked up at me, eyes wide in the midst of a shaggy mane of auburn. The whir of the grapple gun’s engine was loud in my ears as it pulled us slowly up the mountainside. My other hand still held my staff, but I couldn’t use that hand to cast while it was busy hooking Oderion.

He said something, but I couldn’t hear it. My heart was beating harder than it ever had. Below us, I saw dark shapes scaling the cliff wall and realized that even if we dealt with the spirefiend, there were more on the way.

We reached the top of the cliff and I helped to pull the dwarf over before dislodging the grapnel and winding it back into the gun—I did all this as fast as possible, aided by the automatic movements of the system, but the shadow of the spirefiend, made long by the setting sun, fell over us just as I finished.

It had come back for another pass. And I’d had no time to prepare.

This was not looking good.