I tagged one of the four-legged, hulking beasts with jagged spikes sticking from their back and a mane of twisted spikes surrounding their glowing red, central eyes:

Saurshrike – Level 5

And immediately, I tagged it with my demonology skill:

Lore – Demonology – Saurshrike

A saurshrike is a valley cupsnout that has been been corrupted by a demonstone and haphazardly fused with metal scraps. It travels in groups and attacks its prey by grabbing them with its powerful jaws and impaling them on the spikes that jut from the backs of its kin.

A saurshrike has low psychic and fire resistance and high physical resistance. They are fairly unintelligent, and will follow the commands of more powerful demons without regard for self-preservation.

I retrieved my grapple gun from the ground and began to reload it as the group of saurshrikes advanced, and I scanned the lore description quickly, my heart falling as I noted the physical resistance component. Our front-liners would be particularly weak against these higher-leveled monsters, leaving us in a bad spot even if I could kill the spirefiend, which was still at two-thirds HP.

Even as I thought this, it returned—only now it didn’t swoop in for a grab. Instead it glided over the ledge, coming at us at an angle… then folded its wings and dropped from the air with a tree-shaking crash, standing on all fours with its wings folded forward.

Before it got its chance to spit its Vilefire Blast at me, I took a few steps forward, broke my Moment of Mastery, and loosed my Implosive Missile into its glowing eye.

It did 453 damage.

I started casting a Supercharged Moment of Mastery, which, like my damage spells, required only a command word at the end of its casting and left me free to speak. “Undo the knot!” I cried, my gaze still fixed on the spirefiend.

A voice called out in answer, but I didn’t see who it was. At the same time the spirefiend began to move toward me, its wings digging out clods of earth as it moved for the beacon platform.

“The knot!” I cried. “My waist! Someone untie me!”

I felt a hand briefly touch my waist and the tension in the cable immediately relaxed. The spirefiend, now at 30%, spat its Vilefire Blast at me, engulfing me in the brief flash of pain I was now used to, then began to charge.

This was the uncomfortable fact: the spirefiend, attacking as it had been by coming at us through the air, had been working to our advantage. Yes, it had minimized the damage that we dealt to it by making passes and spending most of its time out of our range, but all its grabs had failed, and the Vilefire Blasts had been healable. Best of all, my own massive damage spikes were themselves something that happened in passes: its attack strategy had played right into our strengths.

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I saw my Hit Points: 35% and dropping.

It hauled itself onto the beacon platform, my Moment of Mastery still seconds from completion, and lashed at me with thrashing jaws that I knew were sure to knock me backwards and lose my spell—but as I winced, anticipating impact, the creature’s head passed harmlessly through me, my body becoming nothing but a soft golden glow as I felt the same soothing feeling that had come with the healer’s spells. She’d used some ability to negate the attack.

I finished casting my Moment of Mastery.

The spirefiend struck me with its second attack, its teeth sinking into my shoulder to deal a large chunk of damage and making me stumble backward, now at 27% Hit Points.

But the short distance that I stumbled backward was just enough space to clear the spirefiend with a Mighty Leap, which I did—soaring over it and landing just behind the advancing demonic dinosaurs.

I started casting a Fragmented Supercharged Implosive Missile as soon as I landed, all part of my plan: the fragmented spell could be broken up, completed in segments, which meant that I wouldn’t lose my 9-second cast to the interruption of a forceful blow.

The dinosaurs turned to me as soon as I landed, happy to go after the closer prey. What was more, I saw the spirefiend also pivot in place to come after me. I turned to the cliff’s edge and began sprinting, fast as I could—either the dinosaurs would follow me or they wouldn’t, but if one of them got close enough to grab me it was likely over.

I reached the cliff, skidded to a halt as I turned in place, raising my grapple gun. The dinosaurs had indeed followed me, and were just outside reach. The spirefiend had made it halfway.

I aimed at the most distant tree I could and launched the grapnel. It connected a moment later, yanking me across the ground by the cliff’s edge, past the saurshrikes and out of their reach before slamming into the boughs of the pine, hooking my grapple-gun arm over a branch as I continued to cast my Implosive Missile.

The dinosaurs ran toward the bottom of the tree, then halted in seeming confusion, then turned and ran back toward the platform—I’d successfully wasted a huge portion of their time. The spirefiend, though, reared up onto its hind legs and put itself in the air with a few powerful beats of its wings, then began to glide toward me, its massive weight at odds with its sudden silence.

I was ready for this too: I grappled another tree at the edge of the gun’s range, the pull of the gun ripping me free of my current tree in a shower of twigs and needles and sending me straight into the crown of another one, which swayed under my weight with an uneasy splintering sound.

But I had brought myself past the spirefiend, and its momentum now worked against it—it collided, talons outstretched, with the top of the tree I’d just occupied, then pushed against the feeble-seeming pine to bring itself back in my direction.

Its jaws burned with sickly yellow fire: another Vilefire Blast, this one sure to kill me, was on its way—but too late.

I finished the cast time of Implosive Missile. I cracked my Moment of Mastery. I leapt from the tree in a moment of slowed time, loosing my deadly spell into its weak point in a moment of pure focus….

439 damage. The burning spirefiend twitched in the air, then fell with a crash to the ground at the edge of the cliffside, dead.