Ignoring the pain in his leg, Eik leapt on his good foot. The Gohkamorian didn’t seem to have expected that because Eik’s Viper Fang went into his stomach with little more than a hand raised halfway in response.

A breathless gasp escaped the alien’s mouth as the blade went through skin, fat, and muscle, twisting into his insides. It took him a second to come out of the shock of the attack but then he pushed Eik away with force, sending him reeling to the ground.

Michael was right behind him, however, hurling his mace as hard as he could. It was batted out of the air, but at the same time another arrow zipped through the air and slammed into the Gohkamorian’s bare chest. Immediately after, Sonja came sailing out of the darkness, chasing her arrow as she spun out of the Disengage.

She swung her thin sword, using her momentum to slice his trunk-like arm down to the bone. Blood spilled thickly into the moss, blocking in the cool, blue-green glow.

“Why don’t you just die, you piece of shit?” Eik gasped as he tried to claw his way back to the giant who was immobilized completely by another deep cut to his thigh by Sonja. He tried to force his Profound Toxin to swarm the hated foe but it just didn’t seem as malleable as it was when he lost his temperament. Even if he had plenty of anger in him at the moment, it was not in control of him like it had been when the guy with the bowl cut had insinuated his fault in Heath’s near-death event.

The huge man’s voice was so deep that it sounded like it was digitally distorted as he laughed, interrupted by a wet cough. He didn’t seem the slightest bit afraid of the death that he must certainly have known he was facing. “Even if I die, so will all of you… eventually. None of you have any idea…” he rasped. “what’s waiting for you.”

“We know about you Gohkamorians!” Heath snarled as he limped forward and hacked his thick blade into the giant’s hand, severing his fingers and eliciting a hiss of pain. “We know that the monsters sent through the fractures for nine years to kill our people were sent by your people!”

This seemed to take the man by surprise, all three rows of protruding, hairless eyebrows shooting up. “But… how could you know?”

“You don’t need to know, dead guy!” Eik said and buried Viper Fang in his leg, pushing Profound Toxin into the wound and triggering Accelerant.

The boom and the pulse shook his body and he spit up blood. The Gohkamorian’s head lulled forward as if he had become sleepy before he fell back onto his back where Sonja sliced through his neck in two slashes. Eik stabbed him twice more for good measure, and Heath and Michael joined in, anger fueling their actions and making them look like zealots performing a bloody ritual.

Eik thought about his brother Torbjørn, Olivia, his parents whom he had never been able to get back to because of the monsters. Judging by their faces, the others had similar thought and memories running through their heads. All of their pent-up frustrations and rage were being manifested through their bodies.

Although it was a barbaric thing to do, at this point it almost felt like committing an act of righteous vengeance. The Gohkamorians were responsible for billions of deaths of Earth. An attempted omnicide. This was the first of them that had been brought down by humans. The first of many, many, many more dead Gohkamorians to come.

Once they were done, they all silently agreed to not discuss the bloody deed. The mutilation was a release — none of them could deny that, but it was also something that distanced them from their humanity. It was something which would never belong in the societies they had grown up in, but which might not be so foreign in their new normal. It was bestial.

Michael let Heath support himself on his shoulder as they made their way to the tent set up by the assassins against the edge of the ridge surrounding the base of the fungus king. Sonja lifted Eik into her arms bridal style and followed the others. The ease with which she ran while carrying his entire weight was a testament to her E-rank body, but he still felt embarrassed.

After getting his leg caught in the path of a gigantic war axe Eik had thought he’d lost the leg, but thanks to Michael’s Single Protection a nasty bone fracture and some broken skin was the worst of it.

At the camp Eik was given the last of the three healing potions Atla had given them as Michael started on him with his Healing. The killers had left their packs behind when they responded to the ambush and the Earthlings found some extra supplies inside, both some manner of compressed food bars as well as containers of water.

They immediately drank a good amount of the water that they found, their injuries and the exertions of the battle leaving their throat parched and their bodies sweaty. As the healing potion and Michael’s Heal began to take effect, Eik fished out his plaque to check on his ability levels.

Profound Toxin had only leveled up once to level 38, while Movement Boost had gone from level 12 to level 14. Resistance Toxin hadn’t gained any levels.

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Heath’s new Shields evolution called Resonating Strength, which strengthened him slightly for a short time according to a small portion of the power of a received blow, had helped him withstand the onslaught of the golden boy. Each hit blocked hit from the man’s sword had provided a tiny bit of extra strength so even though the buff lasted no more than a second or two, he had been empowered for a significant portion of the battle.

The fight had brought Heath’s Shield ability to level 28, and Fortitude to level 42. Unerring Strike had only gained a single level and hit level 12.

Michael’s Heal had gone up from 19 to level 22. The ability’s Galvanic Fortification evolution, which applied a skin durability buff to any wounded target, had likely helped both Heath and Eik to not lose their legs. With his crucial use of Single Protection and Bind throughout the fight, Michael had shown his true value throughout the fight.

Both Single Protection which had hindered a couple of E-ranked attacks, and Bind which he’d been using as much as possible, had hit level 12. Just as people said, support abilities had indeed shown themselves to be difficult to level.

Sonja’s Archery had leveled up enough to gain an evolution. The first choice was called Steady Aim, which she immediately dismissed. Second and third choices were titled Sharpened Arrows and Boosted Arrow respectively.

“What’s even the difference between those last two?” Heath asked as he stared up into the stars above, one of the first humans to ever lay eyes on these particular celestial constellations.

“I don’t know,” Sonja answered, staring intensely at her wooden plaque as if reading the names of the evolutions repeatedly would provide some kind of epiphany. “Sharpened Arrows has the word ‘arrows’ in plural, while Boosted Arrow is singular. I think that might mean that Sharpened Arrows is a general strengthening of all shots with the bow while Boosted Arrow is an activated skill, kind of like your Unerring Strike.”

“Makes sense,” he nodded. “So what are you thinking of choo—”

“Boosted Arrow,” she said and quickly slid a finger across the other two options.

Without another word she readied her bow and nocked an arrow on the string. Pulling it taut, she mouthed a couple of words upon which a white, razor-sharp pike of energy expanded out of the head of the arrow like a thick coating.

The archer that Sonja had shot to initiate the battle and later gone back to kill while Eik and the others fought the rest was lying supine halfway down the slope, the arrow that killed him still protruding from the nape of his neck. She aimed at the corpse and released the string.

In the blink of an eye the empowered arrow punched into the body, pushing it almost a meter further down the ridge where it rolled and broke the new arrow at the base with a crack.

“Wow…” Michael muttered. “That’s some power right there! How often do you think you can do that, Sonja?”

She prepared another arrow and pulled the string back as she concentrated. Something akin to a hazy, glimmering shell briefly rippled over the tip of the arrow but it didn’t stay around. She gave it another second of focus before she released the string. It sunk into the body with no more force than her regular shots.

“Seems like a pretty lengthy cooldown,” she concluded tentatively. “It doesn’t feel like I’m going to be able to do that again for a good while.”

“It did look pretty insane, so if you could just do that all the time you’d become super overpowered in an instant.”

“But it’s going to be very useful for ambushes. With this you probably wouldn’t have had to go back to kill him. He would have been dead from the first shot.”

“Maybe we can use it for the boss,” Heath said as he peeked down into the basin below. “Speaking of, I don’t see anything that could be called a boss down there. Are we in the wrong place?”

Eik hissed as he moved, trying to keep his leg as still as possible, but he managed to drag himself up next to the others.

The striders didn’t appear to have taken any notice whatsoever of the tumultuous battle that had just been fought, their proboscises still buried in whatever fungal nectar they were feeding on. Everything was bathed in the gentle shine of the cap of the fungus king as if from a fluorescent ceiling light. The gigantic mycelium root network of the fungus king stretched outward in all directions, revealing a fraction of what was likely buried underground.

Along the foot of the ridge, spanning the whole crater, was water deep enough for the bottom to be obscured completely by murky darkness. It was as if the fungus king was a fortress surrounded by a protective moat. There was no telling how deep the thing went, or where it lead, but all the water that constantly streamed into the crater from the converging waterways had to go somewhere for the water levels to remain as shallow as they were.

“There’s no way this is the wrong place though, right?” Michael said. “I mean, look at it. This is the only place that looks remotely different from everything else in this godforsaken place.”

“So how do we find the boss? It’s just a big mushroom with a bunch of roots and creepy spider crab guys crawling about,” Heath asked.

They were silent as they observed the skittering monsters feeding as their feelers danced flutteringly from their carapaces. None of them seemed particularly large or… boss-like compared to the others. The weirdest thing remained the fungus king with its root network and the bottomless moat.

“What if—…” Michael began, hesitation clear in his voice. “What if… What if the boss is the fungus king? What if that’s what we have to kill?”

They exchanged glances as the massive mushroom towered above them so tall that they had to lean back to see the top. It stood unmoving like an obelisk, otherworldly.

“Let’s find out, shall we?” Sonja said and rose to a stable kneeling position and drew her bow.

“Can you already use Boosted Arrow again?” Michael asked. “That was fast.”

“No, I’m just checking something. Since we're not ready for a fight yet, I'll just do some scouting at range. Give me a second. ”

She took aim and let loose a regular, non-boosted arrow. The projectile sailed through the air, across the crater, and struck the trunk of the fungus king soundlessly.

For several seconds nothing happened. Then a low rumble echoed throughout the rocky bowl. One of the roots closest to the trunk began to wobble and shake as the wet earth beneath churned and crumbled.

From the soil emerged a hand wrapped in green and brown stalks, glinting with bio luminescent light.