The party was stuck between a rock and a hard place in a very literal sense. Behind them loomed a cliff face on the beach where they were fighting less than a hundred good paces from the water lapping at the shore.
In front of them was the real problem. Between them and those waves stood a massive monster. The very same monster that they had come here hoping to defeat and cash in on.
The creature in front of all but Brass was like nothing that Aiko had ever seen before. It vaguely resembled Zenya but only in the sense that it had a hard shell on the outside. The creature stood On eight massive legs taller than many of the houses in the town where they had been living for the past few years.
The shell of its body was Blue and white and somewhat flattened and Looked like nothing so much as a soup tureen. If all they had to deal with was a massive armored body and giant armored legs that would be one thing but this particular menace to the shipping lanes of the coastal city made its presence known by wielding a pair of massive claws.
One of the claws was smaller but that was a relative term since that claw was as large as Merrill. The orcish woman was easily the tallest member of the party. The larger of the two claws was the problem because it was almost three times the size of its counterpart and easily big enough to shear through the Hall of any boat in the harbor.
The monster had shown up in the harbor one day and began tearing into the hulls of the fishing boats and eating the catch and crew with equal abandon. Only the clarity of the water of the harbor allowed anybody to figure out what was happening since the creature didn’t come on land to attack.
It had actually taken quite a bit of persuasion on the party’s part to get this particular creature to follow them onto land. They had originally hoped that if they could drag it out of the water it would die Like a fish because it couldn’t breathe.
That plan backfired, spectacularly!
Now, here they were with their backs against a cliff and this giant monster bearing down on them eager for its next meal. Aiko wondered not for the first time how she had gotten herself into this mess.
Ten days prior in the town that she now called home.
It had taken Aiko years to get Zeyn to come out and talk about his loss and his pain. The only reason why she, Brass, and Zenya had gotten a job with this particular party was because the scout of the party had been killed a few years back. It had been the work of months and no small amount of liquor to get Zeyn to finally open up and talk about his dead love, the scout Aldine.
Zeyn had Finally relented in telling Aiko about how Aldine had accidentally triggered a trap and had been skewered on the spot. He had spent a good half the night avoiding the subject of the talk and drinking himself into a stupor before he finally opened up about her demise.
After he finally began talking about what happened it was like somebody had flipped the switch and the words and tears wouldn’t stop pouring out. Aiko wasn’t certain of it but Brell the giant grizzly bear of a guild matron had insisted that it was good for him and roped Aiko into her plan to get him to finally talk about it.
It was the next morning and Zeyn was practically mortified that he had spoken about it at all but by any reckoning, he looked better in some ways. Not to say that he looked good because frankly despite his lanky frame and normally grayish pallor of his fur-clad skin, today he was looking rather green.
Aiko and the rest of the party were all sitting there eating their breakfast when a rather haggard-looking man burst through the door of the Guild Hall. Vargas, the leader of the guild, was manning the counter when the man rushed over and began blabbering on about how the coastal city needed any adventurers that the town could spare right then.
Menk, originally being from said coastal city, jumped up immediately and ran over to find out about what the man was blathering about. He came back a scant few minutes later and insisted that they needed to leave immediately so that they could capitalize on this job offer.
At the time, nobody had objected. Thinking back on it, Aiko could kick herself.
Back in the here and now and within sight of the coastal city on a small scrap of coast.
The giant monster was certainly sporting a few nasty gashes all over its shell but didn’t really look like it was in the mood to stop moving. Zeyn and Menk had done a number on the thing with their quick slash and evasion tactics.
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Every time the two of them would distract the monster Merrill would jump in and land a devastating blow on one of its legs. More often than not her blows would shatter the shell wherever she hit and it was leaking fluid from numerous splits on its shell.
Zenya hadn’t been able to do a whole lot because of her relatively small size. This did however offer her another unique advantage in that the monster either disregarded her or simply couldn’t see her. She had exploited this oversight to a rather large extent by exploring the thing’s body and stabbing it numerous times in some partially protected squishy bits under its legs.
That did seem to make the monster a little weaker but had the added benefit of making it a lot meaner.
Shumai was hardly slacking. The monster was covered in a number of splotchy red marks from her magic. She had tried just about every kind of magic that she possessed but fire was the only one that it seemed to be worried about. Every time one of her fireballs struck its tough shell, the normal dark grayish blue would suddenly turn a vibrant shade of red in that spot and the creature would back up for a time.
Aiko had used Chaos Grasp several different times to try and slow the crab down but it wasn’t having a very good effect. The creature was just too heavy for her amount of magic to make a difference when dealing with its enormous strength or weight. She’d had a little bit of luck in pulling its leg inward out from under it but that’s about as far as it went.
She also hadn’t had much luck using her Chaos Knife because the shell of this thing was just entirely too thick. Aiko could tell at this point in the fight that everyone was running on pure nerves alone and that wasn’t going to last much longer. If they didn’t find a way to take this thing down pretty soon somebody was going to make a mistake and it would be bad.
As one of the smallest combatants and one that hadn’t physically done harm to the monster, it had mostly ignored her in favor of the larger opponents that it could see doing damage. Suddenly the idea struck her and she began looking for how it was seeing them.
Up until this point, Aiko had been under the assumption that this thing didn’t have eyes because she didn’t see anything that looked like eyes on it. Thinking about the way that it acted, that was pretty dumb because it was clearly watching what they were doing.
After studying the monster for only a few seconds of battle she spotted the movement on top of its thick shell. There, studying everything they were doing were a pair of club-looking limbs that were swiveling with The movements of each of her companions that were attacking it. In one decisive moment, Aiko called out to Brass to cut the appendages off the top of it.
Brass managed to bound up onto the shelled monster and in a single swift motion, planted a knife into the base of one of the two limbs. He then used his body weight, small as it was, to leverage his knife and pry one of the two stalks from the top of the creature.
Aiko had been hoping for some kind of big reaction but the creature didn’t seem to feel very strongly about losing one of its eyes. The big spiky whiskers near them began flicking about a bit more violently but that was about it. Aiko began to get a little bit desperate at that point and tried to figure out some new way of dealing with this foe. A couple of times throughout the fight she had used one of her newer spells called Chaos Slam. The effect of the spell was to press a creature down and generally hold it in place but it didn’t work any better than her Chaos Grasp had.
She began looking at it from a different direction and thought about Merrill and her Hammer blows that had cracked the monster’s shell so easily. Suddenly it came to her and she focused on trying to narrow the application of her downward force into a smaller spot.
From past experience, Aiko knew that she had to use a mental focus of some kind in order to enact this kind of change on a spell. She thought about the way that the small round hammerhead of Merrill’s hammer delivered all the force of that weapon. With that image in mind, Aiko called out the name of her newly formed spell Chaos Hammer and watched in befuddlement as a round hole that she could have fallen through punched cleanly from the top of the monster through the bottom of its shell.
The monster staggered for a moment and she had an instant of jubilation thinking that it might well die from such a grievous wound but then it’s I swivel to her and it suddenly charged. The creature spread its giant claws to either side and batted the rest of the party out of the way and its sudden lunge for her. In a desperate moment of panic, Aiko called out for her Chaos Knife, hoping to stop the sudden charge of the monster.
She suddenly felt the drain of this bell taking hold but didn’t see the blade appear in front of the monster the way she had hoped. Instantly, fear gripped at her heart as she saw that the spell hadn’t landed on the monster. Realization dawned on her that she was about to die.
Just as the monster was about to Crest one of the large rocks leading up the coast towards the Cliff and lunge straight at her, all of the legs on its left side gave out and it collapsed to the ground unable to use any of them or the giant claw on that side, it seemed.
In a sudden stunning turn, the battle was over. With the crab unable to move one side of its body the party managed to dismantle it in short order. Later that day the party was treated to a giant feast where the people of the coastal city had cooked the monster and it turned out to be quite delicious.
Aiko was still curious about what had happened and when one of the cooks overheard her talking with the party about it, he came over to have a few quick words. “Miss, I thought that you had done it on purpose so I didn’t say nothing earlier but you was the one what disabled the creature? That musta been a right nasty spell you used for it to cut all of the muscles inside of the creature like that!”
Aiko just stared at the man unable to find any words as the implications of that settled in.