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“Look,” she said, pointing.

I looked. To the right of us, a little way away, with another further off, were small hills of earth. No, mounds of earth!

“They look like…” I said.

“Worm mounds,” Arturo finished. He unslung his bow.

“Or even, wurm mounds,” Samantha corrected him, drawing her swords.

Crow pulled his own large blade forth.

“A giant wurm?” I asked. “Does that sound like something that could be the level boss?”

“A good candidate at least,” Jinsu said. “Judging by the size of these mounds, it’s pretty big.”

“Anyone have any information on giant wurms then?”

“Their hide is very tough,” Crow volunteered, our monster expert. “Some can breathe poison gas, but this is rare. Don’t fall for the old tales of getting swallowed and hacking away from inside either. There is strong acid in the belly and no air, even if you aren’t minced into little pieces by the teeth.”

“Good to know,” I said. “Very well, let’s keep an eye out. Spread out a little too, we don’t want to make a concentrated target.”

We carried on in loose formation. The landscape remained the same, with the exception of more and more worm piles.

I considered what spell would be best against such a beast. Probably some kind of slicing attack, but a strong one against something with tough skin. Or maybe a piercing spell, like stone bullets. Large ones. As I walked I modified my incantation code.

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There, that should do it.

Not a moment too soon.

“The ground!” Jinsu said, stopping.

We all felt it. The earth beneath us was trembling.

“Where…” Arturo started to say, but was cut off by the answer.

Not one, or two, but about half a dozen long, brown wurms erupted from the ground all around us, luckily not directly under anyone.

On the plus side, they weren’t nearly as large as I was expecting, probably being a little under a metre in diameter, and seven or eight metres long, but the downside was, there were six of them!

“It’s a swarm!” Samantha cried, leaping forward and slicing at the nearest with her swords. She cut deep, and green ooze began to leak from it.

“Is it a swarm though?” Arturo asked, loosing an arrow at another. It stuck into the creature, which showed no sign of noticing it.

“A flock?” Samantha ducked as the beast she’d injured lunged at her. The front of the wurms were basically holes lined with multiple rows of razor teeth.

As Crow sliced the one nearest to him in two, I loosed my new spell at another, throwing two giant, icicle shaped, granite rocks at it from above. They embedded themselves in the middle of the creature, puncturing clean through the body and pinning it to the ground. It let out a surprising screech and writhed around, unable to move further. Green ichor leaked out from the injuries.

“I wasn’t aware wurms made sound,” Arturo said. He was pulling back on his bow again, but I heard him mutter an incantation before he loosed it, at the same monster as before.

This time the arrow punctured the thing like a hot knife through butter, piercing the rough hide deeply a little way behind the head area. Without so much as a squeak, the wurm thudded to the ground, and lay still.

Samantha and Crow had now dealt with three between them, so only one was left. Jinsu had drawn her short sword and was playing a game of dodge with it. As I watched, she slipped underneath the head and stabbed upwards, in the same region that Arturo had aimed for.

The sword bit deep, and she was thrown back as her wurm thrashed about, squealing before collapsing in a twitching heap. Jinsu ran over and hacked madly at it, until it was in two pieces, and she was covered in green blood.

“I’m going to stick with swarm,” Samantha concluded, wiping her brow.

“They weren’t so hard,” Arturo said. “I was expecting a tougher fight.”

“You…” I started to say.

Too late!

The ground was shaking hard, like a mini earthquake.

“What?” asked Samantha.

An eruption of earth answered her, some metres off to our right, and a gigantic shape rose from the ground, like a flexible missile. The massive new wurm hissed like a steam train as more of its body emerged from underground.

“Shit,” I said. It had to be about three or four metres wide, and fuck knows how long.

“I think we just killed the children,” I shouted. “And the mother’s mad!”