Our vision was obscured for a few moments while the dust swirled around the room, kicked up by whatever monster had fallen from the cathedral ceiling of the room. As a side note, I’m not really sure how far underground we were at this point, but I suspected that ceiling was too high for our depth. I wondered if we were under a hill now, or if the laws of physics and reality were being bent again. Games have been known to do that.
Anyway, after the air in the room cleared, we could finally see the monster standing before us. And I just couldn’t keep myself from commenting.
“Huh, that’s kinda gross.”
“Can’t you take this a little more seriously?” Horvath asked, never taking his eyes off the enemy.
The monstrosity stood almost twice Horvath’s height. I called it a monstrosity because that was really the only word I could find to describe the thing. It had four legs, each about as thick as my waist. Not that Lilith’s waist is particularly thick. She was designed to have a fairly good hourglass figure, after all.
Like a centaur, from it’s front it had a large, muscular torso. From that four large arms sprouted. The bald head was also quite large, with a horrifying face with none of the features in quite the right place. I didn’t take the time to count, but it had quite a few eyes, rather than the usual two. Picture a spider’s eyes, except made up of a number of normal eyes, rather than one compound one. The mouth was very wide with several rows of sharp looking teeth, and hung open with some drool dripping from it.
The entire monstrosity was unclothed, and was evidently made by sewing together a large number of corpses. The skin was a number of mottled patches of different colors. Some were standard shades of skin, others were a pale bluish. There were several patches of very darkly tanned skin, and still others were varying shades of green. There were even a few other, even more exotic colors. Though blue and green are already fairly exotic.
“So, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say this isn’t natural. Or as natural as you can get with undead. Either way, this thing looks like someone intentionally put it together like that. Any ideas on how we go about killing it?” I quietly asked Horvath as we and the monstrosity stared at each other, waiting for the other to make a move.
“Really, what clued you in? That it’s got too many of basically everything, or that it’s clearly sewn together?” Horvath asked sarcastically. “Anyway, we should probably just stick to our usual routine, since we’ve got no clue what this thing is capable of. We’ll go into melee and I’ll try to keep its attention. Aurora, keep us alive and fire your Holy Bolt whenever you can. Amber, aim for the eyes. It’s not likely, but maybe we can blind it. Lilith, it’s big enough you can probably close in with your whip. I’m willing to bet your mind magic will be just as useless here as it is on regular undead.”
After getting everyone’s acknowledgement to the plan, Horvath ran forward positioning himself directly in front of the monstrosity. Seeing us charge towards it, the creature gave a loud roar, and began its own charge and took a swing at Horvath with both of its right arms with a thundering impact against his shield. Surprisingly, Horvath was able to hold his ground from the tremendous blow, and didn’t move at all.
While Horvath was absorbing blows from the monster, Simona dashed forward to his right, while Celeste charged to the left. Using my wings, I quickly soared behind the monster. I activated my flame slash spell, and took a swing at the monsters back legs.
Most of the monster’s attacks were focused on Horvath, but occasionally it would take a swing at the rest of us while still aiming at Horvath with the others. In my case, it would attempt to kick me with it’s rear legs. The first time it tried that I was barely able to get out of the way, and nearly got hit hard by the claws that were sticking out of the foot.
Our attacks were chipping away at the monstrosities health, but it was very slow. We searched around as we fought it trying to find weak points, but other than when Amber shot the eyes it seemed to take very little damage. When she wasn’t healing Aurora started firing her Holy Bolts at the eyes as well, but the rest of us were stuck hitting the torso and legs, since we couldn’t reach higher.
After we got it to roughly half health, the monster gave out another roar. Since we weren’t sure what it was doing, Horvath had us all regroup for a moment, but after the roar nothing seemed to change. At least at first, then from the side entrances of the room, a couple zombies came shuffling in.
Initially, we thought the zombies were coming to attack us from behind while we were fighting to the monster, but things turned out much worse for us than that. The monstrosity leapt over to one of the zombies, picked it up, and shoved the whole thing in it’s mouth. As it chewed on its undead snack, it’s health began to recover, and some of the eyes Amber and Aurora had managed to destroy began to regenerate.
“Don’t let it eat the other zombie. We need to limit the amount of health it can regain.” Horvath yelled, and Celeste used her charge to attack the second zombie. The rest of us started running over as well, but her ability made her faster than even I could go with my wings.
The monstrosity finished crunching on the first zombie, and turned to see her take a swing at its second meal. It dashed toward her, intending to stop her before she can kill the zombie. As it reached her, it picked up the zombie with one of its left hands, while both of its right fists came crashing towards Celeste. Just before impact, Horvath managed to leap between them, and raised his shield.
Because he had just arrived, he hadn’t had time to properly get his footing, and the impact from both of the fists sent him flying backwards. He managed to survive the blow, but only barely. He wouldn’t be able to do much until Aurora healed him some.
With the obstruction out of the way, the fourth arm came swinging down on Celeste, who wasn’t able to dodge it and was sent crashing into a wall. Hitting the wall, she burst into small lights, the first loss for our party.
Unfortunately, we didn’t have time to be upset about losing Celeste. Because we had all closed in to try to stop it from killing her, now Simona and I were in close range without a tank to distract the monster. As a general rule, lightly armored characters like us don’t do particularly well in this situation, and this was no exception. A large fist came crashing down on me before I even realized what was going on. Just as it hit me, I heard a loud explosion from above, and then my vision went black.
---
When my consciousness returned, I was standing back at the beginning of the dungeon, in the room where we had first received the message congratulating us on discovering it. My body was a sore all over, probably because I was just crushed by a giant fist. That tends to be a painful experience, and I would know. This isn’t the first time that’s happened to me.
Looking around the room, Celeste was sitting leaning against the wall.
“You alright?” I asked.
“Yeah. I wasn’t expecting it to hit that hard, though.”
I smiled. “I don’t think it had been, up till then. I wonder if attacking the zombies enrages it or something. Anyway, things were looking pretty bad, so the others should-” As I was speaking, there was a flash of light, and Simona appeared. “... be arriving soon.”
This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.
“Ow, I didn’t expect the pain to linger after coming back.” Simona sheathed her swords, and sat down by Celeste.
Before long, Horvath appeared in the room, followed closely by Amber and Aurora. I can only guess, but he probably tried to hold out as long as he could to protect them, and after he was gone they were quickly dispatched by the monstrosity as well.
“Alright, that didn’t go so well. Let’s take a break and try to think of a plan, since that clearly didn’t work. Also, that should give the soreness from respawning time to go away.” Everyone agreed to Horvath’s proposal.
“It was going alright, other than it healing and us not being able to do much damage to it.”
“Yeah, I think we need to hit it harder, especially the eyes. Speaking of which, what was that you used near the end, Amber? That did a good bit of damage, so if possible, can you use those more?”
“Oh, that. The results of an experiment. I only had a couple of them right now, though. They’re tricky to make, and also a bit unstable. I have the materials to make a decent amount if we want to use them, but it’ll probably take an hour or two.”
“Um, what are you two talking about?”
Amber grinned at my question. “Ah right, you died just as I fired the first one. It’s a surprise, and one you in particular will enjoy.”
“Alright, I’ve got a few more ideas we can try. Let’s take a break here and have a meal. Amber, get as many of those made as possible. It’s risky, but I think we can pull this off.”
Horvath has always hated losing a battle. He views it as failing his job as a tank, and so he gets frustrated when things go south. Luckily, he’s also good at analyzing the situation and coming up with new methods.
We all sat and had a meal. Amber say a bit away, for safety, and began working on whatever it was she would be using in the coming fight. As for my meal, it was Celeste’s turn to feed me, so while Aurora prepared everyone else’s food we found some privacy, which sounds a lot more scandalous than it really was. As usual, Aurora insisted I eat with everyone else afterward, and we spent a couple hours recovering and calming down.
---
“Alright, are we ready to try this again?” Horvath asked as we looked into the room large room. This time the monstrosity was already sitting on the ground, so I suppose the drop in was only for the first appearance. It’s health was back to max, but I wasn’t sure if it summoned a bunch of zombies to snack on, or if the game just restored it when all its enemies died.
After getting the okay from everyone, we once again marched in to face the monster. This time our formation was a bit different. Horvath, Simona, and Celeste were still in front, since they needed to close into melee. Behind them was only Aurora for healing and the occasional Holy Bolt. Finally, Amber and I were on our own, in the air out of the monster’s reach. I was to carry her, while she fired her crossbow from above.
As I scooped Amber up into my arms, something interesting occurred to me. “Hey Amber.”
“Hmm, what’s up?” She asked, looking over her shoulder at me.
“You’re considerably smaller than Aurora, so why is it you’re actually heavier than she is?”
Amber turned her face away from me, and didn’t say or do anything for a moment. Then her elbow jabbed into my gut.
“Guh, don’t do that. I might have drop you.”
“You should know better than to comment on a ladies weight! In fact, I’m pretty sure we had this conversation before! Now fly steady. If you move erratically these things may go off and kill us both.”
She pulled a quiver of the special bolts she had been making from her inventory, and hung it so she could smoothly draw and fire them. These were the unstable things she had been making during our break earlier, a set of prototype explosive crossbow bolts.
Our strategy was simple. The melee fighters would be on the ground, holding the creature’s attention. While they were going to do some damage, their primary goal was to keep it in place. Meanwhile, I would fly out of the monster’s reach with Amber, who would be firing her explosive bolts at the monster. Since there was a danger of them exploding if they were shaken too much, she wouldn’t be able to dodge attacks, which was why we decided to have me carry her above the monster. Plus, this gave her a clean line of fire at the monster’s eyes. We were also responsible for eliminating the zombies before the creature could consume them.
As for me, I was just gently gliding through the air with a gnome in my arms. Occasionally I cast Inspire on myself to keep my strength up, since it would be very, VERY bad to drop Amber. If I thought I could, I would also cast it on the others, but I didn’t do that often since maintaining the effect on myself was the highest priority and I didn’t want to risk running out of mana.
KATHUNK, the crossbow launched it’s missile at the monster’s right eye cluster. As soon as the bolt made contact, KABOOM, it exploded in a large fireball, singeing all of the eyes around where it hit, and temporarily blinding that eye and carving off a good sized portion of the monster’s health.
“Hey, move a bit to the left so I can aim at that eye. Let’s alternate targets back and forth to try to keep it blinded.”
“You got it.” I began slowly drifting back and forth in the air as Amber rained explosives on the monster’s face.
Of course, the monstrosity wasn’t going to just ignore the flying target that was doing most of the damage to it. It bent its knees to prepare to leap up and attack us, but this was something we had planned for and expected it to do. As soon as the knees bent, all three of the melee fighters attacked them, destabilizing the creature and causing it to fall over. Until it was able to pick itself up, they began slashing at it’s face, going for the eyes that were now in their reach.
Before long, we once again had it back down to half it’s health. Once again, the monster let out a roar, and a couple zombies came shuffling into the room. However this time our melee fighters didn’t back off when it roared, so it wasn’t free to rush over to where the zombies where. Instead, the zombies slowly started making their way towards the monster.
“Brace yourselves!” I called out to the rest of the party as Amber and I drifted toward the first zombie, and Amber quickly sniped it with her explosives instantly destroying it. Seeing one of it’s zombies destroyed, the monster began slamming its fists into Horvath’s shield harder than it had been so far. As we had guessed, attacking the zombies enrages it.
We quickly dispatched the second zombie in the same way, then went back to attacking the eyes. This time it started attempting to shield its eyes with two of its hands, which slowed our attacks. It still had to move the hands away occasionally to locate our party members, though, so we did have windows to fire in. And with two arms occupied protecting its eyes, the melee fighters were free to attack more as there were less attacks aimed at them. Unfortunately, the enraged state didn’t seem to be going away, so those attacks they did get were stronger.
From then, it just became a matter of shooting the eyes when we had the chance, while the others kept the monster in place. It tried a few more times to jump at us, with similar results to the first attempt.
At roughly a quarter of it’s health remaining, it once again summoned a couple zombies to try to heal itself. We used the same tactic as before, and shot down the zombies while everyone else kept the monster from going to eat the other one. After killing the first zombie, however, the monsters blows became even stronger. It seemed that killing a zombie in every wave could increase the enrage bonus even further. At this point, Aurora had to stop casting Holy Bolt entirely to focus on keeping Horvath’s health up.
The zombie summoning repeated again at about ten percent of its health. At this point, all four fists were constantly hammering down on Horvath’s shield, with the impacts actually pushing him backwards a bit. Aurora constantly cast healing spells on him to mitigate the damage, and I saw her quickly drinking a mana potion. Horvath also was using healing potions to help ease her load, but it wouldn’t do much. If the monster didn’t die soon, we would end up losing Horvath due to attrition.
“Amber, can you fire faster? We need to finish this fast.”
“No, but I do have one thing I can do. I’ve only got one, but there is a bolt that does an even bigger explosion. It’s even less stable than the ones I’ve been using, and is liable to go off while I load it if you shake at all, though. Can you hold very steady for a bit?”
“I’ll do what I can.” I focused on keeping us as still as possible, shutting out everything else to concentrate on the movement of my wings. I barely even registered the movement of Amber in my arms as she loaded her crossbow. And then I heard the sound of it fire. Looking up, I saw the monsters entire head suddenly engulfed in a massive explosion. The light and heat from the explosion caused the rest of our party, who were closer to it, to have to shield their faces with their arms and step back away from the monster. The monster itself gave off a thunderous roar and staggered backwards, before toppling to the ground with a loud crash, and disappearing into countless small particles of light.