Veis was looking a lot older in the eyes as she and the girls stumbled into the tent in the morning, and they all promptly fell asleep together without saying anything.

Briggs kicked back on the side of a hill, the vivic fires eating away at the remnants of the Gargovian nest also helping to make the sky blue and faintly sunny, a nice day. “He must have popped away at dawn,” he observed to me.

“He did. And without dupes of Him here, shouldn’t be coming back.” There’d been literally hundreds of dupes of Him to kill, although they happily exhibited no teamwork, and didn’t have the Health Qi of an actual demigod. Just big, strong, lots of claws, and inordinately tough. Wolfpack them and they went down pretty easy. “She probably made a dupe of Him every time He died, and He was drawn back here by them after every real hunt, until the true Dusk in the outside came to steal Him away for a Hunt. Really, getting brought back over and over to kill gargovian dupes of Himself and his dogs, for who knows how many times?”

“Well, not evolving and adapting to the times is a bitch. Hopefully His Favored Enemy Slayer/Aberrations is up nicely, or at least he got Foe Hunter out of all this. If not, eh.” He glanced at the scar on his shoulder. “So, what do you think this symbol does?”

“Well, according to Noir Rabe, it’s the Mark of Herne, which makes us the equivalent of people who have bested the Lord of the Wild Hunt in battle. He sounded a bit envious.”

“Huh.” Briggs rubbed his nose. “Well, I suppose having a modifier on Diplomacy and Intimidate checks against Fey can’t be all that bad. He doesn’t have any real enemies, as I understand it...”

“No, he’s older than both Courts, and beyond their control, a servant of Nature Herself. The Fey Hunt is a smarmy attempt to imitate Him. He could probably tell we’d wiped one of them.” I smirked, and he laughed low and roughly. Damn, he really did have to hurry his hormones along...

“How do you think the Hags trapped a Gargovian in here for so long? Seriously, giving a Gargovian that much time, it should have eaten the planet a long time ago.”

“I imagine that it has to do with the Formation they started, and the Mother being pinned by its influence. It just ran out of biomass and has just been sitting there cannibalizing its children, slowly starving unless idiots come in to be eaten. Herne must have somehow come in to hunt one of her kids, and been trapped and killed many, many times over.”

“Yeah, even a classless demigod has fifteen Outsider Hit Dice. Even with no gear, those things were pretty mean.” They could have been a right terror if every one of them wasn’t basically fighting at least six Sevens or higher at once, and simply wasn’t allowed to kill one of them before it died.

The Mother had definitely gotten addicted to demigod flesh. It had morphed into a canine tauren, three dog heads with burning green eyes and stag horns, furred femalish torso, six legs, huge clawed hands, moving with divine speed and energy.

Oh, and twenty feet tall.

Alas, its instincts and constant spewing out of more Gargovians meant it ended up fighting in a birthing chamber, without the area to run around with its vast speed and really be a threat to our forces. We’d simply plugged up the main way out with a lot of shining steel, and then Bane of Legends, Bane/Aberrants, Enmity/the Unnatural, and Greater Soulbound combined for +X on our Weapons as we carved into the planet-eating spawn-spewing thing.

Had a lot of Health Qi, did a lot of damage. It was really, really shocked when all three of us straight up shanked it dead, and it had real problems dealing with us.

Well, me. I was the one with the Shield blocking for the boys, Transferring wounds with Tremble and just concentrating on hitting it as many times as possible for Healing Edge to do its thing. Stand intercepted dozens of attacks that could have really done a number on us, bearing up under the impacts in his new Indestructible QL 50 Adamantine home.

Bane of Legends wasn’t a Slaughter effect, it used a different type of Rune. It was basically an evener, a quintessential fight of the little guy against the powerful, there to compensate for enormous, unnatural power. As such, it fit into Arsenal, and now a lot of the Ironblood had the chance to add it to their Weapons... which might trigger a fatal surprise if something that thought itself obscenely strong and them not at all dangerous went reaping into them...

Good lads. Most of them were just sitting down and doing casual maintenance work from their kits right now.

AA was off taking a look at the Obelisk in this zone. Scholarly interest? Brothers found it almost impossible to relax in normal areas, let alone in some place as humming with distorted magic and reality as this.

We didn’t have to worry about residual taint. The Mother would only allow its spawn to escape if it had sufficient reserves, at which point it would have evolved into a Great Mother and would send out Mothers of its own, which would grow in size, and then come back for a big battle Royale, turning into a Grand Mother which could then literally start the process of eating everything alive on the planet.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

Yeah, Gargovians were not shit to mess around with. Happily, this batch had been mostly predictable, as the only biomass it had had for a long time was Herne and His hounds, which basically supplanted the other, lesser bioforms it could have used. So, hounds, dog-demigods, and demigods, all with that wonderful Gargovian touch, had formed ninety percent plus of what we fought.

--------------

Zone 10...

Great brutes roared hard enough to shake the leaves of the trees.

The earth trembled from the mass of great bodies thumping across it.

Boulders crashed through the trees, exploding against mighty trunks and bouncing and plowing holes along the crowd.

Blood flowed in great gouts and streams, staining the ground with streams of it, flowing out of massive bodies.

It was Jotun time!

The most numerous of our attackers were ogres, coming in their hundreds, with the hill giants behind them looming over them. Driving those twelve-foot brutes on were their thirty-foot tall mutant cousins, the mountain giants, using whole stripped trees as crude clubs, with their Jotunblooded ruler looking like he was made out of black gneiss or something in charge.

You’d think a bombardment of that many thrown rocks would be dangerous, but since we knew they were coming and were there, well, all it meant was a lot of elves had to stop the rocks in midflight and send them falling to the ground in front of the befuddled giants, while Rockborn longspears held an uncompromising line and the command crew lit into them, with Ancientaxe proving devastatingly dangerous against things the heart of his Order was made to kill...

Lots of Gauntlets and Girdles material to salvage from here, as well, and yo, Jotuns have, by hook or crook, decent loot...

------------

Zone 11...

We watched the hunting pack of Tyrant Raptors, literally a dozen of the great carnivores hunting together, threading their way between massive herds of sauropods grazing along the riverbanks, and making their way in our direction. They spread vestigial black wings, and black acid was dripping from their jaws as they hurtled our way.

Bane to Dragons swiftly began to arise on the Weapons around us... because those sauropods were also turning to look our way, and they had vestigial wings, too!

Draconic brontosaurs and Tyrants, and a half-dozen other types of dinos, and that wasn’t even counting the magical ones, like the Thunder Lizards.

The mood of the five dragons in the sky was very, very bad. This was why they killed all evil dragons as soon as they could, because the fuckers would mate with anything and totally infiltrate the ecology with dragon-spawn.

Briggs pointed silently, and a great black-scaled sauropod two miles away turned to look at us. The wings it unfolded weren’t vestigial, and were wide enough to basically span a football field. Nor did it have the flat teeth of a plant-eater, as it bellowed out a challenge that had every single mutant dino in the land raising its head and contributing to with lungpower that was definitely on the excessive side.

Ancientaxe wasn’t off-put, he just sighed some. “That’s a lot of meat to hack,” he murmured, with the air of someone who’d seen this sort of thing before.

We were definitely, definitely going to be able to add to the Dragon Baneskulls from this area, in addition to the ones being harvested off the Warp Dragons...

This zone... might take a while just from the sheer amount of meat we were going to have to cut through. No wonder the border with the giants was strewn with so many bones...

-------------

Zone 12...

There were massive reptilian bodies playing out there in the waters of the lake, which was wide enough that we couldn’t see across it. That wasn’t a terrain problem, as the three of us could all run across water, towing Disks with the troops behind us.

It was that there was a whole lot of plesiosaurs and wako in the way out there, a considerable number of which had dark scales and vestigial wings.

Up above in the sky, Wrath was flashing, frost and lightning were flaring, and pteradons, pterosaurs, and similar flying wedge-headed dinos were tumbling from the sky, with many a large scaled body in the waters below surging to the sites of their splashdowns.

Damn, there were a lot of them.

It wasn’t that we couldn’t outrun them, either... we certainly could, but sound traveled faster than we did, and if they warned the ones in our way, well, we were stuck in an open area with unlimited attacks from below possible. Not the most advisable way of doing things.

This lake spanned almost the entire width of this reality shard. We’d have to go through at least five other zones to get around it.

We could punch past the dracosaurs here, sure, and outrun them... but they’d roar warnings to their kind ahead of us, they were smart enough to do that, and we’d find another wall of sneak-attackers ahead, possibly with some deep-water dwellers of size, to make things difficult.

But that was fine. It was still better than going through the additional zones to the sides, at least one of which was thick with incorporeal undead.

There were a lot of sentient eyes watching us, ready for us when we made a move. That meant they weren’t watching up above, and so when the Shield Dragons came swooping down to unload some lightning on their acid-resistant, lightning-vulnerable hides, their surprise was great, reactions instantaneous. They dove and fled, opening up a path... and Ancientaxe led us right out there to face it, Glaive at the ready.

Wrath manifesting as lightning added to the chaos, as did a few spells, giving the massive bodies underwater more shocking surprises, sending more than a few heaving and convulsing out of the water in their death throes.

We surged past at sixty mph, skimming across the top of the waters, a wedge of Disks behind me, the Wake of Reality driving us forward as we escaped the shoreline carnage and headed out into the deeper blue of the lake.

Behind us, frustrated roars rose, signaling those deeper in the waters, and above us, griffons and dragons flew grimly ready, swooping energetically ahead to look for surprises and help us avoid them. We chewed up the waves and spray as we surged forward for the opposite shore, fifty miles away.

Beneath us, dark things in the waters began to stir into motion...

+++++++++++

Author's Note: Tauren is a term for any creature that is half-man/biped, half-animal, like a centaur or minotaur. An ogretaur has an ogre upper body and bear lower body, for example.

Anthropomorphic is a variety of tauren where animals are 'evolved' into humanoid form, so your cat-folk, dog-folk, rat-folk, etc. Many of the wild, feral races are anthros, like the hyen (hyena folk, i.e. gnolls) and the huul (savage wolf-folk). Orcs can be seen as pig-folk, there's frog and toad folk out there (grippli and bullywugs) and so on, with croc-folk, lizard men, and serpent folk also prominent.

Sauropods are the big plant eating dinosaurs, like brontosaurs.