Duskbound

Maybe someone like Torwin would have known what was going on. The man had decades of experience and he seemed pretty smart, so he'd probably seen all sorts of weird stuff throughout his career. No doubt he'd have three different stories about giant brain monsters and what that meant.

Velik was a simple man. He knew that monsters, like people, generally needed brains to survive. There were probably a hundred exceptions where the monsters were made entirely of dirt or were undead or whatever, but as a general rule of thumb, he'd had good luck with the strategy of locating and destroying brains when he wanted to kill something. There was no reason to change that strategy now.

The monster—whatever it was, and Velik was trying hard not to think about that thing that had Chalin's face in it—apparently also felt the brain was important, because it wasn't content to let him just rush forward and stab it. Its flesh shaping took on a whole new level. No longer willing to mold its shape into grasping hands or a forest of arms, it instead projected ridged and spiked bones out of its body. They were sharpened like spears, and hundreds of them rose out of the ground and descended from the ceiling.

No, not bone. Teeth, he quickly realized. They lacked the muscles to bite and chew, but they were still teeth. Each one was six feet long, four inches at the base and tapering to a needle point for the last foot or so. They spiked out of the flesh seemingly at random, but always aimed to impale Velik. He'd thought the monster had been aggressive in its attempts to catch and restrain him before, but this was a whole different level.

If he'd had a few more seconds on the haste potion, he might have made it to the brain in time. Instead, a new wall of flesh rose up between him and his target while the teeth fended him off. Time sped back up in his perceptions, the monster's movements no longer slow and predictable. Everything snapped back to normal, and suddenly he realized how sore his body was, how much [Savage Rhythm] had pushed him beyond his limits while under the hasting effect.

That caused him to stumble, almost so bad that he was impaled on a growing tooth. Only by slapping his hand onto the side of it and earning himself a slice across his palm in the process was he able to shift himself out of the way in time. Velik ignored the stinging pain and tried not to think about how sharp the teeth were to cut through his skin just from brief contact.

He got past the line of teeth a moment later, but it was too late. The flesh membrane growing as a barrier in front of him was rapidly darkening as it got thicker, and if it was anything like those clear walls in the cave, he'd need a [Dread Lance] to get through it. That wasn't going to happen in the next minute or so, maybe longer at the pace he was pushing himself. The skill was incredibly draining to use, something he hoped would be alleviated by ranking it up a few times.

Fortunately, it was the only one that really pulled heavily on his mystic stat. [Apex Hunter] got a bit fuzzier when he used [Dread Lance], but not to the point where it wasn't functional anymore. That meant that pretty much all his reserves could be used for offensive purposes, but he still needed to pace himself between shots. He was still getting used to having a skill that used so much power, and mystic wasn't something he'd really specialized in.

Just because he was sure the wall was as unbreakable as all the others didn't mean he wasn't going to try. If he was lucky, he'd reach it before it finished solidifying and could cut through. More teeth were already jutting out of the flesh-covered floor, and the spots under his feet were pulling back, trying to trip him up and cost him his balance. Velik was too quick and too coordinated to be stopped by either tactic, but if the goal was just to delay him until it was too late, he had to admit the monster was doing an excellent job of it.

It just wasn't enough to stop him. He jumped another set of needle-like teeth and drove the spear into the rapidly-thickening wall. Even before he landed, he was adjusting his feet to prepare for the deflection when he failed to cut through, so he was quite surprised to find that the flesh parted just as easily as the rest. The spear punched clean through the wall, then split open a loose flap for Velik to peer through.

He got a brief glimpse of the brain, now being encased in what was probably bone that had grown down from the ceiling. The brain itself was higher in the air, perhaps tugged up on those sinewy ropes that tethered it to everything else, and more muscle was building up beneath it, thickening around a quasi-skeleton that Velik was sure didn't have half the bones needed for unaided movement.

Then the wall stitched itself back up, the tear in it closing as new flesh grew out from the edges. Velik stabbed another hole in it, but not before more teeth lanced up at him from between his feet. Eager to dodge that particularly painful injury, he quickstepped to the side. What the hell is that thing doing in there? Is it just growing more defenses? But if so, why weren't they already in place?

He'd never fought a monster like this before, but he was starting to get worried. If he was right, the layer of flesh covering the entire cave complex was all part of this one organism. It was no wonder the mana compass had gone crazy while he was inside. And that meant it had literally tons and tons of mass to manipulate. There was no way he'd ever kill the monster just by stabbing at it. He needed to target something important, and that meant getting to that brain before the monster finished doing whatever it was trying to do.

Morgus, please tell me if I'm making a mistake here. Don't let the brain be a decoy or something. Don't let the monster be that smart. Gods, what are the odds this thing isn't at least as smart as me? It can talk and control other monsters… Is this thing even a champion elite? I never got a notification about its domain.

Velik shook off the questions. What he needed now was to focus on figuring out how to kill it. Everything else could wait for later, and hopefully be answered by someone much smarter than him. He stabbed through the wall again, this time reshaping the tip of his spear into something with a thicker blade in the hopes that it wouldn't repair itself so fast. He needed to cut his way through, and that wasn't going to be easy if it kept closing up as fast as he could damage it.

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Fifteen seconds later, not only had he failed to make any progress, but the cave itself was getting better about hindering him. That was more the result of there just being basically nowhere left that was safe to stand than anything, but what mattered was that he was starting to struggle even stay near the wall, let alone damage it. He could have used more time to recover, but he didn't feel like he had it anymore.n/ô/vel/b//in dot c//om

With no other option, he sent another [Dread Lance] through his spear. Energy crackled across the blade, exploding outwards in all directions and turning flesh, muscle, bones, and blood into a fine mist that appeared as black flecks to his [Night Vision]. When the mist cleared enough for him to see past it, he started mentally cursing. The brain was no longer visible.

In its place was a… thing. It looked something like if a human and a spider were merged together, or maybe it was more like a human and a scorpling, all things considered. It had a torso ten feet long with eight arms growing out of it, but maybe they were actually legs. No, he decided, limbs that end in hands are arms, even if it's walking on them.

The monster's head was nothing but a stretched mouth wide enough to fit Velik inside it, if just barely, and it hung open, revealing the same needle teeth he'd been dodging around for the last minute, just on a smaller scale. That wasn't to say it didn't have eyes. If anything, it had far too many. But they weren't in any particular spot on its body. Eyelids blinked open and closed all over, on its chest and its scalp, on its arms, and on the weird, almost wing-like appendages growing out of its back.

They weren't really wings, not precisely. It was more like two massive hands that had regular-sized palms but eight-foot-long fingers, and twice as many as it should, at that. Stretched between them were heavy, drooping strands of skin that almost looked like webbing if it had been woven out of human remains.

The monster was still connected through the cave in multiple places. Long, thin lines of what Velik assumed were nerves strung themselves between the monster's back and the roof of the cave. More of them were connected to its belly. He wasn't sure how it planned to move without tangling itself up, but then again, that wasn't his problem. He'd be happy to cut those connections anyway. Maybe then, the creature would die.

Or even better, maybe all the flesh coating the walls would die instead. That would be nice to score a quick win against so much monster mass. He doubted he'd get that lucky, though, especially when the creature took a step forward and tore a few dozen of the connections apart. If that hurt it in any way, Velik couldn't tell.

Its mouth dropped open, stretching far wider than should have been possible, and with a lurch, the monster bounded directly at him.