There was a drop as Nic leapt into the domain of the sand devil monarch. The entrance had once been level with the floor, but thousands of passings of the monarch’s thousands of legs had worn the ground away, turning it to a fine sand.

As he landed, dozens of small fragments of stone began to bounce against that sand, jolting up and down as the earth below began to shake.

The monarch was on her way.

Above, fire filled the tunnels. The pyromaniac devil was visible, a black shadow in the rolling fields of red flame. It was watching him.

It thought it had the upper hand.

And against most opponents, the devil would have been right. The devil was powerful, with a strong offensive shard and the cleverness to use it patiently, relying on what must have been immense reserves of aura to wield the flames to cut off routes of escape and pen its victims in.

But if it thought a patient, slow style of combat was in its favor, it was wrong. Nic thrived in the chaos of combat, and giving him more time to think, more chances to capitalize on a mistake-

There was something arrogant in treating this like a hunt, instead of a life-or-death clash.

Nic turned, and began to move. The monarch’s approach sounded like a stampede, thousands of legs scraping against the tunnel’s floor and low walls. The sound grew and grew as he retreated into the labyrinth, taking paths at random, trying to get a feel for the maze. One dead end- one blank wall instead of a way forward- and he’d be locked into a head-on clash with the monarch.

There was a shaking of the earth, and she burst into view, rushing down a passageway parallel to Nic.

Her head was a hideous interlock of sand devils melting into one another. Their carapaces broke into oozing, gelatinous melt, connecting bodies together in a web of filth, and their limbs twitched violently. Dozens of hands clawed the tunnel walls, producing sparks and a hideous scraping sound. An avalanche of legs carried her through her domain.

As the train of legs rushed past, Nic lifted his axe up and took an experimental swing. The blade hacked down, but barely managed to cut through her thick carapace, leaving only a shallow wound- in fact, Nic had to hurriedly pull the hatchet’s blade free before it was ripped from his hand by her relentless forward momentum.

If he was going to get in multiple strikes and cleave through her thick armor, he’d need to slow her down-

But that single attack, crippling a leg, had gotten her attention.

The head roared in anger, and she began to turn about, hauling herself through the tight twists and hairpin corners of the underground labyrinth with her dozens of arms. She slithered across the walls, body twisting through the passages as she aimed herself like a missile at Nic-

And began to speed up.

The stampede of a thousand footfalls became on overwhelming, drumbeat sound, the entire tunnel shaking violently and dislodging great veils of dust from the ceiling above.

Nic ran. Drawing his bow from his mystic bag, he knocked an arrow, turned, and fired over his shoulder, barely missing a beat as he sent an arrow spiraling through the air. With all his cultivation in his feet to speed his running, it lacked the strength to bite through her armor, clattering off the thick carapace.

But the next shot found its mark, sinking into the gooey, bleeding gaps between the fused bodies of the sand devils that made up her hideous torso. Yellow blood began to spurt outwards as the enchanted bow did its work, beginning a slow waterfall of blood-drain.

As he ran, head swiveling left and right, marking the passages he found, Nic summoned spikes of hardened sand from below using the Sandrider Blade on his back. They erupted forth at a crooked angle, letting the sand devil’s monarch crash against them and impale herself as she continued relentlessly forward. Impact after impacted cracked against her armor, broke her arms, split her many screaming heads like ugly, pulp-filled melons.

Even so it barely slowed her down. Even losing her heads only made the banshee shrieking- like a train’s demented whistle- increase in volume, filling the tunnels.

Finally, Nic caught sight of what he was looking for. A series of three connected left turns.

Dropping his bow back into his bag, he grasped a pair of grenades and darted down the left hand path. She was gaining now, catching up, every second building speed under her countless feet. It was a race Nic couldn’t hope to win. She was simply too large, gathering too much momentum.

But she wasn’t exactly very smart.

As Nic took another left turn, he flung the first grenade down a side passage, timing the fuse with a rough guess and a desperate hope.

One more turn-

And he ran straight into the wall of the sand queen’s long body, still filling up the tunnel he’d left with the original turn. He had come full circle, tying her into a knot as he did, and now the queen’s own enormous bulk cut off his escape. He was closed in.

She clawed her way around the turn, and her dozens of eyes settled onto him with dark, insect-dumb malice. As she screamed and rushed forward the fuse was ticking, ticking, ticking-

At the last moment Nic dropped his second grenade and braced for a brutal impact-

But the first grenade detonated before that could happen. In a flash of electric energy, Nic was teleported, snapping back to the location where he’d thrown the featherflight grenade and out of the queen’s path. He was safely in a side passage, listening to her scream of rage-

And the detonation of the flashbang grenade. It went off with a brilliant flash of light and a piercing, high-pitched roar, filling her eyes and ears with fury as she rushed at the space where he’d been, and collided with her own body.

He saw the impact shake through the long trail of legs that flooded the tunnel it front of him. With a brutal, earth-quaking crush, the queen slammed into her own side and was tangled up, the collision lifting her legs off the ground and twisting her body into a knot. Even then, the few legs that remained in contact with the earth were simply too stupid to stop running- the signals from her head could only slow reach down the length of her body, and so she was trapped, her hindlegs trying to force her forward with no room, no space, brutally crushing herself.

Nic grinned.

The Sandrider Blade and his mystic bag dropped to the ground beside him.

Without hesitation he rotated his cultivation base and unleashed the bright, powerful spark of his Bloodline Sea from within. The transformation felt like shedding his entire body, his old skin peeling away like a scab. He expanded upwards, head flattening out into a cobra’s hood, his already strong body growing more powerful with the addition of thick-hewed muscle as he rose towards the ceiling. His arms split twice, new muscles swelling into place to house each new set of arms, until he had six in all, the skin around each powerful limb turning into hardened scale as his legs fused and elonged into a sweeping tail. His armor was pulled into his naga body, becoming a patterning among his scales.

He reached down, drawing his newly forged Scarseeker from the bag. Admiring the way it gleamed with its own purple-white flame of a light.

The queen was locked in place. Desperately trying to get her limbs to listen to her, and move backwards.

Nic advanced without mercy. Held in two hands, Scarseeker swept down in a sudden, quick cross, scoring open the heavy shell in a ‘x’ of thick yellow blood. His other four limbs shot forward and caught the edges of the cut, grasping the carapace and ripping it apart, drawing the wound apart to reveal the ugly insect meat below.

His blade lifted and crashed down, burning the strength of the Internal-Sacrifice Cauldron within his belly. The forbidden technique fed a burning, cascading strength that made steam pour from his arms as the blade hacked down, over and over, cutting deeper into the sand devil queen’s core as she screamed. Each blow brought out enormous quantities of blood, sloshing over Nic’s arms and chests. The physical reality of fighting such an enormous beast was gory beyond belief- there was simply too much meat to hack through for anyone to come out clean.

Blood dripped from his hands as he ripped into the monster’s side with brutal glee.

The queen was still fighting to untangle herself, and Nic was meeting bone with his downward cuts, muscle and organs splitting apart under his blade. As she began to slide backwards, he stabbed down and wedged the long-handled blade deep, pushing his full weight against it to drag a long and bloody cut through her side- using her own motion to rip and tear.

Even as an E-Class he was struggling. His body was painted in gore, and his muscles ached, his insides filling with blood that came coughing up as he burned through his life with the Internal Sacrifice Cauldron Technique. He was stronger and faster in his naga-form, but she was simply bigger, and his efforts so far amounted to a single severe wound.

It was then, as the monarch began to unwind, that his danger sense screamed.

Nic ripped Scarseeker free and turned to see an Ascended devil drop down into the caverns. It wasn’t the skull-faced pyromaniac, but a smaller, bright-green devil with the head and colors of a grasshopper. Pale brown thorns covered the backs of its legs, and it had long, bent arms that scraped the ground. Wings like a cape of gossamer dripped over its body, covered in crawling multitudes of beetles, centipedes, and ants.

Nic lunged forward, but as he did, the soft earth below erupted. A multitude of bugs poured upwards, covering his skin, and began to flare with a green light that swelled them from within.

Until the moment of detonation, they didn’t trigger Nic’s danger sense at all.

Then, in the instant before impact, the Eight-Eyed Mantle screamed. Dozens of tiny explosions tore into his flesh at point blank range, throwing him backwards and tearing into his scales. The natural armor kept him alive, but flesh and bone were exposed and caustic, sizzling black acid was left clinging to the edges of his wounds. He slumped down against the ground and shot backwards with his tail, grasping the Sandrider Blade and sweeping it.

The sand lifted up and shot away from him in a wave, exposing a second volley of bugs squirming beneath. He spat diluted mist across them, shriveling their bodies to dust as he grabbed the wall of the cavern and hauled himself up.

The bugmaster devil was already sprinting away, making good use of its powerful mantis legs to shoot off at top speed. Nic went after, slithering low across the ground and using the furthest down of his six arms to boost himself across the earth. Behind him, the monarch was unraveling, and soon the chase would begin again, the bloodied queen tearing across her domain to hunt him as he tried to keep up with the devil.

And somewhere out there, he knew two more would be waiting. Ready to harass and ambush as he attempted to wear down their goliath monarch.