It had been something like fifteen minutes of running that Kaldalis started to feel the effects of fatigue. There wasn’t any sort of stamina bar, but the human body - or the vathon body, whatever - had limitations. Even if he was a videogame character and could run non-stop for eighty hours of gameplay. His mental fortitude had limits. But even if all he was doing was holding a directional pad in one direction, there was a limit to how long he could keep going before he had to stop. Or if he artfully arranged a roll of quarters on the keyboard and go make a sandwich.

What didn’t seem to have limits, though, was the devotion of the hairy humanoid following after him. He ran past at least one grizzled dragon lazily sunning itself in a clearing. As well as a few other creatures he didn’t recognize. There was a trio of strange wolf like beasts that seemed to be clinging to the sides of thicker trees. Another feathered monstrosity - though this one was much smaller than the irritator, with black feathers - briefly leaped from the brush at his passing, but didn’t give chase as he ignored it and kept running. It clarified why the hairy humanoid was chasing him. It wasn’t looking for food or even sport. It was just looking for him, to the exclusion of all else.

The chase had gone on long enough, he supposed. He had succeeded in luring it well clear of the encampment, and if he kept going, it was out of some belief that it would give up. Since it was closing in on a full hour since he saw it in the clearing, that seemed very unlikely. It was time to stand and fight. What was the worst that could happen? Death wouldn’t be permanent. He imagined it would not be fun, but as a tank player, it was inevitable.

It was simple. Fleeing wasn’t working. That left fighting as the only option.

He waited until he found another one of those unexplained clearings. Without knowing what to expect, it seemed prudent to fight in an open area rather than the tighter corridors outlined by the jungle’s trees. Sure, it was a smaller enemy than the enormous irritator, but he didn’t know anything about it. Maybe it was going to be making large sweeping attacks. Or breathing fire. Or something else he would hate to have to deal with in tight quarters.

Kaldalis set his feet and readied his spear. He remembered how it had leaped for the irritator’s face, so he angled his weapon up, ready to force it to impale itself in order to perform a similar attack.

The beast emerged from the undergrowth at a run, but drew up short when it saw him. Kaldalis had only had a passing look at the beast so far, and so seeing it now only a little ways away made it all the more terrifying. It looked larger than he’d thought before, probably because he’d seen it next to the irritator. It was almost eight feet tall, and while its proportions had seemed to mirror that of a muppet from a distance, it looked more like an unnaturally thin gorilla now that it was near. Pale lips peeled back as it regarded him in turn, showing a row of serrated triangular teeth.

Inwardly, Kaldalis hoped that if he was going to die to this thing, that it killed him quickly, before it started to eat him.

The creature didn’t make a sound when it attacked. It just surged forward, each step covering an incredible distance as it rushed him. Its hands were bare of fur, and ended in wickedly curved claws that were black as pitch, standing out in sharp contrast to the pale pinkish of its flesh and the eggshell hue of its fur.

When it approached, it reached out with a long arm and slashed at him, and he barely managed to dodge.

Its arms were almost as long as the reach of his spear.

And its speed shocked him.

But Kaldalis’ reflexes were fast enough to keep out of its reach. He returned with his own attack, thrusting his spear in at the creature. Surprisingly, it didn’t stand and take it. It turned aside from the blow, rolling its shoulder with the impact. While the head of his glaive made contact, it glanced off of the creature, doing no damage.

The creature’s next attack was blindingly fast. Curved claws lashed out right at his face, aimed as if to pluck out his eyes. Kaldalis barely avoided the attack, leaning back away as black claws raked the air right in front of him. Instinct took over in his panic, and he found the tip of his spear landed solidly on the creature’s spindly thigh, leaving a solid puncture. As soon as the blow landed, he felt his heart drop into his stomach.

He did nine physical damage, and zero wind damage.

That was only slightly more than he’d dealt to the elder nautilobster.

This creature wasn’t just out of his league. This was a boss fight.

And he didn’t have a dozen allies in close proximity ready to do the actual damage for him.

Fuck.

Kaldalis tried to rally his motivation. He wasn’t going down without a fight. Sure, he might not be able to kill it in a reasonable timeframe, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to try and make a fight of it.

Claws raked in at him, aimed to dig into his chest, and Kaldalis had to leap backwards to avoid the blow. He almost fell on his face, but the extra balance offered by his tail kept him on his feet. He tried to brace to counterattack, but the creature stepped up and was on top of him again already. Another slash sent him stumbling away, just barely staying ahead of it. This time he managed to crack it across the face with his glaive, getting another nine damage in.

He tried not to delude himself into thinking he was making progress, but the lanky creature’s attacks were very telegraphed, and relatively easy to dodge. Sure, he was doing very little damage in return, but as the old saying went: “Reduce the enemy’s hit points to zero while preventing them from doing the same to you. Works every time!”

His hope faded before it even got a chance to blossom. The creature pounced, and while he easily dodged the first strike, the second was not so predictable, as if it had heard the criticism in his internal monologue. As the first attack swept just an inch shy of his throat, claws sank into his side, ripping through the armor there and plunging into his flesh. The pain was searingly hot, and he managed not to scream by gritting his teeth so hard he thought they might crack. Kaldalis credited the armor with the creature not ripping all the way across to disembowel him on the spot, but he knew that it was probably because he still had some hit points remaining.

Considering the strike had hit him for 177 damage, that felt like a temporary condition.

This creature wasn’t just higher level than he was. It was party content, not solo. That was a regular attack and it was an immense chunk of his hit points. Considering how slowly he was whittling away at it, he was going to be dead long before he did more than mildly inconvenience it.

He was going to die.

He was going to die.

It was kind of freeing to realize that victory was basically impossible.

If failure was inevitable, then failure wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t that he wasn’t good enough to win. He shouldn’t be able to. And while his favorite pastime as a tank was enduring the impossible and outlasting mobs that were supposed to be unbeatable without a full party, he was only level 4. Kaldais just didn’t have the tools he would later. No one could take on a dungeon boss solo with literally nothing. And in level 1 gear.

That said, he didn’t intend to just lay down and die. He tried not to let the wound in his side distract him too much as he backed off, making some space between himself and the beast. Blocking out the pain, Kaldalis’s attention narrowed in on the tip of his spear. His body was forfeit. He was going to die. All he could do was hope to plant the tip of his spear into the hairy humanoid enough times to make sure it knew it was in a fight.

The creature paused just long enough to raise its bloody claws to its mouth to lick Kaldalis’s blood from them. Kaldalis expected that it would pause, making a show of it, but that was not the case. It barely touched its tongue to the bloody claw before it lunged again. Kaldalis managed to duck under the first sweeping claw, and he stepped inside the monster’s reach for the second, and his shoulder was slammed by its forearm instead of the scythelike claws.

As he moved in, Kaldalis shifted his grip on his weapon until his foreword hand was just beneath the bladed head of his glaive. He used the adjusted grip to slam the blade into the creature’s torso, hard.

It was like jamming a kitchen knife into an uncooked potato.

The weapon sank in, but only a little. He got nine damage in, which was all he really needed. He yanked the blade out and jammed it back in to get another nine damage in, even though he knew it left him open.

Just as expected, sharp pain and another one-hundred and seventy-seven damage landed. That was the halfway point. Only two more strikes and it would be the end of him.

His physical instincts were to withdraw. To run. Fear clouded his senses. But fear was useless here. He already established that he couldn’t run far or fast enough to lose it. The creature was also fast enough that he couldn’t dodge its attacks forever. If he had the opportunity, he might embellish the story to make it seem that his first death in this world was faced valiantly. He might describe himself as fearless. But he wasn’t being fearless, just fatalistic.

He still wanted to make it a tale worth telling, and so he didn’t even try to wrench away from the creature. Kaldalis lowered his shoulder and shoved against the beast. It was stronger than he was, but it was obviously not expecting him to push forward. If it were a closer fight, statistically speaking, he could keep that in mind to use to his advantage. But now, though, it didn’t much matter.

The tackle knocked the creature to the ground with him atop it. He tried to assume control of the situation and wrestle it to the ground, but it was just stronger than he was. It didn’t help that his weapon - though he was holding it like a knife - had a long haft off of the end of it, and as the struggle sent them rolling across the clearing, the distraction of trying to keep the weapon cost him dearly.

There was a rumble in the creature’s throat as it finally got on top of him, pinning him under its weight. Gritting his teeth did no good this time as claws raked across his face, ripping through his flesh. He screamed as his hit point total was reduced to just one-hundred and two. With no leverage to get free of the creature’s grip, the next blow would be the end of it. All he could do was aim for one last strike of his own.

Nine damage wasn’t going to do much, but it was the last message he could send.

As the creature raised its claw to bring down the final blow, he raised the blade of his glaive. He couldn’t swing it properly from this angle, but he hoped he could use the monster’s own strength against it. It was a feeble hope, and so he attributed it to his luck rather than his guile when he got that last nine damage he was looking for. He was actually surprised to see that the sheer force put behind the attack caused the blade to take one of the clawed fingers off, leaving it with only four claws on that hand.

The howl of pain that ripped from the creature was the smallest of moral victories. The sound itself was duller than he expected. It was like a metal dumpster being dragged over concrete. He considered, even as he knew it was futile to hope that that little bit of damage might have crossed the threshold that had sent the grizzled dragon and irritator fleeing from him the previous day.

But he hadn’t inflicted nearly enough onto it to even make one of those much lower level beasts run away.

He wasn’t surprised at all when it snarled and slammed its uninjured claw into his chest, finishing him.

Kaldalis’ lifeless corpse hit the jungle floor with a muted thump.