Kaldalis put a lid on his terrified shriek - er, manly battle roar.

He realized he wasn’t going to accomplish much running down the roads as he was. The narrow road only meant he had nowhere to dodge, and the creature didn’t seem to be any slower despite the columns and structures of stone it was barreling through.

And there was no way in hell he could outrun it.

The terrain here was not to his advantage, and he both rued and lamented that he’d tried to game the system by leaving the obviously-marked boss arena.

He took a sharp turn at the first intersection he came to, and he regretted it instantly. The creature tracked his turn, smashing through buildings on a beeline towards him, even though he was out of sight. It burst out of the front of one of the buildings he’d investigated earlier, sending empty metal vats flying into the street before it.

Kaldalis instinctively popped his Jump cooldown and bounded forward, spurred on by the thundering of his heart in his chest.

“I shouldn’t have left the courtyard!” he yelled. “I get it now! That’s the boss arena! You don’t like being outside of it! Let’s just put aside our differences and head back there, okay?”

His words fell on deaf antennae and the beast let out a clicking roar. It rumbled down the road towards him, still in a full charge. Kaldalis made use of his Jump ability, keeping pace with the charge in leaps and bounds. He didn’t want to force it to slam into another impassable barrier like the rubble it had struck earlier; he didn’t know how he would deal with one of those red orbs spawning now, in these tight quarters.

If he could avoid seeing them at all, that would be the most prudent move.

The beast charged on, heedless of the obstacles. Kaldalis ran through one of those little parks with the stone tablets. The creature had no respect for the adventures of speedy otter man who defied science and put out fires by running really fast. It just crashed through it.

Kaldalis felt a pang of anxiety rip through him. Hopefully this shit respawned in the next instance.

The street came to an abrupt end straight ahead in a T-intersection, and he stopped to wait so that he could leap clear of the charge at the last minute rather than continue dragging it through the city. It was his narrowest escape yet, and one of the horns scraped the back of his armor after it blasted out of the nearest rock wall, but the clip was apparently not close enough to inflict damage. The giant insect slammed into the building at the end of the road.

Kaldalis started running again, doing his best to make for the courtyard. He could run back the other way to try and get back towards the edge of the city, and see if there was somewhere else he could lose it, but he could picture it very clearly smashing through the entire dungeon all the way back to the beginning.

Assuming it didn’t mash him to paste somewhere along the way.

“This thing is like the fucking terminator,” Kaldalis shouted as the creature rammed out of another building back onto the narrow road, grinding against the walls on both sides as it continued the chase. “And I’m running out of Jump cooldown!”

If he wasn’t in an open area when the cooldown ran out, he was going to be next to helpless. He’d have to kite it around corners and actually hope to force it into impassable rubble to avoid getting run down, and then dealing with the glowing red consequences of that action. “Maybe I can cheese it.”

He shook his head. “I don’t like it, me. I don’t like it at all. But I’m out of options.”

Kaldalis reversed direction with a grimace. He absolutely didn’t like this. But with only ten or so seconds left on his Jump cooldown and a bit too far to go to get back to the open courtyard where he could dodge without it, the alternative was getting run down and ground up into bug chow. He waited until the charging train-bug was nearly on top of him.

And then he jumped.

He landed on top of the creature’s head. Kaldalis slammed his glaive down, driving it into the shell until he got his twenty-five damage and his fourth stack of gust. The creature made an angry clicking that reverberated up through Kaldalis’s whole body through his weapon.

But it didn’t stop charging, and so he held on for dear life, using the leverage offered by his glaive to keep his grip.

The end of Kaldalis’s Jump cooldown came and went, and a few harrowing moments later the giant insect burst through back into the courtyard. Kaldalis wrenched his weapon out of the creature’s shell and rolled to the right, sliding down the armored plates to the ground. He almost went into a full tumble when he hit the stone from the speed of the creature’s charge, but he was able to tuck and roll to avoid hurting himself.

When he got to his feet, it was just in time to see the creature come to a stop and shake itself, dribbling a new poison puddle for itself to stand in before raising its head.

Kaldalis had done only a little more than one hundred damage to it. Barely. And he was already feeling battered and exhausted.

“Anytime you’re ready to cut me a break, Monsoon,” he said while panting. “Really, any second now. I promise I won’t complain about the game being easy mode for babies if you just let me take a quick nap.”

The only response he got was the giant monster slamming its head into the ground, forcing him to hurl himself clear of the geyser of stone that erupted beneath him. He just barely made it by diving forward, towards the beast.

Kaldalis went into a roll and broke into a run as soon as he was on his feet, strafing around to the right. As the creature’s head slammed down again, he dove to the left, just barely in time to avoid the geyser of stone. He supposed that meant it was leading its target, since the blast wasn’t right behind him.

Which was good. Interesting. He hoped he might be able to use that knowledge to draw the fight out a little longer.

Kaldalis turned to run towards the boss. The blasts had come in threes when it used poison, so he was trying to think a few moves ahead. The poison would fade, and then he’d pounce, trying to get to six stacks of Gust.

Its charge was becoming a problem, and he hoped he could avoid seeing it if he stayed up close and personal.

Unfortunately, thinking a few steps ahead meant he wasn’t focused on the step he was on. The giant bug’s head came down and he tried to pull up short to let the blast of earth explode in front of himself, but dramatically underestimated the size of the AoE. Stone ripped right into his face and chest, dealing three-hundred and fifty-three total damage to him, taking out more than half of his remaining hit points.

He almost tumbled over backwards, but barely kept on his feet with the aid of his lashing tail.

“Well,” he grimaced, pulling out his final healing potion, “that’s probably the end of me. It’s all over but the crying.” He drank the potion, healing some of the damage of that last hit, but he was far from out of the danger zone.

The poison puddle dissolved, and the giant silverfish lowered its head and charged him again. He had hoped that being closer would make it step up and attack him with its normal strikes, but apparently not, and now he was too close to avoid the first pass. He activated his Endure cooldown to tank through it, and when the creature’s bulk impacted with him, it reduced the damage to one-hundred and thirty-one total.

Still a considerable chunk of what he had left.

He had fewer hit points than the earth blast would hit him for. With no more healing left to fall back on, his remaining three-hundred and forty-six would have to hold him over.

He briefly considered his other cooldown, the new one. Kaia’s Flicker. But he didn’t know what it would do. Would it phase him out for an instant too short to dodge anything? Or would he be trapped in an otherworldly landscape for hours? It just didn’t seem to be worth the risk.

Then again, the risk was seeming more and more reasonable as the giant monster curved around its charge, roaring up at him again. He hurled himself out of the way at the last moment, but wasn’t paying attention to his surroundings. One of the steps up on the tiered courtyard caught his toe and he toppled ass-over-teakettle into a roll. His tail couldn’t catch him if there wasn’t a way to physically get his feet beneath himself.

He scrambled to his feet just in time for the giant silverfish to charge up on him again. He hadn’t been able to track it mentally while he had been on the ground. How did it turn so fast? Why was it still charging? How fucked was he?

The charge hit him full on, sending him sprawling with its one-hundred and thirty-one total damage. He barely looked up at the creature as it raised its head to strike him again. He didn’t even have his feet beneath him as he half-scrambled, half-crawled out of the way. The attack didn’t hit him, but the shaking ground almost sent him flat on his face again. He got to his feet at last just in time to jam his glaive into the monster. He got his twenty-five damage in, and another stack of gust.

He suspected he wasn’t going to live to see a sixth.

“Well,” he said, raising his glaive as the creature pulled its head out of reach, “I guess I can always zerg it. Just keep trading aplomb for protecting the library? That seems… like not necessarily a waste.”

That was when something hit him in the back.

He had a moment of panic that he had missed a red globe spawn and that he was dead already.

Kaldalis was aware of the number two-hundred floating through his awareness, but…

Hit hit points went up instead of down.

“For Frodo!” Myrin yelled triumphantly as she hurtled past him at inhuman speeds.

“Wait, what?” He looked over his shoulder, seeing Balrim and Haldir there as well.

“You heard her,” Haldir said, jogging up to his side, a healing potion in his hand, holding it out to Kaldalis. “For Frodo, whatever that means.”

“I mean, I get it… You’re here to save me. But why the hell am I Frodo?”