The monstrous woman’s charge seemed terrifyingly fast, but the part of his brain that wasn’t locked up with fear saw that it wasn’t as fast as she could go. Despite her words and threatening posture, her approach was tentative.

Testing.

Unsure.

She wasn’t confident about how the fight would go.

Did that mean he have a chance of survival?

He raised his spear, taking a protective stance as he stood between Ara and Dalgaard. He lined up the head of the weapon with her hips, where he assumed her body turned from woman to snake. It wasn’t exactly the center of mass, but only because that was somewhere behind her on the ground along the extremely long serpentine body. Not exactly the ideal target.

She drew up short on her charge, and while her fanged mouth was twisted into a smirk, she was well out of range of his weapon. Which meant he was far out of reach of her red-clawed hands.

Was he right? Was she afraid of him, too?

“Stay back,” he heard himself say. It felt like an extremely silly thing to say at this point, but he didn’t have much else in mind.

Kaldalis didn’t want to be looking at her. Her monstrous form was weird, but mostly not intolerable.

What disgusted him were the eyes.

There were too many of them, and the extra ones were so disturbingly inhuman. And they were still hungry, but not in the way that meant he’d be a meal.

He didn’t want her face any closer to his, and not just because of the bite mark on Dalgaard’s lips.

“Little mortal,” Ara rasped out a laugh. Her eight clawed hands clenched and unclenched, kneading on the air around her. “Standing your ground to save your companion instead of fleeing. So noble. Dutiful, even. Fighting for your life against certain death. Such will. Such vitality. It makes me regret your choice all the more.”

“You’re going to regret it, alright,” Kaldalis said, taking a deep breath to make his voice a little less shaky. “You don’t know who you’re dealing with here.”

Her grin grew larger - inhumanly large, showing a second, smaller set of fangs just behind the ones that dripped venom down her chin. “You misunderstand me. I look forward to your vital forces nourishing me. It will make the meal all the more satisfying. That is inevitable. But imagine the brood you would father. That loss is what I regret.”

“Oh.” Kaldalis grimaced. He fought down the vomit welling in his throat. “Seriously. Can you not? Just for one minute? Can we just try and kill each other without it being a weird sex thing?” He waved the head of his spear at her, suddenly filled with a disgust and anger that overcome his fear. “This isn’t flirting! This isn’t going to end with us kissing in the heat of combat and then throwing weapons aside to fuck! You’re a vicious cannibal monster and we’re fighting to the death. Just… I don’t know. Please take this seriously.”

“Mmm.” She licked her lips, tongue rolling gingerly around her fangs. “Such a take-charge attitude.”

“Oh, fuck you,” Kaldalis snapped. “You’re doing it on purpose now to make me uncomfortable.”

She opened her mouth as if to taunt him again with another overtly sexual threat, but instead she struck.

Lightning-fast, too.

She darted to his left and then charged straight at him, getting around the head of his spear and reaching for him with her claws.

He didn’t know what to expect. On the one hand, she was talking to him. On the other hand, the reveal of her true form was cinematically overdramatic.

Was she a boss monster?

Was she an NPC?

Would her stats be close to his own, or would she mop the floor with him like a dungeon boss?

He couldn’t afford to tank a hit to find out. Not until she caught him fair and square, at least.

Kaldalis jumped to the right, putting space between his body and her claws. She slithered along with him, trying to stay close. Eight red-clawed hands reached for him with hunger plain in her eyes.

He kept dancing back.

Kaldalis wasn’t putting out any damage, or even learning how much damage she could do in kind, but he was accomplishing something important. He was dragging the fight away from Dalgaard, hopefully keeping them safe. Maybe the poison would run its course and they would join the fight in a minute.

Once he felt like he’d kited far enough away from Dalgaard that the fight could start in earnest, Kaldalis reversed direction as suddenly as he could physically manage. He shorted his grip on his spear, his rear hand going from nearly the butt of the haft to a couple of feet up, putting his forward hand just a little bit behind the weapon’s head. The new grip meant she couldn’t get in too close for him to threaten her with the weapon as he thrust the sharp tip towards her.

He expected her to blunder right into it, and trade the blow for an attack in return from her claws. Instead, she stopped just as suddenly as he did, and her serpentine lower body rippled as she threw herself to his right away from the attack. Claws swiped out at him, and he jolted back quickly, yanking his arm out of the path of the strike.

Ara drew herself up again, arms raised threateningly, and Kaldalis found himself standing off against her, the head of his weapon poised between them.

“What the fuck is this,” Kaldalis asked, his mind racing. “Is this a pvp fight? Are you some strange optional race? Shapeshifter prestige class? Do you even have a meatspace body?”

“Stop struggling,” she hissed at him. “This will be easier once you’ve tasted my venom.”

“Okay, so no?” Kaldalis said. The adrenaline in his body was dropping to more manageable levels, and he tried to stop looking at her as Ara and see her for what she really was: a monster.

He had to put his fear aside. This wasn’t an interpersonal conflict. This was a fight.

He had to kill her or die.

She started to speak again, but Kaldalis took a page from her book, lunging suddenly.

Choking up on his grip on the spear meant that he had a lot more reach than he’d looked like. As the tip of the weapon lanced forward, it thrust into the forest of untied silken sashes below her waist.

Ara shrieked in anger and pain as the metal pierced the snake-like scales beneath.

The attack did pretty nice damage, too. Sixty physical and nine wind. But it made Kaldalis wince. He decided that in this one case, he wasn’t going to add it up to a total damage number in his head on subsequent hits.

Her claws came in at him immediately. He threw himself backwards, twisting his arm as he pulled the spear out of her. The shriek that ripped from her lips was more anger than pain, though, and he hoped she wasn’t about to smash him for a billion damage.

Two claws raked the air right in front of his face, and another one scratched against the haft of his spear, an inch away from his foreword hand’s thumb.

But with so many claws to swipe at him with, he couldn’t stay ahead forever.

The blow landed on his left shoulder, and pain lanced through his body. He was worried she was going to be boss level and blast him for a few hundred damage, but she only did seventy-nine physical damage and applied a stack of poison.

The total damage was surprisingly close to what he’d dealt her.

Kaldalis tried to get himself under control. He might actually be okay. He had a ton of hit points.

As long as he could draw the fight out, he had an inventory jam-packed with potions from his stream viewers to keep him going.

The thought of his streamers reminded him. He had potions for more than just healing.

“Alright then,” he said, reaching for his inventory as he staggered back from her strike. “If it was really her, someone tell SeventyEight thanks for me. I owe her for this.” With one gulp, he swallowed the lesser ire potion he’d received that had been attributed to her by the system.

The ire potion increased his attack by a small amount for a minute. It was only a 10% increase, with a maximum increase of 50 - even if it was only 13 points for his current stats. All he wanted was to change his damage number. Speeding the fight up with a little more damage was a nice perk.

Ara swept in at him in that slight pause of the potion. He swept his spear up between them, but she ignored it, claws outstretched. He managed to get his spear into her shoulder (wasn't she all shoulders?) though one of her claws caught him across the face. Her fingertips raked down his jaw, and he felt his skin parting under the sharp red talons.

They traded hits, him taking the seventy-nine points of damage, but dealing back to her one hundred physical damage, and fifteen wind damage in exchange. The increase was so sharp - an increase in damage felt disproportionate to the increase in attack - that he decided if it was SeventyEight who had gifted him the potion, he would have to compose a more formal display of gratitude than a quick demand to his stream to pass along a kind word.

Despite the damage advantage being on his side, Ara didn’t let up. Claws whipped in at him and he swept his spear around in a whirling flourish. The haft of the weapon caught three of the reaching hands, deflecting them, and then the head of the spear slashed cleanly across the palm of a fourth hand, dealing another one hundred and fifteen damage to her. Another claw raked across his chest, though, and he took another seventy-nine damage, and she landed a stack of poison on him again.

She shrieked in mingled pain and rage. Kaldalis managed to avoid looking her in the face, and not being face-to-face with all those eyes made it a lot easier to stomach fighting her.

With the squeamish arachnophobia put behind him, he had control of this fight.

Maybe he would need to get some distance and swig some potions, but his health pool was large enough that he could trade blows for now without fear.

He could handle this even if Dalgaard stayed stunned the whole fight.

Naturally, as soon as he thought that he had the situation well in hand, everything went horribly wrong.

Ara raised up on her serpent tail, and Kaldalis thrust his spear into the scaly appendage, red blood spattering out over his weapon and hands when he withdrew. She lunged in to attack, and in that moment he made the split-second choice to slash the weapon up the front of her, standing his ground to tank whatever hit she had in return. As long as she wanted to trade blows, he had over fifteen hundred hit points left to trade.

But she didn’t just strike him. Ara came down on him like a weight, bludgeoning him with her humanoid upper body. Clawed hands latched onto his shoulders, arms, sides, and hips. He expected the rake of them across his skin, but they didn’t scratch. They gripped. He saw what was coming far too late.

The final pair of hands locked around the back of his neck, holding him in place as her lips met his in a violent and forceful kiss.