Erramir could see it now, and it was just as Val said, a colossal sphere. The grinding noise was the sound of its mass rolling on the stone canyon bottom.

“That can’t be just a sphere,” he said. “A big metal orb? That doesn’t make sense. If it’s just a big ball, we could go up on one of the balconies and burn it down from range. It’s got to be more than that.”

Val cursed something unintelligible in response. Then she looked at them. “It’s a level 15 named mob.”

Erramir gaped. “Oh... shit.” Named creatures were a special kind of nasty. They almost always had special attacks and two or three times the health of other comparable leveled creatures.

“Its name is some kind of runic script, though. I can’t read it.” She paused, squinting. “Damn. And its health bar reads as a question mark.”

Erramir looked at Carson, a bit stunned but trying to stay engaged, “Level fifteen is a pretty big ask. Car, you did the math earlier. At level five, with our equilibrium bonuses, what’s our comparable power?”

“Level fifteen?” Carson cringed as he said it. “We're about equivalent to nine because we have points locked until level ten.”

Erramir looked back at the orb, speaking over his shoulder to Carson, “But your spells are beyond your level, right? Didn’t you say your spell power was at least twice your level? So you could cast the equivalent of a level eighteen spell, right?”

“Yeah… but…” Carson balked, then paused to consider, and sighed. “Here.” He bumped Erramir. “Lemme take a look.” Erramir stepped back so the mage could take his spot, and Carson poked his head out.

“Fragglerock. It’s like a massive malevolent ball of evil. That thing is packed with more foulness than a giant re-animated ball of head cheese.”

Carson twisted and flattened his back against the tunnel wall, turning to look at Erramir. Erramir's face was contorted in mild disgust. “Re-animated head cheese?"

“Yeah. Vile, stinking, never-should-have-been invented horribleness that we need to stay the fuck away from.” Carson's delivery was dead serious, then he raised an eyebrow and cocked a smile in pride.

Erramir nodded in approval, “Nice one, bro. But this is one zombie cheese we can’t run from. So, what do you think?”

“Thanks, I’ve been sitting on that one for a while now. Anyhow, It’s the essence. The essence is powering it, no doubt. We need to disburse it somehow.”

He tilted his head back and bumped it lightly against the stone. “I seriously doubt Ice Volt is getting through that armor. I mean... I’ve got a pretty good handle on that bug-killing weave. It’s kind of like a giant essential energy vacuum. But the essence is all bound up in the sphere now, and I don’t even know if it would work on this evil death-ooze shit.”

His face distorted in frustrated anger. “Dammit! I’m useless again.”

Erramir was floored by both the statement and the vehemence of his words. “Car, are you crazy? You’ve saved our asses in every fight so far. We just need to figure out a strategy on how to fight this thing.”

Carson’s expression softened as his head slowly turned down in contemplation. “Huh. I guess you’re right. I didn’t realize.”

Erramir clapped him on the shoulder, “Ease up on yourself, bud, we need you. Our little team needs each of us to be on point for every big fight, and this...” He raised a hand toward the tunnel opening. “This is, hands down, our biggest so far.”

The mage relaxed markedly. He looked back to Erramir and, with a nod, said, “Thanks, man.”

As Carson turned his attention back to the canyon. Erramir started running through tactics for the fight. He worked out a few ideas that depended on what else the sphere was capable of. But nothing he was confident in.

The grinding sound was getting noticeably closer. He wanted to know what it could do before they tried to fight it. He looked at Carson, who was peeking down the canyon. Or… if one of us could create an overpowered attack, and I could just kite the thing around until it was dead.

He had half an idea. “Hey Car–” he cut off, the mage was already weaving a spell. Alarmed but not wanting to interrupt, Erramir crept up next to him.

Carson felt his presence. “I’m going to try and block it with a wall of rocks.” The weave completed, and Erramir saw the essence distortion Carson had been manipulating wink out.

He waited. Nothing happened.

“Damn,” Carson whispered. The orb was still rolling closer, it was clearly visible now, less than a hundred feet away, and Erramir thought he could even pick out a slight violet hue surrounding it. They were running out of time.

“Damn what?” Erramir asked.

Carson glanced back at him. “It’s the ceiling height. The spell worked just fine, I even managed to focus it into a narrow strip to form a wall, but I cut it off. The cavern ceiling is way up there.” He pointed. “And that’s where the weave draws its material from.” As if on cue, in the far distance, the sound of stones striking the ground echoed through the canyon.

“Oh, really?” Erramir said, looking up into the darkness. He couldn’t even make out where the ceiling was.

The sound of the raining stones cut off, and Carson replied, “Yeah. I’ll try again closer to us, see if I can get ahead of it.”

Without the stones pelting the ground, Erramir instantly noticed the absence of another noise. The grinding was gone.

Val noticed it, too, and pulled Carson back. “Wait,” she said. “Listen.”

Carson cocked an ear toward the sphere. “It’s not moving anymore.”

“Right.” She nodded. “I think you confused it.” The grinding noise started again. Val leaned forward, focused down the canyon. “It’s moving back toward the stones.” She sounded slightly encouraged.

Erramir had an idea, then another, and the outline of a plan started to coalesce. “Hey, Car.” The mage turned back, and Erramir waved him closer. “Do you think you could merge Ice-Volt with Hail Stone but make the stones bigger–a lot bigger?”

Ten minutes later, Erramir was hiding inside a doorway about halfway between the metallic monster and Carson. He’d used a 2nd story back-passage entrance in the unit, identical to the one he’d found on the other side of the canyon, to get there.

They had to split up to make his plan work. Carson was alone, back in the original passage. His initial role was to keep the colossal orb distracted with stone cascades while Erramir and Val moved into position.

Carson rained rocks onto the far side of the pipe for the first time as they'd planned. The idea was to test how the metallic sphere would handle the half-buried pipe; at nearly three feet high, he hoped it would slow the thing down.

To his dismay, the orb rolled up and over almost like it had a tackum coating. Must be an ability or somehow essence related, he thought.

The plan was to wait for a sign from Val, then Carson would cast one more shower of stones close to Erramir’s location. Allowing Val to see what he and Carson had just seen while setting Erramir up for a sneak attack from hiding.

Val would then get some idea of its capabilities and come in for a secondary surprise attack. Between the two of them, they hoped to use the homes on either side of the canyon to alternate sneak attacks. Sending it back and forth until Carson was ready.

Hopefully, Val would get into her spot soon. With each cast, it seemed to be taking less time for the massive round machine to thoroughly crush all of Carson’s distraction stones.

Between dropping rocks, Carson was trying to work on an improved version of his hail-stone spell. Erramir was calling it hail boulder–Carson hated that name.

He’d warned them that spell design would be terribly inefficient while having to stop and cast every two minutes. And that he would probably need seven to ten minutes of uninterrupted focus to work out the new weave.

That was practically an eternity in a fight and nearly two eternities in a battle where you were as badly outclassed as they were in this one.

Erramir’s plan was based on winning with a devastatingly powerful attack. Unfortunately, Carson had cautioned them that he wasn’t sure he could cast it at the power level required. He was confident in his ability to figure out the weave, but he wasn’t sure his channels could handle the volume of essence required to piece level 15 armor.

Erramir activated his DrakkenWood Skin, and the tickle of scales rolled down off his head and across his body. There was still no sign from Val.

She did have the furthest to go. The fifth level was where the lowest stone bridge crossed the canyon, and she had to climb up to cross it, hopefully without being detected, then descend on the other side and find the right 2-story unit across from his hiding spot.

He estimated Val’s speed put the athletic woman well over the bridge by now, and the orb hadn’t noticed anything. At least that much of the plan seems to have worked.

Anxiety began to creep in. C’mon Val, get there. Erramir urged mentally as he watched for her sign.

The canyon fell into silence, and he glanced back. The grey metal thing was immobile; was it processing? Maybe it’d forgotten about his original touch on the pipe and was going to power down?

It began rolling. The steady grind started again. Dammit. He looked across the canyon and caught movement two units down to the left–just a flash through one of the window openings.

He stared; a figure flashed by again–was it Val? Why would she be running around in the unit?

Clang! The ring of metal being soundly struck rang through the canyon like a gunshot—Clang, clang, clang! The strikes came rapid-fire.

It was a cadence Erramir recognized. The same sound he’d first heard in his nightmare with the freakish Goblin chef.

Val’s combo attack–she’d found another mob.

Val bolted across the bridge, hunched over and along the edge furthest away from the monstrous animated ball. It was busy chasing Cason’s little rocks.

She found herself with a slight smile; her mind space was quiet. Virg’s incessant chatter had stopped not long after the ‘bugs’ disappeared.

She couldn’t think straight with the little bugger yammering away in her head, and the silence was blissful. From the complexity of his communication and an increasing sensitivity in their bond, she was getting the sense that he would mature quickly.

She silently prayed that the guess was accurate.

Erramir had convinced her to stick it out with Virg, convinced her that the payoff would be worth it. Now, with a bit of clear-headed time to think about it, she wholeheartedly agreed.

Ditching Virg was simply not an option. Not only was he an astonishing weapon with incredible utility, but she also suspected her relationship with Entiarch would not survive if she abandoned the staff. And Val couldn’t bear the thought of losing that connection.

Virg held a sliver of Entiarch’s soul essence as well as hers. So, in a strange way, one that definitely made her uncomfortable, the staff sort of was their child.

The thought made her skin crawl. She had never, ever wanted to have kids. And now, she was concerned about messing up the pre-adolescent psyche of her sentient battle staff. A weapon that was also her love child with an ancient tree. So fucking weird.

Reaching the end of the bridge and slowing just for a heartbeat, she banished those thoughts and stained her hearing. She didn’t detect any change in the sound of stones being pulverized.

Good, it didn’t see me. Going left and striding down three houses, she turned into the passage she’s spotted from the bridge.

Three flights of ramps disappeared in a blink, and she was on a landing that accessed the hidden back passage. She was between two doorways, both about 30 feet away.

With a glance at her map, she went left, toward Erramir. The idea was to keep their distraction tactics away from Carson until his spell was ready. Hopefully, we can survive that long.

Inside the door was an arched opening on the right, as Erramir had described. She poked her head in and found stairs leading down to the left. She descended three at a time—the stair treads were much wider than human steps, eighteen inches at least.

Erramir had joked that he found them to be just about right. She felt like they were too much like courthouse steps, better for sitting on than going up and down. Whichever race built this place apparently had big feet.

Val hit the bottom, skidded to a stop, and froze.

A hip-high stone slab was sliding open in the wall directly in front of her. The panel clunked fully open, revealing a tightly packed stack of rectangular metallic bricks.

Each was about two feet wide, two inches high, and probably six inches deep, although the depth was hard to judge as there was almost no gap between the stack and the cubby walls.

She stared at them, then saw the bottom several blocks were split done the middle and only one inch high–a quarter the size of the upper ones.

They sat there, big metal bricks stacked on top of small metal bricks, all packed tightly into this hidden cubby, doing nothing. “What the hell is this,” Val whispered.

Virg’s voice chirped in her mind. The stack jumped ever so slightly, little gaps appearing between the bricks.

“Dammit, Virg.” She ground out between gritted teeth, jumping left through an opening into a short hallway to the main room.

She curled around a corner to the left, pressing herself flat against the wall. A quiet clattering sound came from the stair bottom.

Virg said again in her mind. The clattering changed, slowing for a moment, then speeding back up. The noise expanded, filling the larger room.

Dammit, Virg! she cursed at the spot in the back of her mind where his voice lived.

The clattering stopped. She edged along the wall away from it. Damn block robot, why the hell is it here?

Virg said, sounding almost uncertain about the name.

Val started. What? Virg, can you hear me? she sent. Did he just infer a name for the thing from her?

He sounded more confident this time.

She looked back and almost screamed. A single metal block hung at head height, nearly vertically, sticking out from the hall.