Kay saw the tentacles transforming into strange, legged worm monsters and mentally threw a few curse words in the direction of the Eldritch Being at fault for this entire mess. The tentacles that sloughed off and became monsters regrew out of the creature’s back seconds later, with part of the monster becoming a disgusting incubator in the face of Kay’s new reinforcements.

Four of the monster’s tentacles remained out of the new spawning process, and they twisted themselves forward to start stabbing at Kay like spears. He dodged between the simultaneous attacks when he could and blocked those he couldn’t, forming and dismissing shields of blood from his arms. One of the attacks flew over his shoulder and stuck in the ground for a moment. Kay used the opportunity to slice the end of the tentacle off. The tiny opening as it regrew let Kay get close enough to get some slashes in at the main body of the creature. The arms it had leftover from the Rittian giant lashed out at him in wide arcs, which Kay rolled under. Wounds left by Kay’s melded blood sword left hissing wounds that sizzled and melted because of the eldritch purifying effect he’d added to the weapon.

The monster growled and shrieked and snarled and screamed from its many mouths, but repeated exposure had limited the effect of the mental attack, and Kay shrugged it off without much trouble. He saw Meten and Eleniah tense up for a moment, letting some of the growing pile of worm monsters get strikes in, but they were glancing attacks that bounced off of the pair’s stronger defenses. They both managed to shake it off quickly and retaliated by destroying the offending monsters.

While he fought the main monster, part of Kay was able to watch the two tier fives fight. With the insane amounts of hydra blood he’d drained from the corpse after going back to find it and the currently overclocked version of Enhance Blood, he was able to heal wounds to himself in seconds, so it became a bit of a slugging match between him and the creature. It hit him if he didn’t manage to dodge or block the attack, he healed whatever injury if left on his body, and then he hit it. The monster didn’t seem to understand the idea of not letting Kay hurt it, so it wasn’t that difficult to do damage to it, and his sword was leaving much more lasting wounds than the monster was doing to Kay with its teeth, claws, and tentacles. That gave him some leeway to see how the two stronger people here fought.

Eleniah’s style was simple. Pure, unrelenting force. Mostly with punches, but a few kicks and elbow strikes and such were mixed in there too; she obliterated everything that got near her. The smaller and weaker-looking mouth worms exploded into goo as soon as she hit them, and the bigger ones were tossed away from her with the force of her blows, crushed and broken.

This was actually the first time Kay had seen Meten go all out as opposed to just sparring with him with weapons, and it was a sight to see. Meten’s tier five Class was Ashblade Painter, and Kay finally got to see the two parts of that class that wasn’t weapon-related. Glowing pieces of black and gray ash floated off of the blade of his glaive as he swung, and the monsters he struck started to burn and flake away into nothing. He drew shapes with the ash he made, both with his fingers and the tip of his weapon, sometimes making shapes that looked like complicated glyphs and other times drawing detailed pictures. As he finished each one, some effect occurred, from spikes of ash forming in the air and impaling enemies to a copy of Meten appearing for a moment from a cloud of the ash and dashing into the growing crowd of worms, slicing and burning into the copy exploded into flames.

“Okay!” Eleniah shouted as she axed kicked a worm into paste, “This is getting annoying! They’re getting bigger, and there’s more and more of them!”

“Move! I’ll clear them out!” Meten shouted.

Eleniah nodded and jumped backward, away from the swarm.

Meten also jumped back, but not as far, and started wielding his glaive like a giant calligraphy brush. With slow and deliberate strokes, he painted a giant character that floated in the air in front of him. It was flecked with different colors of ash, some parts bright white and others pitch black, all blending together into a gray color that looked like it was shifting in place from the heat waves it generated. For a moment, it sat there, unmoving, then as the wave of worm creatures flooded towards Meten, it scattered like it had been struck by a wind. The ash danced through the air and surrounded the mass of wiggling, toothy monsters. Then it started to spin. Seconds after dispersing, the ash conglomerated again and formed a massive tornado of heat that burned the monsters into even more ash.

Kay saw what was coming and three himself to one side as the tornado became a wave that flooded over the main monster. It passed over half of it, burning and melting the flesh even more than Kay’s blood sword did. The monster staggered as its unburned mouths screamed, and Kay dived forward after recovering.

He slashed out with the sword, shifting it from a halberd to a sword and back again over and over as he slashed, stabbed, hammered, pierced, and struck the monster over and over again, his attacks looking like a strange dance as he spun and jumped from place to place along the creature, chaining each attack into the next with his changing weapon.

As Kay jumped into the air, clearing the space where one of the last remaining tentacles would have taken him off his feet, the remaining hand on the Rittian body backhanded him across the chest and sent him flying back. He managed to absorb most of the blow and flipped backward to land on his feet. He was braced to charge back into the fight when a literal wall of sound slammed into him and pushed him back.

Every last mouth remaining on the eldritch monster screamed at once, a high-pitched sound that soon became pitched past the level Kay could hear. He felt a few drops of blood drip from his ear as his eardrums broke and healed multiple times in a second. The monster began to squirm, and its flesh sunk inward as pieces of its body began to fold over themselves. The clawed rat-man arm grabbed the eye in the center mouth on its former torso and ripped it out. The two remaining tentacles split multiple times, becoming smaller waving tentacles that had one mouth through the width of each. The solid parts left over from the Rittian merged together into a lump, torso, legs, and neck, all turning into a lump of flesh with disgusting squishy sounds. When the thing’s transformation was done, it had become a lumpy ball with an elongated Rittian arm coming out of part of it at a weird angle, holding a lumpy eyeball that glared around at the three of them. The thin whip-like tentacles opened up along their edges with thin mouths, and the ends were barbed with sharp teeth and wiggled menacingly as they oozed across the monster’s new body.

“This isn’t a fucking Dragon Ball episode!” Kay cursed, “You don’t get to shift forms every time you’re about to lose!” He dashed towards it, weapon out, sidestepping the whip cracks of the attacking tentacles and slicing them off where he could. When he got in range of the main body, he began to slice chunks off of it and realized that the monster was much weaker now. Whether it was finally near the end of its rope, the transformation had weakened it, or some combination of both, the pieces that Kay cut off slopped to the ground and began to melt, without the monster growing replacement parts like it had earlier.

Meten attacked with blades of ash and burning slices of his glaive, while Eleniah just punched it over and over again, and the monster began to shrink from its original house-sized form into something more school bus sized, then even smaller as it lost more and more pieces of itself.

“Has anyone tried hitting it in the eye?” Eleniah called out the question as she casually blocked a tentacle with her forearm.

“Tried? Yes. Succeeded? No!” Kay called back.

“Well then…” She held up one hand, and her fist glowed gold for a moment before she threw a lightning-fast jab at the arm-eyestalk hybrid. Even though she was at least ten feet away, the creature still moved, the arm bending out of the path of the attack, the first time Kay could remember the monster trying to dodge anything. The spot along the arm that was in the path of the punch seemed to waver, and then it broke and popped like a water balloon, the force of Eleniah’s punch traveling the distance and rupturing the part it hit.

A few of the thing’s tentacles stopped their flailing and tried to catch the eye. Three of them managed to do it, and they started to merge into it, making some new limb to hold it. But for a split second, before it could finish the transformation, the eye was suspended in one place, unmoving. It was the perfect target for Kay’s glowing sword to pierce right through, especially after he’d pumped the last bit of mana he could into the Meld Blood of his sword and Purify Blood.

His blade pierced through the eye, just off from the pupil, and the whole thing began to wither like melting snow. All of the creature’s tentacles began to flail at him, trying to force him back, but he ignored the attacks that bounced off his armor and the ones that penetrated to hurt him alike and held the blade in place. The entire eldritch monster began shrinking in on itself as he kept the anti-eldritch blade buried in the creature’s eye.

The pupil swam around wildly within the remaining substance of the eyeball, and the creature struck out at the tiny human that was hurting it until the intelligence behind the beast finally gave up. It turned a baleful gaze on Kay, and he felt tendrils of his thoughts and will invade his psyche again, weaker than before. He felt thoughts of rage, and endless hunger that could never be filled, an appetite for all things that would last until the end of time.

Part of Kay wanted to say some witty thing like “Go eat a sandwich” or something, but that didn’t actually sound all that witty, even in his head, and he didn’t want to say anything Eleniah could tease him with. So after the long, hard day, he’d had fighting this thing and its minions, he said what he really felt instead of anything that would sound cool.

“I don’t care. Fuck off.”

What was left of the being stretched outward, then shrunk in on itself, before it disappeared with a pop. The cut-off bits and the remains of the dead worm monsters born from its tentacles wobbled and bubbled, then vanished.

Kay stood there for a moment, staring at where the monster had been, then slowly deformed his armor and weapons and let them turn back into liquid blood, which he absentmindedly stored in his flask again. His hands tightened almost involuntarily as he tried to relax, and he glanced down at his hand as he felt something in it. The slightly glowing sword made of blood was still there. He mentally commanded it to become liquid again, and it resisted.

“Huh? Why won’t it-”

He jerked back as a fanfare went off, and a screen appeared in front of his eyes.

╠═════════════════════════════╣

QUEST COMPLETE!

~Rewards Available!~

- The survival of your settlement

- One enchanted item related to one of your classes (Tier Five Equivalent)

- One enchanted settlement item

- Keep the assistance granted to you

╠═════════════════════════════╣

Kay stared at the slightly glowing screen, and especially the brightly glowing words at the bottom. “That reminds me.” He glanced up into the sky, and he felt like he felt something looking back at him from all around. “What’s up with that?”

There was a pause, then the same strange words that didn’t have a screen with them floated up in his vision.

Calculating…