Lysette sized up the creature towering ahead of the four of them.  It looked much like an animated simulacrum of man made entirely of stone and minerals, only even bigger than it was described by the magistrate of Gnaria.  Each of its monstrous calves were as long and much thicker than Lysette’s entire body, and its head was bigger than her entire torso.  

It reached down to tear off one of the stalagmites ahead of it, crushing it with a single grip. And as chunks of stone smashed into the ground with increasingly loud thuds, it picked up a few of the nearby chunks, crushing it within massive jaws lined with over a hundred fangs of diamond and ruby and sapphire.  Lysette should have been afraid of the beast by all rights, and yet she confidently walked forward, as though she knew that they would make it through the fight somehow.

“Stay back for now,” Lysette said.  “Mirae, you and Serrena are the only ones who have any ranged attacks.  I’ll take the lead; you three cover me.”

Lysette took a deep breath and closed her eyes, and with but a thought, dashed at full sprint toward the massive stony beast.  She clenched her fist as she got within range of her aurasight, quickly calculating the flow of Essence flowing throughout its body.  Strangely, most of it seemed to be concentrated in a rather small area about its core, with only trace amounts in the surrounding shell.

She leapt up into the air and crashed down fist-first with all the strength she could muster.  But her attack did little more than dent the hard exoskeleton about its backside and cause it to turn its head around, glaring at Lysette with its beady eyes of sapphire.  Undeterred, Lysette launched another attack upon the same spot as the first, causing only small cracks upon its outer shell that quickly healed.

Before she could press the assault further, the creature’s massive palm crashed down upon her with a speed unbecoming its size and form.  She dissolved herself to avoid the crushing blow, slinking out of the crevices between its stony fingers and crawling up its arm.  She rematerialized and aimed another massive blow at the back of the orephage’s neck, to little more effect than the first two.

As the orephage thrashed about with abandon, Lysette leapt back into the air and rejoined her comrades, who were still watching the battle.  The room had been lit up a bit as someone had strewn a number of the light bulbs throughout the cavern, illuminating the damp space with a brilliant and extraordinarily vivid white light.

“Dani, do you think you can move fast enough to evade the creature’s attacks and serve as a distraction?”

“I definitely can’t hit as hard as you can.”

“That’s fine.”

“Mirae,” Serrena said.  “Lyse says you can use ice attacks at range.”

“I can.  It takes more out of me than I’d like, so I won’t get too many shots though.”

“That’s fine.  You keep your strongest attacks ready on my signal.”  

Serrena cloaked her hands in glowing orange spheres which shimmered the air about her with the intense heat of her flames.  She stoked them yet further with passion and Essence in equal measure as she approached the strange beast, and with a rending roar, amassed a sphere of flame the size of her head and launched it at the beast.

It did little more than singe its skin and cause the monstrosity to turn its gaze toward the inflamed woman, but a few punches from Danitha and a drop kick from Lysette were sufficient to reclaim the monster’s attention.  Danitha did what she could, launching stones the size of her head with a force that would have been impossible for her stature were she not a fellow Cultivator, while Lysette darted around both Serrena’s onslaught and the shrapnel the beast was spewing out of its mouth and palms alike, scanning the creature for some sort of weakness.

Lysette sustained a few superficial wounds from the unrelenting barrage— the quantity and speed of the tiny shards were so numerous that even her enhanced mind processing her aurasight at preternatural speeds couldn’t calculate a perfect trajectory, but it was good enough that her regeneration could keep pace with the damage being inflicted.  From time to time she spun around a larger stone, catching it midflight and flinging it back with even greater force, but this too failed to pierce the creature’s stony hull.  

Throughout the several minutes that the battle had gone on, the most they’d managed was to irritate the orephage and cause its outer shell to incandesce slightly from Serrena’s flaming strikes.  Danitha was holding her own, but Lysette was starting to grow winded from the seemingly neverending engagement, as though the beast could somehow see that she was the biggest threat.  Lysette reasoned that was probably because it had some ability to see Essence just as she did.

The orephage stomped forward toward Lysette as it attempted to suppress her movements, each of its massive feet slamming into the ground with enough force to shake the entire cavern as it fired shards of crystal and stone even faster than before, causing Lysette to resort to dissolution.  Teleportation was still an option, but considering its downsides, it was the last resort.

What Lysette did not expect was a strike from a single crystal the size of a sewing needle which both punctured her incorporeality and damaged her in her dissolved state.  The wound wasn’t particularly deep, but the fact that an attack was able to injure her at all filled her with anger, anger which she used to fuel her incoming assault.

“Now Mirae!”  

Serrena’s shout boomed throughout the cavern, loud and distinct enough that even with her vision and hearing blurred from being dissolved.  And a huge beam of bright blue-white followed, erupting out of Mirae’s outstretched palm as it pummeled the beast and chilled the air all around it.  They’re really something.

Lysette pushed down those feelings of pride as she leapt back out of the ground and charged the orephage once more.  But something seemed off— the beast’s movements weren’t quite as fluid as they were before, and though it was almost imperceptibly faint, the movements were furthermore accompanied by the sound of cracking rock as the strange joints of the monster rubbed and ground against each other.  Lysette recoiled and pulled herself back to avoid the rain of more needlelike crystals of the same type as the one embedded in her right thigh.

She yanked it out of her flesh and stashed it in her pocket.  She knew that that was usually a bad idea, but as it seemed to be suppressing her regenerative abilities, it seemed the less bad option in the moment.  Whatever those crystals were, they clearly had some strange properties, and Lysette planned to do some research on exactly what they were later.

Turning her focus back to the battle, she leapt in midair while Danitha had the beast distracted and launched a powerful drop kick upon the beast’s neck.  It wasn’t enough to sever it, but, unlike before, she did manage to crack through the hard carapace.  Not enough to shatter it, but enough to deal lasting damage beyond the creature’s limited ability to repair itself.  Another punch in the same spot did as much damage to it as her, causing the creature to wail in pain for the first time but her to wince as stone and bone grated against each other with only a tiny layer of skin and flesh to cushion the impact.  She leapt back toward Mirae and Serrena, clenching her fist to stem the bleeding.

“Are you okay, Lyse?” Mirae asked.

“Not the time, Mirae!” Serrena interjected.  “She can take care of herself.  We need to focus on what we can do.”

“But–”

“No buts, Mirae!”  

Serrena jumped forward with flaming fists and joined Danitha on the front lines while Lysette took a moment to recover.  Her regenerative abilities were already hard at work repairing the damaged tissue and stitching up the various tears and punctures in her skin, but it would be a few minutes before she was back to fighting capacity.  In the meantime, she stood in front of Mirae, holding her left hand up in a defensive posture as she prepared to intercept any attacks that headed their way while her young disciple gathered her strength for another frigid blast.

Serrena wasn’t quite as fast as Lysette, but was more than capable of matching Danitha on that front.  And with her flames augmenting her already formidable physical might, she hit the orephage nearly as hard as Lysette could, though the damage she was sustaining in turn was starting to accumulate.  She continued further, unleashing a devastating onslaught, pulverizing the creature’s neck in the same place where Lysette had already injured it before, only to pull back at the last second.

“Another one, Mirae!” Serrena shouted.

“On it, Serrena!”  

Mirae stepped out from beside the defensive formation Lysette had taken and launched another one of her beams of polar might, again striking true near what would have been the creature’s right shoulder blade and cracking the incandescing stone yet further.  Although she wasn’t yet fully healed, Lysette saw the opportunity with the orephage stunned and leapt back into action, a punch from her left hand enough to finally bust through the orephage’s armored shell, only to be greeted by yet more protrusions of crystal and some weird ooze that seemed to serve as some sort of blood for the monster’s odd physiology.  

Essence was coagulating at the site of its injuries, quickly crystalizing into a hard gemlike scab.  The creature attempted to throw Lysette off, but a series of well-timed kicks from Danitha and Serrena beat back the monster’s hands as they attempted to pull Lysette off the back of its neck.  Lysette winced from the pain but blocked it out as she again pummeled the creature, and with a combination of malice and determination, tore off the coagulating and rapidly solidifying fluid and began digging into its stony flesh.  

In this regard, the beast’s attempts to repair itself served as a boon to Lysette.  The slimy ooze quickly wrapped around her fingers, coating them with a thin layer of crystal that protected her as she tore into the creature, looking for some way to access the massive store of Essence within its chest that she assumed must’ve been some sort of living core which adapted and controlled the stony body from within.  But without any signs of vitals, the most she could do was tear apart its neck.  It took the better part of a minute, but with her three comrades keeping the beast from interrupting her, she was able to tear through the rest of the orephage’s neck, causing its head to slump to the ground with a terrifying thud.  

More of that strange liquid crystal oozed from the severed vessels within the creature’s body, and it immediately attempted to grab its head, only for said head to be batted away by a simultaneous diving kick from Serrena and Danitha.  The now inanimate head smashed into the back wall of the cavern with tremendous force, loosing a number of stalactites that dropped to the ground like bolts of lightning, the sounds of their impact along the ground the thunder left in their wake.

The creature stopped moving for a moment, and the four took defensive postures, staying a short way from the stoned beast.

“Did– Did we do it?” Mirae asked.

“No,” Lysette said.  “The creature’s been weakened somewhat after I tore its head off, but the core inside of it is undamaged.  We’ll have to find a way to get inside its torso and crush it for good.”

“Core?” Danitha asked.  “How do you know about something like that?”

Lysette sighed, taking a moment to catch her breath.  “I said I could see in darkness, right?  I suppose now’s as good of a time as any to mention that I can also see Essence.”

“But that’s–”  Serrena cut herself off.  “We’ll continue this conversation later.  It approaches.”