Raw kinetic energy torrented outward. While they were safe behind the pillars, the sheer force of the impact broke the delicate crystals on the walls. In one moment, the entire room went dark. Apexus’ nails were already shining, illuminating their environment as they hurried out of hiding and back towards the kneeling Laghast.

Their hasty steps were but one sound in the room. The pained, squelching groan of the Laghast was another, caused by breaking and rearranging bones inside its changing shape. Louder than that was the grinding of stone on stone, as the mouths of carved faces opened. Out of them streamed a thick fog that quickly spread in the room.

The Laghast raised a hand to block the Sunlight Bolt that Aclysia had just sent hurling from the tip of her staff. The burn caused vanished almost immediately, just as the wound in the boss’ back had sealed up. With a tearing sound and another tormented scream, the Laghast threw its head back, as the bumps all over its ribcage turned into spiky protrusions. The tentacles extending from its impossibly wide-open mouth curled in the air as it fought itself to its feet. The black spheres of its eyes shattered like orbs of glass. Two were now white, the third, upper one revealed underneath it a tendril that extended forwards. On its end was a thick lump that exuded light.

Reysha had reached the boss now and was ready to finish what she had started. About to lunge again, she wisely interrupted her attack upon seeing something slither in the accumulating mists. A long, naked tail sliced through the air where she would have been. The Laghast gargled annoyedly, having missed its target with this new limb. It took a step backwards and was swallowed by the tumbling white that filled the air.

“Stick to me,” Apexus commanded. The distance he could reliably see through was shortening. Mist and darkness made the chamber feel like an endless pit of danger. His light at least let his party members find him. Soon, the three of them stood shoulder-to-shoulder, waiting for anything to tell them where the Laghast might be. The thickness of the mist peaked.

The phenomenon that had just occurred was called Phase Mutation. Monsters, usually of the boss variety, sometimes possessed more than one form that they took throughout the battle. How much these forms differed from one another was wildly inconsistent and so were secondary effects that may have come along with the transformation. In the case of the Laghast, its Phase Mutation unleashed a strong energy wave and granted it short-term regeneration. Both served to make sure it wasn’t killed during the transformation and that it would remain a challenge afterwards.

In the mist, the Laghast gurgle transformed from pained to gleeful. Its prayer had been answered and the power the god of this dungeon deposited inside it had been unleashed. The anglerfish light that hung from its forehead glowed with baleful light. It was of an unnatural, sickly pale tone.

Apexus dimmed the honest silver coming from his fingernails in response. The more the Laghast’s light contrasted with the surrounding darkness, the better they would be able to make out its position. Dispersed by the mist, it was little more than a dull dot, but it was better than nothing.

The guide had warned them about the transformation and about the capabilities the boss now had. His emotional manipulation changed from an active measure to a passive, dreadful aura, steadily spreading from the light. It reinforced the uncertainty of the mist. The Laghast could have been stalking, walking, crawling or crouching for a charge, the group had nothing to go off except the occasional mocking gargle and the position of the light.

The latter was also treacherous.

What the boss had lost in active emotional measures, it had gained in minor illusion magic. In this environment, just the act of faking a sphere of light was a massive advantage.

Hyperaware of this, Apexus tensed all of his senses. His tremor sense combined with sight and hearing to create a more accurate layout of the room. At least he tried to get an accurate reading. The Laghast was moving with such utter care that Apexus couldn’t feel it outside of tiny missteps. Eyes and ears were better relied on, in this situation. Eyes, ears, and the capabilities of his teammates.

The slime narrowed his eyes on the light, several metres removed. Staring directly at it was dreadfully hypnotic. Like a rabbit staring at a snake, he was drawn in by the danger. He growled at the feeling, a gesture Reysha echoed with a cat-liked hiss. As predators, they hated this feeling of being prey. A mocking gurgle responded to their dread.

A gurgle right in front of them.

The light in the distance suddenly switched off, just as the bleak-white skin of the abomination launched out of the dark mist. Two lanky arms snapped forwards, grabbed Apexus and Reysha and tossed them to the side with immense force. They were knocked to the ground, sliding over the slippery wet stone, while the boss monster assaulted the last member of their trio.

Several options rushed through Aclysia’s mind, her brilliant mind trying to discern which was the perfect one and taking too long to decide. A simple panicked reaction was to protectively raise an arm in front of her chest. The Laghast took the outstanding target and bit down.

Needle sharp teeth penetrated the soft, flesh-like metal that made up the majority of the angel’s physical form. Yanking its neck back, the Laghast forced Aclysia to extend her arm. The tentacled slithered out between the thin needles, grabbed the white-haired woman’s arm and held it in place while the abomination changed the angle of its bite. Like a bizarre mixture between serpent, octopus and anglerfish, the Laghast unhinged its outer jaw and let the tentacles pull Aclysia’s limb into its maw.

Aclysia whimpered and screamed in pain, a sensation she experienced so much less than her comrades, while she struggled to pull out. The boss was too strong, especially once its four elongated fingers wrapped around her narrow waist. Like tightly wrapped wires, they started squeezing, putting immense pressure one her bones, while the skin of her fist and arm was rapidly gnawed off by a secondary, internal set of teeth within the monster’s throat. Every layer of ‘flesh’ removed made it more difficult to use magic with that limb.

When she was down to the shoulder inside the disgusting, fleshy depth of the creature, Aclysia managed to formulate a single thought. ‘Bolt.’ Heaving the tip of her staff against the monster’s chest with one hand was difficult, but the metal fairy managed. Magic concentrated in the crystal tip and then came blasting out.

The heat dispersed on the thick skin of the creature, leaving a scorched mark on the blubber and a pissed Laghast. Its jaw unhinged further; the formerly humanoid shape now grotesquely stretched when it came to the head.

‘Thinner,’ Aclysia realized what she had to do in order to penetrate the opponent. ‘Like a dagger.’ Magic weaved together again, while sharp teeth borrowed into the underside of her shoulder and the top of her scalp. The monster wasn’t trying to eat her, all food it needed was supplied by the dungeon, just to break her bones with the sheer force of its jaws. At least her skull was harder than her skin, buying her time. ‘Concentrate…’ she tried to blend out the pain, even as a steady whimper escaped her lips. All she could see was the writhing flesh inside the monster’s maw.

When pain and dread became too much, the spell was unleashed.

Magic, condensed into a smaller point, blasted at the already wounded spot on the monster’s chest. The blubber was penetrated by the concentrated Sunlight Bolt, scorching the muscles underneath. “Grhhrhrhhhrllll,” the monster let out a gargling, pained protest, all of its muscles tensing and relaxing for a moment from the shock. Its neck snapped back and Aclysia finally saw the room again.

And a redhead’s dagger descending.

She had needed to orient herself, but Aclysia’s pained outcries had allowed her to know where to go fairly quickly. With the calm rage of a semi-insane tiger Rogue, she had snuck back to her original position. The Laghast didn’t know he had to hurry until a knife was rammed into its left eye.

It was much harder than it seemed to be, feeling more like a mass of cartilage than an eyeball under Reysha’s blade. “Piece of shit!” she growled, pulling back her blade for the next strike. A wave of revulsion hit her, as the Laghast defensively increased the light its lantern produced. Towards a more weak-willed adventurer, that would have had a paralyzing effect. Reysha, however, had gone through too much trauma to let something as simple as magically induced despair stop her. “GET OUT OF MY MIND!” she screamed and sliced off the lantern.

The boss let out a high-pitched scream and stumbled back, pulling Aclysia with it. The metal fairy felt parts of her spine shatter under the continuing squeeze. An organic person would long since have died from organ’s tearing. It was her luck that she didn’t die from those causes, but the continuous degradation of her form threatened to destabilize it enough that her divine soul would be evicted.

Before the boss could retreat into the dark mist, it was suddenly tackled by Apexus. Rage surging inside him at the sight of his beloved fairy’s state. Her spine was crooked, her beautiful white hair disrupted by several dozen thin trenches, and from the boss’ maw exuded the green mist her wounds dispersed.

Wordless, Apexus grabbed the monster’s face, embraced his shoulder and bit his neck. It was far from a loving gesture, as the duality of sizzling and pain from the boss proved. The slime’s body, heated to the point that he added additional steam to the mist, scorched the creature wherever he touched it. The blubber protected against the worst, but its eyes weren’t shielded in the same way.

All the while, Apexus ripped chunks out of the monster’s shoulder and swallowed them whole. That arm became useless in a matter of bites. On the other side, Reysha was frantically hacking away at the monster’s jaw muscles. She had to dodge the Laghast’s wild attempts at getting away in the meantime. Even covered in wounds, it still tried to retreat backwards. Its tail swung from side to side, but the vengeful duo ignored the whipping and kept on going.

The boss and the group knew that the adventurers had won. However, the Laghast could make that a hollow victory if it only managed to ruin the corporeal form of the angel. Granted, the Laghast thought of this as an act of simple murder. A slightly less despair inducing prospect for the group.

All the Laghast had to do was keep biting and squeezing, using its remaining hand.

“No, no, no, no,” Reysha stammered, letting the panic fuel her movements. She needed no method to dissect an unknown organism, she just needed enough stabs that the jaw failed to work.

Done with the arm on his side, Apexus started to expand. By pure accident, he found the wound Aclysia had blasted into the monster’s chest. Slime as hot as steaming water poured into the cavity. He couldn’t start dissolving the Laghast, pulling something out of the body and under his membrane was too difficult to try in this position but it did hurt. Hurt enough that the Laghast’s body trembled and that the sinews became loose for one moment. Loose enough for Reysha to cut it.

Noticing her success after three more stabs, Reysha backed off the ruined, slacked jaw and instead ruined the monster’s arm with a few deliberate cuts with both of her weapons. Then she simply dropped both and wrapped her arms around the metal fairy. While the Laghast kept retreating, Reysha pulled at Aclysia.

“Fucking tentacles!” the tiger girl cursed over the disgusting sound of teeth scraping over metal. She knew nothing of the internal jaw and Aclysia was in too much pain to explain things to her. Capable of feeling torment with every part of her body, nervous system replaced by a magical sensing of body integrity, it didn’t matter that the arm that slowly emerged from the disgusting maw of the Laghast was gnawed down to the bone. “Hang in there, Aclysia!”

The metal fairy did. She did more than that. Clenching her teeth, ignoring the tears of pain that rolled over her face, she raised her feet and kicked the Laghast’s chest as strongly as she could. That she hit Apexus’ slime in the process was of fairly little concern. The heat didn’t bother her and all that mattered was that she got out.

Scratching over her raw, black bones, the two sets of teeth kept torturing her body and ears. The more she slid out, the more tendrils tried to grip her. The boss got a good grip on her towards the end, only for her absolutely ruined wrist to snap off. Reysha and Aclysia fell backwards, the boss swallowed the hand, and Apexus enveloped him fully. The Larghast tried to free himself, using his still functioning legs. In a limited way, it succeeded, one of the kicks breaking through the inside of Apexus’ membrane. Getting out of the boiling, acidic slime was impossible, however.

“It’s going to be fine… it’s going to be fine…” Reysha mumbled repeatedly, both to Aclysia and to herself. While the metal fairy healed herself from the heavy damage, the tiger girl tried to not think too much about the memories the sight of the black bone evoked.

While it may have been far from clean, they had won.