Tahar Shul was insistent that we visit the Tall School before anything else. I wanted to too. If this monster was as half as dangerous as they implied, I wanted to take a look myself and assess how strong it was. Benadora and Adrian decided to come with us, even though by Tahar’s word there was little of interest to see where we were going. The monster was ‘guarding’ the main artery through the construction, access to most of the deeper rooms wasn’t possible.

She explained to us that there were other entrances above the cliffs, but they’d been buried under the dirt after hundreds of years of disuse. Benadora had leapt at the chance and ordered the remaining members of our team to head up there and dig holes until they found one. The odds of that happening were small, to say the least. The Tall School had the footprint of a good-sized city and the sedimentary layer left no space for clues.

So we walked, and walked, and walked. It took us nearly twenty minutes to reach the entrance that she sought. When we arrived, a profound feeling of disquiet ran through me. The stone pillars invited us into the maw of a great beast. Pitch blackness awaited us inside. We would walk unsighted to find the monster that they spoke of. It was quiet. The gentle splash of a low tide against the nearby rocks.

“It’s here?”

Tahar nodded and prepared her weapon, “Yes, here. Deeper.”

“Benadora, Adrian, are you sure you want to come inside with us? It’s going to be dangerous until we are rid of this monster.”

She rolled her eyes, “Bah, a little danger never hurt anyone! What kind of scholar would I be if I was warded away from discovery by a monster or two?” Adrian didn’t seem so certain, but he was going to follow whatever his master said regardless…

The eagle-woman led the way. It’s difficult to describe the full scale of the building we were in with just words. I could imagine dozens of creature three times my height standing side by side in what was supposedly nothing more than a hallway. The walls were white marble, marked with moss and dirt that had gathered through years of moisture finding its way inside. Those walls were intermittently interrupted by the arrival of huge openings that split off into empty rooms and more pathways.

I was drawn to several piles of small stones, taken from the surrounding area and accumulated into mounds. They were the only visible feature of the hallway, but I quickly realized they were not a part of the original architecture. She knew I was looking at them. Her words were full of terror and foreboding, “Beast, leaves nothing. Crushes bone. Empty graves.”

Nobody wanted to risk their life retrieving what little was left. The darkness encroached quickly. Tahar withdrew a torch from her pack and struck it against a piece of flint. I retrieved a small glass lantern from my own bag and lit it just in case. “Where is this thing?”

“I do not know,” she said, keeping her voice low – “It could arrive. Any time.”

I felt the need to remind her before we met it for real, “We are not fighting.”

“No?”

“Observe first.”

She nodded.

Happy that we weren’t going to be literally dragged kicking and screaming into a fight to the death with this fearsome monster, we continued even deeper. The light from outside was growing thinner by the step. And then we heard it, something rumbling nearby.

“You two stay back.”

Adrian didn’t need any prompting from me to duck into a side tunnel and hide. Benadora was surprisingly compliant too. I could always appreciate people who were good at following orders and keeping out of my way.

Tahar spoke with just a tinge of fear, “It comes.”

I saw them through the dark. A pair of big, beady black eyes. They caught the faint light from her torch and entrapped it within. It shuffled closer with an otherworldly gait. Even as it drove a straight path towards us, its body wiggled and moved like a snake. Its skin was pale, and covered with patches of white hair. A hideous, gaping mouth filled with crooked teeth – freely released a deluge of saliva onto the dirt below.

It was huge, bigger than the strange creature that had nearly killed me by the branch before. If not in height, in weight and volume. This was a beast that walked on all fours, it had to. Despite it closing the gap between us, it made no motion to attack us.

She whispered back to me, “Be still. Be silent.”

“[Inspect.]”

A primitive name and a lack of information. Nobody lived long enough to catalogue its existence, or to contribute their memory to the collective magic. One thing was for sure, it was crazy strong. This thing has lived a long, full life – and feasted on the blood of hundreds of powerful warriors. I could feel an inkling of my own fear dripping into the back of my mind. It was horrendous and terrible. What kind of mad god would make something like this?

I jumped as a voice from behind us cried out in shock.

“Adrian!”

It turned to us. In that moment where our eyes met, I truly felt the full weight of death on my shoulders. It bound my feet to the ground like heavy chains. It moved. It roared. It was running right for us. If I survived, I was going to fucking strangle him.

With no chance but to stand and receive the brunt of the monster’s assault, I drew Stigma from my back and timed my first swing perfectly. I stepped to the side and sliced through its side, it was a shallow cut, but even that could turn the tide of a battle. That is unless…

The small injury I had inflicted closed just as fast as I’d opened it. The beast was regenerating itself right before my eyes!

“Fuck me!”

It was fast, it was strong. I didn’t even have time to react as a long, prehensile tail swung back at me and ripped me off my feet, through the air, and into the side of the stone wall.

I gargled out a pained cry as I felt my insides smack against the confines of my body. I thumped back down onto the ground in a jumbled pile, I was certain that I’d broken one or two limbs, and maybe even a rib. My entire body seized up as my mind was enraptured in agony. It was the heaviest hit I’d ever taken, and the blunt impact of me hitting the wall wasn’t going to be stopped by my armour.

The chamber was illuminated with a violent gush of fire as Cali let loose with one of her spells. It seemed to work wonders against the mostly blind creature, which wailed and backed away from us. Any damage caused by contact would surely heal in an instant, but that distraction was what we needed. I felt Tahar wrap her arms around me and drag me back as fast as her legs could carry her, which as a demi-human was pretty damn fast.

“Run, run!” she demanded. I couldn’t speak, or even fully comprehend what was happening anymore. My brain was being bounced around by the movement of her body. At some point she had picked me up and cradled me in her arms. Cali was beside us - holding Stigma in a similar manner. We ran and ran and ran, not even checking to see if the thing had followed us. When we finally returned to the embrace of the sunlight, the party finally came to a halt and tired to catch their breath.

“What in God’s name was that thing?” Adrian gasped.

“The horror,” Tahar responded curtly.

“What about Ren?” Cali asked.

Benadora wandered into my field of view and looked down at my battered body, “Take him back to the camp, we have some healing potions for this kind of thing, we can set that arm too.”

“Did… did you get… Stigma…”

Cali held out the blade so that I could see it. Happy that I hadn’t lost the one thing keeping me alive, I passed out.

---

Not the most restful nap of my life. Not when I was awoken by the feeling of a foreign substance being forced down my throat by a gruff looking sailor. I gagged, but the feeling of my ribs sent me back down onto the cot with a groan of agony. I swallowed the potion, but it could only do so much. My left arm had been tied up in a white sheet.

Benadora was there by my bed. I could see Stigma leaning up against one of the wooden pillars holding the tent up. With my faculties returning, I realized just how fully I’d fucked up by even trying to pick a fight with the thing. Then Adrian walked in with an ignorant smile on his face. I stared dagger through him, stopping him before he crossed the mid-point of the space to speak with me.

“You’re lucky I’m stuck in this bed right now.”

Adrian clenched his teeth and ducked out of the tent. I didn’t want to deal with him. Benadora tutted to herself, “Don’t go being mean to Adrian. It was an honest mistake.”

“This is why I didn’t want to bring you along. Bunch of good I’m going to do now with a broken arm. How long have we been here, six hours? I’m already beat to hell.”

“Thirteen. You’ve been asleep for seven.”

I could see the evening sky through the gaps in the fabric above my head. I was furious. With myself and Adrian. If he’d just kept his mouth shut, or if I’d put my foot down and told him to stay away, I wouldn’t be in this situation.

Tahar ducked under the entrance and approached me, “You see. Strong foe.”

“Yeah, I got that. When I cut it with Stigma, it healed immediately?”

“Heal? Yes. Heal.”

Which made killing the damn thing nearly impossible. I didn’t have the strength or the power to kill that thing in one go. I couldn’t even see how much HP it had! Short of expending Stigma’s power in a last-ditch effort to kill it, I didn’t know what I could do. It looked like Benadora’s expedition was over before it even got started.

Tahar looked at the foot of the cot and leaned over, picking up my chestplate between her claws and studying it closely. “This. Good armour?”

“Yes.”

Her eyes lit up, “Blacksmith. At tribe. Can [affix.]”

“They can affix it?”

She nodded.

Thinking back, Sakura had seemed very insistent on gathering affixed items to ‘get stronger.’ I didn’t put much thought into it at the time. Most affixes weren’t worth the effort it took to gather them. The ones that I risked my life for when I first met Cali weren’t even that powerful. Sakura clearly disagreed with that perspective.

Maybe a change of tact would work wonders.

The entire time I’d been treating this world unfairly. I needed to make a build. I needed affixes that worked together to amplify my power, for both my armour and Stigma. I needed burst damage. I needed to nuke that ugly son of a bitch from orbit. And I needed to do it fast. Benadora paid me good money to get this thing rolling.

“It’s too late to go there now,” she said, raining on my parade. “You should get some rest and let the potion work. You were hurt really bad.”

“…Right. Tomorrow.”

Tahar smiled, “Tomorrow! Tribe.”