It struck her in the back just above the hip, and she felt the familiar numbing surge of death magic spread through her body.
But her [Defense] meant that the blow was a meager thing, easily thrust to the back of her mind while she focused on fighting. She lunged and thrust upward with a [Mighty Blow] that took the creature just below the neck, cutting its narrow body in two and causing it to burst into a rush of violet hellfire a moment later.
She pivoted in place and absorbed some of the flames to heal herself as more of their attacks struck her. As she did so, she reached out and touched the cracked surface of the ground beneath her, hitting the boss with another [Energy Drain].
Good, she thought, bounding forward to avoid some of the luminous tendrils that grew from the boss as they swept through the air toward her. She cleaved another one of the strange newcomers in half and launched her sword through another of them, rolling and touching the boss again to afflict it with her [Energy Drain].
Then she pulled herself back toward her sword and retrieved it before laying into the other half-dozen enemies that the boss had summoned.
For all that the Abyssal Rift was supposed to be terrifying, Ashtoreth felt like she’d won a kind of boss lottery. She couldn’t imagine a boss that was easier for her to fight: again and again she absorbed [Bloodfire] by afflicting it with her [Energy Drain], and its minions were little more than a chance for her to set it alight with even more draining hellfire.
One of its tendrils passed through her, temporarily paralyzing her and increasing the strength of the boss’s ubiquitous psychic assault, but these two things together meant very little. Her absurd [Vitality] combined with her vampire racials meant that her regeneration could outpace the boss’s damage.
Soon she’d killed the summoned minions and the surface of the floating island burned beneath her. The boss’s psychic assault had mounted, and the motions of its luminescent tendrils were more frantic and harder to dodge… but Ashtoreth could put her full attention into evasion. She only needed to touch the surface of the island to hit it with her crucial ability.
It wasn’t long before her flames ceased to noticeably dwindle. Soon after, they began to grow more intense as they burned the [Bloodfire] that they could drain from the entity. Its psychic assault against her mind began to dwindle, its stats lowered by the constant [Energy Drain].
Then, all at once, the assault against her mind ceased. She’d been expecting more minions, or more alterations to reality… but she guessed it had run out of [Mana], or whatever its resource was, as her flames burned its stats away and it constantly assaulted her mind.
A moment after the assault ceased, the island began to fall through the air beneath her, apparently so drained that it couldn’t even generate its own gravity anymore. Then it clicked: as she’d lowered it stats, it had needed to spend more and more resources to maintain its flight.
She converted her sword into her scythe, then rose into the air as she watched the island fall away below her, soon to crash against the ground and, with luck, perish.
She started flying back toward where she’d left the humans.
“You guys!” she said, hoping her voice would carry across the cavern. “I got ‘em! They’re not nearly as intimidating as they look!”
Then she noticed that the floating island with the orange aura was coming toward her, with no sign of her allies in sight.
“...You guys?”
“You guys, I am so sorry about the eldritch abominations!”
About an hour had passed since the humans had died to the second boss. She’d killed the other floating island, then used her compass to hunt out the boss of the Abyssal Rift scenario, which had essentially been a malevolent tree made of teeth. She’d unceremoniously killed it and triggered the next scenario to resurrect them.
They’d all spawned on a rocky, brush-covered cliffside overlooking a deep, dark jungle filled with wild noises. The humans stood in a row in front of her, their faces all the same: pale, wide-eyed, all of them staring at some distant thing that she couldn’t see.
They’d been killed by a spawn of the Near Ones, after all. Psychic deaths were the worst kind, or so Ashtoreth had been told.
“In hindsight,” she said. “I can see I made a lot of mistakes. I shouldn’t have left alone to deal with one of them all by yourselves. I should be trying to help you all build the skills for those kinds of engagements! But Dazel said that if their auras crossed all reality would unravel—”
“Which it would,” he added.
“And I sort of interpreted that as ‘go kill one as fast as you can’ and I don’t know if I should really say this or if I’m being to hard on myself but I think I might sort of be a little too eager to show off.” She shrugged. “Maybe that’s a little harsh, and even if it is true, obviously it’s at least a little understandable, but we really needed a different plan back there. You guys?”
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Slowly all of them had come to stare at her with the same shaken, lost expression on their faces.
“I saw it,” Kylie whispered. “I saw its mind. I saw it all….”
“...On the upside,” Ashtoreth continued. “When day one starts with you being killed by an eldritch horror, it’s all uphill from there! Am I right?”
Hunter sat down on a nearby rock, his eyes still wide. Frost began to look at the world around him, his face uncomprehending.
“Now, from what I’ve heard,” she continued. “Your sense of identity should sort of… creep back in over the next hour or so.”
“They’ll be fine,” said Dazel. “They just need a minute to—”
At that moment, everyone’s attention was drawn toward a series of loud crashing noises from the jungle below. A tall, slender, long-snouted dinosaur emerged from the darkness of the brush. It took a few steps up the rocky hillside, saw them, then stopped let out a loud roar that showed off a mouth fill with long, sharp teeth.
A moment later, the sound of Frost’s shotgun filled the air. His attack was immediately accompanied by Kylie’s blasts of death magic and several lines of Hunter’s black-and-white fire.
The dinosaur shuddered under the combined might of their attacks, falling limp as the shotgun blasts dug into its flesh.
Then its body continued to shudder as the humans kept pummeling it with everything they had.
“Uh, you guys….”
The dinosaur’s body became a rotted, torn and burnt-up heap of flesh that was gradually being pushed down the hillside. The report of Frost’s shotgun ceased for a moment.
“You guys, you got it, it’s—”
Frost clapped another drum magazine into the shotgun and resumed firing, and over the course of another few moments the dinosaurs body was further reduced to bone fragments and charred paste.
Then silence filled the air at last.
“Uh, I don’t know if Kylie can resurrect it as a slime….” said Ashtoreth.
“That thing ate me,” said Frost, finally turning to her, his voice haunted. “Not my body, Ashtoreth. Me. My memories. My thoughts. Everything getting crushed up and swallowed….”
“Don’t worry,” said Ashtoreth. “You’re safe now! This place looks like an easier scenario mostly filled with animal wildlife, and I—”
But as she was speaking, the world around them brightened. Ashtoreth realized what had happened with a sudden shock: a cloud that had been covering the sun had finished passing over it, so that the world was lit once more with sunlight.
Her eyes widened.
Frost burst into flames.
Hunter and Kylie’s heads snapped over to look on Frost in horror as he was engulfed in blue-white fire and began to scream in pain and confusion. Ashtoreth looked around frantically as she wove her hand through the air to conjure the image of a gazebo encasing Frost.
As she suspected, the glamour had no effect: while it appeared that Frost was in the shade, the sunlight still caused him sacred damage.
She gritted her teeth, then surged forward and grabbed him in her arms, immediately overtaken by the horrible pain of sacred damage as her skin blistered and melted. She dragged Frost through the air, taking cover behind a shrub-covered rock that gave enough shade for him to at least stop taking damage, even if he’d still be severely weakened.
She batted most of the flames out with her wings, then slumped against the rock next to him as they both regenerated.
“Sorry about that,” she said. “I should have told you to be sure you took the first rank of [Daywalker] before we left.”
Frost, still smoking, nodded mutely.
“What the hell was that?” Kylie asked, appearing on the top of the rock.
“Okay,” Ashtoreth said. “Obviously we all just need a bit of a breather.”
“Are you sure?” Kylie asked. “Because it seems to me than only one of us actually needs to breathe, and the rest of us are dead!”
“I feel ignored,” Dazel said.
“I can definitely assure you that this world is much safer than the last one we got,” Ashtoreth said. She raised a finger. “—And, for those of us willing to look for the silver lining, a lot cooler!”
“Cooler?” Kylie shrieked. “He just burst into flames!”
“Okay,” said Ashtoreth. “While I see what you did there and I appreciate it, this world has dinosaurs.”
“Dinosaurs.”
She thrust out both her hands as if presenting the jungle around them. “Dinosaurs, Kylie! Dinosaurs!”
She formed a claw and wove it through the air, creating a glamour that was nothing but the sound of a recorder playing the theme to Jurassic Park.
“I hate you so much,” Kylie whispered, clutching her head.
As the music crescendoed, it was joined by the sounds of more crashing from within the dark jungle below them.
“Another one!” Ashtoreth cried. “Sure, it’s hostile—but think of how cool it is to finally get to see dinosaurs in real life! What kind of dinosaur do you think this one will—”
A gigantic centipede with glowing red eyes emerged from the dark gaps in the trees, its mandibles clacking beneath a hideous face. It reared up as it saw them, dozens of legs twitching in the air as a red light gathered between its antennae and crackled with the unmistakable appearance of lightning magic.
“Okay,” Ashtoreth said, to the centipede. She conjured her sword, and its point thunked into the dirt at her feet. “You. Are not. Helping!”
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