The laugh came out first, and my body’s immediate response to it was another comprehensive wave of agony through my left side that made the laugh fold right then and there and come out as something considerably less triumphant.

All the while, the monster stood there in the freezing dark with its eyeless face turned toward me and those deep guttural growls rolling outward across the basin floor in slow, continuous pulses, its broken claw still frozen at the end of the arc that had sent me grinding against the ground, but it did not move, nor did it stop growling at me.

[I’ve done all I could’ve...] I thought, and the thought arrived with a certainty that surprised even me. There was no panic attached to it, just the plain and simple accounting of a situation that had been handed everything I had.

The shimmer of blue caught the moonlight as I reached into my inventory and closed my fingers around the capsule, the one with the precise 0.5mL dosage that I had been carrying the whole night, before bringing it to my bleeding mouth and biting down.

And the second it shattered between my teeth, the warmth spread outward from my throat, moving through everything it could reach with a thoroughness that was almost offensive in how total it was.

My tongue knitted itself back together first, the torn edges drawing closed with a sharp internal pressure that stopped the blood flooding in my mouth, and then came the ribs, the fracture lines that had been screaming through my left side with every shallow breath found each other and snapped back into alignment with a series of rapid, grinding cracks that I felt from the inside out and that would have made me scream if the warmth hadn’t been right behind each one, sealing it before the signal fully arrived.

The gut wound flared briefly as the healing passed over it, a sharp spike that confirmed the Tier 9 curse was still working through me, and the warmth addressed the surface and went no deeper; even the stump of my left arm and the void where my right leg had been both registered a brief, aching pulse before the curse shut that down too.

But at least the ribs were whole, and so was the tongue, and I took the first complete breath I had taken without flinching since the claw had found me.

I exhaled slowly through my nose while the golden outlines of the Outsider horde reached the edge of my awareness and kept coming.

The horde that had been cascading after me through the crumpled space-time I had left in my wake was seconds away.

[No rest for the wicked...] I sighed, bringing both streams online before the breath had finished leaving me, and the twin 30 MP/s channels of Fragmentation Pebbles came roaring back to life while the gold orbs began blooming at my Domain’s edge from which the knights stepped at rate of sixteen per second, each one throwing itself into the leading wave of golden outlines before it had fully finished forming.

The margin of error I had was so thin that it might as well not be there; the production had started from zero, and the horde had the momentum of everything it had built up while I was rag-dolling across the basin.

But the streams were running, and the pebbles were detonating, and the golden outlines at the front of the wave were being shredded before they reached me, and that was the floor of functional, and I had been operating on that floor long enough tonight.

Even so, my eye did not move to the horde; it stayed on the monster standing forty meters across the basin with its growls, its eyeless face, and its absolute, unnerving stillness.

Because if it moved, then the sword meant nothing, and every risk I had taken to reach it also meant nothing, and I had crossed half the basin on one leg, chased by an Eldritch horde for nothing.

The very thought of that felt worse than the thought of dying, which said a lot about where I was mentally after a full night of this.

[Dude, just please stay still,] I thought, watching it while a tentacle came in from my left that I shredded without looking.

[Please stay still, please stay still, please stay still,] the thought was looping with a stripped-down sincerity that had nothing proud or composed left in it.

I got my one good leg under me, pushing up from the ground while a supporting knight took the gap the movement opened in my line.

The sweat that had been building through the exertion of the past several minutes slid into my working eye as I straightened, and I blinked it out without moving my gaze from the monster because that was not a risk I was willing to take.

The monster heaved its chest from which the growls kept rolling, the eyeless face stayed pointed at me, and I kept watching it while my heart hammered so hard that it was now painful.

All the while, [please stay still] kept looping, and the line kept holding, and for a handful of seconds, nothing happened in either direction.

And then the damn thing moved.

-Thoom-!

The reverberations of the footfall came up through the ground and found my one remaining leg before traveling directly up my spine into my skull, and everything that had been loose and hopeful in my chest clamped shut in one hard, cold instant.

"No..." I breathed out just that single syllable while my hand clenched into a fist at my side that I could feel shaking even as I tightened it.

-Thoom-!

"Damn it!" I gritted out through clenched teeth as the second footfall reverberated across the ground, my eye going wide while my hand found my inventory in a shimmer of blue light, fingers closing around the hilt of my kukri.

I gripped it in my palm and felt the shaking transfer directly into the blade, while I stared at that massive, ruined shape taking its third step toward me.

-Thoom-!

And the second that third step came down, the monster’s leg gave way.

From the inside out, the dense red flesh of the leg lost its coherence from deep within and collapsing downward in a wet, cascading rupture that dropped its full mass onto its knees with a concussive impact that sent a tremor through the ground, and the guttural growl that had been continuous broke apart on the way out into something that had no clean category.

And then the flesh began to fall.

It started at the shoulders, the mass of dense red muscle losing its hold and sliding downward in thick, heavy sheets while the blood came with it in a sudden release that scattered across the ground in a wide, dark spray.

The massive clawed hands detached from the shoulder joints in rapid succession, each one dropping to the dirt with a wet, resonant impact while the blood followed each separation in a fresh gush that soaked through the ground around the kneeling mass.

The jaw came apart next, the long serrated teeth and the dense bone of the lower jaw simply disconnecting and dropping with a sound that was something that I will never forget.

The monster went backward, sitting with its massive ruined legs folded beneath it while the flesh continued to fal; from every surface simultaneously, falling away in chunks and sprays of blood that turned the basin around it into something beyond description, each piece hitting the ground and lying there while the monstrosity that had been the cultist’s second transformation came apart like a structure whose foundations had been removed at once.

"HELL YEAH!" The roar came out of my throat loud enough that it made the nearest Outsiders flinch, while the despair that had been sitting in my chest since that first footfall reversed itself so fast that even I found it comical.

While a grin that I genuinely could not stop spread across my face. "It flippin’ worked!"

The flesh on the chest came away last, peeling back from the center in a cascade that accelerated as the surrounding structure lost its cohesion, and piece by piece the enormous mass of pulsating flesh dismantled itself, until the cultist became visible at the center of it all.

Surrounded on every side by the collapsed bloody remains of what he had made of himself, with his own chest heaving in deep, uneven pulls, his entire body was drenched from crown to collar in blood while his arms hung loose at his sides.

He was somehow still alive.

And then, slowly, his eyes opened. The fog cleared from them in increments, the blank vacancy of whatever the transformation had done to his consciousness pulled back until his gaze focused, and landed on me.

And what was in his eyes was something I had not seen in them once in the entire duration of this fight, through all the rooftop exchanges and the phantom blade barrages and the basin’s worth of combat.

I saw fear in his eyes.

And right beside that was the dawning realization that Entropy had made enemies with something they shouldn’t have.

His chest kept heaving, and his teeth came together slowly as he looked at me across the blood-soaked ground between us with the face of a man whose understanding of the night had just shattered into something he had never imagined.

"Just what..." he wheezed, his voice coming out barely above a rasp, "Just what are you?"

And as soon as the words finished leaving his mouth, the man burst into a wet, rattling, coughing fit that bent him forward, spraying blood onto his already blood-soaked chest.

I stood there watching it for exactly one second before the grin broke open into laughter, loud and directed straight up at the overcast sky above the basin.

I’ll be honest, it came out more unhinged than the massive blob of flesh and blood before me, but I could not have cared less.

I tucked the kukri under my arm, and hopped to the sword before reaching down to the ground and touching it with a finger, and sending it to the inventory.

And then I started hopping toward him, each hop pushing off the one good leg with Ice Reinforcement behind it, covering meters per push while the twin streams kept roaring and the knights kept producing and the line held itself while the mountain of flesh and bone and blood between the cultist and me grew closer with every hop.

I reached the base of it and started climbing, my remaining hand clenching in the wet, squishy blobs of the thing he had been, while the ice on my foot dug into it with each step.

The cultist watched me climb toward him without moving, his chest still heaving through those uneven breaths, and the fear in his eyes did not leave, but there was something else there underneath it, something that had not bent all the way even through everything the night had taken from him while he watched me come with the specific look of a man who had been broken but not yet defeated.

I reached the top, came level with his face, and placed the kukri against his neck.

"I am many things," I answered his question, leaning in until I was looking directly into those eyes, and they were looking directly into mine, and my voice came out in the same softness he had been using at the beginning of the night, every syllable returned with interest. "... And for you, I’m daddy dearest."

He held my gaze without looking away, teeth still gritted, the fear still there, and underneath it was the defiance I couldn’t help but admire because even with a blade at his neck and a collapsed monster beneath him and one arm gone and whatever the sword had done to him still working through his insides, he glared back into my eye.

And just as I was about to run the blade through his neck... I paused.

I had not seen his face once, not truly, not without the helmet and the visor and the red glow of the eyes behind it, and now that I was looking at it, at the actual face of the man beneath all things Eldritch, something in the back of my skull was pulling on a thread I did not have the other end of.

"Wait..." I said, my eye narrowing while I took a closer look at his face. "You look familiar."