“No?”

  Sip glanced at the rest of us.

  “Not going to run?”

  He let out a sigh.

  “I figured as much.”

  The black mass of rolling ooze drifted higher. What dribbled down turned almost like rubber, bouncing back in arcs around the central mass.

  Catania tore her helmet from her head, chugging a potion. She tossed the bottle. “I’m running low on Guard. Anybody got potions they could spare?”

  Toya shook his head. “I already used mine. And before you ask, I’m out of Counter too.”

  “Same,” Ardenidi hissed. “Sip, got any more?”

  “Excuse me!?” He puffed up in indignation. “What do you think I am, a vending machine? I already stole all the potions in the city! If I had any more, I’d have given them to you!”

  “Just asking,” she grumbled. “It would’ve made things easier. Or…you know…possible.”

  I tossed Catania my last potions of guard and counter. “What do we have left?”

  Catania checked her inventory. “Including what you gave me, I’ve got seven potions of guard and three potions of counter.”

  Sip hesitated. “Only three?”

  “Look, I was doing the best I could, alright,” Catania sighed. “I kept taking fall damage or whiffs that wasted the effect.”

  “I have only one mana potion left,” I stated.

  Soise sat on the ground, her gaze flickering from the orb to the expanding enemy pieces crowding her board. “Toya and Ardenidi would’ve likely died if the two monsters hadn’t formed that gate. That was a Devourer Core, wasn’t it?”

  I nodded.

  ‘We’ve used the full power of a fairy, at least a billion qualm in potions, not to mention all the wizardry Grind has up his sleeves, and we still haven’t killed this thing.” Her hands shook. “We can’t survive another round of this.”

  Ardenidi and Toya looked at the ground.

  Sip sat down, clasping his hands. “This is pretty bad, isn’t it?”

  After a moment of silence, Toya spoke.

  “I think we should seriously consider giving up.”

  “After all this?!” Catania shouted, ramming a fist into a pillar of ash. “We’ve already made it this far, haven’t we?”

  Toya watched me. “Grind, when you kill the nightmares and they split, does their total health decrease?”

  I shook my head. “The little ones would have power equal or higher to the main body when you added their stats all up. Their drop in power is relative to the stats you absorb each time they split.”

  “Only one of the three monsters actually died,” Toya muttered. “The Core absorbed the stats from them to make the dungeon, which it’s currently feeding back into the nightmares. Look, I’m not saying we just give up. But we can’t stay here.”

  “And leave behind the refugees?” Ardenidi hissed. “Are you insane?”

  “There’s no other option,” Toya snapped back, whipping his robes. “Think it through, would you? We obviously can’t stop that monster, which means we can’t protect the refugees from it either! Our one and only remaining option is to bait the monster somewhere else while the refugees flee.”

  My eyes shot up. “Sharon’s recharging his mana. If I get him one of these potions, he should be strong enough to kill the monster again.”

  “NO!” Toya grit his teeth. “We can’t break the monster into pieces until the refugees are safe. The more enemies chasing them, the more people will die.”

  Everyone looked to Soise.

  She had her head toward the ground. “I think…I think Toya’s right about this one. We do have limits, don’t we? If we can’t fight it, we can’t fight it.”

  “I can’t guarantee the bunker won’t get attacked,” Toya sighed. “But this gives them a chance.”

  Ardenidi glanced at me.

  “Orders are orders,” I said.

  She scowled. “It feels cowardly.”

  “It’s the only way to keep everyone alive.”

  “I know that.”

  The black orb squirmed, forming white concrete bones.

  “Run!” Soise commanded, watching the pieces on her board smashing into one another, unable to process the changing magnitudes of power. “Due east! We can hide in the caves beneath the central mountains.”

  Catania grabbed everyone else and jumped, leaving me to fly with small green orbs, skimming over the desert sand.

  Something was wrong.

  I started counting the people Catania was holding. “Where’s—”

  Catania faltered, nearly dropping everyone else.

  Soise shouted, clutching Catania’s arm. “What’s wrong?”

  “SIP!” Catania shouted in outrage, crunching against the hard rock. She took the empty robe and threw it on the ground. “That idiot squirmed out of my hands!”

  “Stay here!” I shouted, spinning around, positioning orbs beneath my heels. “I’ll find him!”

  Piles of sand shot into the air as I cleaved through dune after dune, trailing dangerously low to the rough earth. “SIP! Where are you!”

  It didn’t take long to spot the multicolored blob sitting in the middle of the ruined city, barely an inch from where we’d left.

  He looked slightly thinner now that his outermost robe was gone.

  Sip grinned. “That didn’t take long—”

  Soise’s voice stung in my ear. “Quick, Grind!”

  If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

  I grabbed him by the arm, jumping back.

  Sip remained right where he was, effortlessly detaching the sleeve. My weight changed so suddenly that I fell, bashing against rubble.

  “Sip?” I grunted. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Dying.”

  I stared at him.

  He smiled at me.

  “That’s not funny.”

  “Wasn’t meant to be.”

  He laughed under his breath. “I told you I was dying,” Sip stated. “Be reasonable. Baiting the monster is a suicide mission and you know it. That monster’s big and stupid, which means you have to be close to get it to chase you, which also means you’re too close to avoid its attacks. And who knows how much stronger the next form of this monster might be.”

  “We’re not leaving you behind.”

  “Which is precisely why I left anyway.” Sip stopped smiling. “I assume you assume I’m just throwing away my life, right?”

  Soise’s voice buzzed through both of our earpieces. “What are you two doing? Sip, Grind! The monster’s getting agitated.”

  Sure enough, the orb has grown bone spikes and thorny black bristles into its skin, steadily descending with such a roar of magical pressure as to push the clouds of smoke and metallic vapor from the sky.

  I glanced at Sip.

  “You can’t make me go, Grind,” Sip smiled. “I want to do something with my life before it gets snuffed out and that’s that.”

  “You’ll live longer,” I snapped back.

  Slowly, he rose to his feet, peeling the robes from his skin.

  Sip was thin. Much thinner than I thought he’d be.

  His white t-shirt was stained and ragged. His pants were in noticeably worse condition, shredded at the knee with one leg significantly longer than the other.

  “There was a monster on a mission, and I got hit.”

  He had a cut from below his shoulder, across his chest, down the side of one leg, stopping at the base of his foot.

  “For the record, the wound’s cursed, not poisoned."

  Black spots covered his skin like welts. Where the infection spread, his skin was entirely white. Sip shivered violently. “I-I was on a mission wi-th an-n-nonther team,” he quickly pulled the robes back on, warming with a sigh of relief. “There was some kind of three-star core.”

  “And Xoiae didn’t do anything?” I asked.

  “Couldn’t.”

  I stared.

  Sip shrugged. “I guess the monster was just really strong. Anyway, I’ve only got a couple weeks before my body starts rotting, and honestly speaking, I’d rather die before that, you know? I might as well go out doing something useful. There’s a lot of ways to make your mark on the world, but those usually require a stupid amount of money.”

  He threw Qualm tokens from his inventory all over the ground, laughing like a madman. “And great news! After selling all those stormbeak supplies…let's just say that when this is all over, you guys can live comfortably for a long, long time. Shame I didn’t get to invest further, but then again, I won’t be needing a dime of it! Money can’t buy a heroic sacrifice!”

  Soise’s voice was a whisper. “Sip?”

  “Sorry Captain,” Sip started. “I’ll miss you.”

  “Sip, I learned some new abilities. There’s a good chance I can heal this! Get back to the group before you get yourself—”

  He took the earpiece out, flicking it away. “Grind, you get what I mean, don’t you?”

  “Sorry,” I muttered. “Soise, you’re going to have to leave without us.”

  “Grind? Us?”

  I slipped the earpiece into my inventory. “Nobody should die alone.”

  Sip started to object.

  “I’m immortal, by the way, so this is fine.”

  He faltered. “Wait. You’re…joking, right?”

  “It’s a timeloop thing.”

  “Huh.” Sip grunted. “You know…that actually explains…quite a lot.”

  The orb had grown no less than a hundred times in size, larger than a city block, expanding faster every minute than the minute before, flattening loose rubble under the mounting magical pressure. It was like moving underwater.

  A few weeks ago, this kind of power might’ve killed me on the spot.

  I’d come far.

  And in a short time, monsters like this one would be easy.

  The orb turned lopsided, forming legs and arms with three heads at the top, each twitching and shaking as their mana networks fired. The second head shook violently, breaking off in the plume of dust.

  Interesting.

  It planted one foot down, sinking as the rock compressed, kicking up dirt and dust.

  “HEY!” Sip shouted, waving his arms. “OVER HERE!”

  “What are you doing?” I chuckled.

  “Getting its attention,” he snapped. “HEY! HEY!”

  “Sorry, but you’ll need more than that.” I raised a hand, summoning every drop of mana in my system.

  A tiny orb appeared.

  It flickered into the sky, poking the monster on the forehead.

  {Nightmare Corpse: (-1506m) -506m Hp}

  Everything was white. Thankfully, the blast cone was pointed out into space.

  Me and Sip plugged our ears.

  The monster splattered with a deafening pop, louder than anything we’d ever heard.

  Sip and I were shaking.

  Sip laughed, opening his mouth, though no words came out.

  I snapped my fingers.

  Nothing.

  {Notice}

  [You have sustained [Major] [Inner ear] damage]

  [Hearing has been disabled until [3:00:00]]

  “Hey, they have a countdown. That’s pretty convenient,” I said, unable to register my own voice. I had to do the math in my head, just to double check the number was real. “Wow. Radiant Echo is crazy.”

  Sip blinked, opening his mouth, as if to say, “huh?”

  He mimicked the explosion with his hands, followed by several exaggerated expressions of surprise.

  We stared at each other.

  The two of us started laughing.

  A shockwave kicked up the ground.

  Black tendrils extended from the stump where the monster had been, into its concrete spine, which had utterly shattered. Slowly, the pieces of the monster pulled themselves back together.

  It wasn’t splitting up.

  The monster wasn’t going to split up.

  {{Unknown affliction : Inherent affect} Congregate : Nightmare Corpse(+1b) Hp}

  Sip shrugged, saying something.

  He spread his arms, beckoning the monster over to us, away from the bunker, focused solely on him.

  The Nightmare sniffed haughtily.

  It kept walking forward.

  Straight toward the bunker. But the nightmare couldn’t possibly know where the bunker was. Not this fast. It couldn't.

  The final layers of viscous skin reformed on the monster’s faces, stretching taut as they licked their lips.

  It knew.

  I started running.

  How much of my memory had the Core taken? How recent?

  Why was I even asking? It was obvious. She’d seen everything. She knew where everyone was.

  And she was going to kill them all.

  // {Notice} //

  Hi! Hope you enjoyed my fantasy story. But as much fun as a fantasy is, there’s things in the real world beyond what writing can fix. That’s where you come in.

  Want to fight human trafficking? Whether you’ve got money or time there are two organizations I wholly recommend.

  Race Day — Thirty

  Donate - Venture

  https://www.freeinternational.org