Even with their ally dead on the ground behind him, Hirrus realized that they were right.

He was outmatched.

The man in the bone armor was effective at bodily blocking Hirrus from reaching his fellows - in particular due to the slowing effect offered by his icy, touch-based Arcana. Behind him was the woman in the red robe who had three different Arcana that were restoring the man’s health. Then there was the silvery barrier he could conjure himself.

Hirrus got the impression that even his extraordinary damage output was insufficient to outstrip their recovery.

She even had an ability that blasted her immediate area with pure white light that seemed to undo everything he could muster that would reach past the man in armor and at the others.

Meanwhile, the two other adventurers were clearly prepared to outstrip Hirrus' own recovery.

Every time he attacked with an Arcana he recovered over two thousand hit points per target hit. But they were pelting him from a safe distance with Arcana of their own, dealing three to six thousand damage at a blast.

He managed to avoid some of their attacks, using the man in bone armor as cover against them, but not all of them. One pelted him with blasts of rocks and gravel and his attacks were easy to see coming and dodge. But the other kept firing multicolored beams of light from her fingertips, making them very difficult to anticipate.

When they fell into the pattern of the fight and started talking - joking, even - Hirrus knew he was going to die.

His best Arcana was Peppered Breath, and its cooldown was too long. The initial damage of his fiery breath didn’t kill any of them, and the woman in red was able to stabilize them with a burst of white light before the damage over time effect could burn them down.

They had more than enough time to recover before it was available again.

All of his other Arcana that could reach past the man in bone armor did paltry damage, with the BUR focus of his gear rendering his ATT and RES statistics far too anemic to contribute meaningful damage. And, at the same time, he had to employ them as often as possible. The only reason he hadn’t been killed in the first two minutes of the fight was because of the Cosmic Barrette’s healing effect.

He had no further options, though.

What could he do?

Hirrus could bodily force his way down the stairs, accepting however much damage they wanted to inflict upon him. But then what? Run away? The slow effect of the ice-cold Arcana lasted longer than its cooldown.

He couldn’t get away even if they weren’t blocking his exit.

The same was true if he tried to fling himself from a window or retreat into one of the nearby rooms.

Hirrus couldn’t escape.

He couldn’t hope to change the situation in a satisfactory way to get enough tactical advantage.

It was over.

He’d been cornered by a force strong enough to give him an even fight, in a situation where he could neither overcome nor escape. As the group before him traded jokes about the poor survival history of the scantily-armored woman dead behind him, he realized he hadn’t even put any fear into them.

After he died here, they wouldn’t learn their lesson. At best, they might tighten their security, but that would be the end of it.

They wouldn’t think twice to do it again.

Of course, there was one option left.

Hirrus had one trick up his sleeve, even if he didn’t know what it would do.

4d657263790d0a Transform.

As his hit points dwindled, and death approached, he swallowed hard.

And then activated it.

The world changed around him. Hirrus’ nerve endings lit up with heat near to fire. He was suddenly aware of his nose in the middle of his field of vision as it grew forward and outward, his face suddenly becoming a snout.

“Holy shit!” the man in bone armor said, suddenly startled in a way he hadn’t been by anything else Hirrus had done. “What the fuck is it doing?”

Hirrus' whole body was a blanket of pain.

Pain, and power.

His sun-damaged skin was suddenly an angry red hide, leathery with scales. His hands were monstrous claws, though still dexterous enough to grip the icy greataxe. He felt the bones in his legs break and reform, allowing him to tower over his foes more than his stance at the top of the stairs afforded.

The physical transformation was painful. But intoxicating. He felt power flow through him, more than possible for a guard from a small town.

When the searing heat faded, he was left feeling strong. Revitalized. Indomitable. There was a horrified voice in the back of his mind that recognized him as becoming something like the beast that had killed him - and Julissa - but the raw power rolling though his limbs shut down that complaint instantly.

Activating the ability had given him a buff, and a substantial one at that. Hirrus had been just barely losing this fight. The surge of power rolling through him - regardless of the cost - was more than enough to turn the tide.

He didn’t know what would happen at the end of this, but he knew one thing: it wouldn’t be his death that ended this fight.

Not anymore.

“It’s just a phase change,” the woman in the red robe snapped. “Don’t forget, this isn’t instanced. If you die just because you’re gobsmacked by a fucking cutscene, you’re out until reset on Tuesday!”

“Shit,” the man in bone armor spat before stepping back up. “Alright, alright. We got this. Just have to-”

Hirrus brought his axe around and struck the man solidly in the chest. It did six thousand nine hundred and twenty-seven damage. It was a reasonably-sized step up from his last strike.

The difference, however, wasn’t in the damage.

When a blast of blue-gold light struck him from the woman in red, the wound was still open and bleeding.

“Fuck,” the man in bone armor said, his voice wavering. “Fuck fuck fuck. We need to fall back. He’s-”

“Burn him!” the woman in red robes said, raising a hand and conjuring a large block of ice. She flung it at Hirrus with a bored flick of her wrist. “Just fucking kill him! He can’t kill you if he’s dead first! Just don’t let him bite you.”

Hirrus didn’t even dodge the giant ice cube. It crashed across his chest, shattering to shavings. He didn’t need to.

It dealt a solid four thousand four hundred and thirty-two damage, but the transformation had given Hirrus an increase in his maximum health that outstripped that damage.

Sparkles showed around his eyes as he blasted his Leer attack down at them. It did over two thousand damage to each of the four of them, but the effect of his Cosmit Barrette healed him for twenty-seven hundred and eighty-three damage for each one affected.

A sudden surge of over eleven thousand health

Hirrus spared a moment’s attention to the buff floating in his awareness. The name wasn’t a mess of letters and numbers like the ability that had inflicted it. It was a single word, but one he felt cut through his soul to the core of his being.

Merciless

You have lost control of your character. All primary stats are increased by 20%. The Merciless Plague is transmitted through bite attacks from the Darkwater Monarch and from those afflicted by it.

But he hadn’t lost control. He felt the lure of power, sure, but it wasn’t something he would succumb to. He was stronger than its siren song.

“Fucking christ,” one of the Arcana-flinging adventurers in the back said. “Maybe Tanner is right. If we start getting out of here now, the slow will give us a clean getaway. We didn’t know he’d be a Merciless One. We can come back ready for that.”

“Shut up and push!” the woman in red snapped, shouting down the complaints. “We-”

“Merciless One?” Hirrus said, and the voice coming from his snout was foreign to him. It was deep and gravelly. Just the same, he laughed. “I like that. It’s an appropriate description for what’s about to happen to you all.”

The man in the bone armor scuttled back down the stairs another step. “Holy shit, it can talk?”

“I don’t care if he’s doing showtunes,” the woman in red yelled, grabbing the man and pushing him back towards Hirrus. “We almost have him. Just finish the fucking job!”

Hirrus knew, to a degree, that he was drunk with power. He couldn’t underestimate the adventurers arrayed against him. But he had been flailing around blindly in defeat for several minutes, and had just felt his hand close around the edge of victory again. He could win this.

But he had to do more than that. These adventurers were very close to something worse than killing him.

They were on the verge of not fearing him.

Just moments before they had been joking casually about his death as if it were inevitable. Joking about their dead friend.

And now the woman in red was still confident that they just had to buckle down and they could win this fight.

Even if he defeated them, she might go on to believe it was a fluke. If she thought that some failure of her fellows to commit to the fight had led to their defeat, then she might not hesitate to do what had been done to Yenon again, believing that she knew how to avoid the consequences.

Hirrus needed to show them, in no uncertain terms, that they had come here to die.

He needed them to know that there was no other outcome.

Many of Hirrus' abilities were on cooldown from earlier in the fight, but he still had one more that he knew would do a number on their morale. He knew he would suffer a considerable amount of damage while readying it, but with the boost from his transformation, he had enough to stomach what they had.

His body began to take on a reddish glow, only enhanced by the red scales that had replaced his skin.

Going Ape left him vulnerable, reducing his GLE considerably, but the boost to his BUR appeared to stack multiplicatively with the buff from Merciless. He had only had two thousand six hundred and thirty-eight BUR only moments ago.

With everything he had now, it had been amplified up to three thousand nine hundred and fifty-eight.

He stomped down the stairs, axe raised and ready. The man with the bone armor activated his silvery shield again, stepping up to meet him. Hirrus' axe came down and hacked into his shoulder, carving through a chunk of bone and into the flesh below for a devastating eight thousand four hundred and forty-eight damage.

“Fuck,” the man said as if it were his answer to everything. His wavy blade came in, but the enormous blow to his health had made him hesitate, and Hirrus was able to adjust his back foot and let the blow sweep through the air. “Still think we need to fight?”

A red beam and a blast of fire came in from the other two, hitting Hirrus nearly six thousand each.

While his damage output was absurd right now, he had made himself vulnerable.

“We need to end this fight right now,” the woman in red snapped as a deluge of blue energy poured from her hands into the man in bone armor, not quite closing the wound. “He can’t have much left! Just finish it!”

Hirrus couldn’t agree more.

He swept his axe around and slammed it into the man in the bone armor again. Eight thousand five hundred and one damage ripped through the man’s armor, leaving a wound that looked just one step shy of fatal. Blood splattered across the stairs, and the man gritted his teeth to hold in a shout of pain.

“Go ahead,” Hirrus snarled. “Beg for mercy. See if that helps.”

The icy blue greataxe came down again before the man could make any response. Eighty-five hundred and four damage cleaved the man in twain, putting an end to his part of the fight.

“Well, good fight,” one of the adventurers in the back said. As the body of the man in bone armor skidded down the stairs, he realized that he was the next in line, most immediately close to Hirrus on the stairs. “Sorry, Cloti, but, uh, it’s over. He has the high ground.”

The adventurer turned tail and fled.

“Coward!” the red-robed woman barked, grappling with him as he tried to squeeze past her in the stairwell. “Stand and fight! You’re-”

Hirrus' Peppered Breath Arcana came off cooldown just then, which put a solid end to further dispute.

The stairwell became an inferno. His increased BUR meant that the attack did extraordinary damage.

One of the trio was killed outright by the blast, taking nineteen thousand two hundred and one damage. The one who was trying to flee took fifteen thousand three hundred and sixty-six, but was finished off by the burn effect before the smoke from the flames even cleared.

The red-robed woman - Cloti - took only fourteen thousand four hundred and fifteen. A pulse of white light filled the space around her, stabilizing her in time to keep her upright through the burn effect.

“That’s better,” Hirrus growled, as he felt endless power surge within him. Against a group, he was near unstoppable. “This is what I wanted. What I needed.”

As the smoke cleared, Hirrus saw that the woman in the red robe was scrambling to wrap her seared skin in bandages. Despite her compromised position and oncoming death, she glared up at him with hate.

But under that hate was fear, and the sight of it was unfathomably satisfying.

“This is what I suffered. A monster beyond my ability destroyed my home. In its defense, there was only one possible outcome. My death.” Hirrus snarled, and the sound reverberated in his chest. “This is what you did to me. What I needed was to visit this back upon you.”

He stepped down the stairs slowly, scraping the blade of his axe down the wall.

Hirrus wondered if she would break and run. He also wondered if he would let her go if she did, to tell the others to fear him.

But she stood her ground, wordlessly, teeth gritted in defiance as she watched her death come.

“The people of Yenon had no choice but to stand and face death. To suffer and die as you are about to.” He reached out with his axe, settling the blade gently against her throat. “I can respect that you’ve been given the choice and have chosen to stand and suffer the same as you inflicted upon them.”

Cloti stood tall and proud beneath him on the stairs.

And then, a moment later, she didn’t. Her head tumbled down the stairs, her body far behind.