Zeke suppressed an urge to vomit as he watched the vaguely humanoid mass of sludge undulate in his direction. To call it grotesque would’ve been underselling just how disgusting the thing was. Twelve feet of writhing muck stepped forward, sending an impressive wave of sewage through the pool. The tainted liquid slopped over the edge and onto the stone floor, spreading its vileness in a wide circle.

At least it doesn’t move very quickly, Zeke thought, noticing the thing’s lumbering movements. However, any monster that could send him flying such a huge distance was impressively strong. Only a couple of other creatures had managed it, and they’d both been elites. A shiver ran up Zeke’s spine as he inspected this latest threat.

Fecal Fiend – Level 25 (E)

“Oh, come on. A literal shit monster?” he muttered, climbing to his feet. Rocks and other debris cascaded off of him as he readied himself to fight the fiend. As he stared it down, noticing the sticks, bones, and other random sewer detritus protruding from its malleable body, Zeke couldn’t help but feel a slight shiver of fear. The thing was strong – maybe stronger than anything he’d faced so far, including the drachnid elites. But he was probably faster, right?

Its trunk-sized leg splattered its muck onto the stone as it rose from the pool, and Zeke forced himself not to think about the unhygienic consequences of what he was about to do. Taking a deep, steadying breath, he pushed aside his nausea and darted forward. With each step, the smell grew worse until, by the time he was within striking distance, it felt like a solid thing. He pushed through, his mace already slicing through the air.

True to his suspicions, the fiend was slow, its plodding movements telegraphed and easy to avoid. Even as Zeke swung, he ducked under a clumsy reach of the monster’s massive, three-fingered hand. A few drops of its form hit Zeke’s back, but he ignored it. He had a clear path to his target, and he wasn’t going to waste it.

With a mighty roar, he mustered every ounce of his considerable strength. Propelled by preternatural power, his mace whistled in its passage, striking his intended target less than a second later. With a squelch, the weapon disappeared into the mass surrounding the creature’s knee, and to Zeke’s immeasurable surprise, it slowed to a stop. Panicking, he tugged on the mace, but it was stuck fast.

Distracted by the sudden turn, Zeke didn’t even see the monster’s fist before it smashed into him from above, driving him into the ground. The stones beneath him cracked under the stress, but his massive endurance kept his bones from breaking. Barely.

And just because he was unbroken by the blow didn’t mean it didn’t hurt as badly as anything he’d ever endured. It wasn’t just the sheer force behind the monster’s fist; there was something else. Something indefinable. Like the massive strength the monster brought to bear was merely a shadow of its true power. Thankfully, the fiend seemed incapable of accessing the totality of that conceptual strength, else Zeke would’ve been crushed down to his very molecules.

He didn’t have the luxury of wondering why that would be the case. Instead, as soon as the fiend retracted its hand, he scrambled away from it. Even without the power he sensed lurking beneath the monster’s surface, he couldn’t take many more of those hits. Or any more, he suspected, feeling the creak of his bones.

The fiend’s next strike narrowly missed him as he clawed his way to relative safety. Behind him, he heard a thunderous plop as it pulled itself completely from the pool. Thankfully, the chamber was enormous, so Zeke managed to put plenty of distance between himself and the monster so he could think of how to attack it.

When he finally reached the wall, he turned to see the fiend plodding toward him, one torturously slow step at a time. What would something like that do if it reached the surface? He wanted to think that the elites within the city would band together and deal with the problem, but from what he’d seen, those sorts of powerful people would do no such thing. At least not right away, if at all. And while they hesitated, the fiend would murder anyone in its path. It moved at a glacial pace, but it was plenty fast enough to decimate the lower tiers. The damage would be catastrophic, both in terms of property and lives.

But how was he supposed to stop something like the fecal fiend? He’d put everything he had into that first strike, and it had done nothing. Less than nothing, he thought, his eyes finding the haft of his mace jutting from the fiend’s leg.

It had to have a weakness, though, didn’t it? Nothing was invulnerable.

That was probably true. Maybe. Though Zeke had been fighting his way through this new world for going on three years, he didn’t have the experience necessary to say for sure. For all he knew, the fiend really was entirely invulnerable. And even if it wasn’t, its weakness might be completely out of his reach. What if it was weak against magic? That wouldn’t help him, considering his only attack skill was [Leech Strike], which, while incredibly powerful, didn’t really do much damage. It gave him healing and staying power, but it wouldn’t make him hit much harder – and that was assuming that hitting harder was what he needed.

Indecision warred with impatience.

Zeke wasn’t really the planning sort of guy. It wasn’t that he was against it, necessarily. It was just that when your skills are limited to survivability and hitting things really hard, there’s not much to work with. Even if he was some tactical genius – which he definitely wasn’t – he didn’t have the necessary variety of tools at his disposal.

What was he supposed to do when he came up short, though? He refused to run. And he was increasingly certain that his strength would do him little good against the fiend.

His indecision cut off his options when the fiend closed on him much more quickly than he could’ve expected. Before Zeke had even considered all of his options, a fist comprised of detritus and sludge was already coming his way. He tried to dodge, but the thing’s hand was massive – at least half the size of his body – and despite his efforts, the fiend clipped him. The force behind that punch sent him spinning away, and when he finally got his bearings, he felt something squishy close around his waist.

Before he could even figure out what was happening, he was lifted into the air as if he was a mere toy. The fiend made a gurgling noise that Zeke interpreted as a laugh.

Zeke saw red. It was mocking him, now?

Without further hesitation, he activated [Heart of the Berserker], and he gasped as the power flowed into him. Strength might not do him much good. Rationally, he knew it probably wouldn’t. But he didn’t have much in the way of options, did he? He wasn’t a wizard. He couldn’t sling lightning bolts or fireballs. But when he activated his skill, he did have an incredible amount of physical power. It wasn’t reflected in his statistics, but he estimated it was something along the lines of a twenty-five percent boost, which meant that he had an effective strength in the range of three-hundred.

He put it to the test, clawing his way into the sludge-like substance that made up the monster’s body. His fingers sank into the muck, and he yanked heaping handfuls away, tossing them aside with abandon. At first, it didn’t make a difference, but the fiend’s body was finite. So, eventually, he freed himself from the monster’s clutches.

But he wasn’t done. An inkling of a plan swirled in his mind.

Somewhere behind the curtain that was [Heart of the Berserker], Zeke knew it was a bad idea. However, reason was hampered by the skill’s mental effects, so it didn’t hold nearly the sway that it normally would have. Instead, Zeke could only see one way forward: attack. So, he launched himself at the monster. Unarmed as he was, this meant that he soon found himself clinging to the fiend’s chest and digging into the sludge.

Underneath the raging inferno of his skill, Zeke was disgusted. But he could also feel something buried within the monster’s chest. Something powerful. Something that might just offer him a path to victory.

Of course, the fiend didn’t idly endure his attack. It clutched at him. It punched. It tried to claw him away. But the substance of its body worked against it. The same effect that had latched onto his mace now clung to his legs, holding him fast as he engaged in the worst sort of excavation.

Zeke lost track of time. Thankfully, his digging counted as an attack, so each handful of horribleness that he managed to extract gave him a surge of vitality from [Leech Strike]. That kept him going, one terrible handful at a time.

Finally, when Zeke found himself buried nearly waist deep in the fiend’s thick torso, he found his quarry. A red, glowing crystal about the size of his fist. Inside of it, he could see globs of viscous, crimson liquid lazily drifting about, reminding him of a lava lamp.

He wrapped his fingers around it and yanked. To Zeke’s surprise, it resisted, held in place by some inexplicable force that reminded him of that well of strength the monster couldn’t quite access. But Zeke currently had an effective strength in the three-hundreds, and he wasn’t going to let some little crystal best him. Not after digging through the chest of a monster made of human waste. He’d come too far, endured too much.

So, Zeke grasped it with both hands, lacing his fingers together and repositioning his feet. As he pulled, using every inch of his body, his feet sank a few inches into the monster’s torso. But even then, the crystal didn’t budge.

Not until the fiend wrapped its own hand around Zeke, and in an attempt to dislodge him, unwittingly added its own power to the mix. It let out a gurgling scream. Zeke’s voice joined in, and together, they yanked the crystal free.

As soon as it popped free, Zeke went flying. Again. But this time, he was accompanied by an explosion of waste, sewage, and a host of other things he didn’t even want to contemplate. He collided with the wall, and the monster’s remains splattered into him a moment later.

Some of it even got into his mouth.

But he was rewarded with a familiar flood of experience, marking the fiend’s death. He couldn’t enjoy it, though, because only a second later, a wave of exhaustion crashed into him as [Heart of the Berserker] deactivated and he was forced to pay the price. Thankfully, he surrendered to unconsciousness a moment after that.

Zeke didn’t know how long he slept, but by the time he reopened his eyes, the sludge that comprised the remains of the monster had dried into a solid, brittle form. After a moment, he remembered his ring, and with a mental command, the vast majority of the filth disappeared into wisps that soon dissolved into nothingness. It didn’t do much for what was on his skin, but it completely cleaned everything else.

Sighing, he looked around the chamber. The fiend was gone, its remains splattered everywhere. Resisting the urge to immediately investigate the notifications that had resulted from his kill, Zeke went to the middle of the chamber and summoned his cottage. It had grown a bit – maybe by a few feet in every dimension – but the chamber was easily large enough to accommodate it. So, after stripping down, he went inside and hopped under the shower.

The water was frigid, and he idly wondered where the runoff went. After all, the cellar that housed his spatial storage was directly beneath him. But after a moment’s thought, he decided that the easiest answer was simply “magic.” Once he’d gotten himself suitably clean, he donned his clothes and what was left of his leather armor before settling down to investigate his notifications.

When he did, he couldn’t help but grin at his gains. Not only had the fiend pushed him over the edge and into level fifteen, but he’d also been awarded another achievement. More than that, though, he had a number of options from which he could choose a new skill. Before that, though, he knew he needed to collect his loot. So, with a groan, he left the cottage, desummoning it with a thought, and went about looting the lizardkin priests and the fecal fiend.

Once that was done, he could focus on what he really wanted to do – consolidating his new strength.