They'd stayed the night with Toben's family before setting out for the Dead Strand, sharing good food, great liquor, and the most comfortable beds they'd slept in since they arrived in Ayrgard. Well, three of them slept. Layla spent most of the evening adding more than a few notches to her bedpost before retiring for a few hours before dawn. The young men of Mistelein would talk fondly for decades after that night of the First Sister visiting their village in the form of an inhumanly beautiful and insatiable woman with skin the color of pale moonlight. Toben and his wife would snort and roll their eyes when they heard such talk, since apparently the First Sister, largest and brightest of Ayrgard’s moons, snored and slept with half her body splayed off the bed.

They’d conferred over breakfast, with Rory and Jack arguing to hit the shrine across the Northern Front before the dungeon, and Erin and Layla stridently insisting they get “the phat lootz” before heading north. The girls finally won out, though Rory insisted on seeing Mistelein’s market before they set out.

Those peaceful, happy moments, however, were a distant dream. Their current dreams were all blood and giant crab guts.

-----

Erin flew across the Heart chamber, slammed away from the boss like a rag doll thrown by a child, where she rocketed into the coral wall, scattering calcium chunks in an explosion of dust and rock. At the same time, a thunderous explosion of sound and rapidly-expanding air blasted Jack away from the titanic creature’s side, knocking him flat.

The boss scuttled all the way out of the tunnel it had emerged from to blast Erin away, revealing segment after segment of brilliant rainbow-hued carapace. The basketball-sized technicolor eyes swiveled around, separately settling on Erin where she lay, trying to remember how to be upright, and Jack, only a few yards away. Below the eyes, a pair of long whiskers and a set of odd flap-like flippers twitched and tasted the air. Just under the antennae were the real problem, a pair of folded, stubby, clubbed arms built like a praying mantis. The murder shrimp had snapped one forward faster than a gunshot and smashed their tank across the room.

“It’s a fucking giant mantis shrimp. We. Are. Fucked,” Rory shouted from behind a rocky outcropping.

“I FUCKING TOLD YOU WE SHOULD’VE DONE THE SHRINE FIRST, LAYLA!” Jack yelled as a writhing shadow tentacle shot out and gripped a rocky coral, jerking him to the side out of the path of the shrimp’s second attack.

-----

They’d been fighting non-stop for half a day before they’d reached the Heart, losing track as the kill notifications and experience continued to roll in.

Jack was a bloody whirlwind of slicing darkness and flickering blade, his Devouring Shadows healing him in increments each time the shadows drew blood. The upgrade had completely changed how he fought, allowing him to constantly be in the thick of combat, only retreating to the edges to recover when he was seriously injured. A massive zombified crab scuttled clumsily in his wake, soaking up even more damage, occasionally requiring Jack pause for a moment and cast Galvanize Undead to mend its injuries.

When he fell back, Erin would rush forward, taking advantage of the nearly unlimited Stamina that Laborer provided to unleash one martial art after another, soaking up attacks from the heavy giant crabs with Tower and barrelling through the smaller creatures with Charge. In this place, though, Crushing Slam proved to be the star of her arsenal, ignoring a portion of the crustaceans’ armor and allowing her to crack through their thick shells like cheap drywall. The effectiveness of her heavy armor continued to grow as her Skills taught her to minimize her vulnerable areas and stacked on protections, layer after layer. She was struck far more often than Jack, but took little or no damage from all but the largest of the enemies in the Strand.

As their vanguard danced in and out of the fight, Rory was a shadow, flitting from cover to cover, emerging to slide beneath the giant crabs and drive his quillion deftly up between the seams of the carapace and into the heart, abusing Backstab, Roll the Dice, and his new Exsanguinating Critical to score devastating critical hits and inflict the Catastrophic Hemorrhage wound. The giant crab would continue fighting as though nothing had happened for a bit, gradually losing steam, then slowly collapse, dead from prodigious internal bleeding.

Layla found that the wet, chitinous shells of the crabs burned about as well as soaked firewood, but the nearly brainless crustaceans were almost helpless against her Puppetry spells. She maxed the Skill in the first hour and suddenly started forcing her targets into giant crab deathmatches, casting Flesh Betrays to force one to suddenly turn and attack an ally. The crabs were just witless enough that an attack from an ally provoked an immediate reprisal, taking two of the enemies off the battlefield until they finished mutilating each other, at which point one of the others would finish off her dirty work.

The “dungeon” was more of an open-air coral forest, and they weaved between the walls of towering rock-like proto-animals while the polyps and fronds waved as though underwater. The effect was surreal, like a massive reef had been plucked from the ocean and dropped on the shore. The Dead Strand extended miles into the water of the bay, but without means to fight and breathe underwater, the four opted to stick to the beach. As they grew closer to the inner mantle, the air continuously grew thicker and wetter, soaked with Tide-aspected mana, and the size and ferocity of the creatures emerging from the waterline to challenge their approach likewise continued to grow.

It was a grueling meat-grinder, but one they were suited to overcome. Their growth was explosive, levels and Skill upgrades accumulating as the day wore on. By the time they reached the Heart chamber, Erin and Rory were pushing twenty in Dreadnought and Vandal, and Jack and Layla had passed it in Nightbringer and Succubus. They broke for a snack at the edge of the Grotto, as much to rest as to consolidate their amassed earnings.

“What’d you pick up at twenty, El?” Erin chewed a mouthful of smoked fish and mopped up the tart jelly they’d been gifted with a fluffy biscuit.

“It’s called Bloody Kisses,” she happily mumbled around her biscuit.

“That sounds metal. What’s it do?” Jack asked.

“Gives me like a tank that I can fill up with Health I drain using Mortal Appetites, then transfer it to others,” she swallowed her bite and gave him a strange grin.

“You mean you figured out how to get some healing?” Rory looked up from his delicately constructed fish sandwich.

“Yeah,” she still wore the wry grin.

“I know that look. What’s the catch?” Erin narrowed her eyes.

Layla burst out laughing.

“I can only transfer it with a kiss or sex,” she continued to laugh.

“Of course,” Erin rolled her eyes.

Rory took a bite of his sandwich, chewed thoughtfully, then swallowed.

“Fuck it. I’ll kiss you in that case,” he stuck out his tongue at her.

“Oh yeah?” Layla’s eyes bled gold.

“Not like you’re gonna rustle my jimmies, love. I like dick,” he raspberried her again.

Layla’s skin shimmered and her outline blurred, flowing and rippling like light behind a frosted pane of glass. When it ended, she leaned back and took another bite of her biscuit, trailing large, terribly masculine hands across a set of six-pack abs, up to a pair of obscenely cut pectoral muscles, and across a neatly trimmed, bearded chin, ending to thumb a greek nose set between two deep brown eyes under a fashionably trimmed close-cropped haircut.

Erin and Rory stared, gobsmacked, as ‘Layla’ sat up and stretched, prompting a ripple of toned muscle to flex across her, frankly, perfect body. The spell was shattered by Jack’s snicker, which devolved into peals of side-splitting laughter. Layla finally broke and joined him in laughing at the two gaping Chosen, who finally snapped out of it.

It still took them a minute to close their mouths.

“What the fuck just happened,” Rory blinked twice and scratched his head.

“What? You thought my Mirage was limited to girls?” Layla laughed.

“I… gh… yes. Yes, I did,” he finally managed to snatch some composure back.

Erin wiped her mouth, “Yeah, I get it now, Jack. If she looked like that all the time, I might give her a shot.”

“I mean, I don’t actually have the equipment or anything. But, ya know…” Layla stuck her tongue out and wiggled it back and forth.

Erin scowled at her, then froze thoughtfully for a moment, then shivered, then scowled again.

“Things that make ya go brrrpphtthhthh…” she shook all over.

“Alright, enough fucking around. We’ve got a giant shrimp to devein,” Rory chuckled.

“So, what are we thinking? We just gonna tank and spank it?” Layla asked.

“I mean, shrimp aren’t known for being terribly formidable. It may have some kind of water magic, or maybe it’ll be some kind of skill challenge, like a race to catch it,” Rory replied.

“I’m betting on water magic,” Erin shook her smoked fish at him.

“I feel like I’m forgetting something,” Rory scratched his meager beard.

“Like what?” Jack replied.

“I dunno… just… something about shrimp,” he pondered. “I’m sure it’s not important.”

He was wrong.