Ktalos was before them, surrounded on two sides by small cliffs of sharp rock. A giant, fleshy monster with four weapon-wielding limbs and metallic treasures stuck to its grotesque body.

A fight, imminent.

The small party of Amelia, Mino, Phelia, Mike, and Otto camped out above, watching the legendary beast slither around slowly and beat back the nuisance melanoids that continued to mindlessly attack it.

Mike, the monster hunter, stared at Ktalos in a dazed awe, transfixed on it as if it itself were the treasure they had been looking for all this time.

“Good thing I found your group,” they said, gaze stuck on Ktalos. “My firepower would barely even faze the thing.”

“And we’re your power level solution,” Amelia remarked.

“A distraction to pin it down while I blast its brains in.”

“Hey, you said I’d get the final blow!” Phelia whined. “For my quest.”

“It’s just a figure of speech, little kobold. You’ll get your chance.”

Amelia looked at the legendary beast and her body ached. She had absorbed a few spare soul gems since her big showcase in collecting the treasure chest earlier, but she was still a little low on energy, and her muscles knew they were tired. She was very unsure if she could be the one to actually finish this thing off if the need came. So Mike, or perhaps Phelia, would definitely need to fulfill their goals without faltering.

She then looked at Mino, who watched Phelia with positively heartwarming concern. “You’re going to do great,” she told her. “But please be careful. If anything happened to you, I’d never be able to forgive myself.”

“If something does happen,” Phelia responded, looking down at the monster instead of at her friend, “I’ll have been doing my duty as a kobold. Fulfilling my quests. That’s nothing to feel bad about, because it’s exactly what the Gods brought me to this world for.”

“That doesn’t sound so reassuring...”

Phelia turned her head and smiled, eyes closed. “I’m not going to die! I’m going to win. Plus, you guys are all cool, but I’ll never die without Hummer by my side. That would be really boring.”

Mino’s cheeks flushed. “Oh, Phelia.”

Phelia giggled, just as she took her oversized axe from her back and gripped it firmly, ready for battle.

“We have a great team right here,” Amelia said. “Just have to follow the plan.”

Mike nodded, and stepped into the conversation to take their assumed leadership position. “I’m adjusting the plan.”

“Eh? Why?” Phelia asked.

“Ktalos is starting to wake up a little more. I can tell. These mels attacking it are starting to jolt it out of dreamland. Means close-up attacks are going to be harder than ever, with those huge limbs it has.”

“I’m still up on the cliffs?” Mino asked.

“Yeah. But now, Phelia will be too.”

Phelia looked down at her axe. “Um.”

Mike reached to their back and grabbed their crossbow. They held it out for her. “It’d be my honor.”

“Are you sure? Can I really hit the monster with this? I’ve never used a crossbow before.”

“Just load, point, and fire. Trust me; you’ll hit the monster.”

Amelia did not trust them about this at all. She knew exactly how much this fight meant to Phelia, and to see the look on her face if this “mighty beast” were slain but her magical quest was left unfulfilled would crush Amelia’s heart for good. Even seeing Ed crying herself to sleep would not elicit the pain she knew would come from seeing Phelia like that.

Mike seemed to have ulterior motives, likely motivated by grabbing the best treasure the fastest, but Amelia would make sure Phelia got her moment to shine. At any cost.

Phelia put the axe back on her back and gripped the crossbow with uncertainty quivering on her mouth. “I’ll do my best.”

“Good.” Then Mike turned to Amelia. “You and I will still go to ground level, though. You good with fighting the mels off me?”

“Yeah. I’m good.”

“If Ktalos doesn’t destroy them all first, that is. I give it fifty-fifty that they’ll just ignore us and keep attacking it.”

Mino looked across to the other side of the cliffs, where some relatively loose rocks sat conspicuously still, but shook every time the beast bumped into the wall. “All we have to do is lure it here, and that’s that. I’ll knock those rocks down with kinetic magic and crush it.”

“Yep. The true elven tactics, there.”

Mino shot a look their way, at first a glare, but one that morphed into a prideful smile.

“So, in summary, let’s go over this thing,” Mike said. “Amelia and I will go down to ground level and attract Ktalos’s attention. I’ll use my annoying bullets to tick it off and lure it over to the rocks, and Amelia and Phelia will guard me. Mino will topple the cliffs, we’ll bury the thing, and while it’s flailing around in pain, we finish it off together. Sound like a plan?”

“Yep.”

“I think so.”

“Sure thing!”

Otto barked, even though it obviously was not listening to their conversation.

“Then let’s make it happen.” Mike began rummaging through their bag to make sure they had everything they needed. Not just flintlocks, but short-range throwing knives if things got dicey, and a full-on detonable grenade that they strapped to their belt.

Phelia’s uncertainty vanished and she began to bounce around excitedly. “I can’t wait to kill this legendary beast! I’m so excited! We’re gonna be heroes!”

“As long as we don’t attract the press,” Amelia said.

Mino fixed her happy gaze at her two friends. “I can’t say I was expecting our little dungeon dive to turn out this way, but I’m really happy about it.”

“It’s fun, today,” Amelia said. “And looks like Phelia might have her chance to shine.”

“I hope so!”

“Sure wish sun elves had that cool quest system,” Mino said, starting something she did not seem to realize she was saying out loud. “Kobolds get to know exactly how to make themselves better and stronger. Maybe elves live longer, but our only important magic is the fact we lose all our memories. One fire in my old house, and now I don’t know anything about my life for the first sixty-plus years, you know? Barely know anything about my parents, and official records aren’t any better.”

“Mino, are you okay?” Amelia asked.

She sighed. “Yeah, it’s just... This whole thing reminds me that I really have some good magical powers, you know? I’m a certified tour guide, and I can fight pretty well, but where in the world did that come from? Why am I not just some weirdo farmer like everyone else in Beechhurst?”

“You probably wanted to keep your hostel safe from baddies,” Phelia suggested. “So you practiced a lot.”

“Yeah, tons of baddies,” she said sarcastically.

“Maybe that’s the next thing we can do after Phelia completes her quests,” Amelia said. “Scope out your past and make sure to copy the records six times over.”

Mino shook her head, but smiled. “If you want to go through all five hundred contacts on my old index roll, be my guest.”

“After this fight, maybe.”

“Hope you do.”

Phelia turned her attention away from the two of them and pointed at Ktalos. The floor began to rumble violently. “It’s attacking the mels again!”

Mike finished readying their gear and waved at Amelia. “Let’s start the game.”

They went down a nearby ease in the cliffs where a descent was less dangerous than other places, and once the legendary beast’s bashing had ceased, they began to approach it.

As Amelia suspected, the melanoids completely ignored the two of them. Ktalos was so attractive a target that the intelligence-free creatures, flickering with dark energy and shambling like the undead, focused their full attention on it. Even Amelia’s status as a delectable morsel was no match for an animal that had slept for centuries to suck up more power.

“How many times?” Amelia asked.

Mike turned their head. “What?”

“Legendary beasts. How many of them have you defeated?”

They chuckled. “Six. Four I killed, two I sent fleeing into Floor 6 and below. Never one this big, though.” A sly smile. “You?”

“This’ll be my second.”

“Thought so. What was it?”

“I fought off a daika in Floor 5. Had me by the leg.”

“Nice. Probably just an adolescent, though, if you’re still here to talk about it.”

“Good to know. Time to attack?”

Mike nodded. Spun their flintlocks a few times, and then shot directly into the back of Ktalos’s giant cranium.

Two hits, loud cracks. One went in, blood barely dripped out. The other bounced off, hit a goblin-shaped mel and evaporated it.

Loud, angry rumbling. The floor shook.

The battle began.

Amelia had a hard time remembering many of the specifics of this battle, long after it had finally taken place. She had been in a massive number of battles over the years, sometimes brawls of twenty or more people at once, and even a full-scale battle between an army of the undead and a force of pirates. The sheer chaos of fights like that never took much from her focus; she never had a hard time seeing the world around her, even when death surrounded her on every side.

Here, though, against Ktalos, was a whole different kind of battle. It was not countless golems firing off chunks of their bodies at her. It was not an assorted group of Fourland thugs who did not know what they were doing. It was one towering, disgusting legendary beast with half-open eyes and four long, weapon-wielding limbs that smashed into everything around it in this narrow canyon-like passage. She could not even see the entire monster at once from here; her eyes simply did not have the vision to see such a big creature.

And so the chaos of this fight, when the mindless melanoids were added in, was an entirely new experience to anything else she had ever felt.

Amelia was almost scared.

Almost.

She took care of the straggler melanoids with a wide-ranging [Mana Burst], paralyzing most of them and destroying those that kept trying to move anyway. While they were still shocked, she got to work, grabbing their inky bodies and slamming them against each other, or pushing them down on the ground and stomping their bodies in. Until they were nothing but mana-filled goo, she refused to stop.

Their numbers were great, but somehow they refused to acknowledge her presence beyond the barest of courtesies. Their attacks against her were so cursory she was insulted. Still bashed them in anyway, though.

And just barely dodged a tree-trunk sized arm crashing into the ground, and the claymore it held that flattened a melanoid into a pancake.

Just too much going on around her. Too much fighting. She did not even realize it at the time, but she was succumbing to the same chaos she had always prided herself on overcoming.

Arrow bolts flew down from Phelia, striking Ktalos’s flesh, sticking into its body but not damaging it in any serious way. One arrow struck against a shiny bronze helmet attached to the skin and knocked the armor off—and one of its limbs smushed it into uselessness a moment later. Mino sent cycling balls of water at the beast, too, but mostly to distract and confuse it, not really to cause any damage.

Mike threw their grenade and it exploded underneath the monster’s belly. It roared out in pain and set its sights on them... Right by the loose rocks on the cliff.

The plan was working, and working so well that Amelia was caught off-guard. It was all so simple that she genuinely thought some unexpected element would rear its ugly head, such as an extra set of limbs sprouting up from the monster’s back, or some scavenging monster hunters looking to pick off easy targets.

There was only one thing very wrong, here, she realized as she used [Slice] and, with immense effort, chopped off one of its limbs. If this line of attack continued, Phelia would not be the one to slay the foe. She would not complete her quest.

Mike had already long since forgotten about their promise, clearly; they blasted away at the monster with reckless abandon, just waiting for the rocks to fall so they could finish it off.

But then, in one second, everything went wrong in exactly the best way.

Mino, up on the cliffs, used her kinetic magic, screaming out in the pain of exertion as she shifted the loose rocks out of place. They crashed down—

Two of the biggest ones missed. Ktalos dodged them in time. Smaller ones tumbled after. It saw the rocks coming, literally punched them in the air to break them apart. Powdery dust filled the passageway and obscured Amelia’s vision.

Ktalos was not well, not well at all, but it was much stronger than it should have been as a half-sleeping beast. That was, of course, if it was still half-asleep.

Mino’s trap had been sprung, but the legendary beast remained mostly unscathed. Mike ran out of bullets in one of their flintlocks and had resorted to Amelia tossed some bo spikes its way. Perfect accuracy, but too small to make it even flinch.

She could launch a [Mana Burst] attack, she knew, one that would drain her to near-uselessness, but one that could likely fell it if she was willing to take the risk.

But that would still not solve the Phelia issue.

She looked up to the cliffs, saw the girl still firing Mike’s crossbow and hitting most of the marks. But she ran out of arrows and set it aside, now useless in the battle.

Amelia sighed. Sighed because she realized the easiest path to giving an attack that would definitely defeat Ktalos.

Her Access Core was going to have a chat with her about priorities after she did this.

Focused...

Closed her eyes...

Bzzzzzzt!

Amelia teleported up to the cliffs. Directly behind Phelia. Still had the axe strapped to her back.

“Nothing personal, kid.”

Phelia turned. “Eh? Am—Oof!”

Amelia shoved Phelia as hard as she could, pushed her clear off the cliffs.

The white-scaled kobold tumbled through the air, several stories up, screaming just as she did hours earlier when she slipped from the hook shot.

But this time, a calmness set over her almost immediately. She understood what Amelia had done, and why.

She took her axe, flapped her vestigial wings to give herself the tiniest bit of maneuverability.

And aimed for Ktalos’ giant neck.

With a human-like torso, it surely had a human-like blood system. That was a gamble that Phelia was willing to make, as she raised her axe, collided with the beast, cut through its neck right at that special blood-filled vein. Tore through it as deeply as she could get, and then kept on going.

Ktalos collapsed in pain a moment later, and so did Amelia, from going just a little bit too far for her system’s comfort.

The battle was won without her help.

“Good job, Phelia,” she mumbled to herself.