Kaldalis chugged another healing potion as fast as he could physically get it from his inventory to his mouth. The two-hundred and thirteen hit points of healing was a big swing. But the giant chiraptor charged him, and so he didn’t have time to chug another.

If the beast was allowed to smack him around a couple times while he drank, he’d take more damage than he healed for.

The monster came in with claws swinging, and Kaldalis danced back away from the swipes. He knew he needed to finish this fight before it finished him, but he couldn’t trade blows straight-up.

Moving in for another strike caused the scaled monster to snap at him with its giant fangs, forcing him to abandon the attack and back off.

He grimaced as the giant claws swept in again, and Kaldalis scrambled for a moment to try and avoid the strikes.

But he failed. Its arms were just so long, and the huge claws gave it so much range that he couldn’t keep out of reach after coming in as he had before. Claws slashed across his torso, smashing ninety-two more hit points out of him, though he fortunately resisted the poison this time.

He was surprised at how fast it was attacking. Reducing it to low hit points must have enraged it.

Well, being reduced to low hit points didn’t improve Kaldalis’s mood, either.

“You wanna play games with me?” Kaldalis yelled into the beast’s snarling face. “You wanna play rough?” He popped his Endure cooldown and stepped up to the plate, glaive raised. “Okay.”

The beast’s claws came in, and Kaldalis set his feet and met the strike with his polearm. He accepted the hit that followed, and the seventy-four damage that came with it, in exchange for his forty-three damage and the sixteenth stack of Gust. He moved forward, in towards the beast as it struck again. This time he ducked under the sweeping arm and smashed his weapon into its shoulder with a backhand.

As happy as he was to be putting out damage, he didn’t get another Gust proc, and he grimaced. He needed all the luck he could get to win, but if luck wasn’t going to be on his side, he needed tactics.

The creature leaned back, getting up on its hind legs again, bringing its claws to bear against him to try and ward him away. Kaldalis pressed the attack, diving into a roll between its legs. As expected, the beast’s upright stance didn’t have the agility to turn quickly, and he drove the head of his glaive into its lower back, getting his seventeenth stack of Gust. The creature started to try and turn without dropping to all fours, and Kaldalis struck at the back of its knee, thrusting through the thin scales at the joint and into the flesh beneath.

He got his eighteen stack of Gust, and while the damage wasn’t higher than the last time for the extra three stacks, seventy-five damage was still a significant chunk for him. The blast knocked the monster’s leg out from under it, and Kaldalis had to dive aside to avoid getting crushed under its bulk. A flailing claw caught him across his back and he took another seventy-four damage, thanks to his Endure cooldown still running. Kaldalis used the rotational momentum imparted by the strike to turn around, his tail giving him the balance he needed to reverse direction and come in at the beast.

“Say-” he yelled as he stabbed his weapon into the monster’s chest. “-hello-” His voice was rising in pitch as well as volume as he used the weapon for leverage to jump up onto the beast’s chest. “-to my-” He ripped the weapon out of the monster, smashing at the thick scales of its chest as he ran up the flailing beast’s body. “-little-” He dragged the weapon across the scales, barely aware that he got his nineteenth and twentieth stack of Gust somewhere between those three hits. “-friend!”

The creature looked up, opening its maw to menace him with its fangs as it started to rise, as if to catch him on the way down.

But that was what Kaldalis was counting on.

He set his polearm, gripping tight as he threw his weight behind the head of the glaive and drove the point of it right into the roof of the giant chiraptor’s mouth, driving through the soft flesh there and grinding into the bone beneath.

The physical damage of the strike did was sixty-five damage, telling Kaldalis he got a crit, which was unexpected. What was expected was that he got his twenty-first stack of Gust, proccing it for a big hit.

But he also didn’t expect that the gust damage would be multiplied by the crit as well.

One-hundred and thirteen damage blasted off of the proc.

And the chiraptor’s head exploded.

Kaldalis’s slide up the monster’s chest ended in a spatter of blood, bone, and brains. The little notification that the beast had been a chiraptor king and worth fifty exp did little to distract him from the gory mess he found himself covered in. As soon as he hit the floor, it got ten times worse as a spurt of at least ten gallons of blood sprayed from the open neck of the beasts with its final heartbeat, splashing against his back.

“Ugh.” Kaldalis scrambled out of the pool of gore, struggling for a moment to get clear. “Ick, gross. Gross. Ick. Ugh.” He gagged for a moment after he was out of the red puddle, flailing his arms to clear them. “He slimed me.” Kaldalis grimaced. “Well, okay. I slimed myself.”

He spent a full minute trying to not vomit, wiping the chunky bat monster chili off of his face and body whenever he could bear to feel it on his hands. Once he was sure he could keep it down, he drank another potion. And then another. And then another. He was left with only two potions left, but his hit points were back up to nine-hundred and forty six, which was a much more comfortable fraction of his total when compared to being at only three-hundred and seven, once the last poison debuff had finished running its course.

Kaldalis glanced up at the health bars of his friends, and noted that they appeared to be stable at full hit points. They must have been resting between fights. He wondered if they were watching his health bar and freaking out the whole time. The only thing he could do to tell them that the danger was passed was chill for a bit, letting his health bar remain stationary.

After a minute or two, their bars started moving, Myrin and Haldir taking a little damage before bumping back up, either with their Breaker ability, or with Balrim’s heals.

“I guess they realized I survived and moved on. Either that,” he said to himself, “or they didn’t notice anything and were just walking that whole time.” He shrugged. “Whatever.”

Kaldalis delicately poked around the giant scaled corpse, and soon managed to find the metal gear he needed for the door wedged between a pair of big scales on its back. He found himself limping his way across the room even though he physically felt fine. He supposed the mental strain of all this fighting had to be catching up with him - especially with every fight being drawn out by his low damage output.

He slotted the silvery gear into place at the gearbox and opened the gate. As expected, the gate opened into another stone hallway, with a little metal contraption holding his rewards for completing the boss fight. He resolved to consider the needs of his friends and not hog everything to himself as he dug into the treasure.

There were two charms.

One of them was a “Chiraptor Charm” clearly made from the chitinous scales of something very much like the creature he’d just fought, decorated with bands of blue shell that looked like it had come from a leviabeetle. It was item level six and gave twenty-three armor, and so he put it on before he could second-guess himself, replacing the water affinity charm he didn’t need.

The other charm was a ribbon of red-dyed leather with a diamond shape embroidered on it in thin white thread. It gave attack speed, and so Kaldalis set it aside to hand off to Haldir; Myrin already had an attack speed charm, and it would be easy to convince the other vathon to accept a little something so that the rest of them didn’t feel like heels for hogging everything.

There was another item in the chest. It was a small sack of powder that a cursory examination revealed was cinnamon. He tucked it away to present to Balrim, to help with his cooking. While it seemed like a gift for Balrim, Kaldalis thought Myrin would be the one happiest to see it. The cinnamon would be an excellent compliment to the attack stat food that Balrim had made; more attack food meant more attack, which was often prize enough for a DPS player.

Kaldalis considered giving up his armor charm for someone else’s survivability, but after coming so close to death against the chiraptor king, he wanted every little bit of survival he could hoard. He wondered if he was going to regret losing the water affinity against any further leviabeetles, but the armor working against all damage types was going to be ultimately more valuable. Considering that poison damage was far more common in here, he stood by his decision to-

Kaldalis’s head turned sharply as he saw movement near at hand, maybe fifteen feet away in the shadowy hallway.

There was an enhydra there, with a wooden sphere in its little paws. Kaldalis met its eyes for a bare second before it whirled around to bolt away.

Before he could critically consider a mature and responsible course of action, he was already scrambling to get his feet under himself to give chase.