The giant humanoid barreled towards Kaldalis, fist raised to strike.

His first instinct was to jam on every cooldown and pray for luck, but this wasn’t a fight he could win by praying to RNGsus. He needed to play smart. And that couldn’t be accomplished if he was just rolling his face across the metaphorical keyboard.

Instead, he brandished his weapon and held his ground. Despite the spike of fear that jammed into his stomach. The one that demanded he take literally any other course of action than this.

Its first swing was telegraphed from a mile away as it raised its enormous fist above its head to smash down onto him. Kaldalis had all the time in the world to dance to the left, out of the way of the attack, and he was glad that he hadn’t foolishly wasted his cooldowns. If the giant monster’s attacks were going to be slow and predictable, his initial fears might have been unfounded. The syncoresi boss had smacked him around by being lightning-fast despite its size. If this giant glowy dude was going to be too slow to lay a hand on him, this fight was going to be easy.

Of course, the moment he had that one overconfident thought was when it hit him.

The slow overhead strike was either a genius feint, or the next attack was a brilliant follow-up. The giant monster’s other hand slammed into Kaldalis in an open-hand strike that felt like he just got bodied by the least-padded MXC contraption ever built. Kaldalis was thrown about five feet by the hit, and landed in a roll. He scrambled to get back on his feet as he could feel the ground shake with the monster’s continued charge after him.

The hit damaged him for two-hundred and thirty-five physical damage, and forty-eight fire damage. He wasn’t sure if he was grateful for his upgraded gear making it a manageable number or if he was pissed that despite all the dungeon stuff he piled on, he was still taking such a huge chunk of his hit point pool.

Kaldalis didn’t have time for feelings, though. The monster was rushing him again, ready to strike a second time. Balrim’s healing wasn’t going to cover the full damage of that first blow, so he couldn’t afford to take a second hit.

This was going to be a long and grueling battle, and if he was going to win it, he needed every advantage he could get.

Or, rather, he needed to mitigate every disadvantage he already had.

The next attack was the creature trying to punt him, and he slipped to the right of the kick, smashing his glaive into the monster’s calf. He nailed it for eleven physical damage, and a stack of Gust, but he didn’t have time to celebrate the small victory. The shimmering giant’s attacks seemed to come in twos. Its fist smashed down at him right after it missed kicking him. He threw himself to the left, barely avoiding the attack.

Myrin and Haldir were rushing into position behind the monster, getting to work. Myrin’s blade swept back and forth in an even metered rhythm, and Haldir wove a web of steel. Both of their attacks primarily intersected with the huge monster’s calf, knee, and lower thigh, but that probably didn’t matter. The beauty of hit point-based systems instead of injury-based systems was that they didn’t need to reach anything truly lethal. They just needed to chip away at the big red bar in any way they could.

The monster’s attacks were unrelenting, and so Kaldalis focused on his evasion rather than waxing poetic about philosophy of game design. Fists rained down on him, and he gave his full attention to keeping just one jump ahead of the flurry of blows. He was able to avoid the bulk of them, but the sheer number and ferocity of the attacks meant that he couldn’t dodge them all. Balrim’s healing wasn’t keeping up (through no fault of the healer) but Kaldalis’s health pool meant that it was a slow fuse and not an instant end to the fight.

A flurry of tree trunk sized fists forced him to burn his Endure cooldown to reduce the damage. With that, each hit went from two-hundred and eighty-three total damage down to two-hundred and twenty-seven. While the cooldown was running, Balrim’s healing started to catch up, stabilizing the fight for long enough that Kaldalis wracked his brain to try and find a way to fight smarter, not harder.

He was starting to feel out the tempo of the storm of punches, and as the Endure cooldown came to a close a few breaths later, he felt like he had control of the fight again. Each attack came in flurries of two to three strikes, and there was a pattern.

Two, two, three, two, two, two, three. Repeating, of course.

Armed with that knowledge, the periodic triple strikes stopped surprising him.

The punches and kicks themselves were relatively uncoordinated and wild. Whoever designed the giant’s animations had done them in the classic Monsoon style. They were more centered in professional wrestling than martial arts. Wild roundhouse punches, overdramatic uppercuts, and kicks that would be more at home on a soccer field than in a real fight. The only reason they were effective was because the enemy had enough speed and stamina to keep the reckless blows coming non-stop.

Until they suddenly did stop.

The shimmering humanoid stopped chasing after the retreating Kaldalis, and doubled over. It gripped its stomach with both gelatinous hands.

And it started to pulse.

And then to undulate.

“It’s gonna do the blast!” Balrim yelled. “Get ready to Flicker it!”

“You Flicker, too,” Kaldalis called back. “We don’t know how big it’s going to be!”

“Fine. Just say when!”

Kaldalis tried to meter the pace of the growing undulation. A glow began to surround the creature. He took the first opportunity since it arrived in the clearing to stab it with his glaive again. He felt terribly useless, since he was only doing eleven physical damage with the hit, and this was only the second time he’d even touched it, but that wasn’t his department. He was supposed to give Haldir and Myrin the opening they needed to output the real damage.

And, apparently, shotcall.

“Go!” Kaldalis yelled when he felt like the undulation of the giant was reaching its peak. “Flicker now!”

Balrim and Haldir were gone in a flash. Myrin gave him one last look before vanishing herself.

Kaldalis felt a weird need to be the last one out, as if that somehow would keep everyone else safe. He took a breath and activated the flicker, hoping he had the timing right.

The world was replaced with an empty void again, save for two floating pale shapes and three other figures. Their arrangement in this empty space seemed arbitrary, when compared to where they had been in the real world, but he wasn’t sure why he would have expected it to correspond at all. This was magic, after all. It just worked, regardless of if the results made logical sense.

At least they weren’t slowly clipping through the ground.

This time, though, they could see each other. Myrin wasn’t faced away from him this time, but was similarly just ahead of him. Haldir was positioned where he could see Myrin, and when he turned to orient his perspective on her, Kaldalis came into his peripheral vision. He looked around and saw that Balrim was above and behind him. There were between ten and fifteen feet between each one of them, and Kaldalis couldn’t make sense of any sort of pattern to their positionings.

Encased in a vacuum that would empty their lungs if they let it, they couldn’t really talk. Learning sign language had been Kaldalis’s new year’s resolution for like eight years running, and he’d never actually learned a single sign. Then again, it wouldn’t have helped here, right? If Balrim and Myrin knew it, they weren’t using it now, and Haldir had finally confirmed that he wasn’t from Earth in the first place, and so couldn’t possibly know ASL.

After an interminable-feeling pause, the others blinked out of existence around him. Half a heartbeat later, the void vanished and reality reasserted itself. Kaldalis couldn’t wait for his vision to adjust to the light again. He blindly threw himself to the right and felt the giant fist flying past him before his eyes processed it. They’d manage to avoid the huge blast of dark damage, and the monster hadn’t lost a beat, resuming its pummeling as if all its foes stepping outside of reality for a second was normal.

“We’re clear!” He called out. “We dodged it!”

“Obviously!” Myrin called back. “Less gloating, more cutting! We’ve gotta be getting close!”

“What are you basing that on?” Kaldalis asked.

“Misplaced optimism?”

“Yeah, alright.” Kaldalis laughed. “Keep pushing, then!”