Kaldalis grappled for a moment with a broad range of simultaneous emotions.

Foremost among them, though, was confusion.

What the everloving fuck was Myrin doing here? He was grateful for the save, and her appearance meant that survival was suddenly possible. The reason he couldn’t win the fight was his low damage output as a tank. The addition of Myrin to the equation meant that there was a chance. She might be able to hit hard enough to kill Ara, if he could keep alive.

But what was she doing here? How did she find him?

Was she alone?

A potion crashed to the ground near at hand, and Kaldalis recovered two hundred and sixty-seven hit points.

No. Not alone. Kaldalis breathed a sigh of relief and took a quick glance around. He spotted Balrim near where Dalgaard had been, and from the grim look on his face, Kaldalis could guess the healer had checked on them before joining the fight. Despite the reminder of his new friend’s fate, knowing both of his old friends were here filled him with a sense of relief and renewed confidence.

“Thanks for the reinforcements,” Kaldalis said, activating his Endure cooldown before Ara’s next attack could land. “I thought I was done for!”

“Thank yourself,” Myrin said cheerfully from behind the spider-snake-lady. “With all the screaming, there was no way we could get back to sleep until we came out here to investigate.”

“Useless!” Ara snarled, lashing out at Kaldalis with her claws. “This changes nothing!”

Kaldalis twisted in place, barely dodging the claws. One of them scraped along the front of his armor, but didn’t catch enough to deal damage. The awkward motion meant he couldn’t counterattack effectively, but that was fine. With Myrin swinging away at Ara’s serpentine tail, his damage was only for the sake of holding aggro.

“Holy shit!” Myrin yelped. “It talks?”

“I’ll do more than that,” Ara hissed, “if you just stand aside and wait your turn.”

“No thanks!” Myrin said, her voice chipper to the point of grating. “I’m just going to kill you now, okay?”

There was a burst of fire from Myrin’s attack, which told Kaldalis she’d landed a critical hit. He didn’t know what her damage numbers looked like, but considering how absurdly his damage had scaled with the slight increase of the ire potion, Myrin’s base damage must be absolutely outrageous.

A crit on top of that would be a fucking nuke.

One of Balrim’s arrows sank into Ara’s stomach, and she hissed in aggravation, one hand yanking the missile out and tossing it aside as she slithered in at Kaldalis again. He ducked under her sweeping claws and stabbed his spear into the snakelike part of her body right above where it met the ground. Because he still had the ire potion rolling, and got sixty-two damage off the attack.

Ara’s claws came down, and Kaldalis barely managed to dart to the side before they could rake across his face. Myrin was cursing loudly, and he spared a quick glance past the front of the monster’s body to see the serpentine back half whipping to and fro as Myrin tried to mount her attacks. Ara was doing what she could to avoid Myrin’s damage, even though aggro mechanics meant that her focus had to remain on Kaldalis.

“Why resist?” Kaldalis asked, allowing himself to hope that victory was possible. “This doesn’t have to hurt this much.”

Ara bared her fangs with a hiss. Claws slashed across his shoulder, though his Endure cooldown reduced the damage to one hundred and sixty one total. Balrim’s healing was strong, but Kaldalis couldn’t slack off now.

If he went down, the spider-snake-lady was going to be able to focus her attention on avoiding Myrin’s attacks. The big slow greatsword had been an asset in the dungeon fights against building-sized monsters, but against something more agile, Myrin would never land another hit unless Kaldalis was holding her attention.

He just had to keep ahead of her movements. As it was, he had probably built enough aggro to keep a hold of the boss for the rest of her health bar. That meant he was back to the tank’s job now.

Kadalis was here to enable his friends to work, not to do everything himself.

Ara’s claws reached out again and he hopped away. She surged forwards after him, but let out a raspy scream as Myrin landed another solid hit. Having to move meant setting her coils solidly on the ground to propel herself. Forcing her to move forward meant she couldn’t whip her serpentine body around to avoid the suyon’s attacks.

Just the same, she couldn’t switch targets. Kaldalis had aggro. She had to pursue him until Myrin did enough damage to surpass him, or until she killed him.

Despite them having her at a disadvantage, Ara only hesitated for a moment. She charged him again, reaching angrily towards him with all eight clawed hands. She adjusted her body to stay low, and it meant having a few more feet of snake body to work with on the ground, increasing her speed.

Kaldalis’s Jump cooldown was almost ticked away to nothing, so he didn’t want to give a big leap away if it meant losing the ability to return to the fight in case she tried some shenanigans. Insead, he strafed around to the right, leading her in a smaller circle back towards Myrin.

As soon as the last second of his Jump cooldown ended, Ara lunged. The timing was so precise, he was convinced that she could see his buff timer.

The lunge was also shockingly fast. If she was capable of moving like that, it meant she had been toying with him the whole time.

Her claws were raised to strike as she closed the distance, but he only had eyes for one thing.

Ara’s fangs were bared.

She wasn’t looking to claw at him. She was looking to tackle him and pump him full of paralytic venom again.

Kaldalis wasn’t sure what effect that would have on the aggro system, but it wasn’t necessarily better or worse if she had to smash him to death before turning and killing his friends, or if she could cut right to them once he was immobilized.

Getting bit again was not an option.

He tried to duck left to avoid her, but her arms reached wide. One claw grasped his shoulder, and he twisted quickly, shrugging it off. A second claw closed around his other shoulder as soon as he turned, though, and before he could break her grip there, another grabbed his bicep. And then one claw slashed across his back, dealing one hundred and sixty-one damage to him before getting caught on a seam in his armor.

Ara dragged him to the ground, pinning him under her weight. Kaldalis could feel her body flinch as Myrin cried out, landing another blow against her serpentine body.

The spider-snake-lady didn’t let it stop her, though. Rough hands rolled him over beneath her even as he struggled.

His spear gave him some leverage as he fought to face away from her, but it was only a stall tactic. She was physically stronger than he was.

“Stop fighting me,” Ara said, the lusty purr interrupted by a gasp of pain as Myrin’s greatsword chopped into her. “Your struggle only makes my victory all the sweeter.”

Two red-clawed hands grasped his horns, and the fight went out of him almost immediately. Vathon instincts overrode his conscious mind, telling him that if he resisted while she had a grip on him like that, she’d snap his neck. True to that instinct, her arms wrenched painfully, turning his head to face her.

Kaldalis did the only thing he could think of.

He Flickered.

The Paths Between Paths was peaceful and quiet, as usual. Kaldalis struggled for a moment, going from gasping for breath to out in a vacuum where there wasn’t anything to breathe.

He got his lungs under control before all the air was ripped out of him. This was the farthest he’d gotten away from Ara since meeting her, and he didn’t intend to waste the respite suffocating.

Instead, he floated in the void for a moment, wondering at the two big pale shapes off in the distance ahead of him.

It did his mental health wonders to be able to - metaphorically - breathe for a minute.

Though now that he had a few seconds to reflect, he noted that he’d already started to recover. Just having Balrim and Myrin appear made him feel more comfortable. Their presence eased the trauma of his brush with the snake-spider lady’s underhanded tactics. Now that they were here, the whole experience was reframed as a boss fight rather than a would-be sexual assault.

That said, he resolved to have a mature, adult conversation about it at the earliest possible convenience. The last thing he wanted to do was push it out of his mind and let it haunt his nightmares because he was too small a man to approach the sensitive topic.

Perhaps not with Myrin and Balrim, but maybe Heluna. He could also stand to reach out to the Adventurers League officials to see if there was a counselor or therapist on hand.

His time away from the fight came to a sudden end, though, and Kaldalis reappeared in the real world. He was still prone on the ground, but his brief stint outside of reality had caused Ara to rear back up, either looking for him, or in preparation to turn on his friends. The momentary freedom meant that he could scramble back to his feet.

Ara tried to pounce again, but her movements were jerky and desperate now. He could see that she was bleeding from cuts and wounds all over her - the sign that she was nearing the last of her hit points.

“This isn’t the end,” Ara hissed at him as she raked her claws down his front. Despite the Endure cooldown reducing the damage to one hundred and sixty-one, the strike brought him down below one-quarter hit points. “I’ll have you in my coils again, lover.”

Kaldalis felt a bead of fear forming in his racing heart, even as he drove his spear into her chest.

It was a bluff, right? A meaningless threat? She couldn’t be immortal, too. Right?

His attack did sixty-two damage and sent her flinching back away from him.

There was a sound of impact, and Ara stiffened.

Kaldalis thought she was going to pounce again, but her body sagged. Eight arms fell limp against her sides. Her beady black eyes glazed over and she collapsed face down on the grassy ground.

One of Balrim’s arrows jutted out of the back of her skull.

Kaldalis received an unprecedented eighty-six experience points as a reward for defeating “the jormungumo.” Less unprecedented was the sheaf of notes being added to his inventory.

Even as she lay still, and his heart rate started to normalize, that bead of fear still rattled around. The bosses in the dungeon had respawned when they returned, but they were animals. They didn’t express any intelligence or familiarity. Ara - the jormungumo - had an entire personality, though. When she respawned, would it be another creature with the same statistics and abilities, or would it be Ara herself, reborn and seeking revenge?

He didn’t have an answer. For now, though, he owed his friends a debt he doubted he could ever make good on.