The monster’s huge head came down at Kaldalis, and he hurled himself back away from it as its giant mouth snapped closed where he had been sitting. He flung himself so energetically away from it that he slammed into the far wall of the narrow alley they had stopped in. The enormous head lifted back up out of the alleyway, and despite the slowness implied by the beast’s size, it was out of reach before any of them could take a swing.

Kaldalis didn’t get a good look at the entire beast - most of it was still on the other side of the building nearby, but he could make a guess based on what he saw.

From the huge head atop a long neck, it was obviously a sauropod. It was lightish tan, but instead of its hide being pebbled like the other dinosaur-like monsters he’d seen, it had a coarse texture that appeared to shift in place.

It took a moment for him to recognize what that was.

The sauropod was made out of shifting sand.

“Is that the guy?” SeventyEight asked, even though Kaldalis was pretty sure she knew the answer to her question.

“Yeah,” Balrim said as the group drew their weapons. “I hope it makes sense now why being caught in close quarters was a pain.”

“It’s got an AoE,” Myrin said. She tightened her grip on her greatsword. “It might be a line or a cone or a circle or whatever, but it’s impossible to tell when there’s nowhere to dodge.”

“Alright, change of strategy,” Kaldalis said, readying his spear. “I thought we’d beat it down with raw numbers, but that’s not gonna work if it’s just going to smoosh all of us at once. I’m going to get it out of the ruins. You all follow it and we can fight it out in the open.”

“And how are you going to do that?” Balrim asked in a panicked tone. “I can’t tell which way is out!”

“That’s why you’re going to be following it,” Kaldalis said, shifting his grip and burning a charge of his Jump ability. “It’ll either find a path for you, or make one. With its face.”

Hurling himself up into the air towards the shifting-sand head of the monster, Kaldalis got a reasonable view of the ruins. They weren’t as large as they seemed from the inside, which told him that they had probably been wandering in circles the whole time they’d been there. He also caught sight of a larger building towards the center. Oddly, that building was blocky and square, with visible ribs of columns on the outside - Lataxinan architecture? What did that mean?

There was no time to figure it out right now, though.

He swept the head of his weapon into the side of the shifting-sand face of the huge monster before him. The blade scraped against the moving surface, sending granules scattering through the air. Fifty-two physical damage and five earth damage pounded into the monster, and it flinched back from the strike.

It was obviously boss-leveled, like the thing he had faced in the ruins with Dalgaard. Kaldalis had been doing more damage than that to the Xorn. And while it hadn’t hit him yet, he was expecting it to be quite the damage difference.

He hoped that they weren’t biting off a raid boss and trying to chew it with a little more than a dungeon party.

The important part, though, was that he had established aggro. The monster’s eyes - oddly organic-looking despite the rest of its physiology - locked onto him with palpable anger.

Seeing the rest of the monster’s body, it was mostly what Kaldalis had anticipated. A large vaguely oblong torso was supported by stubby tree-trunk legs, and the body trailed by a tapering tail so long that its end was like a whip.

Counter to his expectation, though, there were eight legs instead of four, and its back was covered in twisted thorny outcroppings that appeared like a briar patch made from stone.

“Let’s go for a walk, buddy,” Kaldalis said as he came back down. He landed right in front of the monster, and its huge head swept down at him again, seeking revenge for the cut on its cheek - even as the shifting sand of its flesh replaced what he’d scraped off.

His Jump ability was the only thing that got him out of the way before it smashed down, not with a bite, but with a bodyslam-sized headbutt. Mud splattered up from the monster’s impact with the ground, coating Kaldalis from the waist down.

He didn’t have time to deal with it, though - his Jump cooldown was ticking away. He’d gotten a good view of the way to the open area outside of the ruins, and so he kicked off in that direction, sailing above the next building.

The cramped and tangled nature of the streets meant that there wasn’t a lot of room for a creature that size to maneuver, so while he was in the air, he carefully considered his next leap. He had the time to make his leaps more vertical to get a better lay of the land, right?

No. No, he did not.

Instead of waddling its way around the building Kaldalis had lept over, it smashed right through the middle of it, sending stone and mud scattering in all directions like shrapnel. Kaldalis’ instincts took over and he hurled himself away again, maintaining enough distance to stay out of reach of the sweep of its huge neck.

The lumbering behemoth let out a trumpeting sound that sounded like a bass-boosted bagpipe, and when Kaldalis landed, the ground beneath him was shuddering with the sound. He didn’t have time to react before the air was suddenly full of sand, as if a desert windstorm had been teleported into the area.

He immediately took one hundred and sixty-one physical damage.

Without being able to see where he was going, Kaldalis just kicked off in the direction he thought was right. He didn’t emerge from the sandstorm until he was already coming back down, revealing that the attack covered an immense area. It also revealed that he was crashing down in the middle of a building instead of on the far side of it.

Kaldalis landed hard on the stone floor, but smartly folded his legs and went into a roll to absorb the impact. The Jump ability meant he didn’t take fall damage, but it was still psychologically uncomfortable to land at that velocity.

Despite the distance covered, the ground was rumbling under the thundering charge of the beast that was still coming after him.

Overworld aggro rules could be a bitch.

“It was a prank, bro!” Kaldalis yelled as he scrambled towards the rounded door of the building. He barely set his foot on the threshold before the back wall exploded in at him. The stone walls were no more impediment to this thing than Styrofoam blocks were to a very determined toddler.

Hurling himself into the air as soon as there wasn’t walls around him blocking his view, Kaldalis finally landed outside the ruins. The octopedal sand dinosaur was right behind him, sending bits of stone and masonry flying.

Right behind it, following in the smashed wake it left behind, Myrin was letting out a roar with her greatsword raised. Reno and Ess were right behind her with daggers and spear, respectively. Balrim was bringing up the rear, with a potion ready in hand for Kaldalis when they caught up.

Kaldalis had hoped that the open area would let him outmaneuver the huge monster, but once it wasn’t trapped in the narrow streets of the ruins, he saw his mistake.

Large did not mean slow.

The many-legged creature lunged at him, covering a shocking amount of distance. Kaldalis tried to leap out of the way, but its neck swept in horizontally, not straight down. It struck him with the side of its neck, sinking another one hundred and sixty-one damage into him.

What was worse was that the shifting material of the creature’s flesh was like coarse sandpaper scraping against him. Being as it was sand, it also got everywhere.

The blow also revealed what he’d missed before.

There was a reason it had only been physical damage. The blow inflicted a stacking debuff on him that he had apparently resisted earlier. It was called Slow, and it reduced his attack and movement speed by 10% for its 10-second duration.

Kaldalis didn’t like where this was going, as his speed was already different even though he was tumbling through the air instead of running on the ground. If he was slower, he was going to have a harder time dodging. And if he was going to have a harder time dodging, then that 10-second duration was unlikely to get cleared.

It was especially worrying since the tooltip described the 10% speed reduction as per stack.

Kaldalis was going to have to work about 10% harder than normal to make sure he could convince himself that those words were a typo of some sort.