Sharlot immediately took off towards the group of Blightlings. Shane had never seen anything in this game move as quickly as she did. She instantly accelerated to her maximum speed—closing the gap between them within seconds.

He watched as she used her top speed and sharp front legs to simultaneously skewer the two weaker Blightlings—their thick skin proving easy for her to pierce.

61 Damage!

62 Damage!

The numbers faded along with the entirety of the two Blightling's hp bars. Sharlot swung her front legs violently, catapulting the two bodies away from her like a couple of ragdolls. As she turned, the two remaining creatures were already upon her, slashing and biting whatever they could get their clawed hands on. She was quick and evasive in her many legs' movements, but the Blightling's speed, strength, and roughly equal size made it hard for her to escape their combined grasps.

Shane began to sweat a little as her health decreased by nine, then a seven, and another nine. The two Blightlings seemed confused by her lasting endurance against what should have been a massive amount of bodily rot. The two creatures usually would have been doing a lot more damage to her with their natural affinity for poison. Luckily, Sharlot had strong resistance to that kind of affliction.

Sharlot used this slight opening in their focus and teamwork to vanish from thin air. From Shane's point of view, it was like she turned invisible, but when he noticed her aura jumped up high into the air, it all made sense. She must have shrunk herself to the size of an actual spider. Sharlot could be a very effective assassin, he internally remarked.

The Blightlings, still frantically looking around for the giant four-foot-tall spider, were immediately engulfed with thick webbing from above. Shane was shocked to see such a large amount of meshed web coming from such a temporarily small creature. The Blightlings movements were massively slowed, and he realized the web trap she had initially used on him was nowhere near as thick and heavy as this latest batch.

As Sharlot fell, she increased the size of her body to its regular size and combined her legs into a single, hairy lance. When she landed, her eight combined legs pierced the weaker of the two Blightlings. The thrashing creature had been making some headway through the thick, sticky webbing. Resulting in Sharlot's falling attack stabbing through one of its arms and legs instead of something more vital.

75 Damage!

With two of its extremities mangled and bloody, the Blightling's thrashing ceased. Sharlot immediately withdrew her front legs from the "lance" and pierced the creature's chest and shoulder. As it shrieked a high-pitched cry from pain and frustration, she opened her mouth to reveal two large fangs and sunk them deep into the creature's skull.

45 Damage!

Its crying and struggling stopped as its face and body went slack from the relief of death. She withdrew her bloody fangs and arms from its corpse and hopped away from the mass of web covering the body. Shane realized something was wrong as she did so. He started running forward. He had to warn her the last and deadliest Blightling was missing from her webbing!

Unfortunately, he was too late, and he gasped as the creature exploded from the ground underneath where she stood. It must have watched her last attack on its comrade because it had its clawed hands together as if it had been diving into a pool. Except here, the Blightling plunged out of the ground and into her thorax, taking a huge chunk of dark flesh with it and shaving another forty hp off her health bar.

Sharlot jumped back, creating distance between herself and the final challenge before her. Shane's worry spiked as he saw a lot of dark green blood oozing from the jagged hole near her hind legs. He was surprised and even a little impressed by her lack of reaction to the pain of her wound. If it weren't for her near immunity to the Blightling's most potent tool, he knew she would have already perished, and the thought made him sick with anxiety.

Enough is enough. Sharlot's already proved her usefulness, there was no argument in his mind. Shane raised his hands and was about to cast a spell to support her when he heard her shout.

"Please don't interfere, master. If I can't win this as your companion, then I'm not even worthy of the rarity of the spell that created me. Let alone worthy of protecting you."

He was about to argue with her when the standoff between them ended—it was the beginning of many high-speed clashes between the two monsters.

Shane could barely track the two of them as they raced across the decaying grass and dead ground. Shane stayed vigilant and was ready to cast a regeneration spell on her as soon as she was hit again. To his surprise, every time it looked like the Blightling was going to attack, she shrunk her body size just enough to avoid it. Sharlot followed up by enlarging herself again and striking the beast during the opening.

Shane was captivated, with each clash resulting in the Blightling incurring small but steady wounds. As their blurred forms blitzed over the battlefield, the dead dirt and grasses slowly became awash with bright green blood. The Blightling's health bar was now sitting lower than hers with steaming blood seeping out of several wounds—some were deep, many more were shallow.

As the fight hit its climax, Shane's anxiety-fueled his annoyance at her plea to stay out of the battle. This is stupid, he thought. I can't let her die out of stubbornness to prove herself to me. Suddenly, the bleeding creature bellowed out a pained roar filled with frustration, and its beer-gut of a stomach began swelling.

This is bad! With no time left to think, he immediately cast "Regeneration" on Sharlot. Tiny, glowing golden orbs appeared around her and began to mend the hole in her thorax and her more minor wounds. Shane rolled his eyes as she stomped the ground with her front legs in what he could only imagine was her throwing a tantrum.

She would have kept stomping, too, if it weren't for the Blightling projectile-vomiting dark, steaming bile all over her.

Indignantly stomping the ground guaranteed her inability to react as the burning substance coated the front half of her body. Even with her high resistance, she couldn't ignore all of the toxin damage. Not even Shane's regeneration spell could fully counteract the bile's damage over time. For every two hp she gained from his spell, she lost four hp in total from the bile's acidity every second.

The two creatures began to clash again at high speed. The sound of her legs puncturing and slicing the Blightling's leathery hide spurred Shane into focused action. He knew she had a little less than half a minute left before the bile's damage would completely drain her HP over time. Even worse, bile that strong would undoubtedly outlast his "Regeneration" spell. By a stroke of luck, a crazy idea came to him in that second of dreadful realization.

What he did next was both a gamble and a race against the clock.