As soon as he broke through the tree canopy, it only took Kaldalis a second to figure out where to go. There was a clearing in the jungle ahead - with peculiarly square edges to mark it as the former site of a large Lataxinan building fallen to ruin - and while he couldn’t see the floating monster from this angle, he couldn’t see any break in the canopy of it where it could have left.

The dull thud of an explosion came from that direction.

Kaldalis descended back down into the treetops, and as soon as he could plant his feet on a branch he launched himself towards the clearing. He sailed over the greenery before bursting out into the clearing.

The Abstract was there, still badly wounded, hovering ominously a little lower to the ground - where it would not be seen by anyone leaping over the treetops. Beneath it the area was already being churned by the monster’s attacks, and a half-dozen adventures there were struggling to keep ahead of the smashing attacks of its hooked arms.

Kaldalis descended upon the thing from above with his spear held high. He landed on one of the inner rings - like Ess and Myrin had back in the town - and stabbed his spear into it.

He still did only fifty-two damage to it, and didn’t even apply a stack of poison this time, but there was definitely a sense of the monster’s suddenly shifting priorities. Kaldalis could almost feel the moment when the thing recognized him as the evasive gnat that had stymied it back in Cotanaku.

“Hey big guy,” Kaldalis said into the monster’s glowing core with his best snarky smirk. “I’m back!”

There was a flash from the core, and Kaldalis hopped quickly to the left along the floating ring he was standing on. The bolt of energy shot out of the core at where he had been, just a hair too slow to catch him, and sailed off harmlessly into the sky.

Kaldalis kept hopping to the left along the ring until he got to the spot where Ess and Myrin had broken a part of its outer shell and stabbed into the weakened spot. The exposed flesh beneath the metal shell was cartilaginous flesh that was a nearly neon orange color, and stabbing into it was like sticking a fork into the joint of a rotisserie chicken. Despite the vaguely nauseating mixture of boney resistance and fleshy softness, Kaldalis’s attack still only did fifty-two damage.

“What are you doing here?” a voice called from below.

Kaldalis looked down to see Martok looking up at him. He was more than a little visibly battered, and the group with him had only two archers. The fellow tank looked agitated to see Kaldalis here.

“Someone yelled for help,” Kaldalis called back, dancing along the floating ring to try and anticipate the next energy blast. It didn’t come yet, but he could sense the Abstract’s agitation continuing to build. “I’m just here to provide!”

“Ha’DIbaH,” Martok cursed in his guttural second language. Despite that, he seemed relieved to be able to fall back a bit as the monster seemed to turn its attention entirely towards Kaldalis.

A few seconds after coming on the scene, the two spear-wielders Dalgaard had sent with him burst out of the tree canopy as well. With calm and professional precision, they assessed the situation, and rushed towards the other DPS from Martok’s group. In seconds, the pair of them ferried a twin daggers wielder and a sword and shield DPS up onto the monster’s arms, just as Ess had demonstrated in the fight in town.

Kaldalis’s Jump cooldown was nearing its end, and he knew it wasn’t going to be smart to stay on top of the monster as its primary target if he didn’t have a reliable way back down to the ground. He jabbed the thing one last time before jumping, just before another bolt of energy launched up into the sky, inches from taking him right in the face.

A hooked metal arm came down on him right before he hit the ground, but Kaldalis was ready for that. The monster had proved to be semi-intelligent, and it attempted to anticipate his use of Slowfall to dodge again. Instead, Kaldalis twisted in the air horizontally, letting the attack pass above him harmlessly. Even if it meant he landed face-first in the dirt instead of on his feet, he knew from experience that if this thing caught him, it was likely to hammer him to death as fast as it could.

“Smooth landing,” Courbois remarked as she ran by just as Kaldalis struggled to his feet.

He wasn’t sure when Dalgaard and the others had arrived, but he was grateful to see Balrim add his arrows to the fray, and a couple of Dalgaard’s people swapping to bows as well. Meanwhile, Courbois used the acrobatic skills of her staff to clamber onto the fluted metal limb that had just missed hitting Kaldalis and scrambling up it like she was playing a precision platformer. As the arm withdrew, she started smacking it with her staff, but the monster’s next attack was still targeted squarely at Kaldalis, without any concern for its new passenger.

Kaldalis couldn’t spare much more attention for the others now. The next blast from the monster was charging up, and he only barely managed to scramble out of the way. The monster started to spin in the air, and hooked metal arms rained down on him rapidly as soon as they came into position to strike.

The ground rumbled as arm after arm thundered into the ground. Kaldalis was barely able to keep ahead of them, casting aside all concerns except scrambling to and fro, in a constant state of praying for luck and being rewarded with yet another second of life each time. The only thing keeping him on his feet was the constant twitching and lashing of his tail, the instinctive counterweight in constant motion as he hurled himself out from under strike after strike of the giant monster.

Despite the other tanks in the fight - Martok had established aggro on it before Kaldalis arrived, and now Courbois at least was clinging to one of its arms - it never moved to attack anyone else. Kaldalis wasn’t sure if that was a sign of intelligence that it could experience hatred, or a sign of animalistic limitations that it couldn’t make any smarter tactical assessment of the battle.

Just fluid motions. Raw instinct. No thoughts, just a complete and total focus on constant and consistent evasion. It took all of Kaldalis’s efforts to just keep ahead of the pure rage focused his way. His world shrank to the rhythmic cacophony of hooked metal arms crashing down.

SMASH. Jump left. SMASH. Dive back. SMASH. Sprint right for exactly three steps and then hard left turn. SMASH. Fake right, spin in place, drop to one knee. SMASH. Roll left, jump up, lunge forward. SMASH.

He almost didn’t notice when the fight was won.

Kaldalis was just starting to tell himself that victory was inevitable as long as he could keep ahead of the attacks coming his way when the attacks suddenly stopped. His whole body seized up in panic when his instincts couldn’t tell him how to dodge the next attack because it wasn’t coming.

The floating monster jerked in the air. Arms twitched and its central rings quivered. The first sound the monster made was like a dozen mismatched tuning forks being struck in discordant tandem.

The light in the center of it winked out, and the parts were suddenly just that. Parts. Big hunks of metal crashed down to the ground one after the other. Each one was badly damaged, with many sections of the metal shell broken. Now that Kaldalis could pay attention to more than the area immediately above himself, he saw the spatter of orange goo all over the battlefield.

There were also way more adventurers here than he expected. About a dozen people were riding the metal parts down to the ground - grunting in pain when they landed - with two dozen more gathered around, either hucking potions at the people hitting the ground or raising their bows in triumph at their victory over the Abstract.

Kaldalis became aware of two things as the monster fell.

First, its death told him that it was not just an Abstract. The system formally called it a “Partially-Formed Unaligned Abstract” which put some things into perspective. This monster had represented a significant threat to the entire town, and it hadn’t even achieved its final form? He had been just about to wonder if the Lataxinans had overstated the threat level of an Abstract. If this thing had been fully-formed, could they have damaged it at all through its tremendous stats? Would he have survived taking any damage at all? Would it have fallen victim to such primitive tactics? Or would it have just obliterated them all with brutal efficiency?

The second thing was that when it died, the Dedication effect of his ring was still active. And the experience point reward for this thing was tremendous even without the multiplier.

In shock, his accountant brain took over, and told him that the base reward had to be the result of a buggy interaction with a monster that wasn’t supposed to exist in this world. It had been worth 3500 experience points baseline. But with the multiplier?

Kaldalis skipped over level 19 entirely and jumped right to 20.