I twisted my arm and shifted my weapon into a spear, then summoned the cruel world’s partition back to me. I felt it buzzing with stored damage, but it still wasn’t enough. It was the only long-range attack that I had, but I needed to take a lot of damage to get it to work. And the hydras weren’t necessarily doing a lot of damage to me; that seemed like it was the job of the main heads, while the ranged heads were annoying fuckers that only existed to get the main heads in range.

Even with all of my stat boosts from my armor, and all the non-immobilizing boosts from endless, I still felt greatly outmatched. No matter how I dodged, there were simply too many hydra pieces for me to deal with. I spun my spear in a circle, hoping that it would create a mobile shield of petal-scales, and was very surprised when it worked.

A disk of petal-scales appeared around my spear, but it didn’t detach from it. I had to pull my spear back and order the two halves to come together to get that to happen, but it was a much-needed reprieve from the constant barrage of horrible annoyances. Even as the petal-scales disappeared under the onslaught, it gave me time to think.

I needed to get the cruel world’s partition in the right place. And I had to charge it up enough without accidentally killing myself in the process. That meant I had to put the partition itself in the line of fire, which would transfer some of the damage to me, but hopefully just as armor integrity loss. I swept my weapon through the air twice to create some ranged weapons, then took a quick look around the room to gauge where I had to place myself.

Most of the room on my side was littered with hydra chunks. Jun’s side was mostly pristine, except for the attacks from the one remaining ranged head she was in the process of dodging. None of the smaller hydras were focused on her at all, and as I took a step back to try and position the shield of petal-scales between me and the majority of the hydra chunks, I noticed something.

Their attacks were slowing down. I glanced over at one of the head-chunks that had been there the longest, and its puddle of off-white light had completely depleted. It looked mostly dead, with the roots withering away to reveal the chunk of bone underneath, but it didn’t stop attacking just yet. And with every constantly weakening attack, the thing withered away even further.

“They all have their own individual battery stores?” I muttered to myself as the battery draw to keep my armor in place grew. Damned teleportation breath. “So we can outlast the chunks that get blown off, but the main body looks like it doesn’t have that problem. And if it keeps regenerating heads, then there’s no point in trying to outlast the things…”

I nodded to myself. The main body was the problem. The little chunks were annoying, but they didn’t have the destructive power of the main body. All we needed to do was destroy the main body, then clear a safe enough space for us to outlast the chunks of fallout.

{Jun, I’m going to get in close.} I said as I kicked off toward the hydra. Even if it destroys some heads, keep them at bay.}

A gunshot that took a chunk from the turquoise head punctuated my sentence. {I hope you know what you’re doing.} Jun sent back, then the line crackled with static. {Drown me, it’s starting to sprout from the other side. Be careful.}

Sprout from the other side? I frowned and opened my shield up for a split second to see what the hell Jun meant by that, and instantly I saw that something had changed. Three of the dangling possible necks had disappeared, and from where I was standing, I could see three more heads mostly germinated on the other side of the hydra. If that had happened between Jun’s gunshot and her second message, the hydra was getting a lot faster at sprouting.

As that thought scraped over my mind, I was proven horribly right. The two melee heads lashed down at me as two vestigial stalks burst to life in a deluge of off-white that flashed and splattered into deep orange and magenta light. I shoved my shield at one head and a slash each at the newly formed ones, then summoned the cruel world’s partition in the path of the turquoise head’s horrible sawblade jaws.

Damage numbers blossomed onto my visor. The spray of small numbers, redirected armor integrity loss, and actual pain that crept up on me was nothing short of terrifying. It wasn’t just armor integrity loss; the system felt the need to make me feel every point of damage the cruel world’s partition redirected. Bastard.

I grit my teeth and planted my spear in the turquoise head, then ripped a petal-scale summoning slash through it. Thick liquid blood splattered onto the ground, but the head didn’t fall. I’d done serious damage–its jaw hung by a thread and half of its upper head was split in two–but I’d managed to keep it from sprouting. I ignored the onslaught of annoyances and pulled my slashes back as I retreated to the sound of Jun’s gunshots severely ramping up in frequency.

Just as I was about to ask her how it was going, the orange head made a move. But not at me. It lunged at the mostly destroyed turquoise head, and in a horribly brutal show of guillotine-like precision, sickly orange blades removed the turquoise head. I spat a curse and ran at the hydra; if that orange head was smart enough to take off the other heads, it had to go. Before it could snip off the other two heads that were being dragged under the hydra’s body.

I swung my spear at the exposed neck, but met a wall of magenta light. The other new head hissed at me while it glowed, projecting a perfect disk of light between me and my target. I reared back and shifted my weapon into a hammer mid-swing, which landed with a horrible crack of petal-scales, but it only sent a spiderweb of damage through the summoned barrier.

Shit. I rolled out of the way of the red head, but that left me immoble and unprotected. Extreme weight settled on my back, and I had to flicker my armor, which took a split second and opened my up for the red head’s follow-up. It slammed into my chest and sent me skidding along the ground. I’d dodged the fangs, which were the real danger, and the actual physical attack didn’t have anywhere near the eight I’d been expecting.

It hit like a midsize sedan, not a freight train. The hydra was spreading itself thin, or so I hoped. I jumped to my feet and swung the hammer petal-scale impact into a large chunk of blue hydra that had set its sights on me, then ran back towards the hydra.

The cruel world’s partition was almost filled–the glowing lines almost completely filled the monolithic shield, and the weight of its existence on my mind was terrifyingly heavy. I needed to get it hit more, or I needed to take a few hits to fully charge it up. If the blast could take out the main body in its entirety, then we’d just have to find somewhere to hide and outlast the battery reserves on the chunks.

Something told me that wasn’t the right course of action. I bit my lip and frowned at the icons on my visor; wipe-away hadn’t activated once. The hydra counted as one large thing, not a collection of individual heads. If the blast didn’t destroy the main body, then we’d be back at square one. Actually, more like square negative five, since we’d have to deal with so many head chunks and a main body.

No; what we needed to do was destroy the main body, then clear the chunks with the blast. That was my original plan, and I was going to stick to it. I challenged the hydra again, using my hammer impacts to slam away the heads that tried to bite at me, and pushed the cruel world’s partition into the path of whatever heads I could. It absorbed as much damage as I took, and after a few more heavy impacts, I felt it jitter with anticipation.

//Cruel World’s Apocalypse now available.

I slammed my hammer into a head without holding back. {Jun, destroy as much of the hydra as you can! Mortician, switch to an empowering buff!}

Both things happened at once. The aura around me shifted colours as a rain of bullets slammed into the hydra, cracking with the first few then shattering with a final shot. But it wasn’t just one set of four shots. It was a constant deluge of crack, shatter, and destroyed roots. I stared with slack-jawed awe as the hydra was chewed up like a log in a woodchipper, even if the heads themselves were still in relatively good shape.

That was my job. I summoned as much power as I could and slammed the magenta head between two hammer impacts, crushing bone and root into a spray of paste and chunks that fell to the ground and started to reform. With that fucker out of the way, I ran in close and sheared the red head clean off with a full-force smash into the middle of its neck. The rest of the heads fell just as easily as those two under Jun’s suppressing fire and my heavy impacts,

Which left only the headless main body and a whole lot of sprouting hydra chunks with their own off-white puddles. But even that wasn’t enough. We needed to make sure the hydra couldn’t regenerate those heads, which meant the main body had to go. Absolutely and utterly. Jun was doing a fine job of it, but she was going too slow; her gun simply wasn’t made for removing large chunks of flesh at a time. And Okeria’s little gun was extremely destructive, but not widespread enough to do as much damage as we needed.

So I got to smashing. Chunks of hydra flesh burst and flew with every swing of my hammer, even as damage and status effects mounted from the chunks that were pretty much fully formed. I grit my teeth and ignored them to the best of my abilities, but as the notifications started to overtake the vast majority of my visor, it got hard to ignore.

I slammed my hammer to the side as Jun bent down to reload, but thought differently of it and motioned for me to take cover. She switched to the smaller gun and fired off three quick shots that split into two in midair, which did enough damage to the main body that I felt confident in taking the next step.

With a thought, I activated the Cruel World’s Apocalypse.