I didn’t have to wait long for the dreaded spell to impact the volcano I was in. I felt it coming even before I was launched out of the protective shell once again. My HP was dangerously low, everything I’d managed to restore with my restoration spell evaporated like it was a dream. A quick view at my status revealed something that I barely thought possible. I was running on fumes on all fronts as my HP, MP, and VMP were all about to bottom out. Once again, the thought of giving up entered my mind briefly but was immediately dismissed. I had fought tooth and nail to get this far, might as well see it through to the end.

Just like the last time this happened, I snapped open my wings and used the force of the attack to propel me away from my assailant. As I dodged the large pieces of the volcano that flew all around me, I got my first glimpse of the aftermath of the spell. The spell itself seemed to have been a sort of shockwave. The wave was still visible ahead of me, spreading out more and more, obliterating everything in its path. Behind me, I could see the voidling stand in the distance, observing the results of its spell, no doubt keeping an eye out for me.

I once again activated void cloak, judging that with the low amounts of mana I had left, I might as well make it as hard as possible to find me. I kept cruising along, trying to stay as low to the ground as possible while keeping an eye ahead and the other glued to the voidling. It was hard to tell what it was doing exactly. The thousands of worms that made it up were in constant motion, the form of the voidling ever-changing.

It was rather easy to figure out what was happening as the worms formed an arm that then proceeded to point directly at me. Even though I had already anticipated this, my heart still sank. It knew where I was. I only had enough mana to make a few more low-range jumps, which wouldn’t even matter. If the two-headed voidling could catch up to me almost instantly after a jump, the big one over there would have even less trouble doing so. My offensive spells were of no consequence to a being such as this, and all of my useful skills were currently on cooldown.

I remembered that I had one more spell in my pocket that might buy me a few precious seconds when the voidling rushed in my direction at unreal speeds. A seemingly unstoppable tide of black worms came directly at me and, seeing no reason to hold my last hoorah back if I would die either way, I used guardian summon for the first time. The seven souls I’d collected materialized behind me in the form of various, translucent sea creatures. Two of them were massive, although I didn’t pay too much attention to them as I simply commanded them to stall the voidling while I continued to race away as fast as I could.

A second later, the summons clashed with the voidling. To my surprise, they actually managed to hold the much stronger monster in place for about three seconds. Then, they were surrounded by worms and disappeared forever. It almost seemed more like the voidling stopped for a snack than the guardians actually doing anything. I didn’t know what exactly happened in there, and I didn’t want to know, lest I get more voidling related nightmares.

The point was, the voidling was barreling towards me like an unstoppable force of nature. I was just about running on empty, had played all the cards I had, and had done everything in my power to delay the inevitable for even one more second. I looked back at the surging mass of worms, equal parts content and terrified. I’d come within a hair's breadth several times in my life as a monster, but somehow this felt more real than any other time. Maybe it was the fact that it was clearly coming for me instead of happening due to a mistake that I barely had time to realize.

The voidling was almost upon me now and I realized that all of the worms had tiny faces on them. Beady black eyes and a tiny mouth with glistening white teeth that somehow made this creature even more scary. I used my last dregs of mana to fire off a few spells, more as an act of defiance than an attempt at actually hurting this thing. Most of them exploded harmlessly against the mass of worms, but one of my poison spears seemed to phase through the creature as the worms moved out of its way in perfect coordination.

Dude was just showing off at that point.

It was when I resigned myself to my fate when a bright wall of light sprung into existence between us and the mass of worms slammed against it like a wave crashing into a cliff. The wall was shortly followed by a massive wave of roiling fire that washed over the worms. Thousands of tiny mouths screamed out in pain as they actually took damage for once and I couldn’t help but marvel at the display of magic before me.

A new system message was telling me that I’d managed to complete the emergency quest and that it was calculating the rewards, much to my relief. As soon as I saw the message I let myself drop to the ground where I skidded to an uncomfortable stop after skipping on the rocks a few times. The cavalry finally arrived, and not a second too late. I let my eyes wander in the direction from where the flame spell had come from, spying twelve humanoids running in the voidlings direction.

It was a pretty diverse group as far as I could tell, all of them dressed and armored differently than all the others. Leading the charge were three people bearing swords and wearing full plate armor. I spied at least one that I assumed to be a dwarf that was only half the height of everybody else and swinging a decently sized hammer around. In the back were what I assumed to be mages, although only one of them carried around a staff that I associated with magic casters. There were also two people with bows and one guy that had a gun for some reason. His presence clashed a bit with the otherwise pretty fantasy group, but I wasn’t about to question it.

Spells, skills, arrows, bullets, throwing knives, and all manners of projectiles flew into the mass of squirming worms where they either cut apart or exploded, froze or dissolved, penetrated or squished a good number of the voidlings mass. I simply lay there watching the group decimate what had seemed like an unsurmountable obstacle to me, one eye passively following the humanoid running in my direction.

It took about five seconds for the human to run to me. As he got closer I took a good look at the man, garbed in almost offensively white robes. If it weren’t for the gold accents I might have thought that he was wearing his bathrobes or something, but that would be insane. He looked shockingly normal aside from his choice of attire. His long hair was tied into a ponytail and he was sporting a neatly trimmed beard. He slid to a stop next to me as his hazelnut eyes scanned me for some reason. Shortly after I saw a spell matrix starting to form. It took him almost three seconds to complete the spell that I’d at best classify as a medium-sized matrix, which seemed odd to me.

A soothing light engulfed me and I could feel my wounds start to heal and I abandoned the questions that were beginning to form in my head. Maybe he was just generally slow, or the spell was new, who am I to judge? I could clearly see his mouth move and I assumed that he was talking to me. Too bad I didn’t have ears to hear with. Maybe I should get some in the future. Maybe some that I could seal up when I wasn’t using them. I had come to like the silence, not to mention the immunity to sound-based attacks.

“I can’t understand a word you’re saying, I don’t have ears.”

The human winced as I spoke to him in the language of the void, no doubt due to the headache-inducing effect the words had on the uninitiated. He seemed to get the message, though, as he stopped trying to talk to me. I was grateful that they didn’t attack me as well, probably because the system somehow tagged me as a non-hostile voidling… or something. In the time that it took to heal me, his friends managed to completely eradicate the voidling that had been gunning for me. I could see that the dwarf was giving out orders, after which the group split up, probably to go look for other voidlings that had survived the chaos.

The dwarf then joined up with the staff-wielding mage and leisurely walked over to us, causing me to finally get up from my crumpled-up position on the ground and assume a presentable posture, right side up. My health was back to full thanks to the white healer, but my mana pools were still way too low to do anything significant, albeit recovering fast. As they drew closer I compared myself to the human standing next to me. I had always been curious about how large I was compared to a human and now I finally got an opportunity to measure myself.

When I was flat on the ground as I currently was, I was barely a bit higher than the healer’s knees. Curious about how I measured up in length, I lifted my upper body off the ground, only using the last third of my body to stand. I felt like a periscoping snake as I stretched higher and higher until I was about shoulder height. I didn’t count my eye stalks in the height comparison, but if I had, I would be taller. My actions got me a few odd looks and I realized that my actions might seem a bit strange to the others and I simply flopped back to the ground.

The dwarf and the mage had reached us by now and the dwarf was in a very animated conversation with the healer while the mage was looking me up and down. He seemed oddly fascinated with me, causing me to wonder just what it was that was so interesting about me.

“Uhhh, hi?” I tried communicating once again and this time all three of them winced at my words. Maybe I should stop doing that. Not being able to talk with these guys sucked major ass. Here I was, standing in front of a whole bunch of travelers that could probably answer a ton of the questions I had, but the language barrier denied me this boon.

The mage waved around his hands for a bit, which caused some odd floating sigil to appear after a while. He seemed disappointed when I didn’t react to it in any way and let the odd spell dissipate. I called it odd because there had been no spell matrix involved in its creation. Maybe it hadn’t been a spell? The three continued their discussions for a while, occasionally pointing at me. The mage especially seemed to have an unhealthy obsession with me. I couldn’t hear or understand anything, but the facial expressions of this guy told me everything I needed to know.

A few minutes later, the other members of their group started coming back, seemingly done with their tasks. Once everybody had gathered, the dwarf addressed them, talking for a while. There was a lot of head shaking after he asked a question, and I could only assume that he had asked if anybody could talk with me. His shoulders sagged a bit as he took out a device from his inventory and pushed a button, which caused a swirling blue portal to appear about five meters away. The group started shuffling in and disappearing one by one while the dwarf turned toward me once more.

He said something, which I obviously didn’t understand, and produced a small card that he held out to me. Getting the hint, I extended one of my arm tentacles to grab it, holding it up to my eyes. The card had some writing on it that I couldn’t decipher, so I shrugged and put it into my inventory. It was kind of funny to get a business card in this situation. The dwarf nodded at me, turning to the portal as well. The mage enthusiastically waved at me as they both stepped through the portal. It disappeared as soon as they were gone, leaving naught but destruction and a confused voidling behind.