Jessica raced ahead and we made quick haste. All in all, it took us a little over a minute to reach the location of the battle. We found some vehicles to the side with a good vantage point and took cover.

The fight had slowed down considerably. Both sides were tired, and it seemed five or six more people had fallen on the True Believer side. Still, the Fiend wasn’t in good shape either. Judging by the fight though, there was a chance the Fiend would be able to finish this cleanly if we didn’t intervene.

That was the best-case scenario for us. By that point the Fiend would be on its last legs and we could dispatch it with due care. At least that was the ideal situation we were looking for. The feeling of impending doom I felt didn’t leave as we watched, and of course… things could never just go right.

The Fiend took the head of another melee class, and during its repositioning, sniped another spell caster with its tongue. This time when it landed, something odd happened. The melee didn’t rush to attack and encase it after it fled, and the spell casters stopped bombarding it with abilities. It was like time had stopped. The True Believers were all frozen in place.

I suddenly had a bad feeling, could it be? The Fiend was also too confused to attack. Its head turned from side to side as if wondering was this was a ploy to bait it into attacking: perhaps it was questioning whether to strike these stationary enemies would cost its life.

“I think the person in control of the True Believers just died,” I said aloud.

“Had to have been,” Thomas agreed instantly. “They all stopped moving at the same time.”

“What happens now then?” Maria asked.

“We wait a bit longer…” Jessica said to everyone while giving me a warning glance. It was all we could do. Safety was the number one priority.

The Fiend remained poised for action for what felt like an eternity, and then rushed a tank who had been giving it considerable trouble. The head of the tank flew clean off with no reaction and the Fiend suddenly became emboldened. It didn’t know what was happening, but it behaved as if a light at the end of the tunnel had arrived. It was going to rampage again.

The True Believer it was flying towards suddenly moved, just before their head was sliced clean off. This movement again gave the Fiend reason to pause. The other cultists were starting to wake. Once more the Fiend watched and waited. It did have intelligence, but not enough to know these humans had once been controlled. Probably nothing about this situation was making sense.

One after another the players started to move and come to their senses, and the sight wasn’t pretty. They groaned and spoke in muddled confusion while looking around. As they saw the carnage and bloodshed all around, their eyes showed unimaginable fear… and then they started to run.

Those who had woken up and regained enough self-awareness started to run like hell. The Fiend didn’t chase them, and instead started to kill those still in a stupor nearby as it grasped the crux of the situation at last. This was its last chance, and ours as well.

“If we are going to fight it, we have to strike now,” I looked at everyone. “If we wait any longer, it’s going to finish them off and disappear. Should we go for it?” I asked.

“It’s still incredibly strong.” Jessica warned.

I had come to terms with the possibility of leaving with nothing, so right now it was truly a toss up for me. In the end, the fight hadn’t panned out as I had hoped, and the amount of power left in the Fiend wasn’t known. It was weakened—maybe even on death’s door—but how many HP it had left was hard to gauge for sure.

“It’s okay to say ‘no’,” I spoke loudly enough for everyone to hear. But even as I said that, the option of declining the fight seemed to be taken away from us.

A female True Believer who had woken from her stupor came sprinting in our direction and having spotted us hiding behind the vehicle, she started yelled like a maniac. “HELP ME PLEASE!”

I looked at her and then the Fiend, while putting my finger over my mouth. It seemed her self-preservation skills remained poor, because she didn’t heed my warning and kept screaming. “PLEASE HELP ME, PLEASE!”

She wasn’t even half way to our vehicle before the Fiend, attracted by her yelling, sent a tongue directly through the back of her head. It then jumped to perch on a vehicle just ten feet away from us, and clearly had no intention of letting us walk away for free.

“Alan, Richard, GO!” I yelled.

They rushed to the front without a word, shields extended to the front. The rest of us took cover, either behind them or the vehicle between us and the Fiend. That tongue attack would be a one-shot to anyone in view. My undead squad poured forth to join Alan and Richard at the front.

Jessica cried out, “Too high level! I can’t get any stats or skills on it.” This was expected, but we at least had an idea of what it was capable of from seeing it in battle. The scream was a terrifying aoe ability that I prayed it wouldn’t use right now. Besides that, the tongue attack was deadly.

At least the Fiend’s terrifying melee prowess was only a fraction of what it had been at the start of the fight. At our current level we could just barely deal with its weakened state. It eyed me with a venomous stare: no doubt it was weighing its options.

“Use all the magic we have!” I told everyone. Elixirs came out of inventories and were popped back-to-back. Our farming had given us quite the haul of usables and now was no time to be stingy.

Alan and Richard threw back an Elixir of every stat, while the rest of us just had Elixirs for our main damaging stats. Whether the Fiend understood what we were doing or not, it was clearly hesitant of jumping in to melee against opponents who were once again behaving differently to what it was used to.

Perhaps the weird actions of the True Believers had made it question what it knew about humans. It wasn’t logical to attack without self-preservation in mind. That was something ants, or bees, or beings that only lived for a collective colony did.

Previously, its interactions with humans would have shown us to be timid creatures who cared about self-preservation more than anything. The people it would have met would have fled or tried to hide, and I could imagine how even when death was guaranteed they still crawled as if there was hope at the end of their fingertips, just out of reach. Today, it had met a human army acting to maximize the collective damage by sacrificing individuals.

Alan slapped his shield with his sword, and that meant the Fiend had no more time for contemplation, “Support me!” he cried, then cast Battle Shout and charged directly at the Fiend. Richard rushed behind him to assist. Alan was fully heated up now, and there was no turning back.

My undead warriors rushed forth like a tidal wave and quickly wrapped around the Fiend, lashing into it with their blades. The Fiend was completely encased in a circle of undead with Richard and Alan at the front opening. My spell casters were constantly firing magical bolts through the openings between our fighters.

Maria shot an Entangling Arrow and Jessica prepared some Quagmire traps in several directions. Given its high agility, the Fiend was going to be moving quite quickly. Hopefully, some of the Quagmire traps would prove useful as the fight progressed.

Lucas sent out a Windslash between Alan and Richard, but otherwise waited from a safe distance. As the only other melee, he needed to bide his time so as to not end up in the way, or worse, dead. Anna, Maria, Jessica and I had it much easier, all sending ability after ability towards the Fiend from a safe distance. The only thing holding us back was our MP limit.

Our teamwork was a beautiful orchestra to witness. I’d have believed it a fluke that every projectile reached the Fiend as Alan was just arriving to attack. It wasn’t a fluke though. It was synergy gained after fighting hundreds of battles together.

As Richard swung like a madman towards the Fiend, the Fiend also struck back. Its claws flashed out towards his jugular in a strike that had decapitated a hundred people already this day. The result that the Fiend must have expected, however, did not happen.

Richard’s head did not fly from his shoulders. No, a sword dug into the Fiend’s flesh instead as Alan parried the attack, sliding the sword across the top of his shield for stability. Not only that, a magical spell and two arrows shot into the exposed arm, the fiend’s only remaining arm, as it tried to attack.

The Fiend attempted to kick off Alan and retreat while tearing our tank’s belly open, but Richard was balanced to fend that attack off, too. His shield, glowing like hot iron, proved the defense against the kick of the Fiend, fully protecting Alan.

My horde of undead were raising their weapons and in another moment would have left the Fiend riddled with wounds. Despite its horribly damaged state, though, it launched off Richard’s shield as if gravity didn’t exist, fully breaking out of the enclosure of undead and repositioning itself with a furious glare towards Richard.

As it flew away with great force, it left a mist of blood hanging in the air from the wound inflicted by Alan on its arm. Nor did the bleeding stop. No doubt this was a result of Rend from Alan’s special sword.

“Careful of that tongue! Stay low!” I warned everyone while sending my undead after the Fiend in a frenzied chase. It always sent out a tongue attack with each repositioning, and I fully expected that scenario to repeat itself. Hopefully, everyone was fully concentrated and in their peak state, ready to duck if they were the target.

In anticipation of this moment, I had the forethought to position my casting skeletons between the Fiend and Jessica and Maria. The tongue did come, but it merely smashed into the skull of one of my casters before retreating as fast as it had come. Lucas had sent a Windslash in anticipation of the tongue attack, hoping to remove such a devasting and risky weapon. Unfortunately, the tongue was just too fast and it escaped the spell.

My warriors reached the Fiend just a moment later, as did Alan and Richard. We couldn’t give it a moment of reprieve. We all knew what happened when it was free to go on the offensive. Heads would fly. Even one loss would be devastating, let alone the fact that as soon as we began to go down, we could easily all be wiped out.

Fully surrounded on all sides, the Fiend lashed out with an almost break-dance type move as its back legs twirled. With its remaining, terrifyingly sharp claws, it probably expected to see slit throats or torn bellies on all sides.

Instead, it had simply sliced along the bones of each melee undead. Alan and Richard had cleanly parried its attack with their shields. Despite the ferocity of its move, it had failed to damage our melee classes. It knew a counter-attack was coming, and so the Fiend jumped again.

It jumped, but instead of finding a new vantage point for a tongue attack, the Fiend landed in a Quagmire trap. Its movement became sluggish and as though weighed down. A moment later there were vines covering its body as well. The damage done by the True Believers before our involvement had truly put the Fiend on death’s door. Its mobility was greatly weakened.

When the Fiend had looked at me, in its eyes I could see that it thought it would effortlessly finish off the remaining runners, and then have time to recuperate. Instead, it was being outclassed while in its weakened state. Now it writhed and faced away from us, clearly wanting to escape, but found that it almost couldn’t move from the floor at this point.

The air around it was frozen solid, and even the blood on its body crystalized and stiffened to a point every movement caused it to scream in agony. The Quagmire trap effect and Ensnaring arrow must have felt like chains heavy enough to restrain even a god.

The Fiend could only watch helplessly as magical spells flew at it and bombarded into its body constantly. It must have had a very high magic resistance, because the spells did not seem to cause much harm. Physical attacks however, were different.

The Fiend had taken almost all of its damage from physical attacks, especially when the True Believers had given their lives to deal damage to it. Because of that, I could see that it paid careful attention to arrows and melee weapons.

So now, when there was a fiery arrow shot directly towards its head, it did everything in its power to dodge. Despite the numerous restraints and terrifying damage, it twisted its body and bent its neck at great peril to its open-wounds. The Explosive arrow from Maria rushed by its head and exploded on the ground behind.

The world seemed to be in slow motion. I dreaded the fact that the Fiend had a moment to counter-attack: it was opening its mouth, preparing to strike with its tongue, and then suddenly its face exploded into gore. Through the blood and gore, I could see the confusion and dismay, the questioning: What had happened?

It was Jessica’s Godless Arrow, masked perfectly behind Maria’s Exploding Arrow. To something intelligent, this situation would be utterly baffling, and terrifying. To feel the enemies’ attacks could not be dodged, or to feel you’d done something correctly but the result was wrong.

It must have been terrifying for the Fiend, especially when the wrong result meant death. It managed a jump away from us, perhaps in hope of regaining its bearings and understanding what was happening. Unfortunately for it, it landed in another Quagmire Trap. The vines came, and so did the chill. We had created a recurring nightmare that the Fiend couldn’t escape from.

The Fiend was now riding a tiger and couldn’t get off. By skillful foresight from Jessica, perhaps based on observing the kinds of landing spots it preferred, it had landed in the second Quagmire she had laid. We would have a few seconds more before it could try to jump again and escape.

“A final effort!” I yelled to everyone. The effects of Quagmire on the weakened Fiend were astonishing, and it made landing the chill from Anna and the vines from Maria easy. Jessica was able to target one of the Fiend’s eyes with her arrows and blind it. The battle power we were unleashing right now was miraculous. We were executing the combat almost as efficiently as the True Believers, and we weren’t of one mind.

Maria shot another Explosive Arrow directly at its face in anticipation of the tongue attack. The Fiend was not so bewildered as to let it hit, dodging a different direction than previously. All the same, there was a new hole blown its face. This time however, it didn’t come away confused.

Its good eye was focused on Jessica and I had a grim intuition that it had noted the way she had released the string of her bow without an arrow flying from it. That eye glared with hatred at Jessica. It knew she was the main threat to the Fiend. She was the culprit. There was resolve in that look and I feared for Jessica.

Somehow or another, as the fight went better and better for us, the feeling of impending doom only grew worse for me. We were winning, but the feeling prickling my neck made me dizzy. The Fiend was on death’s door. A cornered animal with nothing to lose was most dangerous.

The fight reached a crescendo. Alan and Richard were moving in again, as were my undead warriors. Within seconds the Fiend would be surrounded and pummeled again. Contrary to expectations though, the fiend didn’t dodge or leap away from our encirclement. Instead, its tongue flew out lightning fast directly towards Jessica.

I looked at her face—her eyes were closed in concentration. She was no doubt using another Godless Arrow. My casters weren’t in the way this time: as the battle had turned by half a circle, they were out of position to our right. There was no time to berate myself for not having devoted a second of my mental focus to relocating them.

My alarm bells were ringing danger, and even without thinking about it, my feet moved. Not out of the way… but in the way. My world seemed to stop as I stared at the Fiend and that growing blob of pink. Just before the tongue tip completely blocked out my vision, the Zweihander-wielding Skeleton General cut the Fiend’s head clean off.

My neck started to burn like fire that oddly didn’t hurt at all. I reached down with my hand as my vision started to close in on itself. There was warm blood covering my entire hand. I looked at Jessica one last time before I collapsed.