It took a second for the warrior’s horrified cry to spread, but within moments, everyone knew what was going on. The monster wasn’t walking or rolling so much as it was closing in on them. The gigantic ring of flesh was ever so slowly coiling itself up like a snake, finally revealing that it did have a head and a tail as it did so. Each end was entirely without features, like the two ends of an enormous worm. The sheer body mass of the monster was enough that as it pulled itself tighter and shrunk the space between the walls and it, the force of its movements was creating a continuous earthquake. Though it was much worse than that.

  Long before the monster got to the point where it would physically pop them like a grape between its massive form, the hundreds of leashed monsters attached to its body would reach them and tear the defenders to shreds. Each one looked to be as large and as strong as a standard elite monster, and Vin had no doubt that they would have had a horrific battle on their hands already if the tendrils hadn’t existed to hold the monsters back.

  Strange that the monster had formed in such a way.

  Panicked cries rang out as others came to the same conclusion Vin had about being crushed to death, but the Strategist’s voice rang out above all of them, her words somehow magically amplified.

  “Calm down!” she snapped, her words booming across the land and silencing most of the terrified cries. “It’s closing slowly enough that we have time! The plan stands, fire first, then acid! Let’s figure out how to kill this thing!”

  “You heard Mei, make it happen!” Spur shouted, his tone kicking the Earthers into second gear as everyone ran to follow her orders. Shaking his head, Spur turned to share a quick frown with Vin. “Though I don’t know how much good it will do us. What do you think?”

  “It’s already shown to have incredible regeneration ability,” Vin muttered, wondering how someone went about killing something a few thousand times larger than themselves when it could heal whatever meager damage they managed to inflict. “My first thought is death magic, but I don’t have anywhere close to enough mana to even leave a dent in something that size, let alone actually kill it.”

  As he thought, the first of the ballistae fired, launching a few flaming bolts covered in oil. The bolts crashed into the side of the epic monster and the extra oil contained within the shaft splashed everywhere, causing the flames to spread in wide puddles.

  The monster didn’t even do so much as roar, it simply continued constricting inward toward them at the same exact pace. All the while, its small army of horrifying monsters continued to snap and roar at them from the edge of their leashes.

  “Fire doesn’t seem to be the answer,” Golrim said unhelpfully, having darted over toward them as their Strategist began commanding everyone to try acid next. The usually calm and collected advisor looked a tad worried for once as his eyes scoured over the monster, looking for some sort of weakness they could exploit. “Vin, if you were holding anything back earlier when you told me what you and your team were capable of, now would be an excellent time to come clean. I don’t suppose you’re secretly sitting on a high tier offense spell, are you? I promise I won’t even be offended about you lying to me if you are.”

  “Fireball and Stone Shot are all I have in terms of offense,” Vin said, shaking his head as the specialized ballista bolts were fired, these ones tipped with heads Myers had constructed from what remained of the giant slime monster Vin had crushed with gravity magic during the battle for wave four. Wherever the bolts landed, acid sprayed everywhere, covering giant chunks of the monster in sizzling liquid. Though while the acid seemed to be working, melting straight through its flesh and creating a truly horrific-smelling black smoke, it wasn’t nearly enough.

  The monster was as thick as a house, and long enough to wrap fully around town. Even if it couldn’t regenerate, they’d need a few thousand gallons of acid to do any sort of noticeable damage.

  “Epic monsters are bull crap,” Spur muttered, closing his eyes as he desperately searched for a solution to their problem. But before he could give it too much thought, explosions began ringing out around the outskirts of town. Vin stared in confusion for a second as one fleshy monster after another seemed to randomly detonate in a pink blast, before he realized what was happening.

  “They’re hitting Alice’s line of magic claymores,” he said, watching as more and more monsters violently blew up. Yet for every single one that detonated, mere seconds after it was gone, it quickly began forming once more from whatever remained of the fleshy tendril connecting it to the base of the monster. Even so, that was enough to give the Strategist a new idea.

  “Slayers!” Mei shouted, pointing toward the monster. “I need you to try cutting those tendrils off at the base! If we can dispatch the protrusions, we can more easily deal with the giant monster!”

  “We’re on it!” Alka shouted, raising her sword high. “Slayers! Kill!”

  As if they’d been waiting their whole lives for that order, seventeen Slayers broke off from the front of the pack of warriors. The six Slayers who were already being referred to as the Old Guard after their incredible showing in the battle for wave four wore silver armbands to identify themselves, but all seventeen Slayers wore identical black-dyed leathers to mimic Alka’s darthsteel plating. Even Tiffany wore a black shirt, her spider lower-half not needing any form of pants as she sprinted ahead of all the others, leading the charge with her remarkable speed.

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  To Vin’s surprise, there was one other unusual form among the seventeen Slayers. An eight-foot-tall orc with more muscle than the next three closest people combined lumbered along right beside them, wearing his own loose set of black leathers. Vin knew that Trod had been ordered by Curash to go with Alka and help her however she deemed necessary, but he hadn’t realized that meant the orc might very well dive headfirst into his own death doing so.

  Just how loyal to Curash was he?

  Vin expected Tiffany and the others to race over the half-regenerated monsters that didn’t even have upper bodies constructed yet, so he gasped when what looked like the bottom half of some sort of eight-legged panther turned despite its lack of head toward Tiffany, before lunging at her with jagged claws splayed out. Luckily, Tiffany’s merider body had incredible reflexes, and the Slayer stopped and reversed her direction in the blink of an eye, narrowly dodging the surprise attack. Not giving it a chance to attack again, she darted around and sliced off the tendril just behind the monster as it turned to follow her. Like she’d pulled the plug, the fleshy monster collapsed to the ground, unmoving. A new one began growing from where she’d severed almost immediately, and she cut that off as well, rushing down the line and continuing to cut the flesh tendril until she made it to the monster’s true body. Just as the Strategist had ordered, she sliced the tendril off at the base, and everyone held their breath as they waited to see what would happen.

  Barely a second later, the tendril began regenerating, and a new monster started forming right beside the monster. But before anyone could even so much as let out a groan of disappointment, Tiffany leapt into action. Repeatedly chopping off the ever-growing tendril of flesh with the sword in her hands, her merider half got to work churning out silk. Vin realized what she was planning to do mere seconds before she did it, and he couldn’t help but laugh.

  Chopping the tendril off at the base one more time, Tiffany slapped a patch of merider silk directly onto where it kept regenerating, the mana-enhanced webbing holding strong and preventing the tendril from regenerating any further.

  “That-a girl!” Alka laughed, busy fighting her own monster as she did a one hundred and eighty degree look over her shoulders at the merider. The remaining sixteen Slayers and Trod had their hands full fighting back against the swarm of constantly regenerating monsters as they protected Tiffany, but that was exactly what they’d trained for. “New plan! Protect Tiffany as she seals up the tendrils!”

  A fresh round of cheering erupted from the watching Earthers as the Slayers began making their way down the monster’s body, fighting their way through the fleshy imitation monsters as Tiffany sealed the tendrils one by one and prevented them from regenerating. As the Slayers worked, a few hundred other combat classes joined in, rushing out to meet the fleshy protrusions head on and trying to thin the herd. Now that everyone understood their weakness, all it took were a handful of people to distract the protrusion while one slipped around behind and severed the tendril at the base. After that, they could continue chopping off the base over and over again before the monster got a chance to fully regenerate and attack.

  Thanks to Tiffany and her quick thinking, the issue of the endlessly regenerating monsters was solved.

  But not everyone was cheering.

  “That’s great and all, but it’s not fixing the main problem,” Spur pointed out, glaring daggers at the monster as it continued slowly pulling closer to them. “We need to take down the monster’s main body or all of us and everything we’ve built will be ground to dust. I’d say we needed to evacuate, but it has us completely surrounded. We either figure something out, or we all die here as one.”

  “Not only that, but she’s not going to have enough silk,” Vin added. “Merider silk is incredibly mana-dense, but it takes them ages to stockpile it. The monster is huge. Even if she had all the time in the world, she’ll probably run out before she closes up even a sixth of the available tendrils.”

  “Still, it buys us space to actually make it to the main body without having to constantly fight against the regenerating protrusions,” Golrim said, his earlier concerns seemingly entirely gone. Vin knew there was no way they were out of the woods just yet, but Golrim was remarkably good at only showing what he wanted on his face. “Maybe now we can figure out how to kill it. At the rate it’s constricting, we have approximately twenty-three minutes before it reaches the wall. The protruding monsters, of course, will hit sooner.”

  “We could try attacking it from the inside?” Spur offered. “That’s always how it works in movies.”

  “This is not one of your strange, flat plays,” Golrim frowned, staring hard at the monster. “Anything that goes into the monster is liable to simply be dissolved in magically enhanced stomach acid. I think we should try and focus our attacks at a single point. Try to cut it in half. Even if that doesn’t kill it, if we cut it in half, it should prevent it from continuing to constrict around us and crushing us.”

  “Or it will create a second epic monster that we’ll then have to deal with,” Spur pointed out. “Maybe we should save that as a last resort?”

  “It’s as good a plan as any,” Vin shrugged. “And I think we’re already at ‘last resort’ status if we have less than half an hour left before we all die. Though how do we cut it in half? The ballistae are spread all along the wall, we can’t exactly focus our fire with them at a single point all that well. Do any of the combat classes have some sort of ‘giant sword’ skill?”

  Golrim paused, taking a moment to think before an idea seemed to strike him. Fixing Vin with one of his usual small smiles, Golrim asked two seemingly innocent questions that sent joint shivers down Vin’s spine.

  “Where is your girlfriend… and exactly how much weight do you think you can carry?”

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