I looked at the giant soul in the distance, and calculated how fast it was approaching. At this rate, it would reach me in three to four minutes. I squinted at it. I had already known my ‘stealthy thievery’ plans were a bit of a long shot, but I hadn’t expected them to go up in flames this fast. Was the creature somehow linked to the stone golem I had just killed? Or had it noticed the fight for a different reason? It was hard to guess - I had no idea what this creature’s abilities were. The only thing I could be certain of was the fact that its soul was bright - very bright. That meant it was dangerous.

I did my best to estimate its fortitude using its flame of life, and winced. Probably around Grade 16. That meant it was a bit tougher than the giant centipede - and based on the speed it was moving at, its other stats were decently high too, although much lower than its Fortitude. Thankfully, it was much slower than those ridiculous spiders we had fought in the Market last time - I didn’t need to worry about this thing moving so fast I couldn’t even hit it. Extinguish would be of limited use this fight, and whittling this creature down would also be very difficult.

I checked my essence reserves, and frowned. I had taken a rest every time I had gotten into a fight, so it wasn’t like I was critically low on any of my essences. However, I had indeed spent a moderate amount of my alteration essence killing off the stone golem.

A moment later, I started moving. The cave was too confined for me to express my full fighting abilities, and I had 3 minutes. I wanted to get as close to the entrance of the cave as I could before the creature arrived - that way, I could make use of {Fractal Rush} without hurting myself. It would also make it easier to escape if the fight went badly for me.

I no longer worried about stealth. I snapped open my umbrella, and threw essence into it. My body jolted and strained as I held on, and I tore through the cave and back towards the entrance. Luckily, the two grades of Fortitude I had gained over the past month made my body far sturdier and more resilient than before. This level of speed would have deeply bruised my arms last month, but now, the damage was minor.

The damage to my arms didn’t matter. I could use a Renewal to heal my arms afterwards. What I needed was to get to a favorable battlefield as fast as possible. Seconds ticked by as I darted through the cave, doing my best not to crash into any of the walls while flying as fast as I could.

I flew through one tunnel, sprang to the left, and nearly careened out of control as I took a turn a bit too fast. My own reflexes saved me as I swung out of the way of the wall at the last second. My arms groaned in protest as I flew down the correct tunnel. Seconds trickled by as the guardian grew closer.

I was right at the large cave near the entrance when the creature caught up to me. I glanced behind me as the giant soul rounded the corner of the cave, and grimaced.

I had been expecting another monstrous centipede. I had been prepared for that. The creature in front of me was not a centipede. It looked more like some sort of chimeric monstrosity that had recently escaped from a mad scientist’s lab. Its body looked like a mixture of different animal parts it had the legs of a centipede, the torso of a lion, and the wings of a butterfly. Most disturbing of all were the numerous humanoid hands dotting its sides. It had three different heads, although they didn’t fan out horizontally. Instead, they were stacked on top of each other, all attached to one massive, incredibly thick neck. The top of each head melded into the bottom of the next head. The bottom head vaguely resembled that of a giant bee, complete with monstrous mandibles, giant hexagonal eyes, and viscous, golden saliva dribbling out of its mouth. The middle head was like a giant human head, with its mouth eternally frozen into a scream of horror. The topmost head was like that of a spider.

The moment the creature saw me, the bee and spider heads both smiled at me with grotesque, malformed expressions, while the human head wailed.

I shuddered. Did the people who designed this world have to lean so heavily into the body horror themes? Every monster in this world was just awful.

I assessed the body of the monster, and I actually felt a measure of relief. At the very least, this monster didn’t have the chitin the centipedes had. It might be faster and have other dangerous, unknown abilities - but at least its skin seemed softer and easier to cut. I probably wouldn’t have the same difficulty hurting it as I had the giant centipede. 

My gratitude vanished a moment later, as the spider’s eyes glowed. Suddenly, I felt incapable of moving or exerting any strength at all. It was as if I had suddenly lost the ability to do anything at all. My grip on my umbrella started to slip, as my fingers went limp.

A momentary rush of fear tore through my body, as I realized I was about to crash very painfully against the wall. That rush of fear wasn’t quite enough to shake off… whatever the spider had just done to me, but it was enough to remind me I had other options. I hit myself with an empowered Renewal, which was enough to shrug off whatever had prevented me from holding onto my umbrella. I gasped in fear, and then tightened my grip on the umbrella again and slowed down. I hated reducing my speed - but I also couldn’t crash against the wall and break all of my bones before the spider even properly engaged me in a fight.

What had just happened? How had the spider paralyzed me? Was it a mental attack? Some kind of nerve-destroying poison? Or was it something else entirely?

Before I had time to ask any more questions, I saw a burst of light tear into my dress. Luckily, whatever the blast of light had been, it didn’t pierce through my dress. It didn’t seem to do anything at all. Whatever the creature had just done, it was clearly incapable of punching through my dress and hurting me. I glanced at the human head, and realized that its eyes were glowing, and I could feel faint traces of essence near it.

I frowned. The spider had looked at me, and I had lost control of my muscles. The human head had launched some sort of heat or light based attack at me. So did each head have its own special ability?

If that was the case, I still had no idea what the bee head could do. That was even more worrying - the spider and human head already formed a deadly combination, since the spider could take away my ability to dodge, and the human head could attack me incredibly quickly.

As if in response to my sense of foreboding, the bee head opened. Out of its mouth, a giant swarm of bees spread out like a black, inky cloud. All of the little bees didn’t have ‘real’ souls - they looked more like some kind of false life, or perhaps some kind of puppet. However, the tips of their stingers gleamed a bright yellow color, making me suspect in no uncertain terms that getting stung would mess me up.

I blasted the swarm of bees with a lightning bolt, and in a quarter of a second, the swarm of bees turned into charcoal. There were a few stragglers, but most of them had bunched up right next to the mouth of the bee-face on the chimera, making the entire swarm an easy target. I breathed a sigh of relief. As long as I reacted before they could spread out, I could handle swarms of venomous bees.

The chimera itself seemed slightly injured from my lightning bolt, but only slightly. The human head wailed in agony again, and the dozens of human hands on the monster’s sides reached out towards me as if they wished to seize my limbs and rip me apart. The monster’s body contorted, and then it lurched.

My umbrella dragged me to the side as the monster slammed into the cave, cracking stone. The monster bounded off of the cave wall and lurched back towards me as I desperately dodged to the side again.

This time, I moved too quickly.

I successfully avoided the grip of the monstrous creature, but lost control partway through my dodge and slammed into the cave wall. I winced in pain, but luckily, I didn’t think anything was broken. 

A moment later, the bee face on the monstrous chimera opened its mouth again. I prepared another lightning bolt and braced myself to blast down a few more swarms of bees - only for a surge of essence to travel through the chimera’s body. 

I felt space ripple and shift, and the strange feeling of being in the domain of something else intensified, as if I had stepped directly into the house of another person. Space rippled and tore, as essence ripped into the cave system like a set of massive tethers, before they curled around their targets.

A moment later, the space around me rippled, and six centipedes appeared right in front of me.

I resisted the urge to curse. Things had just gone from dangerous but manageable to completely out of control.