The leviathan’s gaze swerved unerringly towards the next tree as Anise and I dashed forward. I tried not to think about how dangerous that was - it would have been better if the creature had kept attacking the Mages.

Ready? I asked Anise as I moved.

Yup. Let’s hope this works, she said.

I grabbed Anise’s hand, and then sent a trace of absorption essence into my umbrella. We shot into the sky.

Below us, Sallia started to rampage through the creatures on the ground. With her ridiculous physical stats and her exceptional swordsmanship, everything that got within range of her blade evaporated.

Meanwhile, the leviathan didn’t even take notice of us. Fortunately, it didn’t start immediately moving towards the next tree - instead, its gaze turned back towards the remnants of the first tree that it had destroyed. The creature leaned closer to it, and I felt a surge of essence tear out of its body and towards the tree.

A moment later, I heard a disturbing crunching sound, as the creature began to take massive bites out of the fallen wood and essence. Each bite seemed to make the creature swell larger and larger, like a balloon inflating with air.

Is it growing stronger by eating the remnants of one of the trees? asked Felix. His voice carried a mixture of awe and horror.

It might be growing stronger, or recovering, said Sallia. She sounded just as horrified as Felix.

I did my best to ignore the sinking feeling in my stomach as I glanced at Felix. He was tossing together the items he had previously made for his own use in this world. As he disassembled all of his enchanted items, he spent several seconds hammering them with his {Craftsman’s Hammer} for seemingly no purpose. Moments later, his items began to flow like liquid as essence, metal, and his hammer worked in tandem to create something new.

I couldn’t quite make out what he was creating - but I knew what it was supposed to do. It would need a lot of essence to work, and Felix had never tried creating an item this quickly before - or with this particular type of effect. However, we only had one chance to succeed, and I I hoped this would work. Still, we needed a power source. Felix’s new creation was an empty battery - it needed a crazy amount of essence and Achievement to fulfill its job.

We flew closer to the Leviathan as Sallia rampaged through the monster horde and Felix worked to assemble an item. Meanwhile, I saw several of the sanctuary’s stronger mages regroup near the fallen tree, before they pulled out some kind of glowing green orb. They spent several seconds channeling essence into the orb while the leviathan feasted, before a beam of sickly green light tore into the creature’s body.

Unlike the other attacks, this one actually inflicted damage. The leviathan shed several layers of burnt, rotting skin as the beam of green light ripped into its body like an infection. For a moment, I thought that the light might at least inflict a grievous injury upon the creature - but after sloughing off several layers of skin like a snake, the creature rolled in the air and returned to its meal. It seemed burnt and injured - but the attack hadn’t inflicted enough damage to seriously hinder it.

Even as I watched, the leviathan’s broken flesh started to recover as it gnawed and ripped and tore at the fallen tree.

Anise stabbed herself in the heart with her sword, and in moments, flames began to roil through her body, like the crackling of thunder after a lightning strike. She had activated her once-per-lifetime sword ability again.

Anise extended her hand towards the eldritch horror in the sky, and a wave of flames tore through the horizon. The leviathan didn’t even seem to notice Anise’s flames - it continued its gruesome feast while Anise’s flames tried and failed to leave scars upon its body.

Luckily, damaging the leviathan wasn’t the point of Anise’s actions. We already knew that trying to fight this thing on our own was hopeless. Far more important than Anise’s actual attack were words of fire that Anise created in the sky.

Join with Felix!

Apart from Anise’s words, she also created a large funnel of flames right above Felix’s location, making him as obvious as possible for all of the nearby mages.

The leviathan still didn’t notice us. It took one final bite of wood, and I noticed that its skin had already nearly finished regenerating. Its rapid regeneration had ceased the moment it stopped consuming the tree - but it had already nearly recovered from the major attack the heavy-hitters had inflicted upon it.

Several of the heavy hitters gave up on their own strategy and flew towards Felix, while others continued to harass the leviathan. The leviathan didn’t even seem to notice their actions as it turned back towards the next tree. Then, it began to walk forward.

The moment the creature moved, I realized something had changed. Before, the leviathan’s presence had been dangerous - after all, it had destroyed one of the trees in only a few minutes. However, now each of its steps felt as if they unravelled the world around it, shaking the very foundations of reality. A new endless rain of monsters poured from its body as it walked.

Its shape started to shudder and warp with each movement forward. One moment, the leviathan was like an endless, unseeing fog. The next, it was like a humanoid giant made of pus. Another moment, it took the shape of a many-winged crow, flying through the sky with wings of polluted curses and madness.

But most of all, it felt like the creature’s presence was distorting reality itself. Every single movement the leviathan made warped gravity, space, and life in its presence. It was like the creature was trying to overwrite the laws of reality just by existing. Even if the laws of reality were fighting off its attempts with minimal difficulty, the idea that the creature was bending the laws of reality just by existing was still terrifying. I shuddered. Something had changed when the creature had devoured a tree - it hadn’t just regenerated. It had grown stronger somehow. Its very presence was a curse upon the world.

Worse, I could feel the island start to tilt to the side as it continued moving. Somehow, the monster’s very existence felt like an anchor weighing the island down now.

I split off an Eldritch Clone, and through the eyes of my clone, I could see more.

The giant in front of us wasn’t just a monster. In some way, it was literally an extension of what lurked far below the sanctuaries. It was a piece of flesh that had separated from its origin, but was still intrinsically connected to the hive. It was a hand, reaching towards the sky and trying to drag our island back to the ground we had fled millenia ago.

Anise grabbed onto my clone with her other arm before it could plummet to its death.

I sent one final message to Felix and Sallia, as Sallia dashed along the ground and chased after the leviathan.

Good luck, I said. We’re counting on you.

We’ll make sure things happen, said Felix.

I glanced at the creature, and realized that it was moving faster than Anise and I. I focused, and used my absorption essence to tear open a portal. Normally, my portals weren’t big enough for me to pass through - but I had used these portals for almost a century now. I was far more familiar with how they worked than I used to be.

I used my alteration essence to warp the way the portals worked, tweaking the dimensional laws that underlay their existence. My warped laws of reality leeched inside of my portals and forced them to change, making them expand and grow. Before, I probably would have turned the portal into an unstable mess that would kill anyone who entered - but now, I understood enough about dimensional terraforming to make it work.

The surrounding laws of reality immediately started tearing at my modifications to reality, but my alterations lasted just long enough for the two of us to teleport towards the creature.

I opened another portal. And another. We skipped towards the leviathan as it surged towards the second tree and the mages dashed towards Felix. In thirty seconds, Anise, my clone and I caught up to the leviathan. It ignored us as I dropped my clone directly onto its back.

Then, both of us used a surge of alteration essence to reach towards the creature’s body, and tried to force the laws of reality into a new configuration. This one was simple - we tried to make the creature’s biology turn on itself by enforcing a different idea for how small particles of matter worked.

It instantly failed, of course. The creature’s body was like nothing I had ever tried to change before - it was dozens of times sturdier than the regular laws of reality. Even more unusual, I could sense a faint trace of something other within the body of the creature. Something I had never encountered before, but that I could instinctively feel was resisting change and enforcing a certain set of laws of reality inside of the creature’s body.

Even though my attack failed, the leviathan froze when it sensed my clone and I attacked it. I grinned.

The creature was somehow a part of a body that it had no physical connection to at all. In other words… it was Eldritch. Just like my clone and I.

It did not seem to appreciate the fact that a new set of eldritch beings were disturbing it. It turned towards the three of us, before a new hand grew out of its body and tried to crush my clone in its grip. My clone danced out of the way, before blasting it with an incredibly low-powered extinguish. It did nothing besides annoy the creature - but that was the point.

Neither of us had any chance of harming the creature, because it was dozens of times stronger than us.

We weren’t trying to win. We were just bait, after all.