The people on the riverbank gasped in shock and horror as the monster burst forth, its tentacles reaching out hungrily. Giant beady eyes shone with a malevolent intelligence, seeking to punish those who dared to witness it.

  The monster was a formidable sight, with a massive, bulbous head and long, writhing tentacles that seemed to have a life of their own, far too many of them for any known creature. Its skin was a deep, inky black intertwined with splashes of a deep shade of purple, and it glistened with slime. It was a creature unlike any other.

  You would think that people that joined for the singular purpose of hunting it—who trained, were equipped for the job, and prepared for the eventuality of meeting it—would be ready for this exact moment. They were not.

  All hell broke loose.

  First, the party of white robes decided that, no, they didn't sign up for being nearly in the same proximity as the rest of us to the creature.

  Then, herd mentality kicked in, like one domino knocking down another. More and more people abandoned their agreed placings and ran screaming.

  The giant writhing mass ran over the lure without stopping and, with a ferocity that seemed impossible given its enormous size, tentacles flailing wildly, lunged for the fugitives.

  All the while, Edith was trying to take control of the situation. Yelling for the different groups to stop running, position themselves on opposite sides of the creature, and pull on its tentacles.

  "Hook it!" Edit shouted. "You lot, join right!" She sent reinforcements to pull on the rope of a lucky fellow that sunk his hook into a fleshy appendage.

  Some found enough courage to get back into the fight and were now trying to catch the tentacles with their hooks, while others jumped on the single rope that held the beast.

  They were having trouble latching the overgrown fish hooks into the glistening flesh. We should have thought of a better construction that wasn't so dependent on the weapon's orientation when it landed.

  With a pang of guilt, I considered if teaching everyone the use of Force to manipulate it in flight would have helped with the task, but it was too late for that now.

  The creature rushed the team on the right, and while most acted according to plan and retreated, holding the rope taut, others fell on the wet ground and disappeared under the writhing mass.

  Still, more people surrounded it, and while they seemed small and insignificant compared to the giant creature, one after the other more hooks sunk into the oily appendages. Their movements, while lacking precision, were calculated as they worked together to bring down the beast.

  The creature towered over the people, its tentacles writhing and lashing out as it attacked. But the hunters didn't need to overpower it, not entirely. All they had to do was hold the rope tightly drawn and keep some of its arms extended for what would follow.

  A deadly tug of war between elephant and mice.

  "Now!" Edith commanded.

  Kenny's eyes were wide, and his arms shook, but he brought the battle wand up and unleashed a tight beam of pure whiteness toward the presented target.

  I recoiled from it, cursing at my insistence to stand so close to Kenny and, by extension, the beams he created. Both the way the light felt when going through my Presence and the way it felt in my Sight was unlike anything I had ever experienced. It was a total lack of anything, a perfect void.

  No, it was even more than that. It was the assertion, backed by a generous amount of power, to turn anything in its path into nothingness, erase it from existence. To turn the world's gaze, which enabled anything to exist in its borders and turn it away. Even do the complete opposite of what it has always done and violently expel the targeted areas as a last insult.

  Yet, the creature's gargantuan size made even this weapon falter.

  Slick skin broke under the assault, but the erratic movement and considerable size made it impossible to cut off a limb in one go, leaving monstrous gashes that ran deep into the enemy's flesh but failed to sever it completely.

  Every time a beam was fired, one symbol from the artifact's dulled, spent from a single use.

  For the first time, the Squid suffered actual damage, and it responded with a frenzy that could only be borne by a cornered wild animal in unimaginable pain. If before, it tried to roll over its victims, presumably to devour them somewhere inside the roiling mass, now it thrashed uncontrollably. Long and powerful tentacles flailed wildly, flinging people aside like rag dolls, forgoing its base instinct to reel them in, thrashing about with reckless abandon.

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  The sight sent shudders down my spine.

  "Crank it up!" Edith commanded, witnessing the devastation.

  Forgoing any semblance of accuracy, Kenny fired wider beams in quick succession. They were powered by whole clusters of symbols from the head of his magical tool. The renewed assault severed one of the beast's arms.

  It could've been enough. We could grab it and retreat with the prize. Live to fight another day, having the rent flesh to sustain us all for some time.

  A pyrrhic victory if I ever saw one. Two of our own were hit by the beams in the confusion, bleeding, broken, and scattered in parts across the ground.

  "Fire!" Edith yelled. "Keep firing!"

  It was a battle for survival—for both sides.

  But Kenny was paralyzed by the consequences of his actions, deathly pale face, gaze locked on his victims.

  Suddenly, a long sucker-covered club shot out from the monster. We were cautious, always staying out of the creature's reach, but it was longer than any of the tentacles. With a snap, it closed around Kenny, serrated edges of outgrowth digging into his skin, brutally yanking him away from us.

  No.

  No, No, No!

  I overpowered my Sight, willing it to act as a connection between myself and the retreating arm, and with the last of my drive, I mustered every ounce of mana to Force it to a standstill.

  But it was of no use. The beast barreled through the resistance like it was nothing more than wet paper.

  I bound after him, a vague suspicion in my mind. If I could only attack the Squid with pain. Not the body, as it was way too big to feel it as anything more than a nuisance, but its very being, the thing I touched on when I discovered my Presence. Could I stop it? Would that be enough?

  But as always, I was too late. Kenny's form disappeared underneath the horrifying abomination. After several more steps, I finally stopped and stared incomprehensibly. Numbly watching the fighting go on.

  Suddenly great bursts of white light exploded from the beast, hollowing it out, carving out everything in their unstoppable way.

  Kenny's last resort.

  The creature swayed and slowly folded in on itself like a hot air balloon that was torn apart, leaking the tension that propped it up until all that remained was a broken shell.

  For the first since the start of the fight, silence reigned over the battlefield.

  As much silence as a bunch of scared, wounded people could handle, that is. Then, finally, the spell was broken. A single cheer resounded, picked up by the others.

  The remaining survivors shouted in ecstasy, celebrating their hard-won victory.

  One monstrous appendage would've been enough to sustain us all for some time, but unexpectedly instead of a measly crumb, we've got the whole cake all to ourselves. More than we could hope to bargain for mere minutes ago.

  I ambled towards the body, looking for a maw or whatever face hole the creature used to feed until I found a rounded beak. It was almost as large as my torso when it was closed, comically small for a creature of that size.

  Struggling to open it, I held on to hope. Finally tired from wrestling to open the beak against the tight muscles and the sheer weight that held it shut, I started hacking around it with my spear, gauging it out entirely. Nauseating smell of rotten fish greeted me as I opened the resulting puncture, but there was no sight of my friend.

  The compass, I remembered—it had one last use to it, dutifully awaiting its turn. I activated it one last time, wishing for it to show me Kenny's whereabouts, but the arrows remained mockingly unmoving, dead.

  I couldn't shake the feeling that, in the end, despite the prevailing excitement, it was impossible to say who emerged victorious. I certainly didn't feel like I did.

  ***

  Kenny's death weighed heavily on me. More than the admittedly high casualty rate of the expedition. The others were foreign to me—the dying of a bunch of strangers couldn't compare to the loss of a friend.

  It was surprising to discover that I was among a minority of people that were affected like this. Most celebrated and hurried to drink heavily from the Squid's essence, restoring their reserves and siphoning as much as they could carry away.

  I sat to the side, watching the crazed mob feed off the massive, otherworldly creature, too numb to take any part in the feast.

  At first, Edith tried to keep things in order and allocate the agreed amounts to the Temple and the rest of the participants. But her team was too small of a part of the frantic masses, unable to control the rest, so everyone extracted as much of the vital essence as they could, bleeding it dry.

  It was unimportant.

  So what if the rendering of the carcass were unorganized and uncontrollable? It had more essence in it than all of us could possibly take away at one time. They would have to guard it and leech from it for days to get everything out. And I had doubts about any group's ability to pull it off. The Temple was the only real contender for the dubious honor.

  But the exuberant excitement was undeserved for another reason.

  Why did it matter if the haul would feed us for another month or even another year? I was having trouble estimating the actual value of our catch, but whatever it was—it was finite. It doesn't matter how much we've got, it would run dry eventually, and there were no other creatures around to fill in the gap.

  Or were there? I played absentmindedly with the chitinous beak I had carved out of the Squid. It was still full of essence, and I saw no reason to hurry, so I took my sweet time with it. It was still perfectly smooth and whole, but I knew its form would suffer as soon as I drained it. Maybe it would even shutter or crumble away.

  The Temple initiates used ghoul bones to find other ghouls. What were my chances of pulling off the same with the Squid?

  Hours passed, and finally, when I couldn't take the passivity anymore, I had to do something, be anywhere else than there, where Kenny died.

  I waded into the water, attracting odd stares. I stood at the same spot the Squid had sprung up from, but the water barely came to my waist.

  I couldn't be mistaken. The shock of the experience had burned the memory deep into my mind to the point I could practically see it playing again in my mind.

  Who knows what kind of abilities the Squid had? Could it use some sort of cloaking similar to what I had used? Or did it teleport or change its size?

  The possibilities were endless, but I was leaning toward the known factors. And I knew of only two things that could explain its sudden appearance and only one of them could explain the mismatch of its size and the shallows it had sprung up from.

  If I were to use only the known and proven abilities, the Squid either hid from us or used the mysterious property of the mist that changed distances and directions to appear there.

  It had appeared right at the edge of our perception, a bubble our shared presence and observation created, ending several paces into the water. Did it come across the river or further up the stream and use the mist to close vast distances to reach us faster?

  The compass was used up, bereft of any magical purpose, but how complex could the spell it previously carried be? I had recreated the lure spell on the spot, after all.

  Holding the beak, I wished for it to show me the way to where the Squid had come from. To bring me to any of its brethren.

  When the intent was clear enough, I could feel a pull. It wasn't physical like some force was yanking on the beak, but more subtle instead, like a vague feeling that, yes, this is where I was supposed to be moving.

  I trudged along the river bank, hoping my reluctance to proceed deeper into the river wasn't influencing the pull. It was scary how quickly the sounds of the revelry at my back disappeared, and the mists swallowed me whole, and mere minutes later, the unexpected happened.

  Suddenly I was surrounded by water, immense pressure pressing in on me, fighting to end me before suffocation could have a chance to set in.

  I was drowning.