Tom made contact first, slamming his shield into one of the legs with his full momentum. The roper didn’t budge. He brought his club down hard into the monster’s leg, where it bounced off with almost the same amount of force it impacted with.

  “It’s hard!” he yelled. “Try poking its joints.”

  Clayton did as he was told, springing past his friend’s shield, jumping out of the way as one of the legs bent at an unnatural angle in an attempt to skewer him before jabbing his spear into the gap between two of the monster’s legs. There was nothing there, in a physical sense. In a metaphysical sense, there was likely plenty. Magical force interacted with other magical force, and every attack anyone with a system class made was loaded with magic.

  He hadn’t seen them, but in this world there were supposedly whirlwinds of pure magic that attacked like beasts. They could be stabbed to death by the lowliest dagger, given the attacker had enough skill to pull it off. Just as that scenario implied, Clayton’s stab seemed to work just fine. The monster jerked as his spear passed between its leg sections, and for just a second it looked like the leg was buckling.

  He was nowhere near that lucky. The leg was bending, yes, but it was for stability as the monster balanced all its weight on that one point and stabbed at Clayton with all three of its now free legs. It was fast. It could have and would have poked him full of holes right then and there if it wasn’t for his overpowered evasion. As the legs came in one after another, he weaved, bobbed, feinted for the leg again, and just barely escaped with his life as the monster tried to block the strike with all three of its legs.

  Alvin took that opportunity to slam into the grounded leg with his sledgehammer. Somehow, this worked just fine. The hammer moved faster and stronger than it should have, and took a good foot off the bottom of the Crystal Roper’s leg, sending it tumbling to the ground.

  Mining. He’s mining the damn thing.

  Clayton moved back in to cover Alvin’s retreat a moment too slow, as the monster uncurled one of its legs and punted the miner across the room. Tom tried to get in the way of that attack, desperately pivoting a second too late, and leaving himself off balance when the monster turned its attention on his shield, kicking off the ground to get over him and then slamming down with all its rocky weight.

  Tom was strong, but not that strong. He was immediately pinned to the ground under his own shield, unable to shift or escape under the Crystal Roper’s weight. The monster started stabbing violently at the shield, denting and penetrating it almost at will.

  Clayton missed with the first two attacks he launched in an attempt to stop the barrage, but then got lucky with the next one, intersecting two leg-joints at once and sending the monster scurrying backwards. Alvin somehow made it to his feet and back to Tom in the meantime, pulling the unconscious man out of the line of fire as the monster found its bravery and charged them both.

  Clayton got his spear into it one more time, distracting it from the charge and turning its full fury on him. It took everything he had not to get killed then and there as the legs came after him rapid-fire, finally driving him into a corner from which there would be no escape.

  The whole fight, flares had been going off near the monster’s head, none of which seemed to do a single thing to it. Now, finally, Grace was trying something different.

  “Hit the dirt!” she screamed. Clayton barely made it there before her all-out beam attack hit, lighting up the monster like a Christmas tree.

  Something in the air told Clayton he’d be better off closing his eyes than trying to know what was going on, at least for a minute. He heard Alvin shriek as the blacksmith failed to realize that in time, and a series of hums occurring within split seconds of each other, first from this direction and then from that. He kept his eyes closed until a sudden surge from his Fate Sense coupled by a shriek from Grace forced him out of his stillness.

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  The Crystal Roper was blinded, if the scorched, blood-red eyeball spinning ruined in its head was any indication. The bigger problem was Grace’s laser. She had managed to stay awake after firing it this time, somehow, but she was floored by the effort. Alvin was rolling around on the ground rolling and covering his eyes. Tom was just now staggering to his feet, which left all of them vulnerable to not only the thrashing, angry monster but also the beam of light bouncing off one crystal than another, losing a little power with each impact but still terribly lethal.

  Clayton jumped to his feet and struck at the monster’s legs, trying to draw its fire. It worked, for a bit. The animal’s movements were too erratic for him to get more than a few clean attacks in on its joints or change much of its general thrashing.

  There was nothing he could do about the light beam, though, and he watched in horror as the now-much-slower spear of magical light finally ricocheted at an unlucky angle, sending it streaking towards Grace. Clayton wouldn’t be able to get there, Alvin was blinded, and there was simply no way she’d survive a direct hit from her own ultimate strike.

  Somehow, Tom was able to come through for all of them. Bloodied and mostly broken, he still got his shield in front of himself and activated a skill. Clayton knew he must have, since the speed at which he moved after that was far beyond what he could achieve normally. He was jerked in front of Grace as if he had been pulled there by a big magnet just in time to take the full brunt of her attack on his shield.

  He didn’t survive the experience unscathed. Clayton didn’t know if Tom was alive or dead, but he knew he wouldn’t be moving any time soon as he tumbled off the floor and onward past Clayton. The battle had been a confused thing, and this meant a new series of shattered crystals almost directly across from the only opening into the room.

  The Crystal Roper hadn’t stood by idly. Clayton felt the strongest impulse of oncoming risk he had felt yet and bent over almost double to avoid a suddenly appearing rope of crystal that separated off the monster and towards him. The other three combatants weren’t so lucky. Within seconds, every one of them was wrapped in a glowing tendril of flexible rock. Alvin, the most awake of the bunch, gasped as the rock began to tighten on his ribs.

  This isn’t good. We’re going to get wiped.

  Surviving by himself wasn’t an option. It wasn’t a matter of bravery. If even a single member of his crew went down, the remaining members would be in the same amount of danger. Clayton by himself was just as dead, but with an added hour of terror and hiding added in.

  He was going to have to try to keep the others alive, and exactly who became clear right away. The monster’s crystal ropes suddenly contracted and glowed, feeding energy visibly through the rocky tendril. Its eye began to repair, transforming back from a scorched, mashed orb to something damaged but functional. That eye pivoted to center on not Grace, not Alvin, but instead the critically injured Tom.

  Clayton wasted no time. Poking his spear out to put the monster on the back foot, he circled it, dodging attacks to get firmly in front of his friend.

  The monster pressed on. Clayton was hurting it, but there was no way he could dodge the monster indefinitely now that it had its vision back. Worse, he was getting backed into a corner, through the smashed crystals that Tom had collided with and approaching where his friend laid. Only his premonitions and the related fighting style gave him a chance, which made it all the more inconvenient when those premonitions were distracted.

  A bunch of stuff became clear to Clayton at once. First, he didn’t have time to read the rest of the notification. Second, almost anything moving the crystals would probably keep them from working. And third, he was about to have to do something that would hurt very much.

  Dammit. Here goes.

  Dodging the next few leg strikes by less than a hair, Clayton dropped the butt of his spear and swept it through the formation described in the system screen, knocking the central crystal over and taking out two of the support crystals laid out in a circle around it. The act of doing anything besides giving his full attention to the monster came with its expected cost as one of the legs cut through his shoulder, leaving a deep gash across the top and pinning him to the wall.

  Put everything in dexterity.

  Clayton didn’t have time to read a single notification or look at any of his status screens. He was making a simple high-stakes bet that there would be something to put into the stat and hoping for the best. The monster lifted up its two free legs to attack again, but found it was a second too late as Clayton’s bet paid off. He thrust his spear forward, suddenly better at fighting than ever before. The claw holding him to the wall got a direct hit to the joint, shocking it back and letting Clayton drop to the floor as the two attacking legs slammed into the wall behind him.

  Clayton got back to his feet fast. Three of the Crystal Roper’s legs were attacking, but not fast enough. Clayton saw their trajectories like they were moving at quarter speed, chose the one angle of forward movement that would get him through unhurt, and stabbed at the monster’s grounded leg. The whole beast toppled to the ground as Clayton clambered out of the way, then jumped to the top of its crystal head at the command of his Fate Sense.

  Oh, no. This is very bad for you, friend.

  The spider, it turned out, could not attack in an upwards direction. At the same time, every one of its legs had a secondary joint where they connected to the center of the being, a target he had previously not been able to hit. That wasn’t true anymore. Within a second, he had stabbed all four of them, and continued poking at them in a circle as the roper bucked, fought, and tried anything it could think of to get him off.