I flashed my interface out of curiosity. Just another regular Errant. How is this not a Greatbeast?

  “I don’t think it can move,” Carlos said.

  A giant tree trunk lifted high up into the air, and then it smashed down only a few hundred paces ahead of us. The ground shook a little while dust puffed to the sides. The trunk rose again, leaving behind a deep imprint, only to clobber a different piece of random dirt elsewhere.

  “Can’t see us either,” Kim said.

  The scene repeated itself haphazardly across the dome. It tore the canopy to pieces within moments. Random flailing struck other Errant trees, obliterating them in waves of first splinters and then smoke. Drumbeats of destruction continued to wildly pound even the remains into nothing. Morbid fascination overpowered common sense, so we continued our watch at the edge of violence.

  “Or reach us,” Kwame said.

  In the distance, a cluster of rubbery brown-black vines, or tentacles, or whatever the hell they were, braided through each other. They separated only slightly below where the open top of the dome used to be, like an arm sprouting more arms, each with a will of their own. Those arms had fingers, equally independent, in the mood for chaos, and capped off with a massive wooden club.

  Elias took control, “Enough stating of the obvious. Clearing the variants is part of the mission. It will not need to move to reach us and we will show ourselves soon enough.”

  “Hold on there,” I said, “Do we really need to? It’s fucking massive. I’m up for a fight and all, but how?”

  “I am… open to suggestions.”

  “Well, I don’t have any. Can’t fight no trees.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” Kim said.

  “It’s personal policy. Trees are off-limits. Can’t fight ‘em, I’m a sword guy not an axe dude.”

  “Didn’t you fight the woodies during the eclipse?”

  “Those don’t count, real trees don’t walk. Just like real-”

  “I have an axe,” Jill interjected.

  We all looked at her as if it mattered. Meanwhile the variant continued to make progress on its entry in the crater measuring contest, desperately trying to outdo the System strike.

  “Not sure even yours is big enough.” A quick flick of my aim-assist put the monstrosity within range, at ridiculous cost. “I can hit it but will probably need a lot more swords to actually do any meaningful damage. Mel wants it dead for the resources?”

  “Correct,” Elias confirmed.

  “What’s the ETA to get a harvesting team here, or does she expect us to clean the place out?”

  “It is a target of opportunity and convenience, to prevent further zone escalation.”

  “So not important for now. Wait, does that mean we have to travel along the west side of the lake on the return trip?”

  “No, the B-team is working their way through there. You propose to ignore it?”

  “Unless anyone has a bright idea?”

  “I want to try at least,” Jill said, because of course she did.

  Everyone else peaced out, so I put ten magic swords in the air and hit all of them along the height of the central tentacle helix arm, breaking two coins in the process. Afterwards, we watched Jill speed off. She progressed in fits and stops, jumping aside to avoid the falling finger logs, at least until the variant took notice of her. What began as mindless trashing turned into a coordinated assault without warning.

  She vaulted over a stacked sweep of a dozen mega-sticks, right into another one coming in from behind it. As she prepared to ram her halberd into one, they split apart and left her falling uselessly in the air, already past the apex of her leap.

  “Back off, now!” Elias yelled.

  No shit. The central braid unwound, propelling a second further along to do the same in chained acceleration, which culminated in a single swipe. It hit her. Hard. She passed by overhead, crashed in between two rocky outcroppings, nearly took them down with her and bounced a little upon landing. This was Jill after all, so she just got up and started a menace walk right back in, while we ran towards her. Not out of concern, but the unbraiding increased the range, broadening the variants crater-in-progress.

  “So, you really want to try again?” I asked Jill. She didn’t even turn her head my way.

  It took Elias to make her stand down, “Enough.”

  “It’s weak,” she said, “the damage is minimal. I can take a hundred more of those before getting really injured.”

  “It does not matter, we have intelligence now. The swords might hurt it, in which case we can kill it on the way back. Otherwise, a specialized long range team would be more effective. Our goal is to fight like professionals, not to bang our head against the wall until it crumbles.”

  “So, a tactical withdrawal?” Cleo asked.

  “Running away, you mean,” Jill said.

  “It will be here still, tomorrow,” Noah countered.

  “We ignore it,” Elias decided.

  Skirting around the thing turned out to be a pain in the ass. We only had one viable route to go further north, along the gletsjer edge. A large crack ran through the mountainside, feeding the river which ultimately led to our mega lake. This was the only area where it leveled out unnaturally into a field, presumably to house the plant dome. While it had been fortunate at the time, nowadays the proximity to a deep crevasse meant we had to pass within the now extended range of the variant.

  Kim shepherded us past with his hiding bullshit. It was more tedious than difficult. Noah had gone on ahead, scouting since this was unexplored territory. Most of our hangers-on had been dismissed, returning to HQ.

  We navigated the crevasse with great difficulty due to the amount of baggage we had in tow. It narrowed the further along we went and seemed endless. Jill almost decided to hammer a wider path for us, but ultimately the truly bad stretches only lasted for a few hundred meters at a time. Those were so thin we had no choice but to anchor ourselves between the walls and painstakingly climb along. We ferried equipment across fireman style and lifted the bulkier stuff even further up. Overall, it was a massive headache.

  This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

  Light shone at the end of the open-air tunnel however, quite literally according to Noah. He returned to us early in the second day of fissure diving. Apparently he ascribed to my school of reporting, by only telling us to see it with our own eyes. He said it wasn’t far out anymore - at his pace. It still took us two and a half days to get close. We cleared a bit of mountain to create an impromptu long, thin platform in between to rest on, for the third time. Lacking anything better to do, I had a look-see.

  Well, I had been wondering on how this would play out.

  The cleft mountain opened up into an orthogonal valley, mostly flat except for where the river had dug a groove on one side, hugging the cliff edge below me. It seemed to circle to an extent, although the curve quickly disappeared behind a bend. While it made for some impressive geography and would no doubt have been considered a wondrous sight in ye olden times, the ash covered burned plains along the horizontal part probably would have put anyone off from going any deeper in.

  We certainly found redhead, considering it rained fucking ash and cinder all around, just like during the eclipse. Blackened soot covered an almost perfect circle. Closing in on the middle, a cave big enough to house a tenement building yawned. A porch of cooled, once molten rock welcomed everyone to come and die within. It was somewhat ideal because the one thing we absolutely could not allow the Greatbeast to do was fly around and bomb us from the air. Hence, engaging it in the cave sounded like a fine plan, albeit an impractical one.

  The only issue was how to get there very inconspicuously and then line up a cannon to shoot the lizard. This involved a series of problems. The couple of hundred meter drop straight into the river was only one of them too. At least there didn’t seem to be any Errant around. But aside from that, we had to navigate the fall and crossing simultaneously, cross about a kilometer of open field and just hope dragon boy didn’t decide to go out for a walk or simply laser us from afar.

  Even supposing all of that went off without a hitch, it would leave all of our people exposed with no practical avenue of retreat. Even the nerds weren’t helpless, with a proper murder or two under their belt, not to mention hundreds or even thousands of slain Errant. But there was a reason slayer squad existed. We were the craziest and so were supposed to be the ones doing the actual fighting. Keeping the snake cave-bound seemed a little optimistic. Especially once a chunk of it got blown off from the outside. It was sure to rush the plains afterwards.

  I received precisely zero grand inspirations from staring for a solid thirty minutes. Well, that wasn’t strictly true but my idea felt incredibly dumb. So I was unpleasantly surprised when everyone agreed to it as the best course of action.

  “You can’t be serious. I said that solely to throw something out there.”

  “It is feasible and maintains the original strategy,” Elias said.

  “There’s like a million ways it can go wrong.”

  “Yet the fail states are less concerning,” Breathless said.

  “For you maybe. We’ll still be stuck there.”

  “We’ll be just as exposed here and unable to retreat quickly.”

  “Yeah, sure, but you don’t have to accelerate a fall for System knows how long in the hopes of landing a one in a thousand hit. I’ll be lucky not to get pasted upon landing.”

  “No, the aiming is a straight line from here barring any unusual local properties and we can use skills to draw it, like a laser sight. But if it decides to flame our position, it will be impossible to survive. You could fire upwards to arrest your momentum, perhaps?”

  “And tear my arm off in the process? No, thank you.”

  “It’ll grow back,” Kim said.

  “Yeah, and until then I’ll be landlocked because aerial maneuvers don’t exactly go according to plan once I can’t balance for shit anymore.”

  Noah gave us both a look. “In the end, I’m taking most of the risk by luring it out. Neither of you should complain.”

  “Fucking fine, so we have the opening salvo figured out, what next?”

  We came up with possible counters for everything we’d seen so far, which wasn’t much. Laser beams, firebombs and the usual claw, claw, probably bite. It clearly possessed some kind of intelligence, blowing up villages and cities all around rather than tunnel visioning on just one. At least we assumed there had been more than ours and Freeport. Moreover, it left Kris’ mangled and charred corpse impaled by her own weapon – an act of defilement so petty no mindless beast could come up with it.

  Kim improved his game however, having trained at a record pace to transform his vision maintenance into second nature. He found the parts he could delegate to magical speed split processing and used some miracle of iron discipline for the rest. Part of it even involved hand to hand practice against Noah, Elias and Cleo while keeping the field up. It was impressive to say the least, so of course I had to ruin it for him.

  “So explain one thing to me. How the fuck are you afraid of the dark but unfazed by a dragon?”

  “What? Oh, that,” he laughed, “I just made it up on the spot. I’m not actually scared, what do you think I am, a five year old? There’s no point in having a review if no one admits their faults, so I went first to break the ice.”

  “Sure buddy, and the pope dines in hell.”

  “I don’t expect you to believe me, but to answer your question… I’m nervous, and also excited. There will be more of these things, worse creatures too. We either fight them or die to them. I’d rather fight - same as you and everyone else in the company.”

  “You’re serious, aren’t you? Motherfucker.”

  “Ahahaha. Don’t worry about it, fooling you is no achievement. I’m surprised the rest bought it though.”

  “Fuck you too, so how you feeling about our chances?”

  “What does it matter? Isn’t that your philosophy? If we win, all good; if we lose, not our problem, eh?”

  “You know, there’s a little flaw in my reasoning.”

  “Now I’ve heard everything, do go on.”

  “It only works if you’re selfish.”

  “Ah, feeling homesick? I didn’t take you for the sentimental type, or to fall in love so quickly. The lack of text messages must be a burden on your very soul.”

  “And when’s the last time you got laid? Anyway, it’s not like that. Sure, being with her balances me out and it’s one of the few good things to have come out of all this crap. But if we fail here, the company is done. Losing a second ace team, especially after all this preparation, funding, you name it. I don’t see anyone else walking in our footsteps. They’d be smarter to run and never stop. All the plans fail, and so on.”

  “I thought you were a gambling man? I must say, this is unexpected. Fostering doubt out of a sense of responsibility? Weighing the burdens of standing at the forefront? What happened to your cockiness?”

  “Oh, I’m killing the fucking dragon, don’t you worry. It’s just, things are so different now. Everything is gone, yet we’ve built something new. We’re all so bored all the time, we’ve grown close, all of us – there’s nothing else to do. There’s people whose names I don’t know, yet they’re my allies, my friends and in some ways, my family. In this world where we have nothing, I spend more time with most of the people around me than I ever did before. A bunch of complete strangers are now my brothers and sisters, we’re all warriors and about to make our mark on this new reality. You think there might be some meaning in that?”

  “I see. You want a justification for those of us who are about to die? I admit it has crossed my mind.”

  “Well, of course. I mean, you’re fucked, right? Isn’t shit you can do to stop it from outright annihilating you. Figured I’d let you know we’ll keep up the spirit, even after you’re gone. It won’t be for nothing Kim, I promise.”

  “Fuck you, Gabriel. If I die then you’ll all follow shortly after.”

  “It’s okay, we’ll pull through. I’ll put a nice wrapper on the wall for you. Kim – Edgelord, Mall Ninja, Scared of the Dark, He Who Wears the Trashy Cloak, Slayer, Ascendant.”

  His ragged suppression aura cloak billowed out, obscuring my sight. Within moments it reformed, now resembling a rather smart and smooth tuxedo. “It’s training, you idiot. The flowing movements and jagged edges aren’t for effect. I’m consciously causing them, for the difficulty of it.”

  “No shit? Fair enough, color me impressed. It is pretty neat.”

  “It is, isn’t it?”

  We prepared for another week. At first we spent a few days observing the cavern, but nothing happened. Once Jill and a few others finished carving a platform out of the cliff edge, Kim risked a skill-assisted peek at the cave, noting a curve no less. The observation gave us enough courage to map out the surroundings and even create an emergency escape tunnel for the nerds by burrowing into the mountainside - which incidentally served as base camp. Afterwards, we had a very contained and quiet party, a day of rest and then it was time for the showdown.

  I watched everyone take positions from above, like a bird watching ants scurry around.

  Good thing I’m not afraid of heights anymore.