Book 3: Chapter 37: Patch 7.0: Monster Showdown

“Fen, we’ll try to distract it while Nell swims. If we all try swimming over then it’s going to just pick us out of the water,” Oleander says.

“Actually, I think I’d be fine thanks to Nell’s buff she gave me,” Fenrir answers.

“But we both know that you wouldn’t abandon us and leave all the fun to us.”

“You know me so well. Serra and Nyaiko,” Fenrir looks behind him at the girls, “you two start swimming over. Me, Olly, and Cass will try holding it off until Nell blows the horn.”

“You shouldn’t let your girlfriends blow other horns,” Serra says, a smug smile expressing her pride in her own humor.

“I want to blow Fenya’s horn-nya!” Nyaiko says, standing behind Serra and holding onto the shorter girl’s shorters. She doesn’t realize that she places both of her heavy, massive breasts right on top of Serra’s head.

Serra and Fenrir look at each other.

That smug smile of hers grows even wider.

“I don’t think you have time to be jealous,” Serra says.

Fenrir shakes his head. She’s right. There is a giant gorilla monster that’s going to be attacking them at any moment.

Looking over at Cassiel, he sees her looking at Nyaiko’s breasts pushing down on Serra’s head. She looks just as jealous as he just did.

“Want me to grow a pair, Cass Cass? If you love them that much then I could just gain a few hundred pounds,” Fenrir teases.

“You can’t gain weight if you’re dead,” Cassiel responds with her sword unsheathed and pointed at him.

They look back at the monster when they feel the ground shaking.

It’s charging directly at them! One of its hands is dragging a tree through the sand behind it as it rushes them.

“I don’t suppose you could take down a gorilla monster, huh, Rod?” Fenrir asks and gets two pulses from Rod. “Alright, I’ll be boring then.”

Fenrir draws his rarely-used sword and readies himself for the charging foe.

“Ready, Fenny?” Oleander asks, several thorns held between his fingers.

“Not really. I could go for a planet-destroying battlecruiser right now,” Fenrir answers.

“I don’t think this game has those.”

“We’ll just tell Tabs to make one. You know she’d actually try to if she had the material.”

“Why aren’t you two taking this more seriously?!” Cassiel shouts at them. “We’re probably going to die!”

“Come on, Cass Cass. Aren’t you used to us doing stupid things that we should die from by now?” Oleander asks her.

“What he said,” Fenrir backs him up.

Rock barks.

Their opponent finally reaches them and swings the tree down into the ground like a hammer! The shockwave from the force of the impact causes all the nearby sand to shoot up and knocks the four off of their balance for a couple of seconds, but not for a long enough time that the monster has easy targets. It tries swinging its free fist down at where Fenrir and Oleander are standing, but they each recover and jump out of the way before the fist smashes into the ground.

Fenrir, Rock, and Cassiel are the closest together, so they are whom the monster focuses on. It lifts its now-splintered tree up from the ground and swipes it sideways toward them! Cassiel jumps up into the air to go over the tree, but Fenrir and Rock both drop low to the ground so that it gets swung right over them.

Cassiel lands on the tree as it travels underneath her, runs up along it until she reaches the monster’s hand, and stabs her sword into its thumb! This gets a pained howl from it, but the damage inflicted is only enough to cause minor bleeding.

She quickly pulls her sword out from its thumb and does a backward leap off of the tree when its free hand swings at her.

“I forget how much of a badass you are sometimes, Cass,” Fenrir says, checking on Rock.

“This isn’t my first boss fight,” Cassiel says.

“Why don’t you try stabbing it in its nuts? I bet that’d hurt.”

“Haah?” Cassiel looks at the monster, her eyes traveling down toward its crotch.

Yep. Giant, hairy sack hanging there.

“I hate you for pointing that out,” Cassiel says.

“You’re the one who looked for it,” Fenrir says.

The monster releases another pained howl even louder than before. Behind him, Oleander has shot two magically-enlarged thorns into the back of his legs.

“It’s slowed down now!” Oleander shouts.

The monster reaches behind himself, tears out the thorns, and crushes them in his hand.

“Nevermind!” Oleander shouts.

“It’s alright! Nell should be on the boat now!” Fenrir shouts, looking over his shoulder.

Serra and Nyaiko are about a fourth of the way to The Shoebill, and he sees Nell standing on the deck fixing her clothes.

He would be mad at her for doing that in this situation if it wasn’t for the fact that he never allowed her to get properly dressed, not to mention that she basically got walked in on while completely nude.

Fortunately for those holding the monster off on the beach, Nell only takes a few seconds to get dressed before she hurries to the horn and blows into it as hard as she can!

Ull told them that even people across the ocean would be able to hear the horn’s sound.

They learn that he wasn’t exaggerating.

The horn is so unbelievably loud that everybody and everything around stops what they’re doing to cover their ears. Flocks of birds fly up from the trees, animals burrow underground, and the monster’s battle cry can’t even be heard with the horn drowning all other noise out.

Fenrir feels like he’s going to pass out from how painfully loud the horn is!

But, it’s worth the pain. The monster drops the tree to cover his ears with his hands, heading back into the forest to try and get as far away from the horn as possible.

Then the horn goes quiet.

The link that Fenrir shares with Nell allows him to know that she’s in just as much pain as he is from blowing that horn. If anything, she has it the worst as she’s the closest to the horn. Then there are the girls in the water trying to swim to the ship. They can’t swim if they have to cover their ears.

With no ear-shattering sound to scare off the monster, he turns around and looks at the source of where that horrible sound came from.

He jumps back over to the tree he dropped, picks it up, and throws it right at The Shoebill!

“Nell!” Fenrir shouts, but she and the boat are too far out for his call to be heard.

The tree crashes straight into The Shoebill’s mast, sending wooden splinters flying in all directions as the boat rocks heavily onto its starboard side.

Fenrir senses Nell’s panic, but he also senses that she’s safe.

“What now?!” Cassiel shouts.

“We might be in trouble here,” Fenrir says.

“All I can think of is one of us trying to lead it away while the rest escape, then whoever gets sacrificed respawns later,” Oleander suggests.

“I don’t think that’s going to work.”

The monster, enraged that The Shoebill is still floating, wades into the water. The Shoebill is his priority target now.

This would be a really good time for it to turn into a giant robot like Fenrir wishes it could, but unfortunately, The Shoebill remains floating without any transforming to save the day.

“Olly!” Fenrir shouts.

Oleander shoots off the rest of the thorns that he has, each one finding its target and piercing the monster’s back.

The thorns only manage to slow the monster down for a couple of seconds.

Fenrir feels Nell’s panic growing by the second.

One of the boat’s cannons fires and lands a direct hit on the monster! The cannonball strikes the monster in his shoulder, causing him to reel that shoulder backward, but it’s still not enough. The cannonball couldn’t even pierce his tough skin, instead just bruising the bone inside of his shoulder before falling into the water.

Fenrir looks beyond the monster and sees Corwin behind the cannon responsible for shooting the monster. Then the cannon next to him fires, and behind that cannon is none other than Tabitha.

The second cannon hits the monster of a boss right in the chest. He grabs his chest in pain and groans as if the wind was just knocked out of him, but he proceeds onward.

Truly befitting of being a boss, neither players nor cannons have managed to do anything other than stall him for more than a few seconds at most.

Nell blows into the horn once more to try and scare him off again, but all the monster does is cover his ears while still wading closer and closer toward The Shoebill.

The second sounding of the horn lasts but mere seconds before Nell can no longer handle the pain from its intensity.

Then Fenrir notices something out of the corner of his eye.

Something is swimming toward The Shoebill. He can’t see what it is, but it’s large and close enough to the surface of the water that it’s creating a wake.