The wall of grubs, including their dangerous butts, crept towards us. Aeshma was at the center of the glade and wasn’t in any imminent danger; I was still at the outskirts, and even though only seconds had passed, the needle-like stingers were already getting too close to comfort.

  I started running towards Aeshma, but I only made it a few steps before the ground shifted beneath my feet and sent me staggering. All across the clearing, a root-like network of pale grub-meat was slowly rising to the surface.

  The effect was more intense by Aeshma. The soil had practically liquefied beneath her feet, revealing a dense mass of the same grubby roots underneath. She looked more annoyed than worried though as the roots tried to drag her underground, easily swatting away the bits that managed to get a grip on her as she pulled the rootball apart by the fistful.

  I was so caught up watching Aeshma that I didn’t notice the movement right beside me until it was too late.

  SCHTICK!

  A pointed stinger emerged from the ground. The damage Aeshma had inflicted upon the Idol must’ve sent it into a frenzy, because the grub-butt that the stinger was attached to was moving quicker than any of them had before. Before I had time to react, it was already three feet off the ground. The stinger reared back, then dove straight for my heart. I tried to get the Mimic between myself and my upcoming death, but there wasn’t time.

  CHK!

  Unbidden, the Mimic whipped its blade into the stinger’s path and parried it safely away from me. I let out a not-especially-masculine yelp of fear and relief and stumbled backwards.

  My trial wasn’t over yet, though. Even as I backed away from the nearby stinger, the roots under my feet were quickly swelling up out of the ground. Small tendrils poked out the top and snaked around like they were looking for a stray limb to ensnare. I thought about slashing at them with the Mimic-dagger, but it wasn’t long enough for me to reach – at least not without crouching down and making myself an easy target for the ensnaring roots.

  Meanwhile, Aeshma was now more yellow than she was purple, covered as she was in a fine sheen of bug-blood. She was still busy ripping chunks out of the rootball, and successfully at that. A full third of it seemed to have been severed and torn. Certainly by this point the Idol must’ve been running low on health.

  I was glad to see that Aeshma was uninjured – she was grimacing, sure, but that seemed more out of annoyance that the Idol was still alive than out of pain. Unfortunately even though Aeshma was doing great, it seemed like I was living on borrowed time. Just then the soil in front of me churned like a whirlpool, at least ten feet wide – and the cleft head of the Idol slithered menacingly up out of the dirt. The creature was still losing blood all over the place from its gaping wound, but it was no less terrifying for it. It opened its fleshy maw in a silent roar.

  I reeled back, only for my foot to catch on one of the upraised roots. I fell backwards. The Mimic chirruped cutely in my hand, apparently enjoying the ride.

  “Oh, shit! Aeshma! It’s here!” I screamed. She looked back at me, apparently remembering that I existed and that I did not have a lot of options to defend myself. But even as she started extricating herself from the rootball, the main Idol was looming over me, flecks of its acid spittle landing mere inches from my face.

  Panicked, I looked at the Mimic. It was a shapeshifter, right? “Hey, little guy!” I yelled at the dagger in my hand. “You gotta turn into a spear! A trident? A pike? Come on, anything longer than a dagger!”

  The Mimic let out a confused squeak, but didn’t transform. No dice, I guess.

  As the Idol lowered its maw over my face, I thrust the dagger forward. My blow landed – just barely. There was a wet squelch as the tip of the dagger sunk into the Idol’s flesh. It wasn’t a significant blow; the Idol didn’t seem to even notice.

  “Bite it or something!” I shrieked. I heard another wet squelch as the dagger’s blade unfurled into a dozen metallic legs which latched themselves into the Idol’s wet, grubby flesh.

  This, the Idol did notice. It thrashed away from us, leaving a solid chunk of its face in the Mimic’s grasp as it did.

  Then Aeshma was there. She gripped each side of the Idol’s split head in her hands and ripped, peeling the Idol in half with a triumphant roar. The roots and grub-flesh around us withered and went dry. The whole grove seemed to writhe for a moment before going still.

  The Mimic and I countered with our own respective displays of shimmering sparks. Killing the Idol had been enough to level us both, apparently. At the back of my mind, I felt the Level waiting to be allocated – and there was something else, too. The Mimic, requesting that I allocate his Level.

  Well, that was interesting.

  “Oh great heroes! You have done a great justice here today!” called a trembling voice, as the well-dressed old man from before emerged from the treeline. He dropped his cane and shambled further into the clearing. Every step he took seemed more confident than the last. By the time he reached us, the man – while still old – didn’t seem rickety in the least. In fact, he was practically swaggering.

  He strutted up to us and gave a swift kick to the deflated corpse of the Idol of Sylvandroon, as though proving to himself that it was really dead. When the Idol didn’t move, the old man doffed his tophat and threw his hands up in triumph – and abruptly lifted off the ground, as though suspended by a set of wires.

  Oh, heroes! My champions! You have dealt a magnificent blow to my mortal enemy, Sylvandroon! he cried as he rose higher and higher, spinning up above the canopy and swelling with blue and gold light. For this heroic deed, I bestow upon you… my Boon! The Boon of the mighty Crankshaft! May your enemies tremble before the promise of my great and terrible power!

  As the old man spoke, he grew to three times in size – until finally he exploded into a wild display of fireworks which arced and sizzled across the sky. There was a brief silence, then a streak of golden light split the evening sky. It was one last firework, which exploded into the shape of a snow-capped mountain before slowly fading away.

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  “Aeshma, what, uhh… what just happened?”

  “Mmm, I think we got blessed by the Spirit of progress and technology, Crankshaft?” Aeshma said nonchalantly. She was picking wads of bug flesh out from under her nails.

  “Okay. And we got a… what did he say? A boon?”

  “Mhm, yeah,” she replied, unhelpfully.

  “Is that like… do we have to answer to Crankshaft now? He said we’re his champions, does that mean, like… Aeshma, how big a deal is this, exactly?”

  “I mean, it’s kind of cool to get a Boon, I guess? But they’re not, like, life-changing,” she said. “They’re great and all, but they never really work how you want them to. Like, you just met Crankshaft, you saw how weird he was, right? And now he gets to decide when and how to help you out with his Boon. Maybe it’ll be useful, maybe it won’t.”

  I sighed. “It sounds like we would’ve been better off just getting directions to the Queen’s Threshold, like he promised in the first place,” I said.

  Aeshma raised an eyebrow. She pointed off to her left — and in the pinkish glow of the sunrise, I saw the silhouette of the same, snowcapped mountain from Crankshaft’s final firework.

  I guess Crankshaft had kept his word after all.

  Aeshma wiped a healthy dollop of grub blood off of her cheek. “Oh shoot, wait a second,” she said. “Do I still have Camilla’s autograph on me?”

  The ink on her cheek was smeared beyond all recognition. Aeshma pouted as I delivered the bad news, but before she had time to complain in more detail, a rustle in the treeline sent us spinning on our heels.

  Camilla, along with the rest of her gang, stomped noisily into the clearing. The bandits all looked a bit worse for wear, dirty and sweaty and tired, which were reasonable ways to look given that they’d been running through the forest for the past hour or two. When they saw us, their expressions darkened. I was sure they would’ve killed us on the spot, had Camilla not spread her arms behind her and gestured for them to wait. She alone approached us, gingerly stepping over the withered white roots around the Idol’s remains.

  She looked down at the worm-like corpse and frowned. “I had my crew combing the whole forest for you two. This was practically the last place we looked… but that figures. Real gutsy move on your part, coming to the place we were gonna bring you anyway. And now…”

  Aeshma looked almost apologetic. I folded my arms. After that battle with the Idol, I wasn’t in the mood to deal with the bandits’ shenanigans.

  “This sacrifice business was real easy money for us, you know. It was a great gig,” Camilla continued. “With Sylvandroon gone…” She sighed. “Well, we’ll be alright. We’ll just have to find ourselves a new occupation for the time being.”

  The bandits behind her grumbled and collectively kicked at the underbrush in frustration. Among the crowd was Thalzar the Wizard with a big gauze bandage wrapped around his head. He glared daggers at Aeshma and me. This could have been because of his painful head injury. It might also have been because us destroying the Idol meant he would now have to go find a job. “Now, now, friends, don’t get too upset. It’s only until our dungeon pass comes to term, remember?” Camilla chided.

  I didn’t bother hiding my crankiness as I said, “What now? Are you all gonna kill us still?”

  A wry grin stretched across Camilla’s face. “No, I don’t think so. Escaping your bonds, ruining our Zone One grift… even stealing from us, with your little Mimic friend? Game recognizes game, you know? No hard feelings.”

  With that, Camilla gave us both a small bow before turning around and disappearing into the woods beyond the clearing. The rest of her crew followed her lead.

  Aeshma’s lip was trembling like she was about to cry. “She’s even got a sense of, like, honor. It’s… it’s the thieves’ code, Roland. Oh man, how cool is that?”

  I sighed and started pulling up my Leveling UI. I hoped that I’d never meet another of Aeshma’s celebrity crushes.

  ———

  A world away, the many-armed Ynadra knelt low on the palace’s white marble floor.

  He was glad that he had good news to deliver. He knew all too well what the repercussions were for failure.

  “My Queen. I am pleased to report that your instructions have been successfully relayed to our agent in Zone One.” He shuffled a sheaf of papers between two pairs of clawed hands. “Additionally, we received word of two destructions. The first was an eleventh Level Succubus in the Zone One town of Golbane. The second was a fiftieth Level Rhinodon in the Zone Two near-wilds. Both were eliminated early this morning.”

  “How?”

  Ynadra cleared his throat. “A ghost-storm, for the Succubus. And, um, let me see…” He rifled through his papers. “Arcano-flechettes, for the Rhinodon.”

  “Hm.”

  Was she upset? Were the Arcano-Flechettes not to her liking? Her Majesty’s tone was inscrutable. Ynadra dared to raise his eyes from the floor.

  Even seated in her great stone throne, the Queen seemed to loom above him. Her fire-warped crown and gem-studded gossamer silks glimmered brightly in the morning light. Her face was impassive as she gazed past Ynadra, past the supports gilt in gold and inscribed with protective runes, past the decorative murals detailing her innumerable past victories.

  She gazed all the way to the far side of the throne room, through the balcony window of her high tower. She looked out over the staggered mesas and mountain shelves, past the glistening, spring-fed ponds which broke into waterfalls and drifted down as mist into the valleys below. She looked farther still, her eyes unfocused.

  Ynadra waited. As the minutes passed his knees began to ache from the hard marble floor, but still he waited.

  At last his Queen addressed him. “You may congratulate Eslao on his success leading the hunting efforts,” she said, her gaze still distant. Her transparent, needle-like teeth writhed wetly as she spoke. “Of course, congratulations are in order to you as well, Ynadra. Operations seem to be running more smoothly now than they did under your… predecessor.”

  Ynadra nodded, relieved. Though of course he heard the threat implicit in Her Majesty’s words.

  “Tell me. Other than Eslao, how fare my Generals?”

  This was a tricky line of questioning. “There is… improvement, Your Majesty. After the incident last year, I have been overseeing their training personally. I hope… no, I am certain that they will be adequate for the next phase. They will be ready in time.”

  The Queen smiled her vacant, joyless smile, the one that never failed to send chills down Ynadra’s spine. “This plan is a decade in the making. It will not be ruined on account of preserving the honor of a few washed-out halfwits. Will it?”

  Ynadra furiously shook his head.

  “No,” the Queen agreed. “If the Generals lag in their training, they will be destroyed and replaced.” She steepled her hands. “Make it clear to them, Ynadra. Or don't, and identify their replacements; it makes no difference to me. But my plan shall not be delayed.” With a lazy flick of her wrist, she gestured for Ynadra to be dismissed.

  “Y-yes, Your Perfection. Of course. I’ll… I’ll have an update on the matter for you tomorrow.” Ynadra bowed deeply, bringing his bemedaled chest to clatter against the floor, and hurried away.

  The Queen of all Monsters waited for her loyal servant to leave earshot. Only once he was gone did she allow herself to sigh.