With just the hint of breathing room, the party let loose a barrage of powerful attacks. Fire, lightning, RHC blasts, Impact-laced charges, and punches that could level mountains, to name a few. Against an opponent the size of the Prince of the Swamp, while the attacks could crack scales and draw blood, they were simply too small to be real threats.

  The Prince bled from dozens of minor wounds, across his legs, body, and necks, and it didn’t even slow it down. No, they needed something big and decisive to do some real damage. Good thing one of them was already working on that.

  We’ll just leave her to it, then…

  One eye on Seeyela—she hadn’t done much that stood out yet this fight, but she was building to something—Hiral focused his RHC shots solely at the base of one of the wide necks. The mighty blasts from his hand cannons were each a foot in diameter, and had a lot a punch, but the hydra’s necks were big. A full second of concentrated fire—twenty shots—busted through the scales, and tore out a good hunk of flesh underneath. True necrotic damage hindered the healing, though it didn’t look like it completely stopped it, likely because of the sheer size of what it was trying to infect.

  That was fine, Hiral would just keep layering it on. Little by little, they’d wear the Raid-Boss down, if they had to.

  Something it must have realized at the same time, the creation process of birthing Tri-dras cutting off to leave fire and lightning streaking vertically across the zone. Under the effects of the party’s domains, the Prince’s deadly combination of terrain-based-damage had eased off significantly, but it hadn’t been completely wiped out. The party still needed to dodge and weave around it, but at least Romin wasn’t playing the roll of lightning rod anymore.

  In place of the flaming lightning shots at the meeting pillars from earth and sky, all twelve heads went into breath-attack overdrive. High and low, forward and back, left and right, dreadful cones of flames, wicked bolts of lightning, and the earth-shattering combination of the two chased the party. Well, seven of them, with Seeyela dancing around unnoticed on its back. Even with her Fangs of the Lady seeking out every breach Hiral or the others had cracked in the scales, and her Ghost-Web Venom doing its dirty work, it just wasn’t enough to get the Prince’s attention.

  It was… honestly pretty understandable it had a mad-on for Yanily, Seena, and Hiral, with the powerful attacks they’d hit it with. And, with three heads trying to turn them each of them to ash, it was doing a good job of preventing them from winding up more big attacks. At least the breaths couldn’t damage the Domain of the Sun, with the elemental blasts streaking through the spectral stadium like it wasn’t entirely there… which was factually true.

  “Romin,” Seena said, ducking under a bolt of lightning before tanking another of the flame blasts. “Do the thing.”

  “I’ll need some help,” Romin said from where he landed haymaker after haymaker against the Prince’s… toe. “Hiral? How long do you need?”

  “How long?” Hiral chuckled into the party chat. “What do you think I’ve been doing this whole time?” With the question, he triggered fifty of the clones he’d strategically hidden around the field. From each of them, a portion of complex runic script burst forth, stretching out like a net to encircle the raging battle. It took less than a heartbeat for it to finish, though it wasn’t complete yet.

  For the last touch, Hiral reached out with his Edicts of Connection, Increase, and Dreaming, then tied them off between Romin and the Prince of the Swamp. As soon as the binding was secured, Hiral pushed solar energy into the matrix, activating the temporary new rule on the area. Thanks to his advanced class, and one particular ability—Touch of Genesis—the effect was instantaneous.

  Class Ability (Passive): Touch of Genesis—While on Genesis, your ability to temporarily access the building blocks of the world and rewrite its rules becomes permanent.

  Note: Runic circles and equations are required to implement permanent effects. Effectiveness is increased if written on solid objects or Genesis itself.

  Note (2): Range of changes is limited by the size of the runic circles, creating areas of altered rules.

  Note (3): Extreme care is recommended, as altering current rules could result in unforeseen consequences.

  Note (4): Refer back to Note (3) a second time. It is that important.

  Note (5): Efficacy of Touch of Genesis outside of Genesis is unknown.

  While the wording of it leaned heavily on permanent effects, a bit of testing had proven temporary effects were even easier to create. And Hiral had been very careful to make sure this one wasn’t permanent.

  “How about you pick on somebody your own size!” Romin said, his Onslaught form growing with explosive speed to smash an uppercut into an unsuspecting hydra head. The force of the blow blasted the falling rain back in a shockwave two-hundred-feet wide, and a second followed from the left-cross that slammed into another head.

  Now standing nearly eight-hundred-feet tall, every step of Romin’s titanic form shook the ground, while a third punch sent the Prince staggering back a step. At the opening, Romin lowered his shoulder, horn glowing with Impact on his snout, then Charged in, sweeping up at the same time. With his armored shoulder pushing back the huge beast a second step, that left one of its heads hanging forward, like it hadn’t caught up to the body moving yet. Which put it in the perfect place for the enhanced horn to drive up into the lightly-scaled base of the jaw.

  Into and through.

  The first real damage to the Prince in the fight, the horn cleanly punched through the scales, the jaw, the brain, and the roof of the skull, to emerge in a shower of gore from the top. Almost like the horn had momentarily forgotten it was laced with a building’s worth of Impact, that seemed to come a second later, literally exploding the head from the inside out.

  Suddenly bereft of the head at the end of the throat, the neck spasmed like a pressurized hose, spewing blood for hundreds of feet as it whipped around.

  “Nivian is going to be so jealous,” Yanily laughed, more Chain Lightning arcing out from his spear to wash across the Prince.

  “He knew about Romin getting the Second Movement of the Chord of the Primal Oath and his new ability evolution before we left,” Seena replied.

  “Yeah, but nobody knew it would make him this big,” Yanily said. “Or badass. Go Romin!”

  Only blushing slightly at the commentary, the combined Bonder didn’t let up on his assault, taking advantage of the brutal blow to stalk in for another combo. Heavy blows rocked the heads they struck, blasting scales off in an impressive shower, and breaking bones with every hit. Three more landed—that was how many Romin got in—before the Prince collected itself enough to counterattack.

  Left, right, under, and above, four heads snaked out with blinding speed, all snarls and shining teeth. At least, for the fraction of the second before they chomped onto Romin. One arm, caught at the elbow, a leg by the thigh, just above his waist on his left side, and the left shoulder, the powerful jaws and necks stopped Romin’s forward momentum.

  Another punch—from his right—smashed back a fifth head, but the other six opened their mouths and let loose with their mixed breath attacks. From the way the blasts willfully engulfed the four heads holding Romin in place, they clearly weren’t any threat to itself.

  Unfortunately, Romin couldn’t say the same, and his health dropped drastically in the Party Interface. Sixty percent. Fifty. Forty. Thirty percent. Twenty-five…

  WHAAAAM, the next punch from the huge Onslaught ripped the head it hit clean off from the force of the blow. A second wham followed an instant later from the now-headless neck whipping over and down to slap hard into the broken ground.

  Having capitalized on his ability The Best Defense…, Romin had turned his health deficit into extreme bonus damage. And the Prince very much wanted nothing to do with him at such close range. Even as Romin pulled his hand back for another apocalyptic blow, the Prince took a step to the left, flexed its necks, and hauled Romin off the ground. Impressive power and the perfect timing of the four heads sent the titanic Onslaught sailing over Hiral.

  The CRASH and shaking earth behind him explained just how far Romin had flown, and it was genuinely impressive.

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  “Laseen,” Seena said, but the vampire was already on it, her threads pumping healing energy into Romin. The Prince probably didn’t realize it, but the smaller Tri-dras it had summoned were the perfect fodder to keep Laseen’s healing well topped off.

  “Heads aren’t regrowing,” Yanily informed the rest of them, tethers of thick lightning emerging from the earth to shackle the limp necks to the ground. If the hydra couldn’t control them, that would hold it in place so the party could…

  Two heads clamped onto each of the bound necks—one at the base, one in the middle—and then they tore the useless limbs clean off in a single, brutal motion. Even more impressively, two quick jerks—one from each head—threw the bloody, flopping appendages into a very surprised Seena and Yanily.

  Like getting one of the taxi-trams from Devinta thrown at them, neither Grower had the chance to dodge before the impact. From the way their health each dropped in the Party Interface, the scaled flesh of the Prince’s necks wasn’t any more forgiving than the metal of the trams would’ve been either. A second later, both improvised projectiles crashed to the ground, utterly squashing whatever was between them and the surface.

  “Hells, that hurt,” Seena cursed from where she had just been Exchanged next to Hiral. On his other side, Yanily rubbed the back of his hand across his Aspect’s snout, blood streaking on his arm from the motion.

  “The Prince just did more damage to itself than all of us put together,” Yanily said. “I don’t know if that depresses me or excites me more.”

  “Don’t say that,” Laseen said into the party chat, a pair of healing needles jabbing into the backs of Seena and Yanily at the same time. “This overweight version of kiddo here did pretty well. He’d do even better if he’d stop whining and get off his ass.” The cackle didn’t even need the magic of the party chat to echo across the battlefield.

  “It’s past Wallop’s nap time,” Romin said, pushing himself to his feet with the ground shaking like an earthquake beneath him. “What’s the plan?” Across his body, many of the injuries he’d taken from the concentrated breath attacks had already healed—thanks to some percentage heals from Laseen—but the Prince clearly did too much damage to rush back into the battle already hurt. The benefits of The Best Defense… only helped if Romin was alive to take advantage of them.

  “Seeyela?” Hiral asked. “Your Primal Chord ready yet?”

  “Soon,” she said. “It’s building still. Dumb hydra is just too big.”

  Seena tilted her head left then right as she cracked her neck. “Then you’re going to need to hold on for that long.”

  “Just don’t barbeque me,” Seeyela said dryly.

  “No promises,” Seena said, and the smirk came through even with those two words over the party chat. “Small change of plans. Let’s see what we can do to contain this big boy. If it wants to rip off more of its own heads, that’s fine by me.

  “Hiral, give us a bit more of that Dreaming goodness?”

  “Have something in mind?” Hiral said.

  “Time to flip the coin on my abilities,” Seena said cryptically, but Hiral understood. The final run of The Final Sunrise had given them more than a few opportunities to test out some new S-Rank synergies between their abilities, and even more so with Hiral’s command over the Edicts.

  “Yanily,” Left said. “If you’d join me, I have a plan that could assist with what I believe Seena is planning.”

  “On my way,” Yanily said, a slight bend of his knees the only warning he gave before he was gone.

  “Let’s go, Hiral,” Seena said.

  “Give me five seconds to get it all ready,” Hiral said.

  “I’ll get you ten,” Romin said, Blink-Charging right back into the hydra’s many faces to hit just as hard as Hiral’s thrown mountain.

  “Ugh, I’d better go make sure he doesn’t die,” Laseen chuckled, her own movement ability streaking a line of afterimages between the reduced number of falling bolts of lightning to catch up.

  Not having wasted a second of the time since he’d spoken, Hiral’s clones spread across the battlefield, a second temporary alteration to the rules of the area prepared. With the explosion of the forty clones, a slight, green hue fell over the space within the Domain of the Sun. Part of that was probably because of the spores blowing out of Seena’s six, lily-like wings.

  As soon as the runic circles were in place—but not yet activated—Hiral called on three of his Edicts. Namely, the Edicts of Restoration, Increase, and Dreaming. Like they knew what he was planning, their power slid smoothly into place with the rest of the concentric runic circles, and the whole equation activated.

  “The stage is yours,” Hiral said to Seena, moving just in front of her to shield her from anything the hydra might throw her way.

  “Then it’s time for a bit of a renovation,” Seena said. “Ur, if you’d please?”

  “Of course, Mistress,” the little lich said from her shoulder, before an unintelligible language spilled from his lips. More commands than words, the lich vanished from where he stood, only to reappear floating in the air behind her. Now standing almost six-feet tall, the image was no longer that of Li’l Ur. No, this was Ur’Thul the Undying, his power radiating out like a physical weight, despite his body looking more wraithlike than solid.

  A second after he appeared, chains of deep black appeared, wrapping around his forearms, waist, and neck, then snaking forward like they were sneaking up on Seena. Another second, and the four chains lunged forward, slamming into the small of Seena’s back.

  The woman jerked slightly at the impact, before the chains tightened around Ur’Thul, and his eyes flared with their telltale, blue flames. Another syllable of power thumped, and the same blue flames raced down the chains and into Seena’s back. As soon as they arrived, two of the six wings sprouting from her back ignited in the same color.

  “It is done, Mistress,” Ur’Thul said.

  “You’re the best, Ur,” Seena said, power radiating off her like an inferno. Except, the woman wasn’t done yet. She had one more card to play, and it came with two more of her petal-wings igniting with a different kind of flame.

  This time, the fire was more like a liquid orange, and burned with a resentment that almost snarled at the world around it. It was, of course, the strange flame Seena had stolen and integrated from Laapdoug—the Fallen—and his weapon. The one that almost killed the entire party.

  In the time it had taken her to prepare, Romin and the Prince had thrown down like they had insulted each others’ mothers, both of them sporting new wounds that splashed lake-sized amounts of blood around them. A brutal one-two combo from the Bonder smashed a pair of the hydra’s heads to the side, the jaws off both broken, before the Raid-Boss moved at a speed belying its size.

  Feet shuffling, the huge hydra spun on the spot to wield a weapon everybody had forgotten about. Its thousand-foot-long tail. The muscular appendage crashed into Romin’s unprotected side, and batted him to the side. The big Bonder stumbled two, three, four steps before his foot caught something, and he went tumbling to the ground.

  On hands and knees, Romin caught himself, already moving to get a foot under him, while eight of the Prince’s ten heads opened their jaws in preparation of breathing their terrible attacks.

  Even as the energy sparked between the blood-covered teeth, all ten sets of eyes suddenly jerked in Seena’s direction. There was no way they couldn’t have noticed the massive release of solar energy from the woman. As it found her standing behind Hiral, there was a brief instant of confusion on its face which was almost comical.

  The party leader had just dumped a huge amount of solar energy into an ability, so where was the fire?

  It got its answer when Seena reached out to either side of her, hands crooked like claws facing the sky, before she yanked them up. Fifty feet to either side of her, the ground erupted in a shower of broken stone as absolutely gigantic roots with the green of fresh growth burst from the earth. Up and up, the circle of twisting roots, each nearly three-hundred-feet wide, billowed out, continuing to grow at absurd speeds, before they rushed forward.

  Like a tidal wave of runaway bulls, the roots tore across the ground, shredding the stone into fine sand as they passed. Branching out as they went, the roots spread side to side, even as they charged at the Prince of the Swamp already hurling fire, lightning, and the deadly combination of the two at the landscape rushing in its direction.

  As destructive as the attacks should have been, the fire did nothing but spawn faster advancement of the roots. The other two attacks did slightly more damage, though under the effects of Hiral’s in-the-moment-named regrowth domain and Seena’s own enhanced powers, the root system repaired the damage within the blink of an eye.

  Still roaring and breathing elemental blasts at the green charge, the Prince tried to backpedal—like that would somehow allow him to escape—right up until a comparatively tiny fist struck the back of its leg.

  Really, when comparing Right’s size to that of the Prince of the Swamp, it was a lot like an ant trying to stop a full-grown Runeocerous. One might even be fooled into thinking the outcome would be the same, or that the double would be outright squashed.

  None of that would be taking into account Right’s—literally—earth-shattering strength. When the double, clad in his own pseudo-aspect, armed with his now-fully-solid Auroran Conquerors, and benefitting from a slew of incredible buffs punched the Prince of the Swamp, it was the massive hydra who stopped cold.

  Around the building-sized leg, the shockwave from the force of the blow birthed a crater two-hundred feet from edge to edge, and half as deep, sending stone fragments outward like a bomb had gone off. The combination of the punch and sudden loss of ground beneath the Prince’s foot had it stumbling back to drop down into an almost seated position.

  Right had managed to zip out before he got flattened, but he was the only one who escaped.

  Another chorus of roars did nothing to stop the jungle of roots that reached the Prince in the next second, each stretching and grabbing like tentacles. More panicked breath attacks did nothing to slow the advance, the roots splitting much like the hydra heads had before to wrap the front half of the great beast.

  Tangled like a ball of yarn, the Prince could no longer control the angles of its breath weapons, defenseless earth and sky suffering under the onslaught. Speaking of Onslaughts, Romin came thundering back in to wail on the bound Prince, one hand each grabbing a head before he slammed them together like cymbals.

  While it took the punishment in the front, the Raid-Boss’s back legs scrabbled at the ground, trying to find purchase to tear itself free from the swarm of vines. Given the creaking and cracking of the mountain-sized Grasping Roots Seena had summoned, it might’ve been able to break free with enough time.

  Something Yanily and Left didn’t give it, with their combined powers manifesting as lightning-laden tornados of condensed storm-clouds reaching down from the sky above. Armored claws grew from the descending streamers of clouds, like a dragon’s, and radiated the same absolute power. Four of them, each big enough to scoop up a whole city block, clamped down on the Prince of the swamp—one on each leg, and two on the long tail—to hold it in place. Bands of lightning danced out from the point of contact, though they seemed to do little damage to the thick scales.

  Damage wasn’t the point, though. All they needed to do was hold long enough for…

  “Ready,” Seeyela said into the party chat. “Let’s end this fight.”

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