Damn, he's not wasting any time!

The black-scaled lizard man skittered through a tower of spindly black arms like an irritable tarantula.

He was surprisingly agile, despite his hulking build.

It's nice he finally stopped trying to hide from me.

His black-on-black scaled-skin was vastly more appealing than a frail sweaty human pelt.

Now, now, don't get attached.

Let him be useful and soften up the outer layers. He'll go out fighting the way he wants to.

Although, generally, it turned out worse when the newbies survived.

I swung with my chain sickle to hack away at the central tower of arms rising from the church's steeple.

This Graven was an especially goopy sort.

I'd encountered blades, mucus, metal, ash, and crystal-based. All different sizes and gradients of madness, but the extremely toxic ones, like this gelatinous lump, were the gluttons who loved exhausting their food source and almost always wound up forgotten and allowed to fester.

Why do they always have to be soo weird and layered in waves of freakish monsters?

And how is this guy even handling all of this? Most people never survive this long. The average scrub freaks out and runs away screaming in terror.

Not everyone had the nerve to walk into a Graven lair and lay it all on the line.

An explosion startled me from behind. It was the hissing lizardman punching explosive charges into the base of the giant arms.

Fuck yeah! Here's a tasty piece of eye candy who listens and comes prepared!

However, it begged the question, what were his intentions for me if I hadn't introduced myself after killing the bear?

"Ha!" I couldn't help but laugh out loud.

More explosions followed and the outer layer of black arms started to wither, freeing me up shred their numbers from the top down.

Same as the minion arms in the forest, we only needed to severe the pressure at the base of the central artery.

We've got this! Him with his bombs and me with my trusty chain sickle piercing, strangling, and slicing away.

The black tower trembled and I howled for us to move. In a heartbeat, the lizardman was clear of the oncoming carnage as the surface layer of black arms came tumbling down.

How long had it been since I had the pleasure of fighting alongside someone who could stay on task and do as they're told?

The tower flopping appendages crashed and filled the air with droplets of acidic decay, forcing us to wait for the debris to settle before returning to the battlefield.

Across the way, atop one of the few remaining clear stone outcroppings, I spotted the lizardman busily typing something into his gauntlet while glaring at me.

His black scales glistened in the overcast sunlight.

There were two tones and textures; glossy onyx coating his shoulders, back, calves, and outer forearms, converging around sooty muted black glazed over his palms, neck, and muscular belly.

He had the build of an extremely hunky male razkur, but considerably more jagged. Every muscle was visible, and the sway of his sleek tubular quills was mesmerizing.

However, his wardrobe had an odd continuity.

Black gauntlets, utility belt, pauldrons, metal knee and elbow plates, with a skimpy loincloth beneath a codpiece that outright dared opponents to just stab him now and reap the penalty.

Though there was a primal allure to the spartan configuration of his weapons and armaments. All high-tech while strangely barbarous and infused with a color-coordinated declaration of vanity.

Damn the gods, will he ever remove that obnoxious helmet so I can see the color of his eyes before he bites it permanetly?!

Thick pink mushroom stems unfurled from beneath the quickly dissolving black arm carcasses. Then the mushroom caps plumped up and burst, filling the air with enormous pink pulsating puffballs.

We stared at the odd floating baubles in bewilderment, then shrugged at one another.

The lizardman pierced one with a single inquiring throwing dagger as it drifted far above our heads, causing the puffball to pop and splatter out a wet pink fetus.

The slippery infant wriggled on the ground and rapidly expanded into an oversized goat-like creature. It wobbled up on four-hooved legs and yowled from several monstrous fanged mouths speckling its entire body.

Well, that's the stuff of nightmares.

The beast blinked each of its ugly sideways goat eyes independently and reared up to charge at the lizardman, but it was too slow.

My reptilian friend was fast on the draw and lodged a second tiny dagger deep into the goat's head.

The goat abomination stumbled but shook the injury off and charged again.

ZHAAOOM

The lizardman aimed and fired an orange pulse ring from his gloved fist. It petrified goat's flesh but the creature only bleated and gnawed away the stoney bits of skin. Then the goat screamed and triggered the other floating puffballs to rupture and spill out a hundred more half-formed fetuses.

Brakes over, time to get back to killing!

I disconnected my sickle's chain and pulled out my machete.

There wasn't any point in waiting for the hoard of mouth-covered goats to fully gain their footing. I darted across the black glade, cleaving the nearest mound of pink flesh into segmented lumps, then moved on to the next.

Across the black glade, the lizardman struggled at holding off the goats circling his stone outcropping. His orange petrifaction rings couldn't deliver lethal damage and only excelled at drawing in more adversaries.

He tossed grenades and fired several more pulses, but the herd of goats kept coming.

Well...

I did tell him to go all out... a shame he didn't bring a stronger weapon.

I shrugged and backed away.

It wasn't surprising that the lizardman avoided touching the goats. They stank like infected cysts and were probably insanely toxic.

No saving the stupid. At least he's keeping them busy.

I maintained my pace, carving up every goat monster in my path. The slaughter wasn't particularly easy, but rather, the chopping motions were well-honed. This wasn't my first grotesque rodeo, or my second, more like my thirtieth.

Or was it sixty? It's so hard to keep track.

Does it matter? Does any of this?

As long as the Graven were dead and permanently erased from history. Or at the very least, that I made reparations for all the lives cut short by my actions.

The bleating mass of goats shrieked louder while clamoring up the lizardman's tiny hill. I could have helped him, but it felt futile. His presence was little more than a pleasant distraction.

The horde surged up the stone and quickly overtook his profile. I dropped my ears and turned their openings away. I've listened to enough people get devoured in my lifetime.

A savage roar rattled the air and I wanted to pinch my ears shut but my hands were busy.

"Ugh, just get it over-"

The cluster of ravenous goats went flying, replaced by the lizardman twirling a double-tipped black spear, each end capped with a long tri-sided white-hot pike!

"Abura below..." I had to chastise myself for almost standing still and gawking.

So that's why he kept firing that useless glove.

He was deliberately luring in as many goats as possible before switching weapons!

The lizardman whirled through the goat pack like a fire spout craving chaos.

He spun his black metal polearm with the precise harmony of the additional limb and radiated with the scent of honeyed musk. The power behind his thrusts as he dismembered and cauterized his adversaries made the blood in my veins tingle and I couldn't pull my eyes off him.

A moment later, the mutant goat numbers dwindled to a dozen, giving the lizardman space to redirect his rampage. His large black-scaled body lunged in front of me, obliterating the small pack of goats converging on my path.

Earlier with the black hands, his tactics were reserved and methodical, but transitioning into melee had awakened something savage.

He was feral and I never wanted it to end.

"Check out this L'rrr'arh juakeda!" <motherfucker> I inadvertently cursed out loud in my father's native tongue. The sides of my mouth curled up to the point that my cheek muscles cramped.

Oh, this one needs to keep living!

I let my sickle's hooked blade drag and rip up along the middle of a nearby goat, bisecting its spinal cord in half. The subtle pop of tendons and nerves breaking clean mixed with the blistering sizzle of his spear made the lower fringe of my ears quiver.

This was the duet I long been craving but until this moment, hadn't yet realized.

Then, just as the lizardman concluded carving up the final freakish goat, he pointed the tip of his white-hot polearm at me.

His chest thrummed with animosity, filling the air with throaty hissing. The lizardman never took his sights off me, even as the glade splitting beneath our feet. His taunt made me curious, but his neglect of the quickly changing terrain hinted at his downfall.

Like all of my fellow slayers that I defeated in Thorngate, the lizardman was out of his depth and in for a world of hurt if he expected to overwhelm me with a simultaneous fight against him and the Graven.

Behind us, the fuzzy black church groaned and uprooted from the ground.

The lizardman ignored it and pounced, thrusting his white-hot tri-sided pike at my head.

I limboed under, sheathing my weapons and darting in to take hold of his hands gripping the shaft. Then I squeezed and twisted his momentum sideways.

He was a full foot taller and three times my weight class, but obviously, he'd never fought a razkur.

His strength pressed down and it took some cunning on my part to prevent him from tagging my sides with the hot tips of his spear. But he couldn't break free of my grasp.

It was best to make this lesson quick, what with the Graven's next attack fast approaching.

Razkurs, particularly females, were deceptively slender. One could never underestimate our extremely condensed muscular or the discreet tensile strength hidden within our bone structure.

I flipped the lizardman's spear and shoved it over our heads, simultaneously side-stepping a nasty kick from his clawed foot.

He growled and flexed his fangs beneath his black metal mask. Then he roared once more and lunged his full weight forward.

Suddenly, a massive tectonic shift ripped the fuzzy black glade apart, but the lizardman was relentless. He ejected a single curved retractable dagger concealed within his right gauntlet.

I jumped back before he slashed open my belly and paired my departure with a hearty high kick to his sternum, tossing him back with a startled thud.

He rolled to his feet and shook off the sting of the caustic fungus floor. Then he stood there, quizzically looking up and down between his chest and the serrated blade in his hand, mystified at how I had landed the hit with my shin intact.

I lifted my ears into a wide V-silhouette and punctuated the tips with a rude flick forward.

Damn right! I am that fast!

The lizardman wagged his head and snapped out a series of incoherent clicks, instinctually responding to my obvious insulting gesture. Then he sprinted full speed after me but got cut off by a sudden explosion of fluid spewing up from the ground.

He leaped backward to dodge the geyser blocking his path and took shelter on the nearest stone, while more giant violent fountains sprang up all over the broken glade.

The air around the geysers was hot and pungent but it wasn't boiling water wasn't shooting up into the sky. The geysers were spraying pure acid!

I felt a flicker of envy at the lizardman's practical black metal mask. The vapor wafting off the geysers stung my eyes and made me gag.

I had in my possession an ancient, but still very functional, Hass'ar skull-plate that could protect my eyes.

However, it was an armament I couldn't wear blithely.

It was a serious killing weapon from a more primitive time, specialized for provoking the unbridled subterranean instincts dwelling within all razkurs. Wearing it would severely jeopardize the lizardman's odds of survival.

Across the chaos, the landscape devolved into a wasteland of crooked shards as the church ruins contorted and reared up on six emaciated rotten legs that stank decaying trees.

But it was the five gigantic shapes bulging from the earth that gave me pause. They were the Graven's guardians, an unavoidable and vexing membrane in every Graven's defense.

Their prompt appearance was a testament to the damage we'd inflicted and the speed at which it had been delivered. Had I been alone, they wouldn't have appeared until several grueling hours and monstrous phases later.

The arrival of the five guardians quelled another private torment. This Graven wasn't passive. All of their kind were a special strain of nasty, but it was the ones who refused to fight that were the vessels of true horror.

This Graven's guardians came in the form of five giant heavily armored opalescent beetle soldiers. Mindlessness, as they were old and their brains had long since rotted, but still powerful because they were close to their master.

The largest of the five rose near the lizardman with a noxious roar. It was orange with elongated arms and possessed several pulsing glands circling its neck. The giant beetle wheezed and twitched its serrated orange mandibles at the lizardman, then huffed out a cloud of thick orange gas in an odious demonstration of its malicious intent.

The second largest, standing at my left, was iridescent purple with heavy clubbed hammers in place of its hands.

The third was deep indigo, with smooth ridges spiraling over its abdomen in a dense coiling maze. Its mouth was long and narrow, spitting out long railgun barbs.

To the west roared a fourth and furious yellow beetle decked out with serrated six whip tails and a matching long thrashing tongue.

The fifth and smallest crouched between me and the lizardman. It was a deep jade snarl of thorns with long flexed hind legs that leaped into the air and littered the ground with a spray of hooked caltrops.

Careful, don't get overwhelmed.

Bigger doesn't automatically equal superior.

The black lizardman kept his gaze predominantly on me but let his attention drift toward the oversized orange gas-spewing guardian stalking claser. He deactivated the heated tips of his spear and shrank the staff into a compact stick that tucked seamlessly into the back of his utility belt. Then he released a second identical dagger from within his left gauntlet and reformed the two blades into hooks.

C'SHINK!

He growled once more at me, clanked the daggers together, and then pounced at the orange beetle.

In the same beat, I sprang out of the way of the yellow whiptail's incoming tongue and claimed a momentary perch atop the purple hammered-handed beetle's head. The large purple beetle failed to shake me off, but I had to hop away when the yellow whiptail's tongue shot at my head.

This time I jaunted over to the backside of the long puckered-lipped railgun spitter and rejoined the chain to my trusty hinged-sickle.

Across the way, the lizardman hunkered below one the orange beetles' large pulsating glands, wedging his hooked daggers into the splits in the guardian's armor to pry open small crannys to insert his time-delayed explosives.

The little round baubles were small and easy to stack, but surely, he had to be running out of inventory.

The lizardman took off toward another gland but got interrupted by a stray railgun dart. He dodged the projectile, but lost a section of one of his thin cranial tendrils and a sticky drop of blue oozed out.

"Oh, his insides are all blue and gummy," I munched a mouthful of bear skulls. "Must be why he smells like candy!"

Suddenly, the hidden explosive detonated, bungling up the lizardman's footing and unleashing all variety of insanity.

The orange beetle reared up and shrieked, with its head and thorax thrashing in flames.

"See, it's easy," I giggled to myself.

The lizardman hung on by his deeply embedded hooked daggers and timed his release by catching a ride on the whiptail's flying tongue.

More than anything, I wanted to finish up my stash of skull-chips and continue watching the show, but it was only a matter of time until the lizardman realized it was me provoking the railgun spitter into shooting at him.

I tracked the lizardman as he flew toward the mouth of the whiptail and yanked my chain to redirect the railgun spitter's head at my next target.

The railgun spitter beetle initially resisted my commands but yielded immediately after a swift kick to the handle of my machete that was securely wedged into the socket of its giant compound eye.

"A few more darts should do it!"

The lizardman sliced off the whiptail's tongue moments before being pulled into the insect's mouth.

I stomped my foot on my railgun spitter's forehead, triggering it to fire at the whiptail's face sixteen times.

The whiptail hissed and flailed, nearly flinging the lizardman across the jagged glade but, as anticipated, my reptilian associate was nimble enough to avoid getting hit, and the freshly rooted darts provided him with convenient climbing handles.

The purple and gold hammer-handed guardian loomed in closer but I refrained from antagonizing another titan. Instead, I doubled down and stimulated the spitter to fire again.

That's when the lizardman finally flipped his black metal mask around and aimed his gloved fist at the railgun spitter guardian.

I belted out sustained A-sharp, redirecting his hand up at me standing on the beetle's head.

The extended reverberation of the powerful note let me decipher the details of the lizardman's face.

Eyes wide with fury, flared nostrils, and a snarl stretched across his scaled lips revealing a row of fangs. His entire body tensed as he growled with rage.

"Com'on, fire!" I yelled, while reclaiming my weapons and stomping on the spitter. Then I bounded down the beetles back seconds before the lizardman's orange pulse ring struck the spitter's face. The desiccating pulse sent the railsplitter guardian into a violent rampage.

At last, it was time to ditch the bug and upgrade to the purple hammer-handed guardian!

The lizardman attempted to follow my lead, but the jade caltrop jumper was hiding. He scoured the broken glade, only to find his orange gas giant smoldering in a heap and the railgun spitter and whiptail guardians preoccupied with shredding each other apart.

If petty was the game, there was ample time for the lizardman to attack me while I went about taming my next recalcitrant insect. But the clever male chose restraint.

Instead, the lizardman stood typing into his gauntlet after spotting the jade jumper tucked into the underside of the black fuzzy church.

The foul jade jumper was busy gathering up the goat chunks and masticating their remains into pink gruel that it was now regurgitating into a sinister pit beneath the church.

The lizardman extracted a hand-sized metal ball from his utility belt and tossed it into the air. The ball spun and plumped a dozen long spines. Then he stopped typing and faced the jade jumper, watching the prickly drone weapon zip across the field to tear through the guardian's spiked carapace.

My own guardian struggled against my improvised chain sickle reins. The eye trick proved ineffective, but I got the purple beetle bucking on cue by tightening a loop of chain around one of its antennas.

A buzzing sound approached.

The jade jumper emerged from its hidey-hole with its hard spiked backside elytra flared out, exposing a pair of fluttering underwings. The lizardman's drone persisted in attacking and drove the flying atrocity over my beetle.

Time to peace out!

I let out a manic hoot and thumped my right foot rapidly on the purple guardian's head in an ecstatic ovation.

"That's right!" I pointed and shouted at the lizardman in my father's ancestral language. "Adapt and conquer you big scaley bastard!"

The purple hammer-handed guardian drummed its fists on the ground while thrashing its thorax in a futile attempt to evict me from my roost.

Still laughing, I guided the purple beetle's momentum, pulled my chain tight, and compelled the beetle to rear up.

The purple beetle yowled and craned one of its massive clubbed hands directly into the jade jumper's torso, triggering an explosion of caltrops that spilled across the ground and clung to the purple beetle like toxic little burrs.

BAAM!!!

The jade jumper crumpled from a single critical blow when the hammer-hand beetle slammed down. The jumper tried to roll up, but the purple hammer-handed beetle pounded its fists into the jumper's green spiky face.

"That's how you do it!" I released my weapons and skipped down the guardian's back, this time taking the time to swing my chain sickle.

Pop went a knee joint, snap went a tarsus, crack, tear, snip. Each successive clamp of my sailing sickle whittled the purple guardian's limbs into gooey detritus. Then I left the purple beetle writhing in an ugly amputated mess.

I half-anticipated the lizardman to make good on another attack, but he never came. Instead, his attention rested in a ghoulish figure rising from beneath the church

The Graven.

.

.

.

...

Translations:

L'rrr'arh juakeda = Mother Fucker

Hass'ar Skull Plate = no translation, it's a proper name for a type of skull-plate armor

...

Author's Note:

Congratulations! You made it.

Final big boss fight next chapter!

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