Things were going … not well, too many people had died already to ever call it that, but close enough that they seemed to be winning. Even if it would undoubtedly be closer to pyrrhic than any of them would have liked.

  Maybe the five dead would have been an acceptable cost to some callous, seasoned military man, but Mia could just barely keep herself together as another one of her comrades died.

  Or maybe not. Mia just spared the most minute moment to glance at Rex, the towering Lizardman lying on the ground near her. It wouldn’t be the first time the guy stood right back up after Mia thought him dead, but this time he’d gotten his skull bashed in with a fucking tree, which was made of pure steel. Mia was reasonably sure she could see parts of his brain before she hastily averted her gaze.

  Throwing up now of all times, would help no one.

  Thankfully, the Guardian had been quite literally disarmed of its makeshift tree-trunk club since then, so it was back to beating people up with its hands. Not that those were much less lethal.

  Mia saw a pair of beastkin she recognised as scouts drag Rex away to where the healer kid was doing his best to heal as many people as he could. The boy had gone through a sizable fraction of their System-made mana potions already, but he still looked like he was on the edge of mana deprivation with deep bags under his eyes and sunken cheeks.

  The metallic bird monsters constantly harrying them were annoying, but Lina was doing a good job of keeping the flock from being anything more than annoying. It was good too, because the aeromancer might have done something stupid otherwise, seeing as her magic was all but useless against the Guardian. The ranged fighters, archers and sharpshooters, who had nothing heavy-hitting enough to harm the Guardian, were helping her out and the surrounding ground already sported more than a dozen bird carcasses. Not that it seemed to decrease the overall number at all, since more of the annoying avians were joining the fight every minute.

  Carmilla had, much to Mia’s trepidation, joined in on fighting the Guardian up close alongside the beastkin. She’d tried her magic on them, but apparently, the Guardian had no lifeforce, so Camie’s Blood spells were reduced to being worse Water spells but with a fancy colour.

  Mia had taken to using Sparkle in a more active role. The little sprite was flying a few metres above the Guardian’s head, and Mia sent her Arcane Blasts through her Bond to erupt from Sparkle, slamming right into the Guardian’s head from above.

  Which seemed to piss off the colossal metallic monster something fierce, if its attempts to swat the sprite out of the air were anything to go by.

  ‘Hahaha, stupid brute, think you can catch me?’ Sparkle cackled in her head, zipping around another bundle of scrap metal the Guardian had sent flying his way.

  Honestly, she wasn’t doing much damage to it, but the distraction gave the frontliners some much needed breathing room. After all, the time the Guardian spent trying to swat Sparkle, it wasn’t spending trying to murder them.

  Its head seemed to be made of even more durable metal than the rest of its body. Arcane Blasts hitting its chest and arms disintegrated chunks ranging in size between equivalents of apples and beach balls, but the head? Every blast only removed the topmost layer, an inch of metal at most. The crown it wore was another thing entirely, as it didn’t show so much as a crack or a dent, even after what must have been hundreds of spells by now struck it. It was pristine and untouched. Not even a scratch, or so much as a blemish.

  Still, for as long as her attempts to tarnish its crown were rewarded by its largely undisputed attention, Mia would keep doing it. In the worst-case scenario, Sparkle would just get his sparkly butt swatted out of existence, and he would have to take a nap, then he’d be back. That was one of the primary reasons for why sprites made Bonds: pseudo-immortality for as long as their Bond-partner lived.

  Pretty handy, that. Shame it didn’t work the other way around, Mia was still as mortal as ever.

  Mia let herself breathe as another convulsion sent the Guardian onto the ground, making its legs contract when it extended them to take a step. That, right there, was the primary reason as to why they were still alive, why this battle wasn’t hopeless. The Guardian was crippled in more ways than one, robbed of its magic, suffering from severe mana — or miasma — deprivation, and its intelligence was … lacking. Compared to the Guardians Mia had faced before, or even just the craftier goblins, this creature was pure instinct, lashing out at anything that annoyed it, oftentimes forgetting earlier targets in favour of attacking the latest annoyance with a single-minded focus.

  It never so much as glanced at the healer boy, or the squishy mages taking care of the bird-shaped annoyances. It only ever glanced at mages when they landed a spell on it that had some effect, but otherwise, it focused on the closest annoyance. A role which Sparkle had been gleefully taking on for the last few minutes.

  “What is it?” Nikki murmured under her breath, but Mia’s ears caught the words nonetheless, even if the woman intended them to go unnoticed.

  She spared a moment to glance at the woman, taking in the frustrated, yet thoughtful frown shining in her ice-blue eyes. She looked almost constipated, like someone who’d been struggling to give voice to the word lingering right at the tip of her tongue, yet outside the reach of her conscious mind.

  The Guardian had shrunk down to stand barely a head over the taller beastkin, less than three metres in height. The mounting air of expectation and that palpable sense of impending victory were so thick that Mia could almost taste it. Mages released spells a bit faster, melee fighters grew a bit bolder, a bit more reckless. Victory seemed so close, they must have felt like they just had to reach out and grasp it with all they were worth.

  Mia didn’t share their enthusiasm, a foreboding sense of wrongness. It had been too easy; it couldn’t be that easy. No Guardian had fallen without some trick, some final fuck-you to its would-be slayers. The rational — or perhaps optimistic — part of her reasoned that it was just as expected. It had been robbed of its magic and forced to fight while crippled; after all, it was reasonable that it would fall more easily than its Level and title as a Raid Guardian would lead one to believe.

  Mia didn’t buy it. But then again, she’d often been accused of being paranoid. Still, paranoia had saved her life more than once already, so she kept her eyes peeled for any sign of … something.

  That something came when the strange ripple that always smoothed over its wounds came next. It had always been quick, just a quarter of a second, and it was over. When this time it kept going for more than a whole second, Mia finally caught on that something was different.

  “Pull back!” She shouted, though her voice was neither commanding nor especially loud. It was barely heard over the battle. “Something’s wrong.”

  Brent was too distracted to hear her, but Mark was not, and he had always had a steady pair of lungs on him, along with a throat to make ample use of it. His new-ish dwarfhood only deepened his voice further.

  He didn’t question her, didn’t ask why, didn’t hesitate either. He took a deep breath, his barrel-like chest swelling and then let his voice loose. “PULL BACK YOU FUCKWITS!”

  That jolted even the beastkin in the depths of their combat focus enough to startle, then take a wary few steps away from the Guardian. Some scowled, looking back with annoyed frowns at Mark, their questions all but written on their features.

  Others stared at the still stationary Guardian, wary looks spreading on their features as they retreated further back to watch the strange new behaviour of the monster unfold. The ripples spread, like its metallic skin was the surface of a lake, once still and undisturbed but now showing crashing waves. Its form slowly grew indistinct, the surface now a chaotic whirl of pulsating metallic flesh.

  Even the dimmer beastkin put a few metres of distance between themselves and the now amorphous glob of liquid steel.

  “Oh, fuck me,” Nikki whispered, and the mix of dread and satisfaction in her tone instantly grabbed Mia’s attention, her gaze snapping to the older girl. Nikki stared at the Guardian and took a conspicuous step away from it, which Mia instinctively mirrored. “It’s a slime.”

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  Now that brought Mia’s thoughts to a stuttering stop. The image of a friendly, knee-height blob of translucent blue fluid bobbing happily snapped to the forefront of her mind. That was how slimes were depicted in anime, the depiction she was most familiar with, thus the one her mind brought to the fore.

  Her gaze snapped back to the glob of twisting, pulsating metal that probably crawled out of Lovecraft’s wet dreams. That metallic wanna-be Cthulhu did not look like anything she would associate with a slime.

  “It has a core, it has to have a core,” Nikki said, seemingly speaking to herself, or maybe thinking aloud. “The crown? No, slime cores are fragile; it can’t be the crown … but it can be protected by it. The skull, it was in its head … “

  She trailed off with a frustrated look on her face, her lips curving downwards into a displeased frown. It was too late now, since the crown had been lost in the mass of metal a while ago, along with what went for the ‘head’ of this supposed slime.

  A metal slime. How did that work? Weren’t slimes supposed to be jellies, or maybe liquid blobs held together by enhanced surface tension, maybe a membrane? Metals were solid.

  Well, obviously not. Mia thought, watching the Guardian as it dissolved into a puddle. Magic had, once again, taken common sense around the back, beat it bloody with a baseball bat, then spat upon its broken remains.

  All those silly thoughts fell away as the puddle stilled, and then the liquid in it spread out, covering everything within a two metre radius of it in a film of liquid metal. People scuttled further away, retreating with swears, curses and weirded-out yelps.

  A few spells slammed into the metallic liquid, notably an arrow of Light and a sizable Fireball, but they didn’t do much. The prior managed to disintegrate a good half-metre radius circle of metal, but more flowed in to make up for the loss, while the fireball just scorched the surface.

  Before anyone else could try their luck, the liquid retracted, pulling back into an amorphous glob that Mia noted was larger in volume than the Guardian had been before it started to dissolve. Then she noticed how the ground around the metallic globule was bereft of the thick carpet of scrap metal that covered every other part of the clearing.

  “Fire!” Someone shouted. “It’s recovering, destroy as much of it as you can before it’s done!”

  Mia didn’t need to be told twice, and cursed herself for not having done so already. The supposed slime had absorbed the scrap metal and recovered some of its original mass, though not all of it. That was a silver lining, at least.

  Arcane Blasts screamed through the air, crackling with barely restrained arcane fury before exploding against the creepy glob of liquid metal. It was hard to tell whether it had any effect as the glob was ever-shifting, its surface flowing and pulsing constantly in a way that covered up any incurred damage before the explosion even cleared.

  Mia squinted at it, and she was reasonably certain that its size was shrinking, if only a bit. Good, it didn’t suddenly become immune to her spells.

  The amorphous glob surged, expanding in the blink of an eye and taking shape so fast Mia barely caught the transformation. It landed with a heavy thud, four metallic feet propping it up as the eerie clicks of its steel claws tapped the sharp iron, glass it had trampled underfoot.

  It stood less than two metres tall at the shoulder, but that didn’t matter. The Guardian had taken on the shape of a massive wolf, one that had steel blades covering every inch of its body instead of fur. It looked dangerous in a way the previous mannequin-like look never did. Sure, it had been creepy as hell, but not so viscerally dangerous that just looking at the thing made one flinch.

  Mia’s eyes landed on its head, ignoring its wide maw filled with dagger-like teeth and its blank eyes, locking onto the crown of horns curling around the top of its skull almost protectively. They were made of a darker metal, grey and dull, like unworked iron, that stood in stark contrast with the polished steel the rest of its body was made of.

  Spells, arrows and even the odd boulder rained down on the monster, speaking of the panic and desperate need to kill the monster spreading through the raiders. A new, smaller elemental storm started growing around the monster, obscuring its form for a moment, then its massive shape burst forth from the storm cloud of mana and elemental fury.

  It was fast, faster than before, but less fluid in its movements, as if it had traded dexterity for speed with its transformation. Not that it needed precision to kill when it had a hundred blades strapped to its body.

  It charged, heedless of the spells bombarding it from all around and tearing chunks of metal out of its jagged form. It cared not, not even when spells shot by the more accurate mages slammed into its head with enough force to pulverise concrete. The change in behaviour unnerved Mia enough to slip behind a tree trunk and continue firing her spells only through Sparkle, who raced after the charging beast.

  Beastkin jumped out of the monster’s path, even the ones with skulls so thick you’d doubt they had any brain inside, recognising that getting hit by a ton of heavy metal in the shape of a canine murder-blender charging faster than a runaway train was not likely to turn out well for them.

  Mia was not in its path, so she continued raining down spells at it. It was working; it already had to do that ripple-thingy when one Light arrow from Tristan blew one of its legs right off at the knee. It leapt, a convulsion striking it mid-air, making its neck snap to the side and its limbs contract. By the time it landed, its legs were back under its control, and its speed remained unaffected as it bounded closer. The treeline was now just a scant few dozen metres away, less than a second at the speed it was going.

  The raiders had all either dashed to the side long ago or taken up shelter behind one of the thick metallic tree trunks like Mia was doing. All but one, Mia corrected herself, her ears catching the panicked hitch of a breath from the healer kid just after a meaty thump reached her. The boy had stumbled, maybe on a protruding root or rock, and his supposed bodyguards had left him behind in their panic at the Guardian’s charge. Mia doubted they even noticed he’d fallen.

  Camie did, though, and shot off in a crimson blur, moving just a smidge faster than the Guardian. The vampiress was closer to the boy, though, so she reached him first, hauled him up easily and leapt out of the way.

  The Guardian shifted its trajectory, its clawed feet sending globs of earth and scraps flying through the air as it kicked off the ground and propelled itself into the air like an unnervingly massive missile of metal and death. The Guardian, massive and weighty as it was, shouldn't have been able to move so quickly. Nothing that large had any right to move anywhere near that fast.

  Mia almost froze, and she did for the briefest instant when she suddenly realised the monster’s pounce would take it towards a tree just to her right. She saw, almost in slow motion, as it landed on the vertical surface of the trunk, its blank eyes snapped her way, then it kicked off. Then the gigantic murder-blender was sailing right towards her.

  Instincts she didn’t know she had bubbled to the surface, muscles contracted in her entire body, toes curling, jaw clenching, stomach flexing. Her entire being clenched into a tight ball of tension, and the world around her disappeared, or rather, she’d lost all five of her mundane senses at once.

  Not Spirit Sense, though, which told her all she needed to know. Her Wisp Form dispersed into a cloud as a massive glob of miasma sailed right through it, then the cloud snapped back into a Wisp the size of an apple. Her senses snapped back into place with a jarring suddenness, making her stumble and steady herself on the nearby tree with a hand. She shook off her daze with a shake of her head, grimacing at the cacophony of panicked screams, all in the voices of people she had come to love and care for. Her mother, Mark, Camie.

  Those voices grounded her, a new surge of adrenaline returning her focus. She spun around, gaze darting around, first to make sure none of the screams were of pain or agony, then to find the monster that very nearly turned her into a human smoothie.

  Her eyes caught her friends one after the other, her ears and Spirit Sense working in tandem under the guidance of her adrenaline-fuelled subconscious to give her the exact locations of her friends.

  Camie was right there next to her already, the panicked look having melted off her features once she’d made sure she was alright, and she now stood towering over her protectively. Mark was metres away, looking her way with a worried frown that was slowly melting off his features.

  Helene was running up to her, still, white-feathered wings beating heavily to boost her speed. The rest were … alive, was all Mia could tell, before the Guardian once again became the sole focus of her attention. She could still feel the cold, lingering touch of death at the back of her neck. That had been a close one. She’d almost died. Again. How many times had that happened since the System came and turned her world upside down? Ten? Twenty? She lost count after she ran out of fingers to count them with.

  The feeling of having that repulsive mass of pure evil go right through her Wisp Form left her gut-wrenching, almost painfully, in a mix of disgust and horror. Had this been the closest one? Perhaps. If she’d been just a moment slower, she’d be mincemeat now, but that sniper probably still took first place in that regard.

  Her breath hitched, but she swallowed the instinctive reaction. She was in a fight, the most important fight of her life! She could have a breakdown once this was over. Just another nightmare to add to the list.

  I’m probably gonna need therapy after all this is done and things calm down. Mia thought with a mental frown while trying to calm both Camie and her mother. She was fine, so they too could have their emotional breakdown after the fight, the fight which they really should be focusing on instead of wasting precious seconds on making sure she was ‘really fine’ for the third time. But therapy, maybe they could go together, if there even would be any therapists alive in Graz by the time things wound down? Clearly, all of them would need it something fierce the way things had been going lately. That sounded good, and more importantly, it was a calming thought. Her, Camie, Helene, Mark and maybe even Brent, all talking things out, maybe over some tea and next to a comfy fireplace, listening to it crackle.

  Mia took a shallow breath, her nerves easing up ever so slightly as the mental image faded from her mind, then refocused. Her gaze, which had been locked onto the Guardian, narrowed as her Core pumped mana through her channels. But I’m going to murder the hell out of this metallic mutt first.

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