Chapter 75: The Behemoth
Urgh!
David let out a soft grunt and leaned back against the Iron-Head Hog’s flank.
The corpse held his weight. Barely. He didn’t particularly care.
His eyes drifted up to his system window.
[System Points Balance: 1,800]
He stared at it for a moment, then wiped his chin with the back of his hand — more reflex than necessity at this point — and let his head tip back against the hog’s side.
’I need a break.’
His stamina was running on whatever Virgin’s Touch had scraped back together and not much else. He could feel the bottom of it now, that specific hollow sensation behind his knees and through his shoulders that told him he was close to empty.
His eyes dropped to his armor.
Or what was left of it.
The chest piece had a crack running diagonally from the left shoulder guard down past the sternum. One of the side plates was hanging by its last fastening. The right bracer was gone entirely — he didn’t even remember losing it. He’d been so locked into the fight he hadn’t noticed the thing shedding off him piece by piece.
’This is practically decorative at this point.’
He exhaled slowly through his nose.
The armor was a problem, but the stamina was the bigger one. That much was clear now. Virgin’s touch was effective, but relying on passive regeneration as a lifeline rather than a convenience meant his base stamina pool was too shallow.
Stamina. That was what the points needed to be going toward first.
And then armor that actually did something.
’Note to self,’ he thought. ’Both of those. Before the next run. Non-negotiable.’
He pushed off the hog’s flank and straightened up, rolling the stiffness out of his neck.
"Speaking of which," he muttered, eyes scanning the dead horizon ahead.
He’d cleared everything he’d crossed on the way in — every silver-back, every hog, every thing that had looked at him wrong. The dungeon felt quieter now. Hollowed out, which left him to ask—
’...Where the hell is the boss, anyway?’
He hadn’t sensed anything that felt different from the rest. No shift in pressure. Just more beasts, and—
Thud.
David went still.
A beat of silence.
Thud.
Slower than a footstep. Heavier. The kind of weight that didn’t so much hit the ground as remind it who was in charge. The sound came from somewhere deep and close and David felt it in his back teeth before he heard it with his ears.
Thud.
Thud.
It was getting closer now.
He turned slowly.
The only honest way to describe what was standing at the far end of the corridor was a behemoth.
It filled a good portion of his sight. Shoulders broad and thick. Hind legs like load-bearing columns, each step sinking slightly into the dungeon floor under its own mass. The skull was enormous, ironclad with natural bone plating that had fused into something closer to a fortress wall than a face, twin horns curling forward like the prow of a ship. Its red eyes found him immediately.
Or rather, they were always on him.
David was off the hog’s flank before another thud hit the floor.
"Dragon Claw."
The blade materialized into his grip in a thread of dark light, handle settling into his palm like it remembered him. He closed his fingers around it and brought it up.
He pulled in a slow breath through his nose.
’Calm down. Calm down. You’re F-rank. This is an F-rank dungeon. Everything in here is calibrated to F-rank. That thing is big but it’s not — it’s not outside your range. You’ve been doing this all day. You know how they move. Just—’
The system window opened in his peripheral vision unprompted, the dungeon’s identification pulsing once above the creature’s horns like a label on something dangerous.
David looked at the notification floating in his vision and felt something cold settle in his stomach.
[Iron-Head Behemoth — Rank: E- Rank]
’Why,’ he thought, for the first time, with genuine fear. ’is there an E-rank anything in an F-rank dungeon.’
He didn’t get an answer. The Behemoth didn’t particularly care about his concerns.
It moved its foreleg.
That was the only warning — just a casual, almost dismissive swing of its foreleg, like it was brushing something off a table.
The speed behind it was immense and completely wrong for something that size, and David’s brain registered the gap between what he was seeing and the next moment when it had closed their distance, already halfway through a thunderous swing aimed straight at him.
’I can’t block that.’
The thought arrived clean and certain. No debate. His arms tried to come up anyway — pure reflex, but too slow — and in the half-second before impact, his system cracked open in his vision like a flare.
[Skill Available: Adrenaline Rush — Single Use]
[Activate?]
He didn’t think about it.
’Yes.’
The world sharpened all at once — sound, light, the grain of the dirt under his boots — and he threw his arm up to meet the swing.
The collision was still catastrophic.
His armor didn’t absorb it. Every plate he had left detonated off his body in pieces as the force transferred through, and then he was airborne, and then he wasn’t, because the ground came up and ended that. He hit hard, bounced once, and skidded to a stop in the dirt with the wind completely gone from his body.
Silence.
Then the pain arrived, all of it at once, and he made a sound he wasn’t proud of.
Kyuah!
He rolled onto his side. Something in his chest moved in a way it shouldn’t. He pressed a hand to his ribs and felt it again — that specific grinding wrongness.
’Broken,’ he thought. ’That’s a broken rib. At least one.’
He blinked blood out of his left eye. Didn’t remember his forehead opening. Pushed himself up onto one arm anyway, head swimming, and looked across the clearing.
The Behemoth was turning toward him.
Slowly. Unhurried. Its hooves struck the ground in heavy sequence as it reoriented.
David’s eyes dropped to the skill timer still ticking in the corner of his vision.
[Adrenaline Rush — Cooldown: 1:21]
One minute and twenty-one seconds.
He stared at it.
’How,’ he thought, ’am I supposed to kill that thing in one minute and twenty-one seconds?’
Dragon Claw was three feet away in the dirt where it had landed when he’d been sent flying. He called to it, grabbed it, straightened as he slowly rose to his feet with a painful grunt.
’Okay. Think...’
The Behemoth was already resetting, shifting its weight for the next move. David watched the mechanics of it — the way the mass redistributed, the slight lag before it could redirect.
’It’s still a hog,’ he realized. ’Bigger. Stronger. But the same animal. It needs time to charge. It’s slow to turn. The speed is in the swing, not the footwork.’
He exhaled through his teeth.
’The armor on the front is solid. But the sides—’
The Behemoth charged.
David went sideways instead of back, pushing forward at an angle, eating the gap rather than running from it. The horns tore through the air where he’d been standing. He came around the outside of the charge, blade already moving, and drove it hard into the Behemoth’s flank.
The slash landed clean.
He felt the impact travel up his arm.
No blood came.
He looked at where his blade had struck and saw the Behemoth’s foreleg had moved — not to attack, just to cover. A thick armored forearm pressed flat against its own side, the plating there turning his slash into a scrape.
It had blocked him.
Casually. Without even looking.
David pulled back and stared at it.
’It...It read my attack? That’s not possible...unless...this one is intelligent!’