He woke up.
Well, that was not really accurate; it was more that he just opened his eyes since he had slept standing up.
He hadn't eaten yet or even drunk anything, but last night only hardened his will.
He climbed up the crevice and looked in the direction of his objective. He crouched atop the stone hill and steadied his breath, looking as far as his eyes would allow. He was not looking at the horizon; he was looking at the mud.
At what was in the mud
'Am I going to die?'
It was a legitimate question. There was a difference between a dormant beast and an awakened beast. The distinction was made clear by the fact that even though he could kill the monsters with a tad bit of effort, that thing... That thing just crunched its jaws, and their bodies separated.
He looked at the big hump in the mud again and watched it rise as another rock shard scavenger got too close, and the same thing happened as if it were a reminder.
'At least I can be sure it's a beast... or maybe a monster.'
In no way was that any better, but an awakened demon with an actual intelligence or, even worse, a devil with powers would have just made him kill himself.
His skin had become similar to stone, but it was not as hard as one, and he did not want to see how much it would take to crack.
But he was still going in.
"Right," Kael whispered, his voice raspy from the sulfurous air. "Let's see if you're as powerful as you look."
He didn't just walk down. He descended with the precision of a mountain goat, hopping from one stable rock shelf to the next. He knew the geography of the "danger zone" after analyzing the area yesterday.
The Beast stayed where the mud was deepest, using its fast swimming ability to move through the thick mud faster than the other nightmare creatures could.
Kael reached the edge of the mudflat after a few minutes. The ground here was deceptively firm—sunbaked into a crust that rang hollow under his boots. He took a final breath and stepped out.
One step. Two.
On the third step, the "breathing" stopped.
Kael didn't wait for the beast to move. He sprinted. His boots hammered against the crust, each impact a dinner bell for the horror that had sunk back into the mud, only its back showing like a bulge in the brown.
He stepped into the shallow mud and then
The mud exploded in front of him.
A massive, slate-covered head, shaped like a blunt wedge, breached the surface. It didn't roar—it made a sound like a landslide, a grinding of tectonic plates as its jaws unhinged.
It was a low-slung engine of armored muscle, its body encrusted with the very mud it lived in, making it look like a moving piece of the earth itself.
Kael skidded to a halt, the weight of his spear's bludgeoning end swinging around to stabilize him.
"Let's end this trial," he grunted.
He lunged. Instead of a defensive posture, Kael used the momentum of his run to drive the spear tip into the soft, unarmored crease where the beast's neck met its shoulder plates. The stone point bit deep, sinking six inches into the grey, rubbery flesh.
The Beast's reaction was instantaneous and mindless. It didn't retreat. It didn't cry out. It simply charged.
Kaelen jumped back, trying to move out of the way out of the mud and back to the stone sand path.
The Sludge-Cracker, built for this medium, didn't give him the chance though. It swam. It used its shovel-like limbs to pivot in the slurry, its massive tail whipping around to shatter Kael's ribs while he was pinned by the mud.
Kael saw the tail coming—a heavy, slate-encrusted club of bone. He couldn't dodge. He couldn't jump, and trying to run would let him just die faster.
He jammed the bludgeoning end of his spear into the mud behind him, using the weapon as a literal anchor. As the tail slammed into his side, the spear took the brunt of the force, the stone shaft vibrating so hard it tore the skin on Kael's palms.
He was thrown sideways, but the mud acted as a dampener. Instead of his ribs shattering, he was simply dragged deeper into the mire. The Sludge-Cracker turned its head, its heat-sensitive pits pulsing red. It sensed he was trapped.
And unfortunately the spear's body had broken in half, and thankfully or sadly he still had both halves as he was launched back. Hunting all these days had taught him that—never let go of your weapon.
It began to crawl toward him, its jaw widening to grind him into the silt.
The mudflat wasn't a uniform surface; it was a sloping basin. To Kael's left, the silt was thin, barely covering the solid shale. To his right, the ground dipped into a "sludge-pot"—a natural depression where the runoff from the sulfur springs collected into a thick, waist-deep slurry of liquid clay.
Kael had been trying to keep his back to the shallow end, but the Sludge-Cracker was a mindless ram.
It lunged forward, using its massive chest like a battering ram.
Kael's boots skidded on the slick shale. He tried to plant the butt-end of his spear to brace himself, but the Beast was too heavy. The impact was like being hit by a slow-moving boulder. Kael felt the air leave his lungs in a ragged wheeze as the creature's armored snout slammed into his sternum, throwing him backward.
He didn't hit solid ground.
With a sickening gulp, Kael vanished into the deeper end of the mud pool.
The transition was instant. One moment he was breathing sulfurous air; the next, his world was a cold, suffocating grey. The mud here was thick enough to act like quicksand but fluid enough to swallow him whole. He felt his boots lose contact with the bottom, his heavy stone spear suddenly feeling like an anchor dragging him further down.
He broke the surface, gasping for air, his face masked in grit. But he wasn't alone in the pool.
The Sludge-Cracker had followed him in.
'Shit!'
In the shallow flats, the beast was a crawler; there, in the deep silt, it was a predator in its element. It used its broad, flat tail to paddle, its low-slung body cutting through the sludge toward Kael. Because it was a beast, it didn't try to drown him intentionally—it just wanted to crush him.
Kael struggled to move his arms. The mud was so dense that every swing of his broken spear felt like moving through setting glue. He saw the Beast's wake—a V-shaped ripple in the grey muck—heading straight for his head.
"Not... like this!" Kael spat, blinking mud from his eyelashes.
He couldn't use the spear-point; there wasn't enough room to thrust. Instead, he gripped the shaft with both hands and submerged to his chin. As the Sludge-Cracker reached him, its jaws open for a bone-grinding snap, Kael jammed the half of the spear with the point into the creature's mouth.
The beast's lower jaw slammed into the stone stick.
'So those movies weren't all that inaccurate, huh?'
The force drove Kael deeper into the mud, his head slipping beneath the surface for a terrifying three seconds. In the dark, he felt the beast's massive limbs churning the silt around him.
His hands were still grasping the stone stick in the creature's mouth, using it as an anchor to pull himself up to the surface. He was blind, coughing up silt, and his left shoulder felt like it was being pulled from its socket, but he was still holding the weapon.
The Sludge-Cracker, momentarily stunned by the impact to its jaw, thrashed its tail. The motion created a surge in the pool, a wave of heavy mud that pushed Kael toward the jagged shale edge of the deep end.
He saw his chance.
As the beast turned for another pass, Kael felt his heel strike something solid—the submerged shelf of the shallow end. He didn't have the strength to climb out, but he had enough leverage to stand.
He planted his feet, the mud still swirling around his waist, and hauled the bludgeoning end of the spear out of the muck. The weapon was coated in a thick, slick layer of grey, making it twice as heavy and ten times harder to grip.
The beast lunged again, its mindless eyes fixed on the warmth of Kael's gasping breath. It was coming in fast, using its weight to create a bow wave of mud that threatened to knock Kael back into the deep.
Kael's lungs burned. Every breath felt like inhaling wet wool.
The stone stick in the creature's mouth had snapped now, and now it was coming back, but it seemed a bit disoriented, almost.
As the creature lunged for the third time, Kael tried to lift his spear. His muscles simply refused. The weight of the stone, tripled by the suction of the mud coating it, was too much. His grip slipped on the slick, blood-and-silt-stained haft.
The spear didn't rise to a guard. It slumped.
The Sludge-Cracker slammed into him. The force didn't just throw Kael back; it pinned him against the jagged, underwater shelf of the pool's edge. The Beast's massive, blunt head pressed into his chest; the weight of the creature's body and the momentum seemed to have definitely cracked his ribs and maybe even collapsed his sternum.
The blood that shot from his mouth definitely made him believe that.
Kael's world began to go dark at the edges. The bludgeon was trapped between his body and the Beast, the shaft creaking under the impossible pressure. He clawed at the creature's armored face, his fingernails tearing against the rough slate plates. It was useless. The beast's jaw was inches from his shoulder, grinding rhythmically as it prepared to take the first and final bite.
Then by some force of luck. It could not have been anything other than sheer luck.
The shelf Kael was pinned against wasn't solid basalt like the ground. It was a pocket of brittle shale. Under the combined weight of the Beast and Kael's frantic struggling, the rock ledge gave way.
With a sharp crack, the stone shelf shattered.
Kael and the Sludge-Cracker tumbled backward into a hidden, air-filled crevice beneath the mudline—a hollow pocket formed by old geothermal gases. For a second, there was no sound but the rushing of silt as it began to pour into the new hole.
Kael hit the bottom hard, the back of his head bouncing off a rock. The Beast landed right behind his head, almost as if it were going to crush him. He rolled to the side as the massive tail slammed down on where he had just been.
The muddy sludge was seeping in slowly and would most likely fill this crevice soon.
Kaelen didn't even think; it was like his body had recognized the opportunity before he did.
The broken shaft of the spear, the part he had with the bludgeon, was being squeezed in his grasp.
He woke and jumped onto the creature's head.
The bludgeon fell over and over and over.
and then there was the opportunity he had sought
The moment the crack appeared, he kept hitting that part again and again, and it was cracking more and more, but unfortunately the beast had been stirred out of its stupor.
'More! More! Just a bit more!'
He held onto the creature's rocky back as his legs locked onto its sides. He felt a pain like his skin was being grated, but he kept hitting.
and then there it was
The skull had an opening now.
'Yes!!!'
Kael flipped the tool around and then stabbed it in. He just felt the spear-tip sink.
The Beast thrashed, its massive tail slamming against the walls of the small cavern, causing the ceiling to rain dust and gravel down on them as more and more muddy sludge seeped in. Kael was being moved around like a rag doll, but he held on.
The Sludge-Cracker, in its mindless attempt to push itself up and away from the pain, only drove the spear deeper into its own brain. The serrated stone point tore through the hard bone of its cranium, then through the soft sludge of its brain, and then it breached both jaws.
It was a horrific, wet crunch.
The Beast froze. Its massive limbs gave a final, violent tremor, and then it went limp. The weight of the dead Nightmare Creature slumped onto the ground.
The cavern was almost completely silent aside from the sound of the mud flowing in.
It was knee-deep.
[You have slain an Awakened Beast, Broken Behemoth]
[You have received a memory.]
Kaelen hadn't worried about that, though, because he hadn't heard it over the noise.
The moment the spell announced the death of the Broken Behemoth, or whatever, a brown torrent of mist exploded out of its body and was moving into Kaelen.
'What's ... happening!?!?'
The mist was flowing faster and faster into him as his body absorbed it all. He felt his bones crack and then reattach. His skin that had grown hard from the [Formless] attribute was getting harder like stone.
He had absorbed the earth essence from the creature.
Just then, as the mud was now just below his shoulders, a white door appeared.
It was there above the mud.
Kaelen swam instinctively.
It felt so much easier, but he did not think about how or why.
Just as he swam up and reached the rock, all the 'essence' had been absorbed.
He pushed the doorknob down.
'This is it. The end of the nightmare!'
He had done it. He was going to be a sleeper.
But the moment he stepped through the white film of the door.
He felt it, he heard it, and he saw it.
Water.
'What...What the Hell!?'
His eyes were as large as saucers.
He was on a wooden plank surrounded by water in every direction.