On the riverbank below him, Ath3na's party had just raced past Leo. It was a good thing too, as Leo, who had left Morgana's shadow, would have been visible to them if they'd just turned their heads to the right.
His apprehension only grew as he jumped into the fog moments after Ath3na's party because the ceaseless screaming had suddenly stopped. This unnatural silence caused Leo to slow to a crawl.
"What the f*ck is going on?" he breathed out.
All was quiet beyond the fog. Even the sound of the party's steps as they raced across the sand had been muted.
"Leo!" Morgana called suddenly from behind him, causing him to jump up in surprise.
"Sh*t, you almost gave me a heart attack!" he complained.
"Never mind that… Listen, I sense danger ahead!" Morgana warned.
To Leo, Morgana admitting to sensing danger was like a warning that a nuclear bomb was about to explode nearby. Nothing less would make a reaper utter such words.
"Can you elaborate?" Leo asked in a hurry for he'd resumed moving toward the danger.
"I've sensed this presence before… very recently, in fact," Morgana's eyes widened in sudden understanding, "I can't believe it… our target's pre-empted us... I believe he's come to hunt those we would have sent to hunt him!"
Leo could guess who Morgana meant. After all, they'd made a whole event just for this particular villain.
The pair quickened their pace.
"You think we have a leak?" Leo asked with a furrowed brow.
"Too many denizens in town… there were bound to be a few loose lips," Morgana assumed.
"This is definitely too much of a coincidence," Leo agreed. "Let's just hope this bastard's master hasn't caught wind of our plans yet… We're not ready for a confrontation with another reaper."
As they closed the distance back to the spot where they'd last seen their players, they began to hear the sounds of an on-going battle — the clashing of steel against steel and the roaring of something monstrous set against the cacophony of raised human voices.
Leo and Morgana cleared the fog, and what they saw afterward left a sour taste inside Leo's mouth.
It was the largest creature in the Abyss that Leo had seen so far. A giant that was thirty-feet tall with a wild mane of unkempt hair framing a massive head. The face had but one single bulbous eye over its prominent brow. The mouth underneath the pug nose was opened unnaturally wide and revealed yellowing teeth that Leo thought could definitely bite a man in half.
A bronze breastplate covered his thick chest while a chainmail skirt covered his lower half. The cyclops held an oversized executioner's axe in his right hand. His other hand squeezed tightly onto a flailing Lyghtning who he'd snatched up from the ground just as Leo and Morgana arrived at the scene.
Beneath the cyclops' bare foot was Black Howler who struggled against the heavy weight bearing down on him. How he got stomped on in the first place, Leo could only guess.
"Oh, my," Morgana exclaimed. "He can't escape that unless he turns into his berserker form."
"And you took that ability away for twenty-four hours as a penalty for illegal PvP," Leo remembered. "So he's f*cked."
Ath3na was the only one standing against the cyclops, and with both Lyghtning and Black Howler incapacitated, it looked like she would have to fight the monster solo.
The ground around Ath3na was littered with corpses. All of them with their heads chopped off. Leo also noticed that one of the dead bodies had the musculature of a young Arnold Schwarzenegger. This meant Thorminator must have been the first of their party to die.
"What was the point of slaying all those dragonlings if you were going to die so quickly..." Leo commented.
Behind the cyclops and a good distance away, Leo noticed the speck of red cape fluttering in the wind as the only other remaining player was already in the midst of escape.
"Dammit, Don Coyote!" Ath3na called after him. "Don't run away, you coward!"
Leo could only feel sympathy for Ath3na because there was no way she could win against the cyclops without assistance.
"I'll handle this," Morgana said.
She snapped her fingers and caused her obsidian baseball bat to materialize in her hands. But before she could join the battle, Leo pulled her back by the shoulder.
"Let's let this play out," he advised.
"Your last three players are going to die, Leo," Morgana reminded him.
As if on cue, Lyghtning screamed. The cyclops had just squeezed her tighter, forcing her to cough out blood.
"See?" Morgana placed her hands on her hips. "They're half dead already."
Leo shook his head regardless of the continued screams of pain assaulting his ears.
They watched Ath3na fire a [SOUL PULSE] at the cyclops, but he just swatted her salvo of spiritual blasts into nothingness with a single swing of his executioner's axe.
"Dying will be a good experience for these guys," he insisted. "I saw it in a movie once… it'll show them what to expect and then think up a counter for it."
Morgana raised an eyebrow at Leo. "You're serious?"
He nodded, although he averted his eyes as Lyghtning finally went limp in the cyclops' hand.
"Oh, that's a nasty way to die," Morgana noted.
She glanced sideways at Leo, and seeing that he wouldn't budge from his choice, she shrugged and sent her bat away in a poof of white smoke.
"On your head be it if they get traumatized from this, Leo," Morgana told him.
"We don't need players who will stop at just one gruesome death, kid," Leo replied. "And I don't think this group is the kind to run away from a challenge."
Lyghtning's head fell to the ground after the cyclops finished decapitating her. And the sight of her companion's corpse violated in this way sent Ath3na shrieking a plethora of curses at her enemy.
She launched a series of attacks at the cyclops' right foot that Leo realized were meant to free Black Howler from being pinned, but none of her attacks even made a dent on its thick skin.
Leo guessed that Ath3na's weapon — the [SPLENDID IRON SPEAR] that was no longer rusty after it had been repaired by Masamune — wasn't strong enough to penetrate the cyclops.
"That's just sad," Morgana commented. "She really needs to buy better gear and not just rely on her abilities."
"Like I said, this will be a good experience," Leo repeated.
To her credit, Ath3na continued to struggle and even managed to evade death several times through good application of [SPECTRAL CLOAK] and sufficient understanding of its cooldown time. She cycled through her many abilities, although very few of them caused the cyclops great harm.
Black Howler tried supporting Ath3na with [WOLF'S HOWL] but this ability proved ineffective against such a large and overpowering foe. Leo also suspected that his position underneath it greatly weakened Black Howler's power to intimidate his enemy.
Soon enough, Black Howler was crushed under the cyclops' heel, making him the only player in the field to not get his head cut off on account of him turning into roadkill.
At that point, tears were dropping freely down Ath3na's cheeks. Yet she refused to give up despite the odds mounted against her. This perseverance, Leo believed, was probably the reason she managed to successfully land a single clean hit on the cyclops.
She jumped up just as the lesser leaned down to try and grab her with his massive hand. Although his movements were inhumanly quick for such a large creature, Ath3na managed to dodge his grapple maneuver and climb up to his face. That's where she stabbed the cyclops in the eye, causing him such great pain that his head got knocked back.
The cyclops yelled out an angry, blood-curdling roar at the heavens, and just hearing it caused a shiver to rise up Leo's back. He could only imagine what Ath3na must have felt as the lesser's ire was turned toward her.
Ath3na was still in mid-jump when the cyclops' axe came swinging at her. And because her [SPECTRAL CLOAK] was still under a cooldown, Ath3na had no way to dodge the attack. However, the goddess of gaming wisdom didn't close her eyes from incoming death. In her last moments, she instead sent the iciest glare she could manage at her opponent.
A moment later, Ath3na's head toppled to the ground, and finally the battle was over.
An administrator's notification window appeared in front of Leo and Morgana.
[WARNING! ALL PLAYERS HAVE EXPIRED FROM THE FIELD. THIS AUTOMATICALLY RESULTS IN A QUEST FAILURE.]
"Alright, you can gloat all you want right now," Morgana hissed. "But I'll reap your soul soon enough, you gigantic pile of excrement."
Leo turned his attention toward her because he wondered who she was talking to, and it was then that he noticed the cyclops staring back at the pair of them with his now bloody eye. A yellow-toothed grin was plastered on his face.
"He's not coming over here, is he?" Leo asked worriedly.
"No," Morgana answered through pursed lips. "He's too much of a coward to take me on alone."
True enough, the cyclops turned his back on the duo, and after raising the middle finger at them, he vanished into the fog. The sound of his foot stomping over the earth was all the evidence they had that he'd been there. Well, that and the pile of headless corpses on the riverbank, most of which were gradually disappearing already as players were being resurrected back at Adventour's Resurrection Hall.
"So… that's the Decapitator," Leo whistled. "I've got to admit, he's terrifying. I wouldn't want to be the one facing him next time."
Morgana shook her head at Leo before smacking him lightly on the shoulder.
"Man up, Game Master," she chided. "This battle is far from over."
---
Ath3na opened her sea green eyes and gazed up at the vaulted ceiling.
At first, she seemed confused as to where she was, but then the memory of her death resurfaced. This caused her to bolt upright and scream. It was a scream that was cut short by the cacophany of screams that quickly drowned hers out.
Surprised, Ath3na glanced around her and saw that other players were waking up on similar white slabs looking like they were all in a state of post-traumatic shock.
Ath3na saw Lyghtning three slabs to the left of her. The poor girl had her arms wrapped tightly around herself. Tears fell freely down her face.
The sight of her teammate who seemed like her cheerful switch was always turned on now looking devastated and lost sent boiling hot anger pumping into Ath3na's veins.
Her mind's eye recalled the grotesque face of the monster that had killed them, and this only served to make her madder.
"Game on b*tch," Ath3na whispered. "Player one ready for round two."