Gladwyn moved forward to meet the chimaera, catching its leaping strike against his shield with a reverberating clang. The impact had enough power to send him backsliding a couple metres. Before he came to a halt, it had already surged around him and aimed for James.

Holy shit it's fast!

The wandering eye on Adam's necklace was locked onto the creature, making it easy for him to focus. He shot all three barriers at the panther serpent before it could turn the Spellblade into mincemeat. The spikes hit its scales and knocked it aside so that its claws barely missed James, however the spikes failed to pierce and small cracks formed along them from the impacts, indicating that the chimaera's scales were incredibly tough.

As it tumbled away from James, Gladwyn slapped his Grafted Tail into the floor to get its attention while also banging on his shield and yelling, "Look at me! I've got your tail, scaly!"

Despite the situation, Adam couldn't help but laugh. Then the chimaera turned on him and leapt.

"Oh fuck! Your taunt's not working!" he exclaimed, summoning new barriers in front of himself and stacking them on top of each other. The chimaera bounced off after striking with both front paws, but it managed to crack all three of them and trigger Last Stand's Fervour.

At least I was right about Fervour still being able to trigger despite the necklace's negative effect.

Adam immediately separated the barriers and sent them into the panther serpent, shoving it away from him. James didn't waste a second and moved forward with a downwards slash of his crystal sword. The aura around his blade grew as he pumped Mana into it, and he managed to clip the chimaera's left hind leg, even though it dodged out of the way. The scales broke where he'd cut through them, but no blood was spilled.

With a loud crack its scaly cat-like tail snapped forward, striking James in his leg and knocking him to the ground with a yelp of pain. The chimaera pounced forward, but before it could sink its claws into him, Gladwyn suddenly came flying, smashing his large shield into the creature and slamming it into the bookcase behind it with enough force to knock several tomes out of the shelves.

As the books rained down around him and the monster, he shouted, "My taunt's not working on this thing! Focus on defending yourselves when it's aggroed onto you!"

Gladwyn chopped his sword down at its neck, but his blade bounced off the durable scales, leaving just a slight groove. Then the panther serpent pushed its feet against the wall and shoved him away, immediately moving around his shield and swiping its claws down his back. It moved with fluid motions and its speed was not to be underestimated.

Blood spattered the floor and hideous rends in Gladwyn's back were visible through his damaged robe and shirt.

"Argh!" he exclaimed and swung his shield to bash its head in, but the chimaera disengaged before he could reach it and surged towards James again.

"Use ice magic to slow it down!" Gladwyn yelled.

James skilfully dodged around the panther serpent's leap and swung his fist into its side just as it landed, triggering his Blood Fist Ring and shooting a spike of blood through the middle of its torso. Against a normal animal it would have been fatal, since both lungs and the heart were immediately destroyed, but the chimaera was anything but normal.

Still, it staggered from the attack and its blood ran down its underside, dripping from the edges of the scales covering its body and down onto the floor. James didn't waste a moment, switching to his Spellblade and performing a flourish that made ice crystals form along its edge.

Adam hadn't just been standing idly by while they fought, and he fired off his triple-fused barrier before James could swing his enchanted sword at the injured chimaera.

The sound was like a whistle as it shot across the round chamber, zipping through the front of the chimaera's body and exploding out its back. The barrier continued through one of the bookcases behind it and vanished from sight.

Not to be upstaged, James swung his frost-coated sword down through its ruined neck, decapitating it.

Its large body and head collapsed to the floor with a thud and clunk.

[Elite enemy defeated,] announced their cubes.

Gladwyn came over and looked at the body and how it had been ruined by Adam's spell.

"That was tough for a mini boss," he remarked.

"How's your back?" Adam asked.

"Already mostly healed," he replied, patting his Potion Belt where one potion was now missing. Gladwyn looked at James' leg and asked, "How much damage did you take from its tail whip?"

"30," he replied. "I've got 36 Health left, so I should be fine."

Gladwyn looked unconvinced.

"I thought you said you only had 50 Health," Adam recalled.

"I made sure to get more Health upgrades after using Nharlla's power," he replied.

He probably has more Health than me then…

"I still think swapping your Health and Mana was a bad idea," Gladwyn said.

James nodded, not arguing the point.

Adam went towards the dark opening that the chimaera had emerged from. "Let's see what it was guarding."

The other two quickly followed after him.

"How long do you think we have before the Tower Crawler gets here?" James asked.

"No idea," Adam replied.

"Still, let's not waste too much time," Gladwyn advised.

As they walked past the opened bookcases and into the hidden area, they found that it was actually a dark hallway that lit up with small blue crystals in the walls and floor at their approach, the effect seeming strongest around Adam and James.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

The hallway curved to the left and led to a strange chamber, the front part of which was a study full of books, with a workbench stacked with alchemical reagents and tools, a surgery slab stained with blood and other secretions, and vials and tubes full of oily fluid arranged on shelves. Within the oil floated organs and tissue, as well as dismembered limbs. There was also a cabinet entirely reserved for bones, each meticulously organised by size. The chamber was lit up by a light coming from the back half of the room which was like a vivarium designed for a giant lizard. The open door in the glass wall, which separated it from the study, made it clear that the chimaera had lived inside. Sand littered with bones took up the left side and a carpet of blue moss covered the right and had a rock over it to block the artificial sun, which was represented by a big round crystal in the ceiling of the vivarium.

Adam looked around, absolutely certain that this was the place where he was meant to find the transmutation notes.

"This tower is crazy," Gladwyn muttered to himself.

James nodded.

Adam looked at the workbench, which had a dark residue left inside several glass tubes in a wooden holder, as well as the aftermath of some particularly messy experiment that had caused a fine brownish-white powder to coat many of the tools. After moving some of the things aside, he found six pages with detailed diagrams and lots of text.

This has to be it.

The moment he touched the pages, the description popped up.

< < Quest Object > >

< Chimaeral Transmutation Notes — Detailed notes about the process of transmuting living creatures together to form a chimaera >

Adam frowned as he gathered up the pages. He couldn't read any of the text, and the diagrams and drawings didn't make any sense to him. The letters used to write the notes seemed like a mix of two alphabets, with one consisting of simplistic block and the other having strange curly shapes that hurt his head when he looked at them.

"Found them," he told the others.

He turned around to find that James was inside the vivarium, standing atop the shading stone above the moss and using his sword in an attempt to break the crystal sun free from the ceiling. Gladwyn was helping him by holding onto his legs to prevent him from falling.

Adam shook his head. "Come on," he told them.

With a grunt of effort, James managed to chip off a small fragment of the yellow-orange crystal but fell back-first into the sand behind him as a result, since Gladwyn had let go of his legs.

As Adam left the secret chamber with the chimaera notes in his hands, trying to make sense of what was written on them, Gladwyn walked next to him and looked down at the pages.

"Looks like there's something special inside the chimaera," he commented.

Adam scrunched his eyebrows, trying to see how he'd come to that conclusion.

"I genuinely don't know what I'm looking at," he replied.

Gladwyn took one of the pages from him and pointed with his index finger at a diagram on it. It was like a cross-section of a four-legged animal, though it looked more like a dog than the panther serpent thing they'd fought. There were rings around the side-view of the figure, as well as ones inside its head and its body. The text for the two circles was different.

"This letter here is repeated again up here," Gladwyn explained, pointing at the text inside the circle within the body and then at the strange notes higher up. The word was circled in the middle of the text, perhaps describing what it meant and did, and Adam was starting to understand how Gladwyn had reached his conclusion.

"Are we cutting open the chimaera?" James asked after catching up to them. He was holding the crystal fragment in his hand.

"Is that thing special?" Adam asked him in return, indicating the fragment.

"It has Mana inside it," he replied. "I think it's sun magic that's powering it."

"Just like the ceiling crystals in Stage Five," Gladwyn commented. "And yes, we're cutting open the chimaera."

He handed the page back to Adam, who put it and the other five inside his Spidersilk Sack. It wasn't the best way to store paper without crinkling it, but the pages seemed sturdier than normal A4.

Although James was eager to be the butcher, Adam ended up being the one to carve open the chimaera, using a double-fused barrier made to spin like a rotary saw in order to cut through the impossibly-tough scales. Once he completely opened the belly scales, he shaped his barriers into blades that he slowly sheared through the inner meat with.

After a couple minutes, he had split the chimaera open to the point that he could use the two barriers to pry it apart, almost revealing a similar cross-section to the one in the notes. And just like the notes, in the middle of the torso, behind the stomach, heart, and lungs, was a strange and heavy sphere. It was the size of a fist and had tunnels carved all along its surface, as though they'd been made by stone-eating termites.

Adam pulled the sphere out of its body.

< < Secret Relic Obtained > >

< Chimaera Stone (Epic) — Once consumed, the transformation quickly takes hold >

"That sounds ominous," Adam remarked.

"Sounds like it'll turn you into a monster," Gladwyn said, his new tail curling around his leg as if he wasn't already halfway there.

"Do you think it'll turn you into a lizard?" James wondered.

"That does actually make some kind of sense," Gladwyn replied. "After all, the chimaera had the body of a panther or lion or whatever, but was covered in scales. It was only the head that was different."

"So if any of us consume it, we'll gain a lizard-like head, but remain human-ish?" Adam responded. "That sounds freaky."

"It probably makes you super fast," James guessed.

"Yeah, it might be strong," Gladwyn mused in agreement. "It's Epic too."

Adam eyed the stone. It was somehow spotless despite having resided inside the body of the chimaera, not even a speck of blood on it. "I don't think any of us could swallow this stone," he then said.

Gladwyn seemed to consider it for a moment.

"It says 'consume'," he replied. "That probably means you don't have to swallow it whole."

"Could be you that'll end up consumed," James joked.

"I'll store it away for now," Adam said, putting it in his silk bag.

< < Optional Stage Objective > >

< Defeat the Tower Crawler >

All of them froze.

So far, none of the optional objectives had appeared without them being in the vicinity of one.

Gladwyn and Adam slowly looked up. The eye on his necklace stopped wandering, as if it too were frozen.

Emelia had told them that the Stage boss was creepy and highly dangerous.

They hadn't really understood what she meant.

She had said it had many arms that it used to crawl through the Tower with, but they hadn't been able to imagine the picture she'd painted for them.

And she had warned that, if it did find them, they had to run away as fast as they could, unless they were confident they could win. It was susceptible to magic, but actually damaging it was quite difficult.

Adam hadn't truly understood until he looked up above the library and saw the enormous eye floating there in the middle of the air right where the floor ended and the ramp continued spiralling up. It was the same size as the hole between the ramps and the one in the ringed landing they were standing on. The eye had a tiny pinprick pupil within a strange golden-white iris that was made with several different rings that all had a black colour, while the sclera of the eye was grey. Most bizarre of all was that the eye was partially obscured by invisible teeth, as though an enormous unseen mouth waited above and its eye peered out at them from within.

But the reason it earnt its name was not because of its freaky eye. No, it was called the Crawler because of the unseen giant hands it used to drag itself up and down the Tower with. These were only noticeable in the enormous pale-blue handprints they left everywhere they touched.

James pushed Adam aside, sensing something he could not.

Then a loud wet crunch came from where they'd stood, as an invisible hand landed on top of the chimaera, pressing it so flat it became a paste. Its tough scales didn't stand a chance and that was despite Adam not even noticing the attack, which had been almost gentle.

For once, he believed in Emelia's advice about a fight he could not win, but that didn't stop him from sending all of his barriers directly up into the floating eye.

They passed right through and vanished as though consumed.

"Run!" Gladwyn yelled.

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