When I stepped around the last corner to the final meadow, the Colossus was staring right at me, its huge eyes glowing with a deep, blue light. It shouldn't be able to see or sense me, and I risked looking around the large meadow.

The towering trees all looked the same, their dense canopy forming a green roof over the entire area. Identify triggered as I focused on one.

"Ironwood Arboreum. Legendary. Member of a rare Ironwood Grove. Much sought after across the multiverse, wood harvested from the Ironwood Arboreum grove, particularly one tended by an Ironwood Colossus guardian, is considered one of the most valuable wood products in existence. The very best craftsmen of the multiverse consider themselves lucky to craft more than 2 or 3 pieces using this legendary wood in their lives."

Huh. I hadn't expected wood from any trees on Arasha to be considered rare treasures elsewhere in the multiverse. Was Cyrus allowed to just randomly seed everything on the challenge planet? Maybe I could get my hands on a few logs if I survived.

The Colossus took one ponderous step forward, the impact shaking the entire meadow. It lifted one enormous fist to point in my direction, and a voice like rolling boulders issued from its huge head.

"The life force of the vanquished feeds the growth of the strongest. To you who challenge for dominance, welcome to the contest of strength."

Revealing myself to the giant monster had to be the dumbest idea in the world, but I couldn't help it. The Colossus's formal greeting triggered a need to respond that bubbled up from somewhere deep inside of me.

Could that be some kind of system manipulation, or was Cyrus injecting thoughts into my head? He could shove magic and stuff in there, but he'd never forced me to react a specific way before? The thought chilled me worse than the sight of the giant monster.

I had no answer, but I filed away the question. Then, deactivating Mirror Cloak, I waved. "Hey there. Every single being who's challenged me is dead. If you think you got the chops to take me down, good luck."

Parley finished. I broke into a sprint straight at the giant at the same instant he shot across the ground at me with unbelievable speed. He didn't move his crane-sized legs, but simply slid like the ground was slick ice and he'd been shot from a cannon.

I wasn't stupid enough to pit my strength against his, though. I set my tether points and shot into the air, zipping across the meadow between some of the gigantic trees before landing on one a full hundred yards away. Kicking off, I shot straight back for my second tether on the Colossus's head.

He slowed and turned, but not nearly fast enough. Baring my teeth in a wolflike snarl, I pulled out the Naginata of the Trebuchet and prepared a multi-stacked attack just like I'd unleashed on Alpha, complete with the 10-times power magnification of the weapon's Siege Strike ability and the 5-times multiplier from Tether Slide's Implacable ability.

In addition, I dumped in 2 potions of Stygian Ichor with Elemental Harmony to help interfere with the monster's vast magical conduits. Finally, I triggered Cascading Force for good measure.

This time I struck with the edge of the long blade instead of the flat. I needed every bit of penetration possible. The blade crashed into the head of the Colossus like a bolt of living lightning and drove deep into the skull, sundering ironwood and spraying debris all across the field. The brutal impact shook my arms to the shoulder and I almost lost my grip on the haft of the weapon.

Then the secondary pure force effect from Cascading Force triggered and half the monster's head exploded. Kinetic force. Perfect.

I stood on its enormous shoulders and laughed. One strike and done!

Except it didn't fall and I didn't get any notifications. The Colossus's giant head was destroyed, split down the middle, with half of it blown to rubble. How was that not a kill shot?

One giant hand swept up on the far side of the head, and I didn't realize the danger until it smashed that fist into the opposite side of its own head. The thunderous impact knocked its own head off and catapulted it across the meadow with me flattened to the leading edge of it. My naginata tumbled away and all the breath was blasted from my lungs from the immense impact, despite my layers of armor.

Then I caught the edge of a tree, turning my straight flight into an out-of-control tumble with the monster's head. The world spun crazily as I bounced between trees, impacting with brutal force that spun me into wildly different directions. I tried to keep my arms and legs pulled in close, but the crazy spinning made it impossible and my left arm shattered as I crashed into another tree, the force of my spin whipping my elbow against the trunk just before part of the shattered monster head collided on the same spot and crushed it.

Even as that searing pain tore through me, my right leg snapped from the next tree, and my world turned into white-hot pain. Half a heartbeat later, I crashed back-first into the center of yet another tree so hard I dented the dense ironwood and stuck in place like a fly smashed flat against a windshield.

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I hung there, dazed by the impact. My head shield had shattered and my skull felt cracked. My Crash Test Dummy jacket and eelhide under layer offered enough protection that my torso hadn't just exploded, but my thoughts scattered and I saw stars. Pain ripped through my entire body and I couldn't seem to breathe. A rib might have punched into a lung again. Man, I hated losing lungs.

Healing energy poured into me from my Tesla Coil bracelet, but it would take a few seconds to settle my rattled thoughts. I couldn't seem to remember what had happened, where I was, or why something deep in my mind kept screaming at me to move.

My eyes finally cleared and all thought froze in horror at the sight of the gigantic Colossus shooting between two enormous trees, heading right at me. Both fists were joined together and swinging toward me, wide enough to swat a semi truck, and driven by all its tons of weight and momentum. When that double punch landed, it would splatter me like a bug.

Impending death is a great motivator for quick thinking. I couldn't seem to move yet, but my fear turned to confidence as I remembered my Phantomstep Breeches. The Colossus was coming fast, but I only needed the blink of an eye. I willed my pants to change.

My Thunderstride Greaves disappeared, but my breeches appeared next to me, not around my legs. Maybe my mind wasn't as clear as I thought, or maybe the fact that my right leg was sticking out at a 90 degree angle halfway down my thigh, then turned again mid-calf had something to do with it. Panic flared as the sight of that onrushing Colossus made me want to scream.

I willed my breeches back into my inventory before they could fall free and focused all my remaining will on imagining them equipped properly on my legs as I called them forth again.

This time it worked and they appeared, encasing my sprawled legs just as the Colossus arrived and smashed both fists into me with all its strength. My Phantom Step spell became available and I triggered it as I screamed my defiance at my onrushing death.

My spell activated a fraction of a second too late.

The unbelievably brutal impact smashed me deep into the ironwood tree, splintering bones and rupturing organs. Endless pain scorched my mind, but just before the monster smushed out my life, I phased out of the physical world.

For a second, everything went black. I couldn't tell if I was alive or dead. My entire world went cold and still and dark, all thoughts ceased, all awareness snuffed out.

Then the pain returned in all its agonizing torment and I could scream again. So I screamed and screamed. In ethereal form, I did not run out of breath, so I kept screaming for what felt like an eternity until I became aware of myself and my surroundings.

My spirit was battered, but in that ghostly form, the full magnitude of pain from my mostly-crushed body was muted. My vision cleared and I realized I was shooting through solid stone. It took a second to realize what was going on, and when I did, a fresh wave of panic tore through my already shredded thoughts.

The titanic pressure smashing into me in the very second I triggered Phantom Step had catapulted my phased-out body through the tree, across the rest of the clearing, and deep into the stone of the mountain. I'd been stuck in the tree at head height for the Colossus, so it had been swinging in a slightly upward angle. When I focused, I could tell I was shooting up through stone at about a 30 or 40 degree angle.

How far had I flown? I couldn't imagine, but I was still shooting through the mountain, plunging deeper and deeper into solid rock.

How long had I been out? Panic made it hard to think. I only had a maximum of 30 seconds per level in any given day to use Phantom Step, but each single use was limited to 5 seconds. Or was that 5 seconds per level? I couldn't remember. How much time remained? Could I escape the mountain before I ran out of time? What would happen then?

The vision of my spell running out and dumping me back into the physical world while still stuck in the heart of the mountain, surrounded by endless tons of solid rock, overwhelmed my Fear defense and my panic spiked. Would I just instantly die as my body fused with the stone, or would I materialize, immobilized and unable to move, forced to languish until I succumbed to starvation?

No. That was stupid. Focusing my scattered thoughts, I willed myself to slow. It was taking too long, but I had to try. Then I soared out of the stone wall and into a gigantic cavern full of liquid.

Some kind of lake? I didn't care. Everything looked strange in ethereal form, and I lacked the focus to see anything but glorious open air. All that mattered was that I was out of the rock.

Just in time too. Phantom Step deactivated itself as I soared through open space, dumping me back into the real world just before I reached the far side of cavern. I didn't smack into the rough stone wall that hard. I would have barely felt it when I was fit, but as wounded as I was, it felt like getting pile-drived by the Colossus's fists again.

All my broken bones and jellified flesh poured nonstop agony through my body. When I hit the wall, the pain exploded into white-hot intensity that swamped my mind and punched me into welcome blackness.

Some time later, I awoke to an eerie stillness. Groaning, I blinked open my eyes, my thoughts sluggish and confused. I was lying on stone in darkness, but I felt surprisingly good. I was surrounded by a soothing warmth that encased my entire body with a pleasant, heavy weight, like a really thick wool blanket.

My eyes tried to focus, but all I saw was red. Turning my head, the view did not change. It took a couple seconds for my foggy thoughts to realize what was going on.

I was lying underwater.

In a panic, I launched myself upward, erupting off the stony floor like a kamikaze dolphin. I was a good swimmer and stroked with all my enormous strength, but the warm, red pool seemed endless. My arms and legs seemed to be working, but I couldn't focus enough to check my status menu. I had to reach air.

Finally, after swimming up at least several hundred feet, I burst from the surface, gasping for breath. That's when I realized my lungs were full of liquid. My entire body convulsed, and I heaved an enormous stream of liquid before gasping and coughing and retching several more times while I weakly tried floating on the surface.

Only when I gasped in my first delicious breath of warm air, saturated with brimstone and acid did I really register my location.

"Beethoven," I gasped, spinning and staring all around in uncomprehending shock.

I was treading water, or rather, treading lava in a giant pool of molten stone.

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