"I'm gonna punch it."

"Really?" I asked Viktor, who was staring off at the rim of the depression the city was in. "Do you think it'll care?"

"No idea." He said, shrugging his huge shoulders, "Still going to punch it."

"Alright then, good luck with that."

"No luck needed, just my fists," the star of the show said, heading off north towards the giant lizard. I'm pretty sure I heard Celistar snort at the last comment, but when I looked at her face, it was the picture of composure, so I couldn't be sure.

I looked over at István. "Pretty sure that thing is dead but just doesn't know it yet."

"Indeed."

The enormous monster had appeared over the lip of the rim just as we sent Qīwù away, probably drawn by all the Nebula emitted by the process. It had shown up too quickly for the motion to be the culprit. It was staring down into the city at us, then looking down, alternately.

Viktor was already disappearing through the edge of the city, moving in as straight a line as workable towards the monster. I elected not to worry about him; he'd proven himself basically indestructible. But that didn't mean I wouldn't try to help his endeavors.

"I'm pretty sure it's trying to figure out how to scale that. We should do something," I said to the two standing next to me. "Punching may solve all problems, but it'd be best to soften it up a bit for him."

István nodded, then pulled out what I can only describe as a big-ass gun. He did it in one smooth motion too, like it'd been under his jacket the entire time.

It hadn't… right? Either way, it was as big around as my leg. Or well, a normal leg; mine was a bit on the slender side. Liam's drawings of me as a stick figure were pretty much on the mark.

Either way, it's a big gun. It was pretty much a tube with some stuff sticking out underneath it. Very science-y things. Vials of liquid and tubes and such that didn't really have any place on a gun. It had a handgrip, a trigger, and this odd u-shaped thing on the underside near the back that I couldn't figure out the use for until he lifted that portion onto his shoulder, where it sat perfectly.

"You will not want to be behind me," he said, and we made sure we were well clear.

He rested his left hand on the side opposite me, and I saw the whole thing light up, seals forming all across the surface. I could see a very substantial flow of Nebula across the device, rushing towards the front, but a lot of it wasn't coming from István, which matched what I knew about him, he was a quality over quantity kind of guy, even when it came to his Nebula.

A sphere of grey light winked into existence at the end of the device, with little squiggles of something getting sucked into it as it grew. I looked closer, perhaps closer than I really should have been, and it seemed almost like the steam you would get from a warm tea, only going in reverse, back into this ever-growing orb.

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As it reached a certain size, I could see a swirling concentration of power in it, packed into layers that were somehow stabilized. It was an application of concepts well above what I could manage.

The ball of energy seemed to reach a stability point, where it would grow no further. István looked over at us. "Plug your ears."

I didn't need to be told any further, and neither did Celistar. Neither of my Elders minced words. I had long learned to take what they said at face value.

He squeezed the triggering apparatus on the device, and a sound like the giant metal thing Gran used to can food assaulted my ears as though my fingers weren't even in them. It was the shriek of a million forks scraping across a million plates. Utterly horrendous.

So, Liam screaming, but louder.

I saw a thin emission of Nebula out the front of the sphere as vanished in a few moments, along with a significant blast of heat out the back, likely to stabilize Elder Scholar, who still staggered back a few steps as the front of the weapon rose into the air.

The effect was immediate. As though an invisible, giant knife had descended, most of the right shoulder and a chunk of the back of the giant lizard fell off to the side, as it fell heavily onto the crest of the sheer cliff it was at the top of.

The meat slice - as my brain rather disgustingly dubbed it - fell through the air, dropping and slamming into the ground. From our distance, it didn't look huge, but when it landed the resulting impact made the ground roll like a kid playing with their sheets. I floated myself off the ground, and the two others stabilized themselves in their own ways.

Just how heavy was the whole thing if a slice of it was enough to do damage from hundreds of meters away?

"I missed," István said, causing me to look at him askance.

"That is what happens when you miss?" Celistar said, taking the words right out of my mouth.

"Yes, I was trying to hit it dead on. I was hoping to do some serious damage."

It seemed István needed to reexamine his definition of 'serious damage'.

Or so I thought, as the lizard pushed itself to its feet a moment later and went back to looking at the descent again - essentially just shrugging off the loss of a non-trivial amount of body mass. Even the bleeding seemed to have clotted up in record time because I was expecting to see enough to make a new pond.

Not that anyone would want to swim in it, mind.

Still, our scaly foe didn't seem too inconvenienced by the entire event.

"Should I do something?" I asked, getting a rather startled reaction from Celistar, who looked over at me with wide eyes.

"Goodness no," the Moon Fairy said, "Viktor is over there." István just nodded sagely at these words, as though he'd never heard more sage advice.

Oh, come on, I thought, I'm not that bad.

Then I remembered what had happened in the center of the meadow I'd done emergency landscaping on before - that impromptu pond I'd dug - and decided to join Elder Scholar in his sagely proclivities.

"Besides…" István said, pointing. It turns out that the path of his weird knife gun had intersected the cliff edge below our gargantuan foe, and done a rendition of what happened to the beast itself.

A cascade of dust and stones - some much bigger than they appeared if the loud cracking sounds of their impacts were anything to go by - fell from what was a rapidly widening fissure in the rock. One the lizard had just placed a foot onto.

With a thunderous noise, the cliff face broke loose, and the massive animal lost its footing. It seemed to tilt over the edge much slower than I had expected, as though it was in slow motion. My brain just couldn't comprehend the motions of something that massive on a normal scale. Fast was slow.

It made some efforts to correct its most unfortunate trajectory, but its size was working against it here. Even solid rock could do very little to arrest that much momentum, and digging its back feet in just increased the destruction as a whole corner of the cliff broke free, tumbling down after it.

Something clicked in my head as I watched it fall, remembering how much just a chunk of it had shaken up everything.

"Brace yourselves!" I said, pushing myself up into the air and grabbing both of them and lifting them with me.

"It's gonna be big!"

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