ROAAARRR!!

The creature screamed. It jumped out of the hole and landed on the stone ground with a sound like a hammer hitting an anvil.

BOOM!

The ground beneath it cracked and split outward in jagged lines from the point of impact. Dust rose from the broken stone.

It growled while looking at the two of them. Low and continuous. A sound that settled in the chest rather than the ears.

The door behind Noah and Damien had sealed again.

"Dammit." Noah stared at it for a flat second. "We were so close."

Damien was breathing heavily beside him. "Looks like we have no choice."

Noah turned back around and pulled his sword out again. Damien did the same.

But they both stopped.

The creature was not charging.

It stood where it had landed and looked at them. Not with the blind hunger and rage it had shown before. Not with the wild animal aggression of something that simply wanted to destroy whatever was in front of it.

It was still.

Its red eyes were brighter than before. Much brighter and the quality of them had changed. The dull unintelligent fury that had driven every charge in the previous fight was gone. What replaced it was worse in a different way.

There was intelligence in its eyes.

Something behind those eyes was looking at them and thinking deeply.

"Damien," Noah said quietly. "Does something feel off to you."

Damien swallowed. "It’s not attacking."

"And it’s not angry anymore like before."

The creature’s eyes had settled on Damien specifically. Not on Noah. It was looking at Damien the way someone looks at a person they are trying to place. Studying him, reading something that neither of them could see.

Then it spoke.

"Didn’t expect to see you here."

The voice that came out of it did not belong to it. That was the only way Noah could describe it.

The sound emerged from the creature’s wide mouth but the voice itself felt like it originated somewhere else entirely. Cold and heavy, with something almost like amusement sitting underneath the surface of it.

Noah felt the hair on his arms stand up.

Beside him Damien had gone completely rigid.

"What? Did it just speak?" Noah said.

He said it out loud before he could stop himself. Not at the creature.

Just into the air in front of him because his brain needed a moment to process what had just happened.

"Yes, it just spoke," Damien said. His voice was flat with disbelief.

"How it spoke?"

Noah had never heard of a monster using human language. High ranking monsters of S rank had intelligence, genuine complex intelligence, but speech was something else. This thing had come out of a hole in the floor of a buried dungeon and it had opened its mouth and produced words.

Nothing about this situation was inside the boundaries of what he had prepared for today.

He pushed that aside and focused.

"Who are you?," he said, directing it at the creature.

The creature did not look at him. Its red eyes stayed on Damien.

"Amusing," it said, in that cold voice that wasn’t quite its own. "To find the child blessed by the Sun in a place like this." A pause. "This was not fated. But it is unfortunate for the Sun God."

Damien’s brow pulled together. "What are you talking about. Blessed by the sun? Sun God?"

The creature began to move. Slow and deliberate, walking forward on all fours, each step placed with patience. It was not closing distance quickly. It seemed in no particular hurry.

"Naturally you have no idea," it said. As if he knew many things about Damien.

"Then explain it," Noah said flatly. He was nervous. genuinely nervous.

The creature tilted its massive head slightly. "You don’t know the Sun God?"

Noah gaze at Damien as if looking at some idiot, "Dude..are you for real? Don’t you know the Sun god? The one to whom many people prays."

Damien thought for a moment. Then his eyes widened slightly. "You mean the Sun God. The deity. The one people worship at temples. Even Lyria goes every—"

"Focus," Noah said sharply. "Enemy in front of us."

Damien closed his mouth.

The creature made a low sound that might have been something like a laugh. "At least one of you has sense." Its eyes returned to Damien. "It is better to kill you now. Before you become a nuisance later."

"At least tell us who you are first," Noah said. he was afraid, still mustered his courage to ask.

A pause from unknown creature.

"You don’t need that information." The cold voice carried no particular malice in it. Just fact. "I sensed a familiar presence entering this place. This insignificant creature was born from me...through him I sense a familiar energy. That is why I am here and to see what this thing had encountered."

Noah opened his mouth to ask what that meant.

The creature moved.

No more warning. No more words. It accelerated from its slow walk to a full charge in a single motion and crossed the distance between them faster than anything it had shown in the previous fight, one clawed arm already raised and coming down toward Damien.

Noah reacted before thinking.

His mana pushed outward and a wall of ice rose between Damien and the incoming claw. Thick and immediate, as tall as the creature itself.

The claw hit it.

Crack

Then,

BOOM!

The wall shattered in less than two seconds. But two seconds was enough. Damien had already moved, stepping out of the impact zone, his sword blazing back to full golden intensity as he swung low at the creature’s leg.

The creature’s other arm came across to block.

Noah was already moving to its other side.

A magic circle formed in the air in front of him, pale blue and rimmed with frost. He pushed mana through it and a dense burst of snow and frozen mist erupted outward directly into the creature’s face.

Its vision went white.

The blocking arm missed its angle.

Damien’s blade connected with the leg.

Slash!

Blood hit the stone floor.

"Gckk." The creature’s voice dropped its cold composure for a moment. Pure irritation replaced it. "Annoying pests."

It turned toward Noah.

"Not on my watch bastard!" Damien’s voice.

The creature once again focus on Damien.

Noah glanced sideways and saw at Damien immediately.