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>>4362292
Both armies quickly stopped fighting as they watched an enormous glowing form elevate itself above the trees in the distance. It was some kind of plant monster, which is not too surprising considering that it is the area where you fought the “ents”. However, it is significantly different and its size is mind- boggling. It towers above the tree tops in its entire 450-meter-tall glory, the questions of how such thing can even exist due to square cube law don’t matter anymore as you can clearly see it there, standing. It has a vague and thin humanoid shape with a hunched back and it lacks the eyes or any other facial features. Its head is surrounded by an arrangement of thick growths reminiscent of tentacles. Thinner similar growths line its spine. Its entire body consists out of networks of “vines” that keeps together some kind of yellow and glowing plant material similarly to how connective tissue attaches muscles. Some parts of the creature don’t glow and upon closer inspection they look like massive flesh- colored tumors that remind you of the Mad Goddess. These tumors appear to be mostly rotting and they have a nasty look of gangrene necrosis tissues. Your guess is that Jane started working on taking over or disabling the monster but you banished her before she could finish with it.

The monster points its head around for a few moments until it zeroes in on the battlefield. It bends its neck backwards, the tentacles wrapping up around its lack of face and then it flicks the head forward producing a deafening wave of sound that breaks trees in front of the monster and easily pushes most of the mortals on the ground and drags them a few meters. It is so powerful that the hurricane- level wind punches you out of the sky and stuns you for a few moments, but you manage to quickly catch yourself before you lose too much altitude. And that’s from kilometers away! This is comparable to a shockwave from a nuclear weapon, but focused in one direction instead of expanding omnidirectionally. The triangle of flattened trees in front of the being shows the extent of the damage.

As to be expected, both human armies panic. This is not something that they have any chance to beat and their only hope is to escape. A sort of truce forms where everyone is too busy with running away to fight. Some attempt to recover the bodies, some horsemen try to pick up the people of their side but the majority drops their weapons and what armor they can ditch quickly and just books in the direction of their borders in a disorganized fashion. In denser parts of the formations there is some stampeding but the crowds quickly disperse as much as they can.

>>4362301
The Monster King, likely unsatisfied with the lethality of his opening move, starts accelerating towards the battlefield at a surprising speed. Big things are not inherently slow, it is the question of inertia. The monster takes minutes to accelerate to its maximum speed but it is still a skyscraper sized tree demon running at over a hundred kilometers per hour. In addition, it is screaming its bubbly roar which triggers numerous echoing sounds in the forest as it summons its ent army. Humans have no chance...

This is hands down the biggest creature you’ve ever encountered and you simply have no idea how to deal with it. The explosive barrels would be like using 9mm on an elephant, same applies to the arrows. You would spend an eternity chopping it up with a sword as well, but if you don’t come up with something, it and all of its ent buddies would annihilate both armies and then they’d likely rampage across the countryside until Ceno or HN pantheons wipe them out. You doubt that their support would arrive quickly enough though, both sides are forbidden from deploying cups or themselves in mortal conflicts. While you don’t doubt that the fight was observed, you still think that it would take at least an hour for either side to respond, and before that you need to do something or a lot of people would die. Think, think! What’s the plan?!

>Roll 1d20 and suggest strategies. Default option is to attempt to drag its attention to yourself somehow and draw it for as long as possible waiting for reinforcements.

Rolled 10 (1d20)

>>4362303
Let's get it's attention and redirect it away fron the soldiers. It used it's tentacles to produce that effect so let's try to fuck them up, maybe cutting them and even using TK to separate them

Rolled 13 (1d20)

>>4362303
Explosions on the tentaçles, discarge our bracelet and try to suck its life force on a specific point, we saw that the bracelet worked very well on plants, so weaken a tentacle and try to blast it.

>>4362303
le rape the soldiers

Rolled 11 (1d20)

>>4362303
Flick through our different vision specs, see if we can find any thing that could be a weak spot or a specific function on it's body that we can attack, it along with our auged mind could give us an idea on how this thing works and how it can be stooped. Do that while we try to distract it

Rolled 5 (1d20)

>>4362303
Would using our TK at full and ramming his leg while it takes a step to make it trip be a valid strategy?
If not ram him with a TK bomb right up his face and deliver rock based doom on his head

damn I pity those heavy infantry dudes, those suits are NOT made for running

>>4362313
>>4362316
>>4362320
>>4362323
>>4362330
>>4362333
Writing

>>4362365
Alright, here is the plan: the monster likely utilizes facial tentacles to cast its attack and they are thinner than its limbs so you might be able to disable them and draw its attention. If you manage to hold its attention then humans might have a chance to get away and you might get some reinforcements or maybe even you could figure out how to defeat it, but let’s not count on that just yet. Also “might” is an operating term here. You were incredibly lucky before; you might not be as lucky now. But while you’re still at a distance you might as well collect some more information.

You flick through your various senses to see if you can find any obvious weaknesses and you have some result. In infrared the monster is about 45 degrees Celsius somehow with a hotspot on its face that seems to cool down slowly, you guess that it is waste heat from the shockwave attack. The tumor spots are significantly colder, just barely above the temperature of environment. Psi energy inflow seems to be focused on the head and upper torso of the monster so you suspect that these zones have some significance if not for life support then for high energy attacks.

You pull out all five of your explosive barrels and accelerate at maximum speed for its face targeting the bases of the facial tentacles. The monster doesn’t see you or recognize you as a threat until you make contact and five fireballs form on its face. The tentacles are ridiculous, they are as thick as ancient trees and your gunpowder barrels only punch out shallow craters spraying hot yellow glowing liquid all over the place. Monster’s flesh appears to be set up like an onion with consequent layers of about a centimeter-thick tissue with glowing liquid pumped between the sheets under pressure. The pressure of the spray slowly falls down which suggests that it has something similar to “vasoconstriction” to prevent “blood loss”, so you suspect that it should have a clotting mechanism as well, it just likely doesn’t work on such short timescales for you to see it in action.

>>4362549
You land on the creature’s face with your sword in your hands and you start chopping at one of the tentacles at the base in an attempt to sever it. The creature’s skin is annoyingly rubbery and while you manage to break apart outer layers the sword loses a lot of momentum. The vines seem to be less rubbery but they are essentially multilayered ropes of a fiber that is incredibly hard to cut. It takes a dozen of strikes at your full strength to finally snap one of them. This will be annoying…

And then you feel something wrap up around your leg. You look down and see dozens of thinner vines wiggling out of the creature’s flesh and wrapping themselves around your legs and slowly constricting them. Tentacles, why is it always tentacles?! First in the infected creatures and parasites, now this shit! You really hope that the designer of this war machine wasn’t a pervert… With a strong burst of force, you rip yourself off the creature’s face and you try to cut the giant tentacle higher up, but it starts to produce these tiny grabbing vines as well. They are thin enough for you to rip them apart with your raw strength, but they massively slow down the process of cutting.

This won’t do much good, you need to think of something else. An attempt to use Rozen’s Gauntlet causes a significant chunk of the creature’s flesh to stop glowing and shrivel up as if it got dehydrated. That spot loses most of the rubbery properties and flakes like crazy allowing you to chop much deeper. However, the gauntlet rapidly overfills and some sort of internal safety prevents it from sucking in more energy. You can use it to refuel your energy pool, but it is near full as well, you need to spend that energy on something useful.

>>4362550
You decide to get some distance and assess the situation. The monster has made it almost half of the way to the battlefield and most of humans are still there. Luckily the other monsters are much slower and have to make their way through the dense forest. Their main force would arrive much later so you can focus on the big guy. As you get away though, the monster’s head turns to you and without slowing down it does the head flip again in a way that a human would break their neck if they tried to repeat it. You barely manage to dodge out of the majority of the sound pulse. It was significantly less powerful but much more focused, almost like a sonic version of a laser pulse. At such short distance it actually rips you out of the sky and you crash in the forest nearby breaking a group of small trees with your back. Your ear ringing stops withing seconds, but you struggle to get up. When you do, you notice that you are bleeding your white blood from your nose, ears and the tear ducts. You also feel “very itchy” to the point of it hurting significantly all over the body an inch below the skin. You have no idea what that is, but you guess that this is some kind of physical damage and you thus successfully proceed to use the gauntlet to remove the sensation which depletes it completely.

This is bad, you were only a minor annoyance to this titan. And you almost dared to call yourself a goddess, huh? Well, you need to come up with a better plan fast…

>Roll 1d20 and propose a plan

>>4362552
Also it is basically midnight, next post would be made tomorrow and I'll try to maybe squeeze in two if the next day allows. I hope you've enjoyed, voting extended until next post is done and feel free to discuss what to do, the fight promises to be a long one...

Rolled 17 (1d20)

>>4362552
Find a huge rock, trip the giant with a TK bullet made of it aimed at his ankle after weakening it using thhe bracelet since its empty

Rolled 13 (1d20)

>>4362552
Go for the back of his neck, use the bracelet to whither it and rip as much as we can, it is an important part for his whole neck snap thing so if we damage it the monster may even damage it further when it tries to use the neck snap. if the bracelet is full do something very very stupid and feed the energy either to ourself or to one of those tumors to see if we can get it fighting "on our side"

Rolled 18 (1d20)

>>4362552
Since his attacke is wave based can we redirect it up or somewhere else with tk?

>>4362617
>>4362626
>>4362787
Hey guys, wanted to post today but ended up busy as hell, I’ll try to post a response tomorrow.

>>4362787
The attack is sonic based aka it is a pressure wave propagating through the air. It is not a TK wave to negate it directly with our powers and it is not very feasible to affect it indirectly due to its overwhelming power. It is comparable to hurricane winds and we are used to stopping pre- gunpowder projectiles. While not as difficult as trying to shield against light based attacks, we still would need much more powerful and thus more energy hungry barrier. However, our current barriers would work against debris flung by the attack.

>>4362552
Hmm. Makes me wonder if it would be technically possible to bait one of the less destructive Ceilings into attacking it, like sticking a radio beacon to its head and legging it. Such an act would be obscenely dangerous and reckless and would likely cause enormous collateral damage (going off the one discussed a while back), potentially get us and many others killed and should never, ever be seriously considered even for a moment with the Ceiling (none of which we really know much about) probably being even worse than the Monster King, but it's an interesting thought experiment (to me, anyway) nonetheless.

>>4365093
(not that we have anything to bait one with, but suppose we did)

>>4365097
maybe not this monster but that is actually a good idea to have as a backup....maybe we could send a radio signal to the mad goddess if she ever acts up too much...
but at the same time....others could use that

>>4365415
I think that even if it worked beautifully, we would likely get reamed out by the rest of the pantheon for playing with fire and potentially setting a bad precedent (perhaps we should broach this with them next time we see them and watch their jaws hit the floor). Still, there may be threats out there that justify pitting them against the Second World's finest for lack of other options, like said dear goddess.

>>4364334
Alright, plan B. Let’s try to damage its neck in an attempt to get to whatever organs it has that utilizes psi energy. Hopefully if it doesn’t kill the monster, it would at least prevent it from using that destructive shockwave attack. You pick yourself from the pile of broken wood, fly back up into the air and accelerate towards the monster’s neck. You plan to use the gauntlet in combination with your sword to make it easier to cut into the King’s flesh, but you have some pretty low expectations. Your only hope for this method is if the psi organs are close to the surface and not in the middle of the neck. If they are deep you would have to dig through tens of meters of rubbery material.

The monster seems to track your position as the neck bristles with vines as you approach. You use your gauntlet to get rid of them and start draining the area while dumping excess energy on useless but energy intensive application of your powers. However, you quickly notice that the draining speed is much lower in this region. The gauntlet always had a limited speed at which it acts, it is not instantaneous. It can likely suck a human dry leaving a shriveled-up corpse in less than a second, but here it is both working against the massive amount of biomatter and the fact that something appears to be resisting its effect. It makes sense that a way to negate biosculpting should exist, else it would be an incredibly powerful combat power that could melt whole armies into puddles of goo in seconds. It is likely that anything both biological and important enough would have a counter and looks like you’ve found one. Facial tentacles appear to be further away and thus susceptible to being severed in this fashion given about ten minutes each, plus minus. There is still over a dozen of them so it won’t be quick either way.

As you dig deeper and deeper with your sword you note that the gauntlet’s effect is weakening until you have to stop. You managed to cut out the hole where you can fit standing up yet you still can’t find anything except the same rubberized tissue layers and lots of that hot glowing liquid that gets everywhere and seems to be mildly acidic judging by the discomfort and skin irritation it causes. It is also incredibly difficult to fight the tiny tentacle vines pushing from the floor and walls of the cavity and trying to tangle you up. The gauntlet’s drain provides only seconds of respite against them. Once you finally rip yourself out of the tangled-up mess of vines you notice that the monster is very close to the battlefield, your plan B took too much time and the King is minutes away from running into still fleeing humans. You need to do something fast!

>>4366278
Your plan C was to utilize your gauntlet to weaken one of the creature’s legs and then crush it with a large boulder. Unfortunately, gauntlet’s effect appears to have issue penetrating deeper into monster’s flesh that is not only in the protected area, it simply propagates worse if it has to go through more than half a meter of already depleted flesh making it basically useless against creature’s legs. While they are pretty spindly if we look at creature’s humanoid proportions, they are still massive pillars 40 meters thick, you could dig out a flat in one and live in it, that’s insane! You attempt to throw a large boulder at high speed at the leg’s joint anyway but the rock shatters with little to no visible damage, you need to find another way…

The idea comes to you once you attempt to just pull its leg back, you’ve never actually used a large chunk of your energy reserves in one go before. You don’t really know how well it would work, but by a rough estimate based on eyeballed creature’s mass you can spend about a third of your energy to attempt to significantly move it, which would still not be enough to lift the creature up and you’d have next to no control over the energy release beyond the direction. However, as it is moving at almost 150 km/h if timed right it would be enough to topple the monster to the ground and that would likely aggro it on you by the energy release alone. This is a substantial volume of energy; however, it would be unfeasible to recover it within any tactically significant timescale even with the help of the gauntlet. This might be crippling if the fight ends up taking too long or requiring another massive investment. However, if you don’t do it the monster would make contact with humans before you can attempt anything else.

Roll 1d20 and…
>Use a third of your energy on the topple
>Forgo this type of attack
Further strategy ideas still welcome.

Rolled 14 (1d20)

>>4366279
>>Use a third of your energy on the topple

yeah, time to buy some time, make the thing go down

Let's try to focus on damaging the energy intensive parts of it's body when we can, we saw them with our vision some posts ago


also, my idea of damaging the neck was not to reach any sensitive area, but to weaken the neck itself...it is an important part of his anatomy responsible for the high speed neck snap, so if we damage it the monster can hurt itself if he does the attack again, like a rope slowly losing threads as more pressure is applied to it after some threads were cut

Rolled 4 (1d20)

>>4366279
>Use a third of your energy on the topple

Rolled 11 (1d20)

>>4366279

>Use a third of your energy on the topple

>>4366279
Interesting note: this monster is taller than tallest Godzilla depiction of 300 meters.

Rolled 6 (1d20)

>>4366279

>>4366279
Hey guys, we might not run tomorrow, not sure. I'm pulling an all- nighter for the coursework that I need to present at 10 am. It might be possible that I would not be sane enough to write good posts, sorry

Rolled 15 (1d20)

>>4373671
Thanks for the heads up

>>4373671
There is one other thing you can do, something that you’ve never done before, you can utilize a large chunk of your energy reserves in one go. Most often your psi reserves have gotten low only due to difficult and prolonged battles or external effects such as when you carried the heat rods across the country, but you’ve never used anything that required such a massive investment of energy at once. To be fair, it’s not like you needed to, you could lift tens of tons into the air during construction easily and the sealed dwarven gate in the ruin was theoretically possible to lift, just very hard to control and you feared that it would misalign or get wedged somewhere. When you were working on reconstruction of Farsalos you experimented with the sizes of prefabs and you noticed that while you could lift more, the bigger the mass the progressively less accurate your power became. Thus, you settled on smaller prefab chunks instead of airlifting in whole floors.

You also know that the Ceno pantheon once mentioned that dropping a small mountain would be a possible option if they didn’t care about civilian casualties, so it must be possible to affect objects of immense mass with telekinesis. This monster, assuming roughly the same density as a human, would weight around 1,1 million tons. If you project only energy requirements for lifting it into the air you would deplete yourself in a fraction of a second while barely moving it. However, you don’t need to, you only need to trip the monster so it falls on the ground. The kinetic energy from its speed is around 865 gigajoules with 2,2 terajoules of potential energy, which means that if it falls it would produce around half a kiloton of TNT worth of energy. Thankfully to anyone in range, it won’t be comparable to a small nuke as it would be expended over a significant amount of time and space. Still, it would likely damage the creature enough for you to aggro it, hopefully. Then you might win enough time for Ceno or HN pantheons to do something, and if not, you would be winning time for mortals to escape and for you to find a way to kill it. In worst case you could probably escape, it doesn’t seem to compare to you in its maximum speed.

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>>4376395
This plan would put you in danger, however, as recovering a third of your energy reserves would take days normally or hours of using the gauntlet which means that you can’t realistically recover during the fight. Additionally, it would be nearly impossible to control, being essentially a massive pulse of telekinesis pointed in roughly the same direction. However, you don’t have much of a choice, in minutes the creature would make contact with the battlefield and thus it would start trampling humans. At high speed you fly forth and land in front of the Monster King’s path bracing yourself…

You breathe in, breathe out and start focusing on the desired effect in your mind. The mental image grows more and more complex along with growing “bigger”, which doesn’t really make much sense for an imaginary mold for psychic power, it is likely an intuitive way for you to understand its energy requirements. You start pouring in energy, but the rate “suggested” by the mold would literally take hours to fill up, so you start pushing it. You increase the rate at which your energy pours into the mold and you notice that it helps, the mold starts filling in faster, but the energy also starts getting wasted. You could compare it to pouring water from one glass into another, if you do it slowly almost all of it ends up in the second glass, but if you just quickly flip over the first glass into the second one, the water would slush around and gets spilled all over the table. Your guess that this is the “waste heat” of psi effects, the “spells” are likely all somewhat inefficient, but these inefficiencies are exaggerated by the rate at which you fill in the mold, the faster you energize it, the more energy you lose. Small molds seem to be more efficient to fill in quickly as they need less total energy while large molds can take minutes, hours or maybe even days to “channel” efficiently.

>>4376397
Curiously, this waste energy doesn’t return to the psi field in the area, instead it gets partially converted by the mold and still manifests in the real world. In your case, you start producing strong pulses of repelling telekinesis force all around you, but mostly focused in front in the cone in which you target your spell. The grass beats rhythmically as waves of pushing energy pass through them like wind making you appear surprisingly similar to what DBZ characters look like when they charge their stronger attacks. You wonder if this effect is “elementally colored”, such as if Elspeth would produce loose electric discharges around her when she fires off her stronger attacks or something similar. You’ll ask about it when you get the chance, but for now you should just keep that in mind for the future. Likely as spell energies keep growing, the waste energy effect would increase in severity as well which could endanger your companions or just people standing too close to the channeling caster.

The creature arranges its face tentacles in preparation for firing its shockwave weapon, likely planning to fire off another shot as it is getting in range at which it would actually maim and kill humans with overpressure. This causes you to rush with energizing the spell further which causes the waste effect to get worse. The repulsion waves get so bad that it starts ripping out the dirt from of the ground and flinging it away from you, thus rapidly digging out a crater with you standing on a tiny pillar of dirt in the center in moments. This barely takes a second, but the spell is primed and you accelerate towards the monster’s legs.

As you get close enough, you time it so that both of monster’s legs are in close proximity during its run cycle, anchor yourself to the ground and fire off the blast. For just a single moment everything around you freezes as your brain goes into overdrive and slows down your perception of time. A huge transparent lens forms in front of you and then quickly accelerates forward as everything else is motionless. The time slowly resumes and the lens rapidly flies away and vanishes in the distance before you can even tell that the brain overdrive is wearing off.

>>4376405
The recoil is massive, ripping large chunks of dirt that you used for anchoring and throwing you backwards at an immense speed. Both of monster legs get swooped from the ground and flung backwards. It takes some time for the upper part of creature’s body to realize that it has no more support and to start falling, at this height it takes 15 seconds for the monster to collapse on the ground. You manage to get far enough away from the impact to witness the result in its full glory without being in the splash radius.

The creature’s warmup of the sonic blast gets aborted and it tries to catch itself with its arms. However, with its mass and energy the ground behaves as if it was made out of half- solidified jelly. The palms slip and dig out massive trenches forward as the monster’s actual body rams into the ground at almost full speed. Its inertia is more than enough to drag the body across the ground for over a meter, which in combination with the impact itself displaces a huge volume of dirt. Imagine a dam failure that causes a massive flood, it looks somewhat similar, but with dirt instead of water. Over the next half minute, the variously sized globs of dirt rain down across the area in front of the monster which is uncoincidentally occupied by fleeing humans. Well, still better than the shockwave, you suppose.

The monster immediately starts getting up and its head turns in your direction in an anatomically improbable way for a human. You see that the whole front side of the monster has lost numerous layers of flesh, but not enough to pose a serious threat to it. Well, you wanted the aggro, now you have it. The question is, how long will it last for? If you frustrate the monster enough by the chase it might switch for an easier to catch prey, so you must find a way to damage it harder to keep its attention. But what can you do? It is highly resistant to blunt force, maybe you might be able to use something huge to cut it with? Like a sharpened boulder? Or maybe you could try to use fire on it? However, you don’t have any flammables on you. You haven’t investigated the tumors yet either, to be fair. Time for the next plan…

>Roll 1d20 and propose a strategy. The monster will focus us down for the next turn at least. Quick note, sorry to whoever proposed looking into tumors, I forgot last time.

>>4376409
Huh, no votes for an hour. Did I start too late?

Rolled 17 (1d20)

>>4376409

>>4376490
I wasn't expecting you to run, let's roll

>>4376508
Oh shit, I forgot to mention that I'll try to move it on Sunday, my bad. For some reason I thought I posted in Twitter and Discord, but I didn't. In any case, we kind of reached the point where once voting period finishes I won't have enough time to write second post today. I'm extending discussion and voting until tomorrow evening(or whenever I manage to post) as usual. Sounds good?

Rolled 5 (1d20)

>>4376409
Dig deep into the exposed flesh

>>4376513
sounds good to me

Rolled 4 (1d20)

>>4376409
I like the sharp rock thing, if it's an onion we can cut it up

Rolled 14 (1d20)

I feel like we need to discuss strategies a bit more before I can write the next post.

>>4376508
>>4377891
Is there anything specific you want to propose or just rolling for whatever ends up decided?

>>4376517
Essentially monster's entire front side was shallowly scraped, I need a specific place where you want to try burrowing in and hopefully the purpose of that exercise. In addition to that, the monster would more actively attack Ag while she tries to cut into it making this much more difficult.

>>4376813
The rock plan is to find the largest boulder we can, cleave off some parts to form a blade or a spike out of it and launch it into perceived weak spot in the monster. Are you fine with that?

The fire thing, can we generate hit by friction with TK?
Maybe another burst of energy like that would make it take us as priority 1 since it probably would put protecting itself so it can kill more later before killing some specs of dust/soldiers on it's to do list

>>4379050
Well, there are two issues in fire plan:
1) It is unlikely that the monster is easily flammable. It is rubbery and has a ton of liquid inside of it. Thus fire option has to be more like “pour lots of napalm over it” instead of “try to make it catch on fire”
2) Telekinesis applies force to objects. We can cause “wind” by pushing the air, but it is not that efficient. We could rub something against monster’s flesh hard and fast enough to make fire, but as I mentioned it is unlikely to be easily flammable.

Regarding another burst of energy, the question is how to use it. Another push when it gets up or something else? Maybe we could use a massive push to fling a boulder of insane proportions at it for example.

Rolled 19 (1d20)

>>4379423
Ok, I have two plans
Push it again while it's getting up, at a time his footing is shaky maybe falling backwards so he can't use the arms to soak up the impact.

Another plan if that fails is to use the sharpened boulder plan and try to reach one of those energy flows that we say with our special vision, go for the one that is most exposed after the fall

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>>4379540
so
how about we hit him with a gigantic boulder at super speed when he is making the movement to get back up. I imagine that the force generated necessary to lift his torso from horizontal to vertical position must be gigantic so we keep pushing when he lift his torso to tip him backwards. since he will be already on a movement generating a shit ton of energy we add up to that with the boulder missile and try to tip him backwards to fall on his back

Hey guys, I decided that it would be better to start the next thread with results of this thread's voting instead of splitting the fight scene into two parts.

>>4381498
Hey guys, I'll unfortunately have to cancel this week's SGQ session. I have some IRL things that need to be done ASAP today that I didn't plan for, sorry. I won't be able to run on Sunday either. We'll run next week

>>4383639
Not waiting to end up on the wrong side of the shockwave, you propel yourself downward and you were barely just in time as a series of overpressure pulses fly above your head. The creature seemingly tried to anticipate you dodging to the side instead of drastically lowering altitude. Interestingly, these blasts were similar to the high precision pulse that shot you down, but they had worse focus and dissipated quicker, which makes you think that facial tentacles are needed for focusing the shockwave. The monster’s face is one of the most damaged areas on its body due to much thinner tentacles that couldn’t afford to lose as much of the protective layers. So, your attack had some lasting effect, that’s nice

This barely took a moment to perform the dodge, but you had ample time to come up with a few ideas on what to do. The issue is that the creature would likely realize that it can’t actually catch you and then it would switch its attention for closest humans again. To prevent that you have to be too high of a threat to ignore. Your first thoughts were related to utilizing the damage it suffered from falling, but you quickly realize that it is not sufficient. Even though the fall took out up to half a meter worth of tissue in some places, the monster is still tens of meters thick in the thinnest parts which still means hours of constant slashing through thick rubbery sponge before you have a chance of severing a limb or reaching any vital organs. It is less of an issue with facial tentacles, but you’d still need hours to give it a “clean shave” with your greatsword.

The second option is to light it on fire. Unfortunately, the monster appears to be non- flammable naturally. You attempted to use lots of explosives against it and nothing caught fire. It is reasonable because if it used to be a biological war machine then making it flammable would be a detriment. It consists out of some sort of biological material soaked in thick acidic liquid, so the only decent idea on how to light it on fire is to dump flaming substance all over it. Essentially lots of napalm bombing. The issue with this idea is that… you don’t have any napalm. You really should’ve seen this coming; you have encountered biological opponents before along with creatures that are immune to blunt trauma. Your psi abilities almost exclusively provide blunt trauma, so you are hilariously badly equipped for this fight. You need to quickly find some highly flammable substance or powerful heat source. Powerful heat source, hmm.

>>4394666
Then again, there is another option. The creature obviously has vital organs located in its head and upper body. You and your sword don’t have enough mass to pierce all the way to it, but there might be another way. If you find a large enough rock, you could shape it into a stake and launch it into the monster’s head in hopes of penetrating into the vitals and killing it. If it won’t work, then at least you’d be making a deep enough hole to make later “deep drilling” attempts much less tedious.

However, the last option has a time limit. You can hit the monster the second time when it is getting up on its feet to topple it backwards while it is still unstable. When it gets up, there won’t be a second chance for that. However, this would be very energy expensive, you would drop to a third of your power supplies. Are you sure that this is the best course of actions? There is no time for being indecisive, you need time for any other plan, and this will hopefully stall the monster further. It is decided then.

Your first massive blast was a prototype, now as you know what to expect you can build on that experience. Now it is far from being an uncontrollable barely directed release of energy. You manage to shorten the pulse length and focus it into a narrower cone. If you have to make a comparison, your first attack was more like a table fan, a cone of pushing force lasting for relatively long half of a second. Your second attack would be more like a punch, short, focused and powerful. It still would take hours to channel your energy into it, but you don’t have enough time and it is not a “special beam cannon” so you’d have to suck up some huge energy losses once again. It takes the Monster King around 10 minutes to get up on its feet which you spend charging your attack. It doesn’t seem to shoot at you that often though, looks like it can’t handle too much of waste heat and its “main cannon” has to cool off between shots. “Weaker” directed shots seemingly need less cooldown than the massive ones and it almost solely switches to weak and precise as you keep dodging away from most of them.

>>4394668
A couple shockwaves manage to clip you and you almost lose containment of your “spell”, but you prevail and finish charging just as planned. As the creature is firmly standing only on one leg, you fly up to its chest and fire off your load. The spike of energy strikes the Monster King with the force exceeding that of a freight train. The focused pushing beam strikes the creature in the middle of the chest causing massive ripples to propagate from the impact site. Weaker vines snap and rubbery flesh breaks open in numerous areas spraying chunks and acidic blood. The pulse travels throughout the creature’s flesh at the speed of light and exits its back in a similarly impressive fashion with a spray of gibs. Unfortunately, it is not enough to cause much of the valuable internal damage as you noticed how the energy gets partially reflected from the same area that sapped gauntlet’s “life force absorption”.

However, even with insufficient internal damage the attack served its function. The monster toppled and was falling backwards. It attempted to catch itself by taking a step back but it miscalculated the push and lost balance continuing to fall backwards. It manages to catch itself successfully by pushing its elbows backwards. This serves to focus the massive volumes of kinetic energy into relatively tiny impact point which severely damages its elbows blowing off all of the flesh from one side and revealing the “bones”. The monster has an internal skeleton made out of yellowish white material that is incredibly resistant to damage.

The creature’s flesh changes its color shade. From lightly glowing piss yellow to orange and then red as becomes brighter and brighter, almost too bright to look at with human eyes. Your gut feeling tells you to GTFO as quickly as you physically can, so you oblige. From its “lounge chair” position it fires a concentrated “beam” of overpressure that lasts several seconds. It is visible in the air as a thick milky white line of fog that produces unimaginably loud pulsing noise. It even parts the clouds like a giant knife as it passes over them. The monster attempts to track you with the beam as you try your hardest to dodge, but in the end, it catches you. You were lucky that the creature ran out of juice moments after that.

>>4394672
You don’t actually remember what precisely happened, you wake up on the ground with everything hurting all over. You wobble back onto your feet and you immediately get violently sick and collapse again into the dirt. It takes a lot of willpower and completely disabled pain senses for you to finally get a hold of yourself. You find yourself lying in the pool of your whitish blood, your vision seriously blurred, your armor is partially missing, severely tattered or bent, your bow, arrows and backpack are missing completely, but you find your greatsword not too far away and your artifact blade is still on you. Your body is severely damaged on the surface, you are bleeding profusely from your eyes, nose and mouth as well as having several holes that were caused by shards of steel armor getting impaled into you. If not for the ability to completely shut off pain responses you would not be able to move right now, but you still have to spend a few minutes to take off most of the damaged armor pieces that now would hinder your movements. Also, you feel incredibly frail. You attribute that to internal damage of the muscles. You are forced to spend more energy on healing yourself to get rid from internal damage and get your eyes back into shape, but you have to leave most of surface level trauma as is. You don’t have the luxury of endless energy to spare anymore, you are just under a quarter of your reserves.

Without missing a beat, as soon as you can you take flight and scan your surroundings. The monster is fixed in its pose as it is slowly getting less red and more orange. It is also steaming severely which implies that this beam attack produces a ridiculous volume of waste heat. It is your chance to strike. You search the nearby area and by sheer luck you find a large boulder almost entirely buried under a small hill. If not by chance you wouldn’t have seen it. You quickly dig it out and realize that it is a rock the size comparable to what the Stonehenge was built out of, roughly sausage shaped chunk of granite weighing around 30 tons, a literal “megalith”. You take your dwarven artifact blade and use it as a jackhammer’s head to start cutting off chunks of the rock to form a point. It takes you about 20 minutes to work the stone into something remotely resembling a stake as the monster starts steering again.

You lift up the megalith with your hands using some of your power to keep the earth from coming apart and you size up the angle for the attack. You will be launching this thing like a ballistic missile. Your flight ceiling is actually below the height of the Monster King, it is only 200- 250 meters when it is 450 meters tall. You could reach its face only because you could push from its body to gain altitude. Here you would be forced to provide a short burst of speed to get the rock into the air and then steer it into the target as it falls, this is the only way to get enough kinetic energy to make a dent.

>>4394674
You lift off and accelerate, burning more and more of your energy reserves, if this doesn’t work you are not sure what options you’d have, you’d be around a tenth of your energy pool. You hope that this kills it or at least wins more time for reinforcements. As you ascend, you see that the monster cooled off back to “yellow” and is no longer steaming, it is once again getting back on its feet. You reach your apoapsis and you start falling towards it, steering to hit it in its head. In turn, it tracks you with its head and warms up for another pulse. Sensing the attack, you quickly move behind the projectile and this protects you from the shockwave, but you miss its face, scoring the hit into the temple at around 75 degrees.

Your guess was correct, the projectile pierced through its flesh like butter with that speed and mass, but it impacted something inside which caused the chunk of granite to partially shatter. The back part of the projectile is sticking out of the wound by almost two meters and it sports massive cracks almost splitting it in three pieces. The worst part is that this seems to have little effect on the creature in of itself, you’ve hit the skull and you are out of energy. What should you do…?

>You are forced to retreat, you barely have enough energy to fight. Don’t be a hero if it means dying
>Heat… maybe you could make a quick jaunt for the heat rods? It would take hours…
>While homing in the stake you’ve seen a tiny speck by the ground, you now realize that it was a human… with wings waving in your direction frantically
>Pull out the shards and start digging, maybe you can pierce its skull
>Other ideas?

>>4394677
Due to how long it took, this is it for today, we will continue tomorrow and the voting extends until then. Feel free to discuss and stuff

>>4394677
>While homing in the stake you’ve seen a tiny speck by the ground, you now realize that it was a human… with wings waving in your direction frantically

>>4394677

>While homing in the stake you’ve seen a tiny speck by the ground, you now realize that it was a human… with wings waving in your direction frantically

>>4394677
>>While homing in the stake you’ve seen a tiny speck by the ground, you now realize that it was a human… with wings waving in your direction frantically

frantically waving means it's important

I thought about it too late but we could have used the spike tactic along with the fall, make it's own weight drive the thing inside it's body

>>4394768
We used the fall to buy us time to target it with a spike. It would be harder to hit if we didn’t topple it and it would target people or shoot at us while we would be searching and preparing the spike. Also the spike would take some time to fly in its ballistic arc so it would be very tricky to do both the toppling and throwing the rock alone.

>>4394768
>>4394733
>>4394703
Alright, I'm back and writing

>>4396271
As you were guiding in the projectile, you noticed a white spec close to the ground but you didn’t have the time to analyze what it was. However, once you’ve struck your target your brain had a luxury to redirect some effort into understanding what you saw. It was a humanoid figure with a single pair of large white wings heavily reminiscent of the lower angels that you’ve encountered before. Is that your reinforcements, or is that the HN observer? You take a quick peek from the edge of the monster’s head and you see that the angel is waving at you frantically, so you guess that this is important.

You rip yourself from the vine tentacles that still try to bind you and fly away from the monster and towards the angel. The monster keeps tracking you with its head but seems to be unable to fire off a shot yet likely due to overheating so you have a few moments. You fly up to the angel who ends up being a boy in the late teens by his looks. He is wearing some pretty light armor... actually you are not sure if you can call it armor since it doesn’t cover most of his vitals, but it doesn’t seem that armor is all that functional on SGs and Cups. He is equipped with one of those heat swords, but in his case, it is just an arming sword and he doesn’t seem to have anything else regarding weapons. You guess that this is a messenger or an observer of sorts, not intended to actually fight anything serious.

>>4396556
“Miss Agatha, right?” he asks quickly in Ceno Lingua with some telltale accent that is not quite as bad as Tabby’s. The angel is obviously very nervous and keeps looking at the Monster King behind you frequently as he rattles out the information: “Thank God… The Chorus force will arrive in ten minutes and take on the monster. Can you hold it occupied until that happens?” You reply that you don’t know, but you will give it your best try. You then thank him and recommend the Chorus to hurry. He nods and starts sprinting away after which he takes flight and tries to get as far from the battle as possible.

In the meantime, the giant monster attempted to get a running start and squish the two of you, but your speed was too high. The King makes a jump into the air and lands with one of its massive elephant- like legs in the area where you were standing, but you barely evade getting a rough shower of flying dirt and rocks. Ten minutes, how do you keep this thing occupied for ten minutes? On less than a tenth of your energy supply?

You gain altitude and notice that the situation just got worse, the tree ents summoned by the Monster King are one by one getting out of the forest in the hundreds and sprinting towards the scattering humans. Some will make contact with fleeing soldiers in less than a minute. Well, “sprinting” is a very loose term here, they are going at about 30 km/h, too fast for a human to outrun but pathetically slow by your standards and with terrible maneuverability due to their huge inertia. In other words, their acceleration is awful. There are hundreds of them though and most of them are between 30 and 40 meters tall, literally a big threat to surviving humans. However, you can’t really direct your attention towards them since you are too busy with the “big boy”. You hope that they won’t cause too much damage before reinforcements arrive. Also, cavalry and ranged units on both sides are seemingly trying to cover the retreat of the infantry with knights trying to flank the ents and archers firing at them haphazardly due to collapsed organization.

Honestly, you don’t have many untried options, you could try to exploit the hole you’ve just made, you could try to do something with the tumors or you could try shaving off damaged facial tentacles. You might also try to draw the King into firing on the smaller monsters, but you doubt that it would be that easy. Or maybe you’re missing something?

>Drill into the hole in the head
>Biomancy with tumors
>Tentacle shaving
>Attempt to cause monstrous friendly fire
>Any other reasonable proposal

>>4396558
>Any other reasonable proposal

can we get that flaming sword from the kid before it escapes, it would probably make cutting the facial tentacles a hell a lot easier and at the same time it would anger the thing enough to try and make him do some friendly fire on the ents

>>4396558
Can we use TK to cut a trench on the monster ent's path to slow them down and buy the soldiers some more time? With their put manuverability they could be slowed down by something like that.
If that is not possible I say we wreak havok on that hole, use the gountlet to make it's skull brittle by pulling energy from it and try to reach what's inside.

>>4396568
Yes, we can catch him and grab his sword

>>4396578
We would completely deplete our energy reserves on the trench, so we can barely do that and then nothing else

>>4396583
>>4396568
I'll go with this too, cutting facial tentacles with fire sword and trying to get him to fire against his tree dudes

>>4396583
Cool, let's get that sword, trench plan can be a last last last resourse

>>4396558

>Attempt to cause monstrous friendly fire

>>4396568
>>4396578
>>4396585
>>4396587
>>4396604
Alright, writing

>>4396641
Had an IRL issue that took up too much time, sorry. Will make next post tomorrow

>>4396784

Thanks for running

>>4396784
Hello everyone. I ended up having one hell of a week and I don't think that I'd have an opportunity to write the post until Saturday. Thus we'd be starting next thread with this turn.