(Zaire POV)
The deaths of those two Starbound ignited something in me that I had suppressed for several years now. It was rage. The aggressive and violent thoughts started to boil up and inhabit every fiber of my being. I tried my best to spare the lives of humans on this Earth, but these vile creatures that invade our realm—that was a different story altogether.
Floating several hundred meters in the air, I raised my arm in one smooth motion. I painted the sky with a hundred javelins, primed to rain down dread and despair on the monstrous being. With a swift downward swipe of my arm, I let my solar-forged weapons rain down like hellfire with blinding speed.
The attack wasn't meant to be a one-shot kill; it was meant to be a gauge to see how strong my opponent truly was. The tentacles of the behemoth moved as if they had a mind of their own, rushing to block my oncoming maelstrom of attacks. Then in retaliation, as if I had aimed for them from the start, the tentacles changed form instantaneously.
The tentacles that were once forged from pressurized stellar water condensed into razors of cosmic ice, initiating an assault of their own. Now the tables were turned—I was the one being hunted. The speed at which these sentient tentacles coiled and attacked me from a distance hundreds of meters away was impressive. It forced me to maneuver and evade in a way I hadn't been pushed to do for such a long time. It also gave me a grim perspective on what it must have felt like facing my oldest son—or me—in battle. I understood the horror one must have felt being pelted with attacks of blinding speed from a distance one could never hope to reach.
The perspective was refreshing in a way, and it helped me clear my head to focus on the matter at hand. In the next few moments, the astral behemoth and I flowed through a dance of attacking and evading. Both our attacks steadily became more fruitless than the last as I spiraled through the never-ending entanglement of its tentacles. With each evasion I nimbly performed, I felt my heart sputter. Not out of fear or danger, but out of excitement.
I felt the vitality of my long-since-passed youth manifest once again. I was finding pleasure in the hunt, even though many lives depended on my actions. Everything started to slow down; every movement and shift became clear as day. The noise of the crashing waves and the howls of the lesser behemoths faded away into the background, no longer obstructing my focus.
I no longer hesitated; I no longer felt the pressure of the moment. I was experiencing the joy and thrill of battle. My body moved on its own, and the muscle memory of past experiences took the helm. I was merely a passenger experiencing something warriors seldom experienced but were addicted to. The once seemingly erratic and random attacks the sentient tentacles performed now melded down to a simple pattern.
The attacks were launched in a rhythmic beat that only an experienced practitioner of combat could ever pick up on. There were three strikes from above, five strikes from below, seven and nine coming from the sides. They repeated the pattern rapidly, causing confusion with the sheer volume of appendages to blind the prey from the subtle clue it was giving away.
After the third repeating cycle of attacks, I changed my rhythm as well and did something uncharacteristic of my fighting style. Manifesting two blades of solar energy, I sliced through the oncoming attack and let the momentum carry me downward, hurtling straight for the body of the creature. As a long-ranged fighter myself, I knew others of the same cloth hated to get up close and personal. So that's where I was going to bring the fight. Solar energy erupted from my feet and hands as I rocketed toward the beast, ripping through the sea of tentacles as if I were a comet shuttling through the sky.
Moving too fast for the sentient arms to keep up, my impact into the behemoth sounded as if several tons of payload had just been unleashed on the sea. I heard the kraken wail in pain from me puncturing its reinforced barnacle exoskeleton. I knew I had landed a fatal blow as I watched the innards of the creature flow out of the cavern I had just created.
I didn't stop there. Still inside the belly of the beast, I forced solar energy to erupt from my hands, feet, and even my mouth as I started to carve the creature from the inside. There was nothing the creature could do. Its main defense was rendered useless, and it just had to sit and slowly fall to an unstoppable demise. I noticed that the veracity of the whirlpool started to dwindle, signaling to me that the end was near. I climbed out of the hole I created and proceeded to head back to the ship and check on the survivors.
As I was about halfway back to the ship, I sensed an immense signature starting to rise. Turning my head back to the dying behemoth, I realized it wasn't dying at all—it was regenerating and reshaping itself. I was so caught up in the moment, I nearly forgot that the beast was of the Stellar Fiend rank. Behemoths of this rank had several tricks up their sleeves. The main one was the transformation ability.
I watched as the large, hulking creature radiated with light being emitted from its core. Everything that once was a part of the kraken no longer existed. All that power and cosmic energy was now condensed into a figure no larger than myself. It now took the shape of a humanoid figure with the head of a kraken. The transformed behemoth had webbed feet and the same deep-blue, semi-ethereal flesh. Its tentacles were replaced by four arms, each carrying a bident.
I knew by the amount of cosmic energy it released—this was its true form. And this form was poised to kill.