Risen World

Joshua quickly blocked off one of the heads as he took the lead. He knocked it back and jumped after it in an attempt to go after the gem on the back of its head. Jayce and Ivan blocked off two of the other heads while the rest of the group started bombarding the centipedes with any attacks they could use to try to weaken them. Titus took on the last remaining centipede on his own as he covered himself in armor made out of vines that were strong enough to keep the centipede's blade like body from being able to cut through them easily.

Joshua was the first one of the group to go after one of the gems embedded on the heads of the centipedes. What surprised Joshua was the fact that it was extremely easy to actually get to the gem. In the current situation the centipede's large size was a great disadvantage for it. It's only way of protecting the gem on the top of its head from Joshua was to create spikes from its body in an attempt to skewer him or to thrash around trying to knock him off.

To avoid any trouble that the centipede could give him Joshua just blinked directly above the gem and slammed his scale blade into it causing it to shatter into glittering shards that seemed to shimmer before disappearing. The entire centipede seemed to freeze up after that before slumping over. Joshua didn't feel a surge of experience after taking it down so he guessed that the four centipedes were in fact one creature since they were all connected. That would mean they would have to take down all of them to get any experience from the fight.

Joshua leaped off of its head back towards the wall so that he could climb up and help the others against the three remaining heads. It was when he reached the wall that he felt a new presence of aura appear right behind him and he could have sworn it came from the direction that the centipede he had just killed was located. He turned around to look at the defeated head he had left behind and was surprised to feel signs of aura coming from it once again. A shimmer of red light appeared above its head as a new gem was formed in the same exact spot where Joshua had destroyed it before.

The moment the gem was recreated the slumped over metallic centipede started moving again as it turned to face Joshua's direction and let out a loud shrill and charged over. Joshua jumped out of the way as the head crashed into the wall and floated over to another part of the cliff so that he could grab on to it while he figured out what was going on. Clearly destroying the gems on their own wasn't the answer to the situation and Joshua needed to figure out why that was.

'Henry we've got a problem.' Joshua said through the party chat.

'Make it quick I'm kind of busy here.' Henry responded as he cast a few support spells to help power up some of the close range fighters so they could make their ways to the gems on the heads of the two centipedes that were going after their group.

'It seems that destroying the gems won't be enough to take these things down. I took out the gem on my centipede and it just reformed a few seconds later before the thing got back up.' Joshua said as he watched the thing pull its head out of the wall.

'I see what you mean. Amy just destroyed the gem on one of the centipede's heads a few seconds ago, but it's moving again. We're going to have to go about this differently. Any ideas?' Henry asked so that anyone could jump into the discussion. 'If not we're going to have to test out a few things.'

'I've got an idea of how we might have to handle this situation, but it's going to come down to timing more than anything else.' Aito said as he shot one of the gems causing it to shatter. The centipede stopped its movements for a bit which freed up the rest of the group to focus on the others while they prepared to stall all of them for a while until they could figure out what they needed to do to take the metallic abomination down for good.

'Well don't leave us in suspense, tell us already.' Adrian said while avoiding one of pincers that cut through the wall in an attempt to kill him.

'I've seen some puzzles before with similar circumstances. There are four objects that need to be destroyed, touched, or something along those lines but there is a certain time limit before the puzzle resets and you have to start over. If I had to guess we probably have to destroy all of the gems around the same time frame. The amount of time the centipedes are frozen after the gem is destroyed is probably the time limit before all of the gems reset.' Aito explained.

Joshua thought over the explanation and agreed that it was likely what was going on with this creature. Now they had to figure out a way to time their attacks so that they can destroy all of the gems around the same time. They were running out of time to take this beast down since if they kept putting it off then there would be no handholds left for them to grab on to in the area consistently. The thrashing of the creature had done some real damage to the wall and they didn't want to risk making this battle any more dangerous than it already was.

'We need to gather them all up together. I'll lead my centipede up to you guys so that they're all close to each other. Lilly should have Titus bring his centipede head closer to the group as well.' Joshua said before he dodged another strike by the centipede that was constantly going after him. By now it was getting to the point where Joshua had to make his own hand holds to hold onto with how many parts of the wall had been destroyed by the centipede's rampaging. He stabbed his dagger into the wall to hang on to before pulling himself up and headed up the cliff. He only had a few seconds before the centipede would pull its head out of the wall and start chasing him again.

With the little time he had available Joshua rushed up the wall to get close to the rest of the group so that the centipede would have to chase after him. Titus did something similar by slamming the centipede he was facing into the side of the cliff and pinning its body with several hardened vines that just continued to keep growing back. No matter how much the metallic body kept cutting through the vines they'd just grow back keeping the centipede from being able to move.

'Alright Aito and Katsumi, you two need to take out the gems on the heads of the centipedes the moment Titus destroys the gem on the head of his centipede. I'll time my strike on the other one at the same time.' Joshua said as his centipede pulled its self out of the wall and let out a shriek before heading up towards the group. "Titus go for it." Joshua shouted.

Titus nodded as the portion of his vine armor wrapped around the hand he had free to move around formed into a spike. Titus quickly swung his fist forward towards the head of the giant metallic life form destroying the gem as the spike punctured straight through it while the rest of Titus's fist smashed the rest of the head beyond recognition. Aito and Katsumi both fired off their shots. Aito's attack was more direct as it went straight for the gem penetrating through anything that got in its way after Aito had made sure to charge the shot up as much as possible. Katsumi's arrow however locked on to the gem and swerved around any spikes that got in the way before slamming into the gem and shattered it.

With all of the other centipedes taken care of Joshua leaped off the cliff and blinked directly in front of the last centipede. He slammed his scale blade into the gem once more causing it to break before any of the other centipedes could get the chance to reform their gems. With all four gems destroyed at the same time the four centipedes slumped over while a bright light came from the direction where all four of the centipedes were supposed to connect together. Amy leaped down and slammed her fist directly into the giant red gem that was giving off the light causing it to crack and fall apart. She kicked off the creature and grabbed back on to the wall.

With all of the gems on the creature destroyed the centipede parts of the metal life form started to rust before they dissolved and disappeared into the air. The last portion of the creature formed a new door along the wall that was wide open for them all to enter. With this they knew the fight was over and all made their way down to the entrance way. It was similar to what happened on the other path and Joshua couldn't sense any other enemies as they made their way down the path to another room. On the inside of the room they came across two treasure chest just like they had found at the end of the other path.

One of the treasure chest had the key to unlock the last lock on the door that lead further into the dungeon. The other treasure chest was a blue print treasure chest as well that gave Joshua something else to look forward to for when they got back to the hub city. The rest of the room was fairly empty which was a bit surprising. Usually by this point they would come across some sort of secret passage or hidden room, but this dungeon didn't have any of them so far.

With one last inspection of the area Joshua lead the group back the way they came as they had to climb up the wall to get back to the branching point. At this point Joshua had already reached level seventy-nine and was a good third of the way through to reaching level eighty. With a decent sub-boss and dungeon boss's worth of experience he was sure that he'd be able to reach level eighty and meet his main personal goal for the expedition. With a smile on his face he led the group all the way back to the branching point to see what was beyond the locked door. Hopefully it would be something that would help him meet his goal.