Shit. This is bad. Edge wracked his brain in the fleeting handful of heartbeats he had left, trying to come up with anything he could do that would help his crew escape from a powerful monster.

  He could Conceal himself, but there was no guarantee that it would work against an enemy that was far above his stage. Even if it did, the skill wouldn’t help the rest of his team survive whatever was headed their way.

  Making a bad situation worse, there wasn’t substantial cover anywhere nearby. If the crew turned and ran, they would advertise their presence to every monster in the jungle, drawing even more trouble to their location.

  “Freeze,” Snake whispered, then ignited his core. “Sit down, then don’t say a word or move a muscle. Veil of Insignificance will protect us if we don’t draw attention to ourselves. It’s a skill that affects the perceiver’s mind, not the physical world. It won’t make us invisible, but anything that senses us will categorize us as beneath its notice—like bugs crawling through the grass.”

  As he spoke, the shadowkiller lowered himself to the ground and sat perfectly still, like he didn’t have a care in the world. Everyone else followed suit as the clamor of something crashing through the overgrowth drew near. By now, Edge could see treetops toppling as something massive forced its way between the trunks.

  Every instinct he had was telling him to either run or fight. That stopping in plain sight was tantamount to suicide. But he trusted his team’s veteran members. Not so much Snake himself, although Edge had to admit that the man was growing on him, but the skillset that had allowed the shadowkiller to hunt the living nightmares that walked the face of Ord and survive long enough to reach stage two.

  Edge could smell the creature before it came into view. Every monster he had fought had stank in its own gag-inducing way. The more powerful the entity, the worse the reek. But nothing else that had the misfortune of crossing his nostrils had been this foul, this wrong. Even pinching his nose, it smelt like someone had taken a net full of fish, slathered them in shit, deep fried the whole thing in a vat of boiling vomit, and then left it to rot in the sun. And that was being generous.

  Ten seconds later, it appeared. He caught a glimpse of something that was shimmering like an oil slick, with an occasional flash of white. Then the trees in front of him came crashing to the ground, and the monster came into view. He knew in that moment that it was stage three, significantly more powerful than the demon. It looked like a ball of oily slime the size of a house that was covered in reaching pseudopods.

  The gelatinous creature left death in its wake. The ground cover was reduced to sludge when it touched the blob’s exterior. He realized that it hadn’t been knocking down the trees. Not the old-fashioned way at any rate. Instead, any trunk that brushed against its bulk dissolved. Some of the treetops fell into the monster, and the rest toppled the other way. Edge was sure that if it did more than graze him, he would meet a similar fate.

  Even Skill-Eater wanted nothing to do with it. His core could sense powerful skills inside the monster, some of which it wouldn’t mind claiming. But it wasn’t worth going head-to-head against that thing. Not that he was inclined to fight it either way. He didn’t have anything in his arsenal that could injure the massive amorphous monster, let alone contend with its life-draining touch.

  And that wasn’t even the worst of it. By now, Edge was close enough to get at good look at the white bits floating inside the grey sludge. His eyes widened when he realized they were bones. Or, more accurately, complete skeletons that were trapped inside the blob’s mass.

  Some were beasts, and others were monsters, but a few of them were human. He had no idea why the creature was storing them inside its body until another monster came into view. This one looked like a cow from out of a fever dream, although it had clearly seen better days. It was wounded and must have been running from a fight—inadvertently sending it straight into the path of something even worse.

  The bovine monstrosity looked up, saw the blob, and let out a panic-saturated scream. It turned to run, but it was already too late. Edge thought that the quivering abomination would come charging straight in, engaging its prey head-to-head. But it turned out that this creature preferred an indirect approach to slaughter.

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  With a series of sickly plops, a dozen skeletons came rising to the surface before being ejected from the blob’s mass—each coated in a layer of foul-smelling goo. Some landed in front of the fleeing monster, forming a ring of slime-covered ivory around its position. It missed, but that ranged attack is bad news.

  Edge expected the injured monster to run right through. Instead, the hideous cow came to a skidding stop while letting out a terrified screech. He learned the reason why three seconds later, when each of the skeletons rose to its feet and attacked as one. Scratch that. It didn’t miss after all.

  When he took a closer look at the gruesome creations, he noticed that the blob’s tissue was animating each skeleton—gelatinous goo serving the role of tendon and muscle. It seemed that the monster’s life-draining touch didn’t extend to its minions. Instead, they fought with their natural weapons, battling with tooth and claw. Their strange state of being didn’t seem to impair them at all, and the skeletons moved with a crisp precision that he had come to associate with experienced fighters.

  On top of everything else, it was fucking weird to watch humans and monsters fighting side by side, even as cadavers. Edge had never seen anything like it in all his decades of being glued to the feed. The blob was using an incredibly-powerful skill, and he hadn’t come close to seeing everything that it could do. A fact that he became aware of three heartbeats later, when the slime-coated skeletons started using skills of their own.

  The furry monster tried to run, but the animated corpses moved to block its path, no matter which direction it fled. It let out a wail of despair and made its final stand, unleashing a flurry of blows that shattered one of the skeletons before the cow was overwhelmed by the rest.

  Once the battle was over, the blob flowed over to the fresh corpse and pulled the dead monster inside its body. Its flesh melted away within a matter of seconds, leaving a pristine skeleton behind—a new minion for the creatures’ portable army. Its minions had been guarding the creature while it fed, and when it was finished, they walked back into the blob’s body to float within the goo.

  Then the elite monster began moving once more. It was heading straight toward the crew, and Edge was afraid that they would have to make a break for it after all. Even if the hunters were beneath the creature’s notice, if it touched them, they would die all the same.

  Just before they were forced to rise and run, twin battle cries rang out in the distance as two monsters began a fresh fight to the death. He let out a shuddering sigh when the blob turned toward the sound and flowed in that direction, passing the hunters with less than twenty feet to spare.

  For a long moment, everyone remained frozen in place, coming to grips with what they’d seen. Then the hunters rose to their feet and began walking in the opposite direction, heading for the entrance to the dungeon on the far side of the maze.

  “What the fuck was that?” Jumo shuddered. “That’s the worst monster I’ve ever seen.”

  “I have no idea,” Fox replied. “It’s not like anything I’ve ever encountered. I’ve heard of corpse reanimators, but that blob was way stronger than anything in our association’s records.”

  “It’s likely something unique that evolved in this bizarre environment,” Snake said. "A byproduct of the endless cycle of consumption that rules the Savage Garden.” He sighed, then sent up a signal flare to warn the other crews that an elite enemy was in the area. “It’s going to take all the clear teams to kill it, and probably Gram too. Even then, I’d prefer to avoid it if at all possible.”

  However, conquering the dungeon without taking out the blob wasn’t an option. A fact that the hunters became aware of when Tessa opened her Guide and read through her updates. “Ah hell,” she said. “Everyone should check out their logs. We just received a quest.”

  Edge did as she suggested, eyes widening by the word as he read.

  Supplementary Quest: Open the Boss’s Chamber

  My day just got a lot more interesting, and something tells me that yours did too.

  Here’s the deal. The door to the boss’s room was sealed after an unsuccessful “attempt.” To break the seal, you must first defeat three elite monsters roaming the Savage Garden. You can think of them as mini-bosses, including the slimy fellow you came oh so close to getting to know on an intimate basis before hiding like a bunch of cowards.

  Stop edging me and fucking fight it already! But all risk and no reward makes for a dull show. So, in addition to opening the door to the final room of the dungeon, each person participating in a mini-boss kill will receive a fantastic prize, the details of which will be revealed after you encounter them for the first time.

  Your reward for defeating the slime mini-boss will be (divided evenly by your team): 250,000 Credits, 50 Mortium, and 25 high-grade potions.

  “Edging.” Mel snorted and looked right at him. “That’s a good one.”

  “I knew parts of the System got fried when the anomaly occurred,” Jumo said. “It keeps getting weirder and weirder.”

  “It looks like we’re going to have to fight that thing after all.” Fox shook her head. “But not alone and not today. Let’s get the hell out of here and let Gram know what we’ve learned. I don’t know about you, but I’ve had enough surprises for one afternoon, and I have a sinking feeling that we’ve only scratched the surface of what the Savage Garden has in store.”