The next morning I woke up to the bed beside me warm but empty. I heard the quiet shuffling of feet elsewhere in the room and surmised that my personal koala was getting ready for the day.

  I rolled over and there she was at the foot of the bed, doing a yoga routine with her earbuds in. The tight lines of her body flowed from one position to another smoothly and with minimal effort. It was truly beautiful to behold, even this early in the morning.

  Her body twisted and I watched her serene face slowly transform into something more smug as she caught me watching her. She didn’t say anything, but I swear she did everything to elongate certain stretches and body movements. I tried to look away. I really did, but her toned muscles smoothly gliding from one form to another were hypnotizing.

  I almost fell out of bed when the door was pounded on, “Up and at ‘em lovebirds!” Mara called through the door. “We got another call for monsters. Time to go.”

  Ashley was just as flustered from the unplanned interruption. She was holding her chest like she was trying to keep her heart from beating out of it.

  I scrambled out of bed and pulled out my clothes from yesterday. They were the least dirty, though there were some black, oily blood stains dried along the edges and splattered across the pants like paint. I needed more clothes and to do some laundry.

  Ashley had apparently planned for more days than I had and pulled out a fresh set of clothes from her bag. Some people are just better planners…and those people are literally anyone else.

  We met everyone in the livingroom. It looked like I wasn’t the only poor planner, though I wasn’t stoked to be in the same group as John on this. Everyone else was in clean clothes.

  Mara greeted everyone, “Good morning everyone!” I hated how much of a morning person Mara actually was. She was so fucking chipper. “We just got a call over the radio for some kind of monster at a nearby farm. Well, everything around here is nearby honestly, but it shouldn’t take long to reach.” She clapped her hands together, “So let’s get going!”

  Mara marched off toward the front door and the rest of us all trudged behind her. Oliver hopped in the driver’s seat. Looking back, that made a lot more sense seeing how much we depended on Ashley’s guns in comparison. Oliver was important, but not an immediately at the start of the fight kind of team member.

  I grabbed shotgun this time around and after getting the address from Mara I started acting as navigator for Oliver. We only had to backtrack once on our trip out to the Johanson farm. It was situated in the opposite direction from the last farm we’d gone out to. Once again we had no idea what kind of monster or monsters were going to be present when we got there.

  When we arrived the farm was quiet. No one greeted us at the gate to guide us where we needed to go. As we drove down the gravel drive toward the house I began to feel a small pressure building up behind my eyes. Like a migraine was developing, without the pain or discomfort.

  Oliver pulled up to the house and put the van in park. We all hopped out, Ashley strapping both guns to her torso, but leaving the army gun hanging near her fingers. I summoned a spear and John coated himself in mithril.

  John led the way toward the house and Mara and Oliver trailed behind the rest of us. He jumped up onto the porch and knocked loudly. The rest of us stayed down off the porch to not seem as intimidating.

  We sat there quietly for several minutes. John knocked again, and we strained to listen. I couldn’t hear anything coming from inside the house. There was some ambient noise, but it didn’t sound like people and if anything seemed to be coming from the back of the house.

  “I don’t know, let’s try circling around the house and see if we can see anyone,” Mara hedged.

  No one had a better suggestion so we trudged around the house in search of answers. The weird pressure continued to increase as we got closer to the back of the house. The rest of the party seemed to be feeling something as well. They were all moving a little more sluggishly. John was still somewhat smooth in his movements, but the others seemed to be becoming more stilted.

  We finally rounded the back of the house and there casually pulling the wall away from the house one plank at a time was something out of a Lovecraftian nightmare. It was a throbbing mass of rubbery, dark purple tentacles. Each appeared to be about the size of my thigh close to the body, but quickly tapered down to the size of my wrist at the tips, they stretched for a dozen feet through the air. I couldn’t make out the rest of the body under the roiling tentacles lashing through the air.

  It floated several feet in the air, but tentacles trailed it through the dirt as it bobbed in place. Someone let out a loud gasp and the monster froze for an instant. Then it rotated in place until there was a giant yellow eye the size of a basketball glaring out from between whipping tentacles.

  The pressure on my mind quadrupled in a blink as I met its gaze. I heard thuds from around me as the rest of the party except John all collapsed in place. John seemed to be moving more sluggishly than normal, but he let out a deep roar and charged into the mass of tentacles.

  That snapped me out of it and I lunged forward with my spear spinning around me. I began slicing through any tentacles that dared to come near me. The monster began backing away from both of us, looking a little uncertain of itself.

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  John seemed to be almost swimming through molasses, his swings were slow and telegraphed. The monster had no problems keeping one step ahead of his swinging scythe arms. Despite the intense mental pressure I was beginning to think originated from the monster, I was moving at close to normal speed. The majority of the monster was keeping ahead of me, but I was catching anything it tried to use to attack me with.

  We chased it away from our friends and the back of the house. I glanced over my shoulder briefly and caught sight of several bodies lying out further in the house. There was also quite a bit of blood near the hole in the wall itself. I feared we may have been too late for at least someone.

  Once we were several dozen feet away from the house it dipped to the side toward John, who lunged forward. He skewered several tentacles as the monster quickly changed direction trying to flit between John and myself.

  I swung my spear in an arc, slicing through several tentacles as the monster tried to squeeze through our gap. I went to lunge forward, trying to bury my spear in the middle of the tangle of tentacles, trying to find its core. Alas the monster crashed into me with several thick tentacles and sent me tumbling across the ground.

  I lost my grip on my spear and spent a few precious moments resummoning a new spear. Then I dove back into the melee. In its effort to move me away, it had allowed John to close with it and he was slowly hacking through the roiling mass of the monster’s tentacles. I noticed my old spear as I went running past and managed to flip it up into my hands as I did. Thank you built in learning. I threw the new spear and moved the old spear back into a guard position as I drew closer.

  The monster intercepted my thrown spear with a thick tentacle. It sliced through most of it, leaving it dangling on to the end with thin strips of flesh, but my spear was stopped. I was going to need much more leverage and momentum to penetrate all the way into the monster’s body. I looked around for anything that might help me.

  Nothing stood out to me except for the house itself. It was two stories high and there were windows overlooking the backyard. If I could get up to them I might be able to leap down onto the monster with my deadly payload. And if I missed, once Oliver was up he could heal up whatever broken bones I would inevitably end up with.

  Decision made I dashed for the hole in the side of the house. As I stepped inside, I slipped and almost fell on my ass in the middle of a large puddle of blood and slurry of body parts. I fought down the urge to vomit and dashed through the house looking for a staircase, barely looking at the house around me. On the way past I ran across several young adults and one older woman lying out across the ground as if they’d just collapsed where they were.

  I finally found a staircase near the front of the house and charged up it. Upstairs were bedrooms and I had to quickly go through the ones in the back of the house to find the one closest to the abomination downstairs.

  I found a pretty standard teenage bedroom with a desk pressed up under the window that looked to be the closest to the monster. I threw it open and crawled out of it, balancing on the edge of the desk.

  The monster seemed to be having an easier time herding John back toward the house and avoiding any major damage. It started edging away from the hole in the wall and toward our downed companions. I knew my time was up. I gave myself one final gut check and then flung myself away from the house.

  I came down very quickly and barely had time to aim my spear, let alone myself. Thankfully my spear aimed true and buried itself through the mass of writhing tentacles. The pressure in my head nearly exploded as I could almost hear the monster scream just on the edge of my hearing, but it was entirely mental. John froze up and collapsed onto the ground like his strings had been cut.

  I bounced off of the body and slammed into the ground without a lot of force transferring to the monster seemingly. I felt something in my legs pop and a searing pain shot up from my right leg. I feared that I may have broken something.

  The monster raged in small circles for several minutes, tentacles waving wildly in the air, some beating at or plucking at itself. I watched as it ripped off more than one set of tentacles as it fought to pull the spear out of its body.

  I summoned a new spear and tried to use it to pull myself up onto my feet. As I went to put pressure on it, my right leg buckled beneath me. The monster seemed to hear me, or sense my pain, I’m not sure. But it turned on me as I sat on the ground, trying to catch my breath.

  The monster locked eyes with me with its single, hate filled, yellow eye. Several tentacles beneath the eye unwrapped and exposed a gaping maw with several rows of serrated teeth, like a shark. It jerked in my direction and I reacted instinctively. I rolled to the side and thrust my spear forward. I felt the weight on the spear change as the monster drive itself onto my spear and then reared back from the pain. It wrenched the spear out of my hand as it thrashed away from me. I couldn’t even see where I’d stabbed it.

  Slowly the thrashing slowed down and the pressure on my mind eased. It eventually came to a rest some dozen feet away and collapsed fully onto the ground for the first time. Its entire body heaved as though with a great breath and then went still.

  [Your party has killed: Yogshagotth x 1]

  [Monster kill total: 13/100]

  Around me the others began to stir. John was the first one up. He was already moving much more like himself. He ran over to check on Oliver before anything else, his mithril coating slipping away as he ran.

  No one from our team was seriously injured aside from myself. Oliver told me that I’d dislocated my hip. He popped it back into place before getting with the healing magic. It was one of my least favorite experiences so far.

  Inside the house a wailing went up. Oliver and Ashley made their way inside to see if they could offer any help. They came out several minutes later with grief and guilt written clearly all over their faces.

  Apparently the monster had come at the house from the backside, completely missing the back door and tearing through the side of the house instead to get to the people inside. It had managed to pulp and slurp up the remains of an older gentleman. He happened to be the father of the woman I’d found inside. They were all devastated to say the least, and there was nothing we could do.

  We made a trip around the property to see if we saw any other monsters and then headed back to town. I needed to borrow some clothes before we could go out shopping. Seeing as how I’d already been the most covered in monster gore from fighting it, I’d been the one to butcher it as well. I’d found an essence of corruption that no one wanted. We were even hesitant to offer it on the exchange. For the first time we decided that there were some essences that didn’t belong in the hands of others. So we locked it up when we got home in one of the closets until we could find a safe or something to keep it in.