As much as he despised the Royal Hunters, he had to credit that shot: the Old One's mask popped neat as a bottle cap. The porcelain face-- with its mocking smile and empty eyes --crashed and scattered among the dimmed crystals. The fight should be over. That mask was its life force, its source of power, the difference between a monster and a mass of dead limbs.

But beneath that mask, howling out of black smoke with a watery shine of mana, cried the tear-streaked face of a wide-eyed child. Its many hands stretched for the hunter's wings, mana gathering and shimmering in each writhing palm. In less than a moment, that Hunter's hands would join the rest in the mass of wriggling fingers.

A cloud of warm, soupy mana enveloped the Royal Hunter and eased her wings closed while it tugged her gently down from the ceiling. The hands gesticulated wildly but did not touch her, as if she were a deadly spider that the Old God was desperately trying to shoo out of its house.

The voluminous blubber was too thick to slice through with any expectation of slowing it down, so Rook slammed down the visor of his helmet (his world clapped into silence, broken only by the perpetual ringing in his own head), charged the beast and slammed the sword hilt-deep into the wobbling trunk like a pin into jelly. The monster, predictably, flinched. Rook pressed his thumb against a yellow crystal in the hilt and braced for impact.

The blubber rippled. The black smoke shuddered. The mana holding the winged Hunter constricted and condensed the air around her then suddenly released her while the deep shockwave tone of a tuning fork swelled to fill the cavern. The Old God vibrated with the noise, all its thousands of hands shaken out and convulsing, as if its ability to move was interrupted by the bone-shaking sound. Its oily skin shook so rapidly that the creature was a shining blur.

Stalactites, shaken loose, dropped from the ceiling in a rain of crumbling stone, and the ear-splitting noise was only getting louder, though dampened inside the blubbery beast. Rook couldn't hear it, but his body shook with it. Though his arms felt like jelly and his heart stuttered erratic he kept his grip, one eye on the Royal Hunter. He couldn't keep this up for more than a few seconds.