Nothing left but to counterattack the madness, the thing that wounds the heart with overwhelming, incongruous wrong.<br/><br/>So big, so much finality in every stroke, it's impossibly surreal.  Each movement predicts its own fate, the shift of a bulging heap of musculature flicks a tentacle into a rippling whip-stroke that can will must rend stone, a half-mile high, but its arc predictable.  The risk is not in its strength, its weight... by comparison, the three warriors are vermin-quick, but physics haven't changed.  It's not the strength of it, it's that the margin for error is so fucking huge-- if one tentacle crashes down a full ten feet apart from its target, there's still enough tentacle to pulverize the body beneath into a wet smear of blood, tenderized flesh, foamy bone-pulp in a crushed sheaf of metal.<br/><br/>Marius is rushing it, the giant blade's tip skimming the surface of the murk behind like a trailing water-moccasin, the hilt in both hands, a half-foot's space between them.  Another explosion of wood, stone, earth-- bomb-bursts of flailing strikes with unmeasurable limbs-- no, there is the danger, not the strength but the size.  Approaching it made it impossible to see all at once, meant a strike could come from anywh--<br/><br/>Another-- amazing, how his feet found solid-enough ground to launch him, spine bending as he leaped to his side, half-stooped to avoid the cloud of flesh that appears, suddenly, like a low ceiling.  The bow over his shoulder springs from his body as it is caught by the swipe of the massive protuberance, in his ears the bowstring's snap like the chirp of an insect.  Then there's a shower of stonework fragments and dust, tiny notes of gravel on metal as pieces of masonry pepper his armor.  The thing could come from twenty yards away, from beside, behind or anywhere.  A witnessed strike was predictable, avoidable.  The others kind-- dodging one was a miracle, and every moment afterward an unfathomable luck.<br/><br/>Paradoxically, however, his only chance is to get closer, so that all that can be seen of the grotesque thing was a close-vantaged map of its bulbous, weeping flesh, slicked with bilous secretions.  Then, even with their massive, flashing blade, carving it up will be like slaughtering a sow with a pen-knife... messy, brutal, repetitive blows, hacking through layer of throbbing, gelatinous layer of rot-reeking flesh.  Unless something vital can be located, then somehow pierced or severed.<br/><br/>The stink of it is meat spoiled, infested, halfway between maggot and fly.  Its flesh splits in a puckering wound at the base of one tree-thick leg, inside of it becoming outside of it, rushing at the wound like an eager crowd, then gushing out in a vomitous purge.  The blade returns for a counter-stroke; Marius' training telling the arm to return the swipe-- he wields it like a halberd-blade, back again in a long swipe to cleave-- as if through a second rank of border-mercenaries after having leveled a first.  His hands slide together on this cross-back whip the blade around his body with enough speed to sever through the pliant outer layers, through a thick rope of a tendon and the gutter-spout of an artery beneath-- the blood pressure must be immense, if it has blood, for the spatter is profound-- a gout, a well-spring of black tar.<br/><br/>Cursing himself to move, move move, he forces momentum, slips in the muck, fights the suction of the mud that tries to swallow him into the things' foothold as the mud and muck beneath the bog's surface sucks down at him, tries to swallow him like a riptide.<br/><br/>He's under it, it's moved-- fuck it all, it's over top of him.  The black and green sludge of the swamp fills his boots, he pushes his feet still, sinks more.  He remembers the ranks of pikemen, as many rended by horsemen as suffocated in the sodden earth.  He could hide there, wait for it to leave... something in his heart, a hole the shape of Amara, swallows that instinct like it ate his fear.<br/><br/>Some deep black well in his heart cannot contain the spreading, inky cloud spilling up from within, erupting out of it, filling his bones and muscle with a blazing hunger to burn, rend, kill.  Its vile, warped form over him like the arch of some black cathedral, a squirming silhouette of god's madness framed in moonlight-- something like genius or revolting stupidity in Marius causes him to thrust his blade straight up into it, driving two feet of the steel length into it-- mostly up, but also at an angle, over his head and back-- giving him leverage to drive it home, twist it, and in pushing it deeper to push himself forward, away from the swallowing chasm of the hole made by its trunk-like leg.<br/><br/>Squelching out of the hole, a grunting curse spat between gritted teeth, he drives against it and hauls himself away before wrenching the blade free.<br/><br/>He must have penetrated its outer layers-- fat, if it has it-- deeply enough to strike a digestive tract, because the bleached, sticky-green remnants of a bog-dweller's half-digested torso spills out amid the undigestible bits of what might have been a massive crustacean and a torrent of green-white bile.