Shaw was approaching the endgame, but before she could finish what was left of her quest, she needed to get rid of the Frenzied Flame (see Update #76). That meant finding and killing, Malenia, Blade of Miquella, the redheaded Goddess of Rot who resided amongst the tangled roots the Haligtree; a truly horrible place, that looks nice in pictures, but which is objectively a pain in the ass to get through. Shaw eventually made it to the bottom, by running past most of the more challenging enemies, only to come across this fucking bullshit:
A nice little shit cherry on the shit sundae, which you have to get through to reach the next site of grace. A river of scarlet run that is filled with centipedes constantly attacking, and through which you cannot move slower than a crawl. FUN! After multiple failed attempts, Shaw went looking for a workaround, which she found in the form of the Bloodhound’s Step ash of war. Sadly, she had not yet found this particular ash, as it was being held by a Night’s Cavalry in Caelid.
Equipping the ash of war made traversing the rot a breeze, unfortunately Shaw kept falling off this tiny goddamn branch once she reached the other side:
After roughly about an hour of back and forth, and multiple failed attempts, Shaw finally crossed and unlocked the site of grace, only to next be faced with a Putrid Tree Spirit. Fortunately, Shaw was able to cheese this overpowered abomination by standing on a branch, just out of reach, and repeatedly firing at it with arrows, bolts, pots, and other various projectiles. It would not be an exaggeration to say that Shaw spent literally every single projectile that she had accumulated thus far in the game on this one foe.
Once the awful thing was finally dead, another frustrating challenge was waiting in the same location; Shaw had to help Millicent defeat her four sisters, at the same time. Such a frustrating, futile fight. 20 minutes and multiple failed attempts later, Shaw went looking for online help, and discovered that if you equipped a certain talisman and jumped onto the pillar in the middle of the area, the sisters would just wait around while Millicent dispatched them, one by one.
Once that was done, Shaw was ready to go and fight Malenia. She looked armless enough.
Oh no.
Well fuck.
To be honest, the first phase was not so bad, Shaw wondered what all the fuss was about, but that second phase…
Shaw kept getting her down to a tiny sliver of life, and kept dying. She was getting very frustrated, so she went to look up a guide, and was told that the best weapon to defeat Malenia was a magma sword; a weapon for which she spent the better part of an hour unsuccessfully grinding. When looking for ways to improve the drop rate, she heard about and went searching for the Silver Scarab Talisman. After finding and going to equip said talisman, Shaw discovered that she had previously been fighting Malenia with talismans that she had equipped to deal with the scarlet rot river, and these were not necessarily optimal for combat. Correcting her mistake, Shaw attempted the fight once more, and was triumphant.
She then had to go back to Millicent’s corpse (yes she died) to retrieve the needle and then go back to Malenia’s corpse to imbue the needle or something? The next step would be to get through the Crumbling Farum Azula.
