SPITTER

What it does

It closes at 0.75x your speed until it likes the distance, then it parks and stays parked. From there it turns its eye to follow you and fires a spinning orange spark every 2 seconds, kicking backward and flashing white as it lets go. The shot is aimed at where you will BE, not where you are, and every spitter guesses your lead slightly differently. The spark does 8, touching it does 5, and the only thing that makes it move again is you getting far enough away.

The tell. A short bright flash in its pupil about half a second before the shot, then a white flash and a small kick backward as it fires. Watch where the eye points during the wind-up — it lines up on the spot it is shooting at, so the lead is readable.

How it kills you

You leave them alive behind you while you handle whatever is chasing you, and late in a run there are four or five parked around the edge of the screen firing into the same space you are orbiting. The shot travels at nearly 3x your speed, so running straight away from one just means it lands in your back.

How you beat it

• Break on the flash, and change what you were doing. It fires at where you are GOING, so a steady sideways drift is the easiest thing in the game to lead — stop, turn back, or cut across your own line.
• Point the right thumb at it. This is the enemy the aim stick exists for: your ball takes whatever is NEAREST, and the one parked at the screen edge never is.
• Or walk into it. It never closes, so you pay 5 on arrival and then have to chew through the toughest body of the four. It drops four times what a grunt does in both XP and souls, which is exactly what the trip is priced against.
• Or put a wreck between you while you deal with what is chasing you. It keeps wasting shots on the wreck.

When you meet it

Share of everything that spawns, at three points in a run.

The numbers

Speeds are multiples of your own. Health grows 16% per minute of run time, compounding, with no cap.