novelraw Chapter 216: Scripted Bossfights Pt. 2
Chapter 216: Scripted Bossfights Pt. 2
What remained of the climb to the top of the spire was only a matter of a single month of climbing, barely a quick outing after how long Rory and Zoey had spent reaching the three spire gates.
And finally, the moment of reckoning had arrived. Just beneath the peak of the spire, a final gate stood in front of them, already open with a path cresting atop a large plateau. Only a short distance away, Rory could sense the pressure of the tier eight King.
“You ready for this?” Rory asked.
“Ready as I’ve ever been,” Zoey answered, cracking her knuckles. “By the way, what do you make of those?”
Pointing toward the rim surrounding the spire's peak were eight claw-like stalagmites that curved upward before converging like the supports for a chandelier.
“No idea, but I’m pretty sure we’re going to find out,” Rory chuckled. “Alright, standard game plan?”
“I run in and take the front, you come in guns blazing right after,” Zoey nodded.
“Perfect,” Rory said.
Following the game plan to a T, Zoey heaved her shield before charging on in. As she passed out of sight for a moment, Rory heard a voice boom out.
“You! You have come to my place of power, and you believe you have a chance to survive? Foolish!”
Sure does like the sound of its own voice.
Waiting a moment longer, Rory felt the ground begin to shake as the fight started.
And that’s my cue.
Staff held so it was parallel with his arm, Rory charged in a moment after.
Well, that’s already a bad sign.
In their prior encounter, the King had attempted to set up a domain to turn against them.
In this encounter, the domain was already active.
No turning back now.
Not letting the fact that they were running into a powerful monster’s domain unnerve him, Rory already had the adolescent wyrm sighted, swinging his staff out as rings of metal appeared around its length, floating rails hovering just above.
Zoey was already being bathed in a flame breath, which Rory took advantage of as he began to fire away, the rails from his railgun magic slamming into the monster one after the other, rate of fire holding steady as Rory made no attempt at conserving ammo.
The joys of a bunch of apprentice smiths are that I can have them make a bunch of rails as practice with promethium, and it's still useful!
Like the steady sound of a pneumatic hammer crashing down, each projectile collided with the monster with a behemoth crack of thunder.
It was a tremendous amount of damage, given how sustained his rate of fire was… Or it should have been.
Because the King seemed entirely unfazed, the projectiles entered its body and vanished without a single wound.
Shit.
“Foolish, I decreed! Scorch the Sky!”
Last time the wyrm had used the skill, some four years prior, the entire sky had seemingly been set ablaze.
This time, the weird stalagmite fixtures seemed to buckle for a moment as the entire spire shook, power coursing upward. Thrumming with power, the stalagmites suddenly erupted, eight golden rays shooting toward one another and colliding above the direct center of the plateau they stood upon. From their collision point, another beam of power shot upward, into the sky, a massive portal appearing as wide across as the entire plateau.
And from the portal, fire rained.
Flicking a claw toward Zoey, a vortex of magma and fire spun up, trapping the woman in a burning coffin as it turned its attention toward Rory.
“Next.”
Sweeping its wings towards Rory, black meteors cloaked in flame were suddenly rushing toward Rory, his own personal meteor shower. It might have been lovely to watch, assuming it were safely occurring in the stratosphere, and not being flung at his face.
In theory, Earth Soul could have stolen control of the attack, but imbued within the aura of the wyrm, Rory didn’t want to test it for sure.
Instead, Rory slammed his staff on the ground as walls of blackened obsidian flecked with red crystal sprang up, intercepting the meteor shower.
Good in theory. In practice? Not so much. The meteors tore through his defenses as if they were paper. Given that it was barriers of stone raised with Earth Soul and further infused with lattice-projections, that was pretty fucking nuts.
Oh shit!
It was already becoming increasingly clear that attempting to face down the King within an already established domain, which was now being further reinforced by the raining fire, was a horrible idea.
A reminder: The King was a level eighty-two territory alpha. Most people wouldn’t even face regular monsters of equal level. As a territory alpha, on average, it had strength rivaling monsters at least two rungs above its own bracket. And it was inside its domain. Even a team of regular peak-tier-eight adventurers, assuming any had existed, wouldn’t have wanted to face such an opponent without serious preparation.
Seeing no chance of surviving the attack without severe damage, Rory ripped his hand downward as if attempting to claw space open.
It wasn’t his regular form of teleportation; the attack launched at him was too wide-scale. So, rather than teleport himself, he would instead teleport the attack. Siphoning a tiny bit of Oblivion energies from his ring, space was separated as a rift was torn open. Rory instantly felt the backlash; tearing space open was still something he couldn’t reliably do, and it was only with the tiny booster of oblivion energy that made it possible.
But, regardless of the how and why, the point was that it worked, as the field of meteors vanished through the rift, to where Rory had no idea.
“Zoey, get your ass out of there!” Rory shouted. The fiery cyclone might have killed anyone else, but Zoey wasn’t anyone else.
As if she’d been waiting for the perfect moment, suddenly the cyclone was destroyed as Zoey stood with her fist extended, covered in shiny blackness. She was utterly marred in soot and burns, and panting like a dog, but she was otherwise unhurt, a look of savage delight on her face.
“The Knight in Shining Armor has returned!” She shouted as she shot forward toward the wyrm, who proceeded to notice her shout and slap her away with a swing of its tail as she slammed hard into one of the stalagmites.
Rory wanted to palm his forehead, for a brief moment forgetting they were in a fight for their lives.
Idiot. Who shouts and gives themselves away?
The distraction was enough that the meteor shower faded, giving Rory a moment’s respite.
The situation was dire, no two ways about it. Rory hadn’t considered that they’d be walking its domain already established. In fact, that should have been so energy-intensive that even for a tier-eight territory alpha, it shouldn’t have been feasible to just… let it remain active.
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Which is when the lightbulb went on in Rory’s head.
Oh. This isn’t a fight to win!
When the King turned its attention back toward Rory, rather than find the man readying to launch himself back into battle, it saw Rory sprinting the hell away.
Specifically, toward one of the stalagmites.
“Flee in terror!” The King shouted in delight, clearly misunderstanding the situation.
“Zoey, distract!” Rory shouted, feeling a bit like he was calling out his Pokémon to attack.
“Center of the World!” Zoey shouted as the King was momentarily forced to look away from Rory, glaring at Zoey.
Using the distraction to his advantage, Rory reached the first stalagmite and pressed his hand against it.
Just like I thought!
Domain anchors. Made not from a skill but established through the natural terrain and reinforced through a singular concept attachment. Had it just been the product of a skill, it would have been easy enough to destroy, but given the energies being drawn from the spire and through them, it would be able to rebuff anything he could throw at it if he attempted to brute force it.
But, if I inject an opposing concept, it might ‘clog’ the entire thing!
This specific stalagmite seemed to have been partially anchored with ash
concepts.“Alright, what’s the opposite of ash?” Rory muttered, thinking quickly. It wasn’t as simple as earth beats fire, fire beats ice, ice beats nature, etc.
Air? Fresh air to sweep away the ash?
It wasn’t a literal video game that he had to discover the exact opposite perfectly, because in reality, there weren’t really true ‘opposites’ for concepts and affinities that weren’t themselves purely esoteric.
“Meaning air is good enough.”
Withdrawing his knife in hand, his best item for quickly carving through material, Rory dug it in a circle around the stalagmite, before scribbling the rune for air within the inside of the ring. Then, for good measure, Rory added a second and third rune, energy and absorption, and finally topped it off with a room gem. Bound circle established, only a moment later, Rory felt the energies flooding through it from the rest of the spire suddenly divert partially into the bound circle as the energy and absorption runes did their thing. Using the spire's energy against it, the bound circle was instantly suffused with a sense of freshness and spring breezes. Acting against one another, Rory smiled as he felt the domain anchor wavering.
“How are you doing over there?” Rory muttered as he looked over his shoulder.
Zoey was currently doing her best to hold open the jaws of the wyrm pressing down upon her, like Atlas holding up the sky.
Yeah, I should probably help out.
“Just hold out a second, would you?” Rory whispered, more to himself than Zoey. Holding his staff out like it were a bow, Rory mimed as if drawing a string back, chanting quickly under his breath. If you squinted hard enough, one could see what looked like a string shimmering, as a coiled arrow the size of a giant spear suddenly appeared, ‘floating’ mid-air. Finishing his chant, Rory released the magic with a single word.
“Nathair!”
The double-pronged, spear-sized arrow, inspired by Eia herself, shot forward, slamming into the wyrm’s eye as it howled in pain, spitting Zoey out.
Not totally immune then.
The problem was that if the only attacks that could hurt the monster had to be on the level of Nathair, that was an extremely small list.
Having given Zoey her out, Rory sprinted to the next stalagmite, pressing his hand against it and getting a feel for it.
Heat. What’s the opposite of heat? Well, not cold, because cold itself is just the lack of heat. So, it would be more accurate to say the opposite of heat is zero.
Repeating the process with the second stalagmite, then the third, and so on, the fight dragged out.
‘Fight’ being perhaps generous. It was more like Zoey continuously forced the King to keep its attention locked on her as she did her best to survive, withdrawing gems at a rapid pace that Rory had prepared for her. Rory, meanwhile, focused on the stalagmites with the occasional assist when Zoey was on the verge of dying.
With only one stalagmite left, Rory pressed his hand against it-
Well fuck.
-and realized they were in a rough spot.
World Ichor. The last stalagmite was anchored with the concept of World Ichor. Ash, heat, lava, obsidian, fire, destruction, and creation, all of those had been concepts he’d already countered. World Ichor was essentially all of them combined and then some, at least in simple terms.
It was simply too complex, too potent an affinity to counter off the riff. Even if he tried to nullify it with oblivion energies, World Ichor was complex enough that when supplied with the endless energy of the spire, it would be able to shrug off the surgical application of the eradicating concept.
Fuck it. When you can’t beat ‘em, bomb ‘em.
Another glance over his shoulder saw Zoey in a rather precarious state. She looked as if her skin were in a constant state of turning into solid steel, then melting into glowing molten metal, and back again. Knowing what he knew about Zoey, about her newest affinity for World Ichor, what she was doing must have been nothing short of constantly cycling between indwelling the World Ichor affinity within her very body and turning herself metal.
Painful? On a scale of one to ten, Rory was confident it must have been around twenty-six.
Right, no time to waste.
Zoey was the most durable person alive, that much Rory was sure of, and no one could take the punishment she could.
But there was a limit to that, and Rory had seen her pushed to the limit enough times to know that she’d be reaching it shortly.
Stepping away from the stalagmite, Rory raised his hands as a gem appeared in each hand. Above and below him, several magical circles appeared, overlapping with one another, and finally, Rory began to chant.
“From my mind, all things imagined,”
The gems began to float toward one another, absolute zero and infinity orbiting one another.
“From my body, all paths traveled.”
Was chant boosting an Oblivion Point attack generally a wise idea? No. Was it absolutely necessary if he was going to brute-force the destruction of the final stalagmite?
Most likely.
“From my hand, all things may be forged.”
Rory heard a thunderous crack in the background as Zoey was swatted away. For all the fighting that had been going on, the King wasn’t just barely injured; it was entirely unhurt as the domain supplied with energy from the spire continuously regenerated the monster. Having tossed Zoey aside, Rory felt her aura waver and flicker out. She wasn’t dead, that much Rory could also tell, but she’d been knocked cold.
Whelp, out of time.
“My mind, a universe manifest!” Rory shouted as he launched a point of paradoxical impossibility at the eighth stalagmite. While the others had been mucked up, what Rory was going for now was total destruction.
Shielding himself in several layers of dome, raised stone, and crystalline barriers, the world shook beneath his feet as the oblivion point exploded. Within his summoned bunker, Rory couldn’t see anything, only felt the shaking. His connection with several of the barriers was washed away as the null energies erased them. Still, enough survived that after nearly thirty seconds, the shaking stopped as Rory lowered his remaining barriers.
Rory was near the bottom of a crater that the magic had hollowed out, and a glance at the far side revealed the wyrm, looking curious as it stared down into the crater.
As for the stalagmite? It, unfortunately, stood standing. Worse for wear, but standing all the same.
“Shit,” Rory muttered. As much as he’d love to throw a second one out there, it took a hell of a lot out of him, not to mention the fact that the King was already staring down at him, unlikely to give him the chance.
“Desperation, and yet failure.” The King all but hummed.
Rory was out of time. Flames were already beginning to bubble out from the corners of its mouth; he wouldn’t have time to blast the weak-looking stalagmite with another attack.
He needed a way to shatter it, something that could cause the sort of large-scale explosive damage, but he had nothing that would-
Oh, that might work.
“Desperation, you’ve got me,” Rory said as he raised his hands overhead.
“Surrender isn’t an option,” The King said, haughty and arrogant in its perceived victory.
“No, but that’s why I’m not surrendering.”
“Arrogance, from one who-”
Not in the mood to listen to the monologue, Rory suddenly spun around, whipping his hand forward. In the exact moment, a sword appeared, flung with all his might at the stalagmite, stabbing hilt deep.
“Was such a foolish last desperate attempt meant to achieve something?” The King asked, sounding genuinely confused as the sword remained hilt-deep in the stalagmite.
“Yeah, this,” Rory grinned as, with his still raised left hand, he snapped his fingers.
Several things happened at once. First, the blade ignited with Oblivion light. Second, and more importantly, a small thread of projected string that Rory had spun around the blade in the instant he’d tossed it, exploded, reaching into the blade itself. The explosion of the pneuma thread was weak enough that, on its own, it amounted to nothing.
But what it did do was erase several of the runes that stabilized the magic that made the blade operational. No longer regulated, the blood-affinity liquid pneuma that was meant to feed the blade regeneration, instead, was fed into the null light itself.
And the funny thing about liquid pneuma was that even a neutral aspect of liquid pneuma was highly dense with energy. Added all together?
Well, in short, the blade went boom.
A second explosion swallowed up the final anchoring stalagmite, and while smaller than the first, the annihilating energy at the blast's core remained the same. The stalagmite, already significantly weakened from withstanding the force of the first oblivion explosion, wasn’t able to take a second one.
Erasing what remained of the stalagmite from existence, a chain reaction went off, the overflowing energies of the spire rebounding as the domain anchored within finally failed. The portal in the sky, which had been raining fire, seemed to reverse course, as all the flames were sucked up into the sky and through the portal.
“How dare you!” The King shouted, flapping his wings and launching a meteor storm at Rory. It proved fruitless, as rather than fly toward Rory, the meteors were sucked into the portal in the sky.
They weren’t the only things sucked up. Having taken to the air, the wyrm found itself struggling to remain in place in the sky, being drawn toward the portal.
Too much power to resist, the wyrm was eventually dragged in, but it wasn’t alone. Zoey and Rory, while farther away, were much smaller. They, too, were drawn upward as if abducted by aliens.
Had Rory been alone, he might have been able to teleport himself away.
But.
But Zoey, unconscious as she was, was completely vulnerable as she was pulled into the portal, seconds after the wyrm.
God damn it.
With no intention of abandoning Zoey, Rory didn’t bother fighting it as he was sucked upward into the portal as well.
I guess we’re doing a good old-fashioned three-stage boss fight.