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The Gamer Chapter 1413 – Thorough Grinding 6 – The New Raid
🕑 Added 2023-03-30 18:06:01 +0000 UTC
“Interesting,” John commented.
“What is the matter?” Lydia asked. Like everyone else around, she had expected to find herself in the middle of a random landscape or building. Instead, they continued to stand in the darkness with the rest of the combatants.
“We’re getting limited in the number of participants for the Raid combat.” John gave the window a tap so it flew over to the queen of steel. One by one, everyone read it. “10 isn’t a terribly restrictive number. Including all my doubles, we have 16 participants, 17 with Stirwin. To be forced to pick and choose a bit does make things more interesting. It’s also a boon in disguise.”
“How so?” his girlfriend asked.
“If only one of my bodies can enter the Raid, I can do other stuff with the remaining two,” John responded. “Might be able to beat the Class Challenges in parallel, rather than do it in a back and forth.” He sucked on the inside of his cheek and then released it with a smacking sound. “Which means I just wasted four days… pretty annoying.”
“Why would you ever go with not your main body though?” Sylph chattered.
“Because my other bodies have advantages too. The Ambassador Double may not have access to my none-arcane Skills and Passives, but it can fly. The Creator Puppet may not have access to… anything, really, but it has by far the best Physical Stats and its defences do not cost me mana.” He rubbed his chin. “There’s a lot to consider. First, let’s see what we’re dealing with though.”
A magnificent, circular chamber took shape around them. Golden and white, it gleamed with radiant splendour. From underneath the dome that sat atop the tall, decorated walls hung five banners. Four were above exits, two on each side of the room. One was grey and showed a vortex of metal. One was green and showed a drop of poison. One was white and showed a downward pointed shovel. One was light blue and showed an ice flower. Between the exits were four arches, matching the colours of the nearest banners, swirling with arcane power in the display typical of a portal.
Last was the banner that hung opposite of the place in the bright room that the party appeared in. Golden, it bore the symbol of a throne. A throne that was located underneath it, so much more splendid than heraldry could ever depict. It was of a stone of pure white, smooth but not polished, like ancient marble figures, and trimmed with bright gold. Neither was it absurdly large nor were the art deco patterns on it complicated. It was simple and in that lay its beauty. Royal purple served as the cushion for the man on it.
Straight, hands on the armrests, and beholding his visitors with a face of unmoving, benevolent sternness, the king sat quietly. A cape of radiant glow, ephemeral in its make, was attached to the pauldrons of his noble armour. A straight rapier laid to his plate covered feet. When he moved, his long, backwards combed, golden hair moved slightly, confined by the crown. Four gems were set into the object of gold.
The king mustered them with eyes of amber and waited for them to do anything. John, for his part, considered his options. “Unusual but not unheard of to put the final boss of the Raid at the start,” he thought out loud. “The whole ‘undefeated bosses join the fight’ mechanic is pretty cool. We can tailor the difficulty to our liking.”
Once they attacked the king, John reckoned, the four knights would come out of the four portals. Consequently, the four roads led to the four paths of the Raid. Ice, poison, metal and shovel – a peculiar selection.
“So do we just attack that guy?” Salamander asked and pointed at the king. “Get this over with quick?”
The thought did enter John’s consideration, but he shook his head. “There might be more bosses than the 4 knights. Typically, when you have a dungeon with wings, there’s more than one boss in each wing. Not sure if that’s still true when you have a reinforce mechanic, but we’ll see what Gaia has cooked up. Anyone have a favourite for where we should go first?”
There were several opinions on that. In the end, Rock-Paper-Scissors cast the deciding vote and they followed the path of poison. An expected reminder to select his combat party popped up the moment they attempted to leave the throne room.
John hummed and considered his options. For a base combat party, his real body was the most advisable of the three. Beyond that, taking the five elemental girls was obvious purely for flexibility. Aclysia was their best tank, so she was in too. That put them at 7 out of 10 already. Picking 3 more that he had a telepathic connection with was a good choice, Beatrice, Claire, Metra and/or Momo in other words. Then again, their teamwork at large was so advanced that it was not a requirement.
Rave was pretty insistent about getting in on the action, thrill seeker that she was. Since she and Beatrice fulfilled similar functions in combat, he decided to skip out on the passive maid for the selection of the last 2. He went with Metra, because the First of Wrath was just too good a combatant not to and Momo because support was something they generally lacked. The lineup gave them 3 sturdy frontliners (Gnome, Aclysia, Metra), two melee damage dealers (Rave, Siena), one hybrid damage dealer (Salamander), two ranged damage dealers (Sylph, John), and two supports (Undine, Momo). A well-rounded party all around.
With the choices made and those ten advancing past the gate, the rest of those that had entered were teleported to a place that Jack quickly identified as the top of the castle. It was a high medieval kind of tower when it came to the style, shaped out of white stone and gold. The palace was an elegant, vaguely cylindrical structure, surrounded by a private woodland and walls. All of it was located on top of a hill.
From the top of the tower they could look down at the party. The chosen combatants were following a road that cut through the woodlands and then went down the hill to one of four districts of the surrounding citadel. It was a four-pointed, walled off structure, located in a gorgeous but rather generic, mountainous landscape. From a high vantage point like this, it looked a lot like a compass rose with the diagonals removed. Each of the four points was filled with stone structures. Grey and brown dominated, as was typical for rock, but the colours of the respective banners were prominent as well. The poison area was covered in glass pipes, pumping a noxious sludge through the streets and from house to house. Mists covered the point dedicated to ice. Meanwhile the metal area looked fairly normal. Only the shovel area appeared completely out of place, with large, open spaces of bare dirt turning the city there into a patchwork.
After scanning the environment, Jack looked at the magical screens that were projected into the air. They showed John and the party from multiple angles. ‘I wonder how careful Gaia is about showing me things I can’t see from a ground level,’ he thought. The mental communication was still in place. The original body could easily see what the screens were relaying, just like they could hear what the people on the ground were talking about. This must have been how Gaia and her friends followed his exploits.
“I hope the poison mechanics here are good,” John said.
“There’s good poison mechanics?” Rave responded. “All I know about’em is that my HP tick down and I can’t do jack about it.”
“Typically speaking, poison mechanics deal more damage than burst, but it’s balanced out by you getting reaction time – it’s not the game’s fault that you only buy full offensive items and then die to someone coughing in your general direction.”
“Nuh-uh, that’s totally the game’s fault!”
John chuckled and rolled his eyes. “Optimally, poison abilities introduce a sense of urgency to your actions or there’s areas around that build up a poison meter that you can cross, but you have to be methodical in doing so to do it without suffering the repercussions. The problem is that most games love to pair poison up with some kind of slow effect, which is annoying.” He looked at the city up ahead. “At least the aesthetics are promising.”
Before them was a city that could be described with one word: methodical. The way the pipes were integrated into the road and walls was carefully chosen to keep them away from the trampling feet of the people. Everyone avoided making close contact with the glass, respecting the noxious sludge that was lazily running along the system.
John expected the people to turn into some kind of horrible poison monster, like Bane, but instead he was thoroughly ignored. Despite their medieval garb, the crowd accepted the colourful combination of characters amidst them without as much as a spare glance. “First time we have non-hostile NPCs in a Raid,” John stated.
“Do you think we have to be cautious, Master?” Aclysia had to look over her shoulder to catch his eyes. The glance only lingered for a moment, before the artificial guardian returned to looking around, dagger in hand.
“Always,” John cautioned. The crowd was not so dense to inhibit the party’s movements. Same could be said for potential assailants that hid among either it or in the many side roads of the area. They advanced, and atop the tower, Jack stretched.
“Maybe we should get the others,” he suggested. Previously, watching had only been possible from outside of certain boss arenas. Now that they had this convenient little side bit, there was no reason they couldn’t have a watch party. “I wonder if we can get a grill up here…”
And thus that was exactly what they did. Specifically, Jack went out, contacted Delicia, who had everyone else drummed together by the time they entered the house. They quickly gathered everything needed for a nice BBQ. Only Lee was left behind, the gamer girl insisting that she had not gotten her share of the chores done for the day. The Gamer accepted that reasoning. It was nice that Lee took the housekeeper role seriously. Whether she would be able to follow later on her own or he had to fetch her would be interesting to find out as well.
The first good news upon returning was that they could, indeed, start a grill on the viewing platform. Typically Raids had various precautionary measures against John abusing the physics engine of reality to trivialize encounters. If it had been an option, he absolutely would have found a way to build literal nukes and transportable shelters and solve boss fights that way.
The grill, Gaia let pass, and so they soon had a shortstack turning over steaks while they watched the show advance.
‘Weird to be on both sides of the screen,’ John thought, as they turned another corner. So far there had not been a single hostile encounter. Just for the hell of it, they attempted to enter some of the buildings. A few were locked, others led into shops that sold useless things, mostly poisons of a variety that Delicia assured she could produce rapidly herself. Everything was nicely detailed. Not quite enough to give John the feeling this was a living, breathing world. The movements, the responses he got when he talked to people, the layout of the city, it all had a veneer of artificiality that was difficult to pin down.
Eventually, it became clear where the road was leading them. Rising above the other buildings was an upside-down cauldron. The dark, cast iron structure was the heart of the pipe network, everything connecting to it in one form or another.
Just out of curiosity, John directed his party off to a side road. “Why’re you avoiding the boss arena?” Lydia asked his double, up in the watcher’s area.
“I want to try and see if, conveniently, there’s a wall of houses that we can’t pass without going through the very obvious intended path,” the Gamer explained.
There indeed was. For a reason that could not be justified by actual city planning, there was a streak of houses that made it virtually impossible to walk around the cauldron-shaped building. Flying over was impossible as well, as noxious fumes hung in the air and gave Sylph the kind of light-headedness she did not enjoy.
Their only choice was to enter the cauldron.
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