I was approaching the beast. As the strongest beast in the whole game, it had ridiculous attack, but for us hunters it was the same case, we had ridiculous armors and weapons. At least ridiculous from what we started with.
My partners were fighting it skillfully, it was kind of strange to see them handle it so perfectly. But a single hit of the monster could bring our HP almost all the way down, it was only thanks to a certain skill we would not die in one hit.
“Guts is a very useful skill” I said in the chat, it is awkward to say things in English in this game, especially since it is an only Japan, so it was blocked by IP but thanks to some tricks we could get to play it.
A hit, his HP went down from 150 to 10, and all that was left was a combo to kill him. Guts was a skill that when your HP was above a certain spot, any one hit K.O. would be neutralized and instead would bring you down to 10 HP. I instantly prepared to heal him by using my special skill ‘Wide-Area Effect”. My partners would use Lifepowders, which were potions that were able to heal other players, but my skill let me use normal potions to do that so I could heal myself and my buddy at the same time.
“Thanks” He said before returning to battle. He then lifted to air with the pair of weapons he used. They were called Tonfas, you could only get them from a certain point of the game onwards, and they were a mostly offensive-evasive weapon. It was more of a Jack-of-all-Trades weapon.
This lift was a simple movement that other weapons could not use, which is only one of the special traits of this weapon. While on the air, one could keep attacking with the weapons, the jump had frames of invincibility too, so he could dodge on those frames any kind of attack. That combined with another one of my buddies’ Evasion +2 skill that was implanted on other people, a skill that let us have more frames unlocked in our evades, made it very easy to dodge any attack.
I rushed to the boss, near its death and entering the third stage of the fight, he suddenly froze himself up. It was a cutscene. From this cool sight the already completely froze monster suddenly exploded and from there a monster with a metallic skin covering him appeared. The cutscene ended and we were facing him again.
He (supposedly male) started flying with his two wings in the air, whilst doing that also making giant ice spikes fall to the floor that would later explode if we came into contact with them. The idea was to dodge them either by running away or just simply evading if we had failed to do so. It wasn’t so hard for the Tonfa user or the Dual Blades player. But for me, someone who was very used to the Longsword, my roll was a pretty straightforward… roll, so while easy it didn’t feel as epic.
The monster finally went down to earth and on that very same spot we all launched to him on an all-out attack. Two Tonfa players and then one Dual Blades and one Longsword. He made a quick tail whip and sent me flying only to see my HP go back to a full 150 because someone used a Lifepowder. Back onto the action.
My attacks were many. So by describing them we can just get a very good view of the battle.
I did a side-step with my Longsword, making a vertical attack, then starting a spirit combo interrupted at the middle, this combo was a simple double horizontal attack followed by another double horizontal attack and a finisher vertical down-slash. On earlier versions of this weapon’s moveset, that would be the end of the combo but I can resume the attack again by continuing with an upward slash. My side-steps could make me get out of the way of an attack but the monster was huge so it was kind of pointless anyways, and they also don’t have any kind of frame invincibility so it was even more useless. I used them to reallocate myself and to back away, and sometimes to keep the combo going because it’s faster.
The beast started turning to me at that time, after focusing on every other player and doing many flashy movements it finally turned to me. I was close to him so he just had to start with the worse kind of attack for me, it was a charge. Of course if I was between his legs he wouldn’t hit me but this game hitbox prevented that from happening, so I had to believe in my roll to evade that attack.
Every frame was calculated by the game, I rolled into the attack because the frames on that side were less than if I were to roll to the side, so if for any reason I managed to roll the attack, I wouldn’t get hit by the continuing frames of it. It wasn’t even a second I could manage to stay like this, but it was enough, and it managed to make me evade his charge in time. I wasn’t hurt and not even affected by any kind of blight, even though that comes from another monster.
“I got you!” I thought at the time, everyone was playing very aggressively because we each one had support on our backs. Everyone cared deeply for the other’s safety, or more like, the death counter. If the shared death reached 3, then we would fail the quest. But we were at 0.
“We’re nailing it, keep going!” Said one of the party members, also a member of my English talking guild.
Following his words we kept, the beast was just making a 180º turn from the charge, it went flying so we couldn’t attack anymore and instead had to wait for him to come down. Huge spikes of ice came flying again and exploding, but this time instead of silently going down, because this was his third phase, he had to have something special for us.
“Be careful” Didn’t type that one, it was an auto-message I had set onto a key shortcut, and it was especially made for situations like this.
The beast marked his fly on the floor with his shadow, and his shadow suddenly cast a huge black hole on the earth, but that black suddenly turned to red, and instantly then turned to a bright white, the ice kind of white. It was a straight line and we were all out of its reach, that whole line exploded sending pieces of ice our way, prepared to hit us as a last-resort of managing to at least kill one of us, even though it couldn’t.
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
“What!?” I thought at that very moment. Those pieces of ice suddenly had crashed into one of my buddies, wasn’t such a big deal, that wasn’t what surprised me though. I had healed him on the spot but suddenly something that we didn’t know happened. The rock of ice that had hit him split into pieces and those pieces fused with the floor around him, even though I tried to heal him my potions didn’t do as much healing as it was required to instantly return him to the safe area of the Guts’ skill.
The area where the ice had fused suddenly became a huge cage of ice around my partner, that cage became more and smaller and suddenly started to crush him before making a huge explosion because of the compression required to do such an attack. It was an instant-kill, that Dual Blades user was there no longer. We became aware of that kind of attack, we couldn’t get hit by any ice or we would die the same death.
“When one gets hit like that, we should probably heal him on duo” That’s true, the first Tonfa user who’s username was typed in Japanese to blend more into the community typed that. My potions could only heal 60 of the total of 150 HP, the Guts skill activates at around 80 HP so we would need two of those potions to reach that.
“Sorry!” The Dual Blades guy who had an English name which got him into lots of problem before came to the area again after preparing in the camp, a special zone in which one starts some quests and also comes to when one dies. It has supplies and all sorts of things but not much for us.
We just typed the usual no problems and started again. That attack took us by surprise, yes, but it wasn’t the end of this rampage. The beast was moving extremely fast now, if I could compare it to something in the real life it would surely be a Jet moving at an extremely fast speed. In fact, that’s what it appeared to be when it was flying. The camera let us see but a part of him in the sky, so we were stuck with his shadow which was positioned to the left of him so we needed to guess his position.
All of a sudden we heard a roar, it was one that made users that didn’t have “High Grade Earplugs” stop moving. I knew what was coming but I couldn’t stop it, I had that skill, most people had it but I knew one who couldn’t get the gem needed for that before having to do this quest, he had regular Earplugs. This was a problem.
“Uh-oh” I tried to type casually before deleting it from the chat box, that would make things worse. We could only see as he trembled, or more like his character started trembling in fear from the roar. When a monster roared we would normally crouch down to protect our ears from breaking because of the extremely high decibels of that roar, in the case of some monsters it could even blast us away. The Earplug skill prevented that, but some monsters required a higher Earplug to resist.
A sudden crash on the floor was heard, when I made way to the area with my camera I could only see that very same person I was talking about being crushed completely by the flying monster that came down to him. A complete body slam that was also furiously amplified by the extremely fast speed at which the monster had been flying and including that the Ice elemental attack which the beast could provoke from its attacks.
“Yeah, that’s not very good” He typed while he was down, the only moment in which we could make sure he could go back to 80+ HP without having to die, Guts had activated and he had come back to 10 HP. We had to make him live, so we had to heal him so Guts would have its effect again, but before doing that we have to rethink our positions a bit…
He was around 10 meters North of us, and we both were in an exact straight line. All the monster had to do to shake us and make us not be able to heal him was… jump south. A quick back-jump monsters did when they knew they were in trouble. This jump didn’t even take a quarter of our HP, it wasn’t too much, but it was certainly much for the one guy we needed to heal.
If it was only a back-jump to evade attacks then it would be fine, but this certain monster started a sudden laser attack which completely obliterated this guy. That was the last thing we were expecting, 2 deaths in the counter and we were about to fail the quest.
“He’s about to die anyways (the monster), let us be careful!” I typed. This same thing used to happen when we started the game, but it stopped happening from a point onwards, that was because we had become more skillful, and that doesn’t only talk about our actual skills in the armor set or gem combination, but also our muscle memory and reflexes made it easier to evade certain attacks and we were aware of everyone’s weaknesses so we were a very good team overall.
Suddenly the monster started flying. This flying monster was a mess, it wasn’t even fun at this point how many things were being thrown at us one after the other, but we needed to withstand it.
So, I kind of started to laugh awkwardly after seeing what just happened. When he plunged into the sky he suddenly rained down lots of ice balls that contained a red matter inside. The ice balls themselves were something we had not expected so if we didn’t evade them at the right time, we would just get all pushed away by them. Yes, it could only be avoided by dodging at the same time those balls impacted the floor. Everyone except me managed it. That would be the end of it, but the “frozen floor” supposedly started freezing me to death, so I died because of the chip damage.
“SERIOUSLY!” I screamed and then covered my mouth with my hands. I could not contain it but I was living in an apartment so I couldn’t just go and shout at night. But it was extremely infuriating. It was a simple attack I couldn’t evade and because of that, the counter of a total of 3 deaths… reached those very 3 deaths.
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