I jumped down the ladder. With only three pieces of smoked snuffler tucked into my belt, I wasn’t in any condition to fight the boss. A full inventory of boar meat would be ideal, but I could make do with snuffler until I got more used to the boss mechanics.
I think I’ll call him Iroth Grimskull.
It appeared Iroth had at least two phases. The first involved circumventing the summoned undead to batter the mage. I should bring at least 3 sets of iron knives to throw at the thralls, and maybe even try to destroy the cages to try and slow down the minions while I beat up Iroth himself. I would have to time my last blow carefully so as to avoid the burst of red smoke. If I could stay next to the boss as it was summoning the behemoth, I would be able to get in at least three solid blows before the boss' animation completed.
Plan set, I hopped off the edge of the fort to enact the plan. Food came first and I littered the forest with traps. Rat meat wasn’t ideal as a food source, but it would serve to keep me healthy the next time I pushed through the second floor of the hemogris fort. In total, I spent four hours collecting supplies and saw noticeable increases in a couple of my stats because of it.
Feeling better prepared, I pushed through the second floor, consuming rat meat by the handful as the hemogris fell to my adze. During this time, I tested out what attack option was most efficient with my adze. I had no way of seeing monster health exactly, and could only form a rough estimate by the number of hits it took to kill the creatures.
To my dismay, it appeared that waiting the eight seconds for the moonstone to charge was only worth it if I couldn’t continuously attack. Triggering the charge more often than that resulted in glitchy inconsistent behavior that made it nearly impossible for me to land the empowered hit on time. Which sort of meant I could only start combat with the moonstone.
At least clearing the floor netted me several combat levels in total.
Once the floor was cleared, I made four separate trips back to the forest to haul up all the food and several stacks of maple logs to the entrance of the arena. Then, without further ado, I lit a campfire and ascended the ladder.
The boss arena had reset, with the looming sinister bone walls and Iroth reclining lazily on his throne. Instead of blindly charging in, I narrowed my eyes and focused on the boss. Several minutes passed, and slowly, an image resolved in the back of my mind.
Higher level than me, but I should be able to deal with him with my gear.
No time like the present, I thought, then burst out onto the floor and immediately sprinted at the boss. Waiting was a fool's errand, and I was rewarded with the staccato sounds of the summoned thralls falling behind me as I unleashed a moonstone-enhanced strike directly to the reclining king’s temple.
Iroth wailed, backpedaling off his throne and summoning bone projectiles at me. I ignored him, spinning around and unloading my three iron knives at the undead. I grinned as my high attack stat caused the knives to rip through their fragile bodies. Bone cracked, and two of the three thralls collapsed. The remaining undead charged me, but I ignored it in favor of attacking the boss.
Iroth tried to escape, but I stuck doggedly on him. I abandoned the moonstone strategy and focused on delivering heavy blows as hard and fast as possible. My adze flickered, starting and restarting its charge but never succeeding in completing it. Every other second, Iroth unleashed bone shrapnel that tore through my armor, but my high defense allowed me to tank the blows without losing my rhythm.
Desperate, Iroth summoned another group of thralls, but I knew he was on his last legs. I took a second to remove the annoying thrall chewing on my back, then ripped back into the boss. My adze dug deep into his flesh as the new set of minions neared. Before they could attack me, however, Iroth collapsed prone around his gnarled staff.
I leaped away from Iroth with a wild, adrenaline-fueled yell just as the familiar burst of red smoke disintegrated the remaining thralls. I ached all over, but inhaling two pieces of smoked snufflers brought me back to full health.
The red wave dissipated, and I instantly spun back to Iroth. The bone behemoth was forming above my head, but I had a few crucial seconds before it became mobile. I lashed out three times, knocking Iroth back and reopening its various wounds. Iroth staggered, terror in its eyes as its hands flicked through another spell. Bone ribs ripped from the ground, forming an impenetrable cage around the hapless boss.
The bone shield knocked me back directly into the scything tail of the behemoth who’d finished appearing. My health plummeted, but I somehow kept my feet as I turned to face the enraged undead. It reared up on its back four legs and slammed the ground with its front two. I barely dodged out of the way, avoiding the majority of the blow, but stumbled as a storm of bone from Iroth slammed into me from behind.
I tossed back one of my four boar meat — healing a massive 18 health points — and grabbed onto the ribcage shield for support. The dual boss’ damage was high, but the real problem was I couldn’t find an opportunity to retaliate. The behemoth slammed the ground again, intent on squashing me, and I danced around the bone shield to protect myself. This opened me to Iroth, and I was forced to duck behind my iron shield as another storm of bone pinged off the dented metal.
I whipped out my adze, heedless of the danger, and ripped at the bone ribs as if I was splitting a log. Three hits were all it took to break one, and Iroth was vulnerable to me once again. I stabbed him, pulling him out of the bone cage with the adze’s hook. The behemoth slammed the ground again, forcing me to jump to the side. Since I couldn’t attack freely, I reverted back to the moonstone strategy. It was excruciating to dodge patiently while my weapon charged, but I was pretty sure it would do more damage in this situation.
Hopefully.
My second and third pieces of boar were consumed as the bosses took advantage of my position. I had to stay near the cage to keep the behemoth from trampling me, but that meant I was forced to take risks to pull Iroth back toward the cage. I danced in and out of the dubious safety of Iroth’s shield, sneaking in blows when I could. My food dwindled, but with one final strike, Iroth fell.
His body stiffened, but instead of melting into a pile of gel or providing me with a kill notification, he transformed into a sanguine mist that absorbed into the huge behemoth. A ghastly light suffused the creature, lighting up its hollow insides and accentuating — but not repairing — the few injuries I managed to deal to it.
It slammed the ground noticeably faster and with more force than before.
Phase three of the fight had begun.
I jumped back, barely avoiding the now accelerated ground slam, only for the whipping tail to clothesline me from the side. I choked, feeling my trachea crumple like a tin can as my face slammed into the rigid ground with a sharp crack. I groaned. Before I could even get my wits about me, an immense fist knocked the wind out of me.
Stolen story; please report.
Once.
Twice.
I coughed, rolling out of the way of the next blow. I jammed the last boar meat into my mouth as I staggered away from the lumbering beast. It chased, landing several more blows before I tumbled down the ladder to the relative safety of the second floor.
I gasped, regaining my breath as the boss raged above me. After a minute, I felt a change in the boss arena, and the behemoth vanished. Looking into the arena revealed Iroth had returned to his throne, and the whole arena had reset.
“Holy moly,” I muttered, slumping back down and topping myself up with some of the extra rat meat I’d brought. I’d lost, but damn, that was an exciting fight. In fact, I was surprised with how well I’d done. If my guess was right, I’d reached the third and final phase of the boss fight on my first real attempt. I couldn’t wait to do it again.
There were many open questions related to the boss. Did the behemoth empower Iroth when it died? Did the empowerment heal them? What was the best way to deal with the bone cage? The list was long and would determine my strategy for tackling each stage of the fight.
I was pretty confident in my first phase performance. Perhaps some extra attack levels would mean I could phase the boss before its minions arrived, but it wasn’t a deal breaker. The second phase was a mess, and I needed to get rid of the cage surrounding Iroth faster. Also, I needed a better way to deal with the empowered behemoth or find some method to avoid the situation entirely.
Regardless, everything would be easier with higher stats.
Humming a pleasant tune to myself, I settled in for another long grind. I would devote two days to increasing my stats before my next attempt. That should be enough to see some significant improvements to give me the best shot, and it should be enough time to collect enough resources for several attempts.
The first day went by easily. It was still tough to defeat the hemogris, but I was getting better and better at reading their movements. Whenever I could, I let them hit me, then used all the food I could to train my recovery. Once I’d cleared the second floor, I’d return to the forest to harvest the hunter traps I’d set previously. This only netted me two snufflers and one silverback per hour so I augmented my supplies with half an hour at the level 1 rats.
By the second day, I’d gained enough silverback hide to upgrade my leather gear. Any extra I dumped into the strange chest next to spawn that kept its contents between resets. I also got into the habit of returning my tools to the chest. It would make re-acquiring good gear in the next reset much smoother.
I calculated I was able to get around 1,500 attack experience an hour with all the back and forth of collecting food. Cooking the food on the ever-burning campfire at the base of the fort could increase that number marginally, but I needed to train more than just attack. Recovery gained experience per food eaten, not per health recovered, so I stopped using campfires to boost my level. Doing so reduced the effectiveness of the food and meant I needed to make more trips for food, but that just biased my experience toward recovery. A worthwhile tradeoff.
On the dawn of the third day, I brought all the boar meat I’d collected over the last two days to the entrance to the boss room and pulled up my stats.
Combat level:41 Health:47/47 Attack:57/57 Defense:49/49 Recovery:52/52 Woodcutting:52/52 Firemaking:48/48 Crafting:33/33 Mining:44/44 Smithing:44/44 Cooking:51/51 Hunter:47/47
I’d gained many levels in hunter, recovery, and attack, with a couple of miscellaneous levels in several other support skills. The most impactful change was to my recovery, which, with the help of a maple campfire, meant that boar meat now healed me for 24 points of health, effectively undoing the nerf the system had recently implemented.
This time, the first phase of the boss passed by smoothly. The iron knives worked perfectly to eradicate the first wave of undead. My increased attack also tore through Iroth’s small initial health pool in far fewer blows. It was almost as if I was dealing a time and a half as much damage as before from just a couple of attack levels. My spined gear certainly helped some, but I hadn’t expected the increase to be this significant.
The second phase came swiftly, and I dodged the initial red explosion smoothly. I chose to try and destroy the behemoth first this time, but that was when things started to go wrong. Killing the behemoth was actually easier than killing Iroth, but once the giant creature died, a green mist enveloped Iroth and the fight grew infinitely harder.
Instead of wave after wave of bone shards, Iroth unleashed endless bolts of lightning up at the sky. The arcing electricity angered the ravens who descended down to the arena with a vengeance. They pecked and blinded me all while Iroth’s attacks grew more deadly and numerous. After ten miserable minutes of failing even to locate the boss, I retreated down the ladder to safety.
The third attempt occurred a day later but failed faster than either of the first two attempts. I tried to bring both bosses to low health before taking out one. That way, I wouldn’t have to deal with the empowered version at full health. It would have worked, but I simply didn’t have the damage or the food reserves to pull off the strategy.
I could simply train more as the damage increase per level was significant. The thing was, I was loathe to brute force the boss this way. For one, the experience required for each level was rapidly growing out of hand. It already required 12,800 experience for one attack level, which was an entire day of focused grinding with my current setup. Simply preparing for each boss attempt took significant time, and I was eager to get at least one kill as soon as possible.
The other reason was more nebulous and centered around the moonstone. It felt...useless. The special attack did a lot of damage, for sure, but even after hours upon hours of practicing and perfecting my timing, dealing one blow every 8 seconds wasn’t worth it. There had to be a better way to use the moonstone. Even sneaking in a basic attack in between empowered strikes would vastly increase my damage.
To that end, I took a break from bossing and focused on mastering the moonstone adze. I went through the suite of tests I’d done originally with the same results. The adze took 8 seconds to charge before it could enhance an attack. Trying to sneak in a strike sort of worked, but it wasn’t sustainable. I managed to sneak in an extra attack for the first hit, but any subsequent moonstone strikes became glitchy and mistimed.
This was the first bug I'd found, and it was a relatively tame one at that. Resetting the world just for this felt silly, so I spent another day just trying to figure out what was actually happening beneath the surface. Hours and countless swings later, I came to a grudging conclusion. The best I could figure was that swinging the weapon again triggered a second charge-up sequence that interfered with the first.
Except...that gave me an idea.
If the separate charge-up sequences interfered, maybe I could interweave them so they didn’t inhibit each other. It took 4 seconds after the initial swing for gemstone to start glowing, so perhaps if I swung precisely at the end of this period, a second cycle would start right when the first ended.
It took hundreds of attempts, but to my shock, it worked. I would swing the adze, then 4 seconds later, I swung it again. 4 seconds after that, before the second sequence disturbed the first, I swung the adze twice in rapid succession; the first to use up the power of the first sequence and the second to trigger another charge up sequence. In this way, I could trigger a moonstone attack once every 4 seconds instead of once every 8. It required impeccable timing, but using this strategy effectively doubled my damage and meant that moonstone strikes far outstripped regular attacks in all scenarios.
I was eager to test out this new tech on Iroth, but I tempered myself. In the chaos of the fight, I would certainly lose my timing, and the whole rhythm would break. It was fragile, and even being off by a tenth of a second would destroy the flow and, therefore, my damage.
So I practiced. I fell into a fugue for hours. Fang came a few times to check on me. I acknowledged him but was deeply entranced in the icy focus of practice. I counted to four again and again in my head. Hours passed. The sun set. Then rose. Somehow I didn’t grow tired, weary, or bored. I sunk deep into the ticking count in my head. The flow of the cycle. Every 4 seconds. Until I could get it perfectly. Every time.
At last, I wiped away the sheen of sweat on my brow and smiled. I was ready.
I approached the hemogris fort, tearing through the low-leveled biters with ease. The ever-burning campfire greeted me merrily as I stepped under the dim overhang. Its flickering light washed over the wolf cages that sat empty and broken in the gloom. Neither of the adult wolves was present to give me their customary threatening growl. Fang, however, was lounging in one of the broken cages.
He gnawed on a large unfamiliar steak as clear gel evaporated from between his claws.