We keep up the pattern for the next ten minutes, whittling down the boss until its health drops below three hundred. It’s damn slow, and my own condition is worsening by the second. I can’t build up enough frenzy to boost my stats, and besides Emily’s song of regrowth, none of the others have constitution or healing buffs.
My health bobs up and down, but the general trend is downwards. I fall below 25%, then below 20%, my body unable to keep up with the strain.
I tap in and out with Cedric a couple of times when I run out of mana, but he’s not doing much better than me. The bear lands a glancing blow on him, tearing a huge chunk out of his hip. Cedric goes flying, his health down by half in an instant.
I rush back in, sidelining him as I get Bruin’s attention on me again. Emily lets her own buff drop, unable to shoulder the mana requirements any longer. She needs a short break to recharge.
This battle is downright insane. We should’ve brought more fighters, we should’ve brought a healer or two, but we couldn’t afford to. I’m worried enough for the people we left back in the safe zone as is.
We’re taking too long, and with each passing minute where we don’t kill the boss, everyone’s chances of survival get slimmer. I’m afraid we’ll return to a breached central hold bathed in blood, if we’ll even return at all.
Pops helps me out for as long as he can, but he’s running out of bullets and has to stop after a while. He’s not completely dry yet, but I order him to keep enough ammo to use bullet hell twice.
I keep dashing in and out, but the boss slowly learns and adapts. At some point, as I go in for a ground pound, it slams a paw down to hit me. My only saving grace is that it gets the timing ever so slightly off, hitting the ground in front of me. I kick out, hitting its shoulder and using it as a springboard. The sudden change in the momentum’s direction snaps my knee like a twig, but I manage to jump over Bruin.
In the short moment I have, I hit it in the temple with the ground pound. The handle of the sledgehammer finally snaps as the shockwave explodes out of it. Then I go tumbling through the air, crashing behind the bear and rolling through the dirt for a solid thirty feet.
I come to a stop on my back, the head of the sledgehammer landing in my lap. A cold chill runs down my spine. The boss gets stunned, and the others are so taken aback that they fail to take advantage of it.
I take the two pieces of the sledgehammer into my inventory.
“Jack, get away!” Pops shouts.
Emily shoots her arrows around me and gets the song of regrowth going again, but another notification accompanies it.
Emilia Faust - Level 24 Arrow Conductor has cast Song of Regrowth.
Warning: you are inflicted with Healing Fatigue.
“Emily, stop!” I yell. “My healing is shot! Save your mana!”
Her eyes go wide as color drains from her face. She makes a quick gesture, her hands trembling wildly, and she sends the arrows crashing into the boss. They fail to pierce its hide, falling around it as the boss shakes off the stun and stumbles to its feet.
It roars and starts coming at me. I try to get up, to run, but my broken knee bends the wrong way. With no other option, I take off on all fours.
Mike spawns a few walls between me and the rampaging boss, but it tears through them like they're made of cardboard. All that does is pepper me with chunks of earth, draining even more health.
“Mike, get him out of there!” Pops yells.
He jumps off the rooftop and starts shooting at the bear. It doesn't take its eyes off of me, so Pops activates bullet hell as he runs. Various guns appear around him from his inventory, firing in unison. The streaks of shining lead light up the night, drawing glowing streaks through the air between Pops and the boss.
But, as impressive as the skill is, most of the bullets bounce right off the bear. Pops shoots a couple hundred of them in the span of a few heartbeats, yet he only drains about fifty health.
The boss finally takes its eyes off of me, turning to face Pops. As it changes direction to give chase, Mike rushes past me on Luna. He grabs my arm, lifts me onto the puppy's back, and we bolt.
“Plan B!” I yell to the others.
They all flinch. Plan A was what we just attempted — Cedric and I facing the boss head on. We hoped the two of us with our fancy classes would be enough, but just in case, we came up with a contingency. That's plan B, where our hard hitters are either sidelined or dead and the others have to take the boss down.
The rest of our fighters charge ahead with some apprehension. They get Bruin’s attention on themselves, allowing Pops to slip away through one of the houses. He goes to retrieve Derek, Carter, and Chris so they can help out.
Mike drops me a few hundred feet away from the fight, looking expectantly at me.
“Go,” I say. “Help them out.”
“What about you? You’re in no condition to protect yourself.”
“Don’t worry about that,” I say, nodding at Emily as she runs towards me. “I’ll be fine, go.”
Mike nods, then he and Luna bolt. Emily reaches me a few seconds later, crashing to her knees next to me as I straighten my broken leg. Pain shoots out from it, passing through my hip and crawling up my spine. She frets over me, trying to help but unable to do anything.
“Do you have any food on you?” I ask.
Emily shakes her head. I have some strips of meat, but they don’t contain enough calories to jumpstart my healing. I pull them out and eat them anyway, forcing the strips down my throat as I watch the others. Mike runs circles around the boss, digging trenches and spawning walls to slow it down. The fighters try to coordinate their assaults, delivering skill enhanced blows every so often. Derek and Carter barge in to help, and I can even see Chris and Cedric up on rooftops, shooting guns and plasma lances.
Everyone gives it their all, and I can’t do anything. The feeling of powerlessness drives me up the metaphorical wall.
Bruin swings a massive paw, hitting one of the fighters before the man can dodge. His body gets bisected at the waist, showering the others with blood. Carter runs around the boss, slapping it with his red hot hands and burning away more fur. Bruin tries to turn and swipe at him, but Derek gets in the way and blocks the attack.
It’s not enough to kill the tank, but the force throws him back like a ragdoll as it breaks an arm and God knows how many ribs.
I try to force myself to stand again, to get back in there, but I can’t. The boss brings its paw down on another fighter, her body crumpling into a pile of gore. One more death, one less chance.
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
Pops returns, stopping next to me to watch as well. He only has enough ammo for one more use of bullet hell, so he has to make it count. He has to save it for when the boss is nearly dead, but it doesn’t look like the remainder of our forces can get it there.
My head swims as I analyze the situation again, looking for something, anything, that I might’ve missed. An angle I didn’t consider, a solution to the problem at hand. Something plummets out of the sky, landing next to us and making us jump.
It’s Polly.
“Jack?” Jessica’s voice calls through the pet. “What’s taking so long? Why isn’t that thing dead yet?”
“We’re trying,” I growl.
Polly’s black eyes take me in for a moment, going wide as she finally notices my wounds.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I know you’re doing your best, and I don’t want to sound like a bitch, but you have to end this. Get back up and kill that thing.”
“Jessica—” Pops starts, but she cuts him off.
“No, Tom! We’re all dying back here! Half the fighters are dead! One of the monsters slipped into the central hold and killed dozens of civilians! We can’t…” her voice catches, and she takes a deep breath as she composes herself. “We can’t hold out for much longer, a few minutes at best.”
I stare at my bloody, mangled hands, then up at the others. I don’t know what to do. What to say. There’s no solution, no way out. No matter what we do, we’ll lose. We tried so damn hard, we fought with everything we had and then some, we — I risked so many lives. So why isn’t it enough, why can’t we catch a break?
“What do we do?” I ask, my voice breaking up with both anger and shame. “We can’t retreat, that would doom the others. We can’t kill the boss, and if we keep trying, we’ll all die ourselves.”
Pops looks down at me and sighs. “I think it’s time for that bomb.”
“Pops?”
He starts walking away, not saying a word. I try to get up again, gritting my teeth and forcing the broken leg to support my weight, but it bends and I crash.
“Don’t hate me for this,” Pops says. “Emily, Jessica, hold him down. Don’t let him do anything stupid.”
“Pops? What are you doing?”
He breaks into a sprint. I reach out, but Emily is on top of me in moments. She flips me onto my stomach and holds my hands behind my back. Polly joins her, adding more weight as I struggle to get them off of me.
“Everyone, get away from the boss!” Pops yells as he runs in.
“Pops! Get back here! Fuck you, old man, don’t do this!”
The others listen to him, retreating from around the boss as Pops activates skill after skill. The air around him burns bright with mana, his aura enveloping the entire battlefield.
“Eyes on me, ugly!” He yells as he triggers bullet hell, slamming a barrage of bullets into the boss.
“God damn you all! Listen to me!” I shout in vain. “Someone get back in there and stop him! Please!”
I cry out the last part, but no one listens. Some keep running away, others collapse from their wounds. Jessica just mumbles sorry over and over again.
“Let me go!”
I buck and turn, throwing Emily off. She lands on her ass next to me as I try to take off on all fours, but Polly digs her claws into my hurt leg. The pain makes me stumble, buying Emily enough time to get back on top of me again. She wraps her arms around my neck and pins me down in a chokehold.
“Please,” I growl. “He’ll sacrifice himself. We have to stop him.”
Neither one says anything. We all know what’s about to happen, what Pops intends to do, and they want to let him go through with it. My anger — my rage — flares up like never before. Words bunch up on my tongue, a stream of I’ll never forgive you for this and I’ll kill you both myself if he dies.
It’s all I can do to not let those words out, to not say them out loud. To not give voice to the rage.
Pops shoots at the boss from every direction, burning through his guns and their ammo one by one. The last two left are his revolvers, and he jumps on the bear’s back to empty them in its head. He tosses them aside when they’re spent, and the boss throws him off.
Pops rolls to a stop, gets back up, and he pulls out the bomb.
“Go to hell!” He screams, pulling the pin on the grenade as he rushes the boss.
Bruin roars. Pops uses one last skill to speed up, closing the distance in a fraction of a second. He shoves the bomb and his arm down the bear’s throat. Bruin bites down hard, the crunch of bone and tear of muscles filling my ears. It backhands Pops and sends him flying away, his arm severed at the shoulder.
“God! Fucking! Damn it!” I scream.
“Pops!” Mike yells, bringing Luna around to get to him.
A moment later, the bomb explodes with a muffled boom. Bruin’s eyes go wide as its health drops. It stumbles and falls, thrashing on the ground as smoke streams out of its mouth and nostrils.
But it’s still not dead. It struggles to get up, and when that fails, it starts to crawl away.
“Emily, Jessica, let me go. Please. We have to kill it now.”
Neither of them flinch. I regret my next actions, but I have to do something before the boss can get away or call for reinforcements. If that happens, Pops’s sacrifice will have been for nothing.
“I’m sorry.”
Emily freezes up, and her grip around my throat loosens for a split second. I headbutt her, then I quickly spin and throw her away. Polly digs her claws into my leg again, but I pull out the handle of the sledgehammer and I smash it into her wing.
A bone crunches, and the oversized parrot jumps away as it spews expletives at me.
Emily just looks at me in shock, blood pouring down her face from her broken nose. I ignore her, using the handle to steady myself as I climb to my feet. It’s not ideal, but it only needs to hold me up for a few seconds. A couple of steps.
I bring out the head of the sledgehammer in the other hand, load a ground pound into it, and I trigger dash. A couple of steps is all I manage, but it’s enough. Dash fills me with momentum, and before I crash again, I put all of it behind a pitch. The head of the sledgehammer flies out of my hand like a cannonball.
It hits Bruin with a mighty crash, turning its head to paste as the ground pound triggers and punches its body into a crater. Then the hunk of metal keeps going, flying through a house in its way and out of sight.
I skid through the dirt from the momentum, tossing and spinning to a stop some fifty feet away. If I still had any steam left in me before, I'm all out now. My health is down to a sliver, the pitching arm broken as well.
My notification folder flashes a few times as I reel with the pain.
“Jack!” Mike screams. “Get over here! Pops—”
He doesn't get the rest of the words out. Pops coughs loudly. New energy fills my body, enough of it for me to turn over and drag myself to them.
Pops isn't dead, but even before I reach him, I can tell he won't make it. He bleeds out rapidly from the missing shoulder, and his midsection is torn open, guts spilling everywhere.
I want to yell for someone to go back into the safe zone and bring a healer, but I don't have the strength. Mike comes over, takes me into his arms, and he brings me to Pops. He lays me down on the ground next to him, and Pops turns to look at me, his eyes clouded by the pain and blood loss.
“Jack?” He rasps.
I swallow drily. “I'm here, Pops.”
He feebly holds out a hand. Mike and I take it as my little brother starts sobbing. Tears flood my own eyes, but I don't dare make a sound.
“I'm sorry,” Pops whispers. “I…love you, boys.”
I nod, and I just say, “I love you, too, Pops.”
“Be strong…for me.” He takes a long breath that shudders his chest. “Take care…of our town. And…take care of your mother…for me.”
“We promise,” Mike and I whisper at the same time.
“Good.”
Pops closes his eyes, exhales for the final time, and his body goes limp.