Felix flew from the top of his tower, on his surf board made of mana, into the center of the ocean. As he flew, he noticed that he was outrunning the storm behind him as he surfed over the ocean, the sky completely clear above him, showcasing the setting sun. He quickly reached the middle of the ocean where the glow from the seal beneath him radiated all the way up to the surface. Looking around, Felix saw a wall of dark grey clouds closing in from every direction. The small spot of clear sky right in the middle was slowly shrinking as the sun set over the cloud cover to the west.
Felix checked his status screen and confirmed, he was as ready as he could be.
Name: Felix Kade FREE 0 Innate: Ascendant Prodigy: Mana (Wizard) STR 1226 Class: [E - Common] Caster (Lvl 91) DEX 1226 Race: [E - Common] Human (Lvl 91) AGI 1226 Profession: [E - Special] Arcane Engineer (Lvl 92) PER 1226 Health: 24520/24520 VIT 1226 Mana: 294172/294360 INT 2453 Energy: 61223/61300 END 1226
He looked through his inventory and made sure to memorize all of the tools he had available to him. He even pulled out the bigger items and gave them a final inspection before the final fight. In his tinkering, he had also made steel plates with a channeled flying spell for his boots and hands. That meant he could fly without the surf board, in case he fell, without consuming any concentration. The plates on his boots were strapped to the balls of his feet and the plates on his hands were small enough to fit in his palm. There was nothing for him to do but wait so he laid himself out across his surf board and enjoyed the clear sky before it was strangled by the encroaching storm.
There wasn't much he could do except relax and be ready. He had already played out the fight a million times in his head both to prepare and out of sheer excitement. He wasn't going to bother with the tracking mana for two reasons, he doubted it would try and run. Secondly, the Kraken was supposed to be so huge, no amount of tracking mana was going to suffuse it's bloodstream and be useful. If he hit the tip of a tentacle, he could be running hundreds of meters away from it's body.
Felix lay on his surfboard, floating on the air, beneath the setting sun and waited for the final battle of the tutorial. Unless he managed to get back in time to watch the war, who knows maybe he could swoop in and provide fire works. His fantasizing was cut short by a System screen.
Tutorial Announcement
The Final Boss has been released.
The seal on the prison holding the Legendary Kraken at bay has broken and the emperor of the sea has risen from the depths. The Kraken will remain for a period of 24 hours if engaged, before being resealed in it's prison. Defeating the boss will result in rewards to be given out at the end of the tutorial.
Good luck.
Felix quickly jumped to his feet and before he could look down, noticed the clouds, in every direction began raining all at once. They were still closing in around him, but now a sheer wall of rain was closing in as well. He saw flashes of light flicker along the tops of the clouds as static built up within the clouds. Finally looking down, Felix saw the glow from below had vanished and instead, a dark shape was slowly growing. He quickly flew over to the side, not wanting to be directly above it which turned out to be a great idea as the first thing to breach the surface, was the tip of a tentacle.
Felix continued to race in a random direction to get out of the way and looked over his shoulder to see the tentacle push upwards and grow like a plant. It continued to grow seemingly forever until Felix was certain it would have touched the clouds that surrounded them. The width of the tentacle also increased until the base of the tentacle was the width of a two lane road. Surprising to Felix was the fact that the tentacle had no suckers on them, instead it was scaly and dark on one side, and lighter on the other. It was a dark grey color with a tinge of blue on the scaly side and a light cream on the underside.
As Felix stared in awe of the massive tentacle, the head of the Kraken pierced the surface and sprayed water in every direction. Once the water settled, Felix looked back to see a massive round dome covered in scales with dozens of bony horns on either side, forming a crown of sorts. Felix thought the dome rose slowly through the water but quickly realized it was moving very quickly, it was just an illusion caused by the size of the creature. The tentacle that had first breached the surface slammed down on the water a hundred meters or so away from Felix causing a massive tidal wave to erupt in either direction.
As the Kraken's head rose from below, so did the tentacles. At first it was the one tentacle that had led the charge, that tentacle was shortly followed by another two, then another, and what proceeded was a seemingly endless torrent of tentacles. Felix had expected eight tentacles because he associated the creature with an octopus mentally. Instead there were somewhere between a dozen long tentacles to hundreds of shorter ones. It was impossible to get an accurate count because everywhere Felix looked, the tentacles weaved and wound their way all around the creature. They rose above then fell below the surface only to continue on somewhere else. Everywhere he looked around the creature, there were tentacles.
At it's full height, once it had stopped rising from the depths, marked by an ear shattering screech, Felix stared up at a creature that rivaled mountains in size. When Grim had said he would be a fly, he hadn't believed him and he had thought of a large horse fly in his head. Grim was right, he was a fly, but he was a fruit fly, he was a tiny speck, nothing more than a large grain of sand. He was less than an ant in comparison as the head of the Kraken stood hundreds of meters tall. He had thought the tentacles were thick, but they were also absurdly long. Before, the creature itself had been surrounded in tentacles, now Felix saw tentacles everywhere he looked. If the creature lifted them all at once, Felix would be completely trapped in a prison almost a kilometer wide.
The Kraken itself was a massive creature that resembled an octopus except that it had many more tentacles, was covered in scales, had nine eyes, a crown of horns and was the size of a small mountain. It did resemble an octopus though, if Felix blurred his vision. By the time the Kraken had fully risen, the clouds had completely closed in, snuffing out the last remaining sunshine and most of the light. Felix could see the Kraken using the rapidly dimming light of the sun that barely managed to pierce the storm clouds above.
[D - Legendary] Kraken: Emperor of the Sea (Lvl 105)
D grade…
As the clouds closed in, so did the wall of rain and with it, winds whipping about in every direction. All light from the sun disappeared and Felix saw the Kraken in flashes, as the lightning above flickered and provided after images of the monster. Outside of those flashes, it was inky black in every direction.
As Felix flew around the creature all sounds outside of him vanished. He could hear his breath as he breathed in and out, he could hear his heartbeat as it quickened and skipped a beat. He felt his skin tense and hair rise, as goose bumps crawled along his skin. Felix wasn't nervous, his body reacted to the excitement that mounted and the lust he experienced for the coming battle. The Kraken's eyes suddenly darted over and locked with Felix's. His chest tightened and his breaths shortened as he experienced the moment before battle.
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Neither he, the Kraken nor even the rain dared move, completely suspended, everything was perfectly still. Felix stood there and simply experienced the moment, savored it. Felix didn't experience the normal moment before battle, strife with danger and unknowing if he'll even survive. Instead, Felix experienced the moment right before he took on an impossible enemy, one he had no hope of defeating and one that he had every intention of conquering anyways.
The moment didn't last forever though and sound came crashing back in around Felix as the rain poured and the Kraken moved. Felix had intended on making the first move, replacing his traditional tracking mana shots with the biggest hit he could to open the battle, instead he was locked in the experience. Instead, the Kraken reacted first, one of it's tentacles reached up to grasp Felix. He noticed it immediately and felt he had plenty of time to fly out of reach then quickly realized his mistake. The Kraken didn't need to move quickly, it's tentacle was large enough that avoiding it's grasp felt impossible anyways.
Felix raced by traveling what felt like a kilometer before he finally felt like he was outside of the tentacles reach. With a creature this large though, outside the reach of one tentacle, was almost guaranteed to be inside the reach of another. Felix spun as quickly as he could and raced in another direction using all of his focus to try and navigate through the endless sea of tentacles.
After dashing and darting around for 30 minutes, Felix had fired a single spell. While he could have opened up his inventory and taken out a wand or cannon, he didn't dare do anything to throw his focus. After another 30 minutes he had fired off another handful of spells. Luckily, it wasn't difficult at all to hit the creature, as he could pretty much fire in any direction and hit it. Unfortunately, he knew his spells were a light tickle at best to the Kraken. Grim had warned him that he would need to slowly whittle it down and so that was what he was prepared to do.
After two hours of dodging tentacles, Felix felt like he was starting to get into a groove. He began predicting tentacles and had even pulled out a few grenades, which were cool except they looked completely useless when their explosion was less than the size of one of it's eyeballs. Felix was especially happy to have created an energy core and figured out how to regenerate energy with his mana because it meant he could keep fighting essentially forever.
Felix had expected to cast a light spell so he could see but it quickly became unnecessary as the flickers of light from above became constant. There was the occasional blackout of light after a lightning strike but Felix quickly learned to be ready for those and in all other situations, the area was dimly lit.
After four hours, Felix felt like he was on top of the world. At first, he struggled to avoid the tentacles and raced as fast as he could in reaction to every move the Kraken made. Now, he felt like he knew what was going to happen before it happened. He was predicting the tentacles and leading them into each-other, winding them around it's head and chuckling as it accidentally knotted them together. Felix surfed the air like a bird on the wind, laughing in glee as he did.
He had managed to significantly ramp up his damage as well as he was now releasing an almost constant barrage of spells. He stuck to single sized Lightning Bolts as those were most efficient than upsizing them and switched between casting and recharging his pool using the batteries he had stored. While he was recharging, he pulled out a wand or grenades so he could keep the damage up. He had eventually used all of his grenades and wands though so he ended up trying to score critical hits with the bigger weapons. He led the tentacles around to create an opening so he could drop his bombs of mass destruction on an eyeball.
When the blast a hundred meters wide finally subsided, Felix saw one of it's eye had caved in so he cheered. He looped around and did the same thing again and again until he had taken out five eyes and run out of super bombs. He still had his cannon though so he set himself up for the perfect hit and finally pulled it out of his inventory. As it fired, the runes covering the outside of the steel tube glowed and the spell grew until it exploded, releasing a torrent of lightning upon the Kraken. A normal lightning strike from a storm was a single big bolt. The cannon released a stream of lightning consisting of countless arcs of electricity. Felix was pretty sure it did less damage than a real lightning strike, but in his mind, it definitely looked cooler.
After 6 hours, Felix was running very low on mana. His pool was depleting and he had just a handful of batteries left. His cannon was empty and although he could replace it's charge with the spares he had, that would take too long. The only weapon that still had charge was the sword. He didn't bother pulling it out for the same reason that it was still fully charged, what the hell was a normal length longsword supposed to do to the creature before him. At best, it would be the equivalent of a small splinter and he never wanted to be close enough to a tentacle to try it on them.
As the battle had progressed, around the 5 hour mark, the storm had reached a crescendo where lightning struck every few minutes within the couple of square kilometers of the battle field. It never struck Felix, luckily but it also never struck the Kraken. All Felix could do was hope and dream though.
Felix was starting to feel pretty helpless right around the eighth hour. He had spent almost two hours conserving as much mana as possible, slowing his cast speed so his mana expenditure was less than his regeneration. Dodging the tentacles, leading them into each-other and tangling them together quickly lost it's appeal for Felix. He was a little bored and the knot of fear in his stomach was growing. He was pretty sure he had no hope of actually killing the Kraken, not that he was going to give up.
There was basically no chance the Kraken was going to catch him and there was almost no chance he could kill it. It was essentially a stalemate. Either he was going to kill it or 24 hours was going to pass and it would disappear. Felix could have taken that as a victory, coming to a stalemate with a Legendary D grade creature. He probably should have, but Felix was stubborn and one of the most intelligent idiots in the E grade, or at least in the tutorial. Felix didn't think a stalemate was a victory, to Felix, if he didn't kill the creature, that was equivalent to giving up. If he didn't kill the creature, his soul would shatter and he would likely die, but in his mind, he would deserve it.
No more losing. Never again.
Felix wasn't going to give up and he decided he wasn't going to lose either, so he concocted a ridiculous plan to kill the Kraken and more than likely himself, unless he executed it perfectly. He had had an idea, back when he had compared his cannon to a real lightning strike but had quickly dismissed it as a ridiculous and certainly fatal notion. Now though, he wasn't sure he had a choice. His cannon might look cooler than a lightning strike from the storm, but he was certain those would do a lot more damage, and a lot more damage was exactly what he needed right now.
Luckily he knew a little about spell forms and theory so he knew how the lightning bolt worked. Essentially he created a path for the lightning to travel, then created a spark. The spark would follow the path and strike the target. Both of these parts of the spell were almost instant though so it just appeared as a simple bolt.
Felix's theory was that he could create a path for the lightning from the storm above, into the Kraken. The only issue with that plan, was that because both lightning and the path were almost instant, it would almost certainly fry him as well. He had a decent idea of how to do everything except keep himself alive. He spent almost 30 minutes pondering the plan as he zipped through the Kraken's tentacles, sitting on his surfboard of mana. In the end, he settled on the only idea he had. He pulled out the cannon from his inventory and removed the lightning spell form disc from it. He stowed the cannon and pulled out his enchanting quill to make some quick modifications.
The kraken, had no idea what was happening, the speck of dust it had been trying to swat was just mildly annoying. The wounds it had caused would heal in a few hours, which felt like an instant to the nearly immortal Kraken. Had the Kraken been able to recognize what was happening, it would have been livid. It continued to swat at the speck of dust, Felix, who was now sitting on his surf board, scrawling on a metal disc, while barely paying attention to where he flew. He effortlessly wove a path through the tentacles using only his peripheral vision as he focused on the disc in his hands. The blatant disregard for the danger imposed by the massive and Legendary Kraken was lost on it, as it simply didn't understand.
With Felix's modifications complete, he inserted the disc back into the cannon and swapped it's battery for a fresh battery. He quickly zipped up a top the Kraken's head, dodging a few tentacles on the way. He used the force enchantment he had engraved on the outside, to reduce recoil, and overpowered it with the last of his batteries. The enchantment, resisting all force in every direction, held the cannon perfectly still as he fired it and jumped into the air. A moment passed, just a sliver of a second while Felix started to fall from the sky and his hope began to dwindle.
Then suddenly, three things happened all at once. The cannon having fired, having seemingly no effect whatsoever. The lightning that had built up in the sky for a few hours now, with a few discharges here and there, collected itself and released in what appeared to be a perfectly straight line. Finally, Felix realized his mistake, lightning was almost instant so he was still more than close enough that the lightning would almost certainly arc off the creature and into him. . . . . .