The second and third rounds of the first stage passed much the same as the first. The zergies did indeed get stronger and faster with every round, but even by the third, they weren’t nearly as powerful as even the monkeys of the jungle. They would have made up for their lack of strength with their sheer numbers, but against our rock-solid formation, it was only a matter of time before they were wiped out. Even I had to begrudgingly admit that having prepared a formation to handle the fight was more than likely what allowed us to win. Not to mention, the design of the formation itself was very intelligent.
The greatest danger I could have faced over the course of the battle was running out of my Flux reserve, but since I’d have to Revive every so often, I was never really at any risk of that. And because there was so little danger, I had an absolute blast in that stone hall. Aside from the occasional zergie slipping past my defenses and dragging their claws over my skin, of course, but that was a part of the game, after all.
With that nagging feeling in my head finally gone – that feeling that I wasn’t using my fire the way I was supposed to – I felt a lightness in me that translated into a grace in the way I fought. I danced with my baton of flame as I swung and jabbed and parried, every movement like a familiar friend, a step in a dance etched into my soul, and I felt complete in a way I’d lacked for far too long.
Gyda’s words rang true, it seemed; I’d been stuck in my indecision for so long it had stalled my progress, hindering the talent and skill in my blood from truly shining. But now that I had a path, a direction to focus myself on, I could feel myself improving by the minute – as if I was catching up to where I should have already been.
By the time the third round came to a close, I was absolutely brimming with joy, itching to continue onward and fight anything and everything that I could find. And it showed on my face, apparently, as Tara gave me a look and shook her head. “Yup,” she said, as if to herself, “you’re a berserker, alright. I’ve seen that face on Gyda more times than I can count.”
I gave her a grin in response, and Gyda looked like a proud mother hen as she nodded in agreement.
“Alright, the mini-boss should be just ahead now,” Najam called out, addressing the group. “We’ll take a ten-minute break, and then continue on. Now, how many Flux Potions do you all have left?”
The people gathered called out their numbers one by one, and I was shocked to find all, save for Ren, had already used at least one, if not two. I’d honestly forgotten that we’d even had them on hand – after all, this was the first time I was fighting with them.
Najam’s group seemed impressed that Ren and I still had five of them left, but nobody made a comment about it.
“Ok,” Najam said, looking rather pleased after he took stock of the situation. “We’re doing pretty good, resource-wise. We have a good shot at making it to the third round, as long as we keep this up.”
And clearing it, I thought to myself, but I decided against voicing that. Najam had made it clear that he had no hopes of clearing the dungeon this run, but that didn’t mean I’d given up on it.
Ten minutes later, our group finally made its way into the middle of the three dark hallways, rested enough and ready for the fight ahead. The hallway lit up as we stepped into it, looking like an exact replica of the previous one. Whoever designed this thing must be lazy, I couldn’t help but muse to myself as I took in the familiar stone walls. Though, I suppose, I can’t blame them. I’d probably do the same.
This time, though, the end of the hallway didn’t immediately feed into a stone room, but instead met with a double wooden door. Our group came to a stop there and ran through our preparations once more, before Najam finally laid a palm against the doors and pushed the doors open.
The doorway was an important point because, according to Najam, once a party entered a mini-boss’ room, it was nigh impossible to leave until the boss was fully defeated. And that meant that if we were wiped out here, it would mean death, from which the chances of coming back were near zero.
“Well,” he’d amended then, “that’s all true for us. When you get to the higher level dungeons, and you go with better equipped and higher leveled adventurers, most of those rules don’t apply. But they do for us, so keep them in mind.”
The warning rang fresh in my mind as we stepped into the new chamber. The place was, as with the rest, ominously dim, with only a ring of torches near the top of the domed ceiling casting a glow down on us. Shadows danced in the corners of the room, their darkness rich and almost alive.
Stone pillars rose in a circle near the center of the massive room, leaving a space of almost a dozen meters in between them. The boss – or rather, the bosses – wouldn’t appear until we walked to the center of the circular space, based on previous experience. As for the bosses themselves, they were three giant centipedes; modified, of course, to be suitably terrifying – because giant centipedes on their own obviously weren’t enough.
So now we had to watch out for their venomous spit, venomous mandibles, and venomous tails. Not to mention, their plated keratinoid armor was highly resistant to any bladed attack our group could manage, mostly resistant to blunt trauma damage, and only slightly less so to magical, elemental damage.
Their only weakness was that the plates of their armor had little gaps to allow for mobility. The soft skin that bridged those gaps was our target – or rather, Ren and Najam’s target. They were the only ones with the skill and precision required to hit those tiny gaps, so the rest of us were sidelined as decoys, with the goal of weakening the monsters until one of the two could come along and finish them.
This information gave Ren no shortage of satisfaction, of course, as he’d fallen to last place in terms of kill numbers over the course of the first stage, much to his embarrassment.
The group wasted no time in making its way over to the center of the makeshift stage, getting into formation as we did. Our new formation, specifically designed for the boss fight, was quite different from the first. We’d split into groups of two – Lionel and Ren, Gyda and Najam, Tara and me – and each pair would handle one centipede. Meanwhile, Galas would stand in the center and offer healing to each group, while directing his wolves to help out where they were needed.
No sooner did we break out into formation did the ground start rumbling once more, signaling the beginning of the fight. A horrible clacking echoed out as hundreds of feet tapped against stone. Tara and I looked up at the closest pillar to us, sharing a look of disgust at the obscene creature we found circling down from it. Its twelve-meter-long body wrapped around the pillar in winding loops as it crawled down from whatever corner it’d been hiding in.
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I got my first proper look at the thing only after it fully came down to the ground and faced us; the bug seemed to recognize that we would be its opponents. The length of its body was segmented with foot-long plates of ruddy brown armor, and from each of the hundred segments branched out two thin, razor-sharp claw-like legs from each side. Two long mandibles jutted out from the end that faced us, and in between them was a jaded abyss of teeth and venom.
The sight was unpleasantly reminiscent of the mutated bugs that had ruined Earth, but I refused to cower before the traumatic response my body had at the sight. I steeled myself and forced my eyes to stare at the grotesque thing, knowing that I would feel no small amount of satisfaction bashing that thing as hard as I could. I was unlikely to kill it, according to Najam, but that would hardly stop me from trying my hardest.
Tara looked just as determined to end the fight without help from either of the two boys, likely miffed that no one thought she had the accuracy required to deal with the centipedes. I gave her a grin before I stepped forward, letting her fall behind as I lit up the space around me.
The centipede seemed fascinated by the fire around me – though I couldn’t really tell, since the thing had little more than its terrifying mouth in terms of facial features. It immediately began the fight with a deluge of greenish venom, the viscous fluid squirting out of the thing’s mouth and drawing an arc as it flew over to me. I rolled to the side just in time for the venom to sail right past me. The liquid puddled on the ground just a foot to my side as I got up, the stone sizzling under the acidic attack.
I didn’t give the bug a chance to continue its attack, pressing forward as I brought down an overhead swing with my flaming pole. The pole struck true, landing directly on the middle of its raised head. The thing screeched in pain as the swirling flame engulfed its head, but I could tell right away that it had hardly felt the physical blow of the pole.
Najam wasn’t kidding about this armor, huh, I thought to myself as I rolled back just before the centipede clamped its mandibles on me. As it did, I hit it again from underneath, and then again from the side as I got back up to my feet, just before I backed up out of reach again.
The fight had begun only a few seconds ago, but I’d already managed to land three good hits on the thing. I’d have been proud of that achievement, had my hits done any kind of noticeable damage. As it was, the thing looked almost exactly as it had when it’d come down, save for a few scorch marks on its head plate.
I gave the thing a grin as we stared each other down once again. So what if you’ve got armor? I thought to myself. Enough fire will burn through anything.
Tara, it seemed, was thinking along similar lines. As the centipede launched itself at me, it’s mandibles open wide as they closed in, a spiralling ball of flame suddenly shot past me, aimed directly at the monster’s face. The boss had the intelligence to shut its open mouth before the ball could get in, but the flame still exploded on the thing’s face, burning against the armour for a few seconds before running out of fuel.
Those few seconds bought me time to batter its face once more with my pole, and this time, I knew to use my flames as much as possible. So, as I jabbed and swung, I made sure to use my free hand to send sweeping streams of flame all along the length of the bug, hoping that the flame would get into the softer areas of skin.
The bug did not seem to like being cooked alive much, writhing in pain and letting out wailing screeches every time I set it alight. Still, the thing fought back with the tenacity of a warrior, and the fight was nothing short of life-threatening. As the fight carried on, the thing caught me more than a few times with its venom, either with its spit or a graze with its mandibles or tail.
The venom was potent, but it wasn’t as bad as I’d feared, not doing much beyond burning my flesh – which wasn’t to say that it was a pleasant experience – only that it wasn’t the kind that slipped into the bloodstream or dulled a person’s senses. And because of that, it wasn’t difficult to Revive when I did get hit. Tara would take the heat for a little bit, letting me fall back and deal with the wound, before falling back once I returned.
The pain of the Revives had a unique flavor to it, I noticed, different from the pain of a Revive after a normal burn wound. And then I realized how sad it was – that I could tell the difference between such a thing. The thought distracted me for only a fraction of a second, but it was just long enough for the boss to graze me with a flick of its deceptively quick tail, which cost me yet another Revive.
The fight continued much the same for the next three hours or so, by which point I’d accumulated about five Revives. The centipede, thankfully, had no option to rejuvenate itself as I did, so it was forced to tank our barrage of attacks with no reprieve. Its obscenely tough armour held up, of course, but the constant heat and pain had taken their toll. The monster was noticeably slower, almost sluggish in its movements. It wasn’t quite on death’s doorstep yet, but it was slow enough that Ren would’ve had little trouble bringing it there.
Ren and Najam were still busy with their own battles, though, so Tara and I couldn’t count on their help any time soon. But the fight was getting much easier as time passed, and by the end, I was having just as much of a blast as I was having in the first stage. I danced about the space, cooking and bashing the centipede with everything I had. It felt utterly amazing to let loose on the insect, as if I was taking revenge for the sins of its brethren.
Tara seemed to be having just as much fun, letting loose a barrage of elemental spells on the karotenoid punching bag. As the stress of the battle tapered off, I finally got the time to watch her, and her Artes, in action. And they were an absolute wonder to watch. Tara’s wand traced glowing golden strokes in the air, spelling out strange, incomprehensible symbols that pulsed with power. The language was written in a spiraling script, starting from the outermost ring and circling inward.
Tara’s hand moved rapidly as she drew, drawing out simple spells with mere flicks of her wrist. When a spell was written out, she would simply point her wand through the floating circle, and the spell would shoot off the tip. She rained down bolts of lightning, balls of flame, foot-long icicles; I was astounded by the variety of elemental spells she had at her disposal. She stuck mainly to the three elements – fire, lightning, and ice – but the ways she could use them made it look like she had an affinity with all three.
Eventually, as the centipede continually slowed, Tara was able to land an icicle in between the monster’s armor. The blue shard bit deep into the flesh, spilling out brown, viscous blood as it did. The wound made the beast cry out louder than ever, and then louder still when my flames melted the icicle and wormed their way into the open wound.
The last straw for the creature came as a flash of brilliance on my part. I was in the air, having just barely dodged its lunge, when I saw my opportunity. Just above my palm floated one of my signature pearl bombs, and just below me was the part of the centipede with the wound. And so, with an almost impossible twist of my body in the air, I flipped myself around just in the right way to jam the golden ball right into the hole left by Tara’s icicle.
I kept my hand against the hole as I exploded the bomb, the rest of my body still in the air, forcing the force of the explosion to travel into the bug’s body. The soft inner flesh was charred to ash as the ball exploded with a muffled boom. Smoke leaked out of the bug’s mouth as I landed softly right next to the monster.
Tara and I watched in a tense moment of silence as the bug flopped to the floor, unmoving and still smoking. When it became clear that the bug wasn’t about to move again anytime soon, massive grins broke out in unison on our faces. Tara and I shared a look of utter satisfaction, having fulfilled our desire not to give up our kill to someone else.
“You know, Ruby,” Tara said as the both of us breathed hard, “I think you’ll make a damn good berserker.”