A/N:If you didn’t notice, the crafters have increased to 5 (because 3 are too unreasonably small).
The party in this quest is also reduced to 18 players (I’m so indecisive >_<)
Agility is the same as dexterity in my mind so I might mix them up.
_________
A crowd of possessed rabbits rush toward us. From this distance, the crowd looked like a sea of white pouring out from the corridor in front of us.
I and another tanker took our position. I’m by the left side of the corridor while the other took the right side; we’re making a gate to let the rabbits pass by the gap between us. We also use the guard’s aura and blocking stance to increase our defense.
Behind us are the melee DPS-es that attacks the stream of rabbits that passes us with simple repeated downward swing. The rabbits are chopped up like we’re some potato mashing factory.
Behind those melee DPS-es are the clerics that heals if anyone got their health low enough. The rabbits are actually above our level so if they hit us, it hurt a bit.
And finally, behind those clerics are the sorcerers and archers, shooting colorful spells and arrows toward the center of the enemy’s crowd.
The sea of rabbits is rapidly processed into stream of light and dropped japtems.
Tifa: “This feels like I’m some part of a meat processing machine.”
(Guild Member): “Welcome to party farming.”
Tifa: “Is this actually the right way to play the game all along? I don’t think I’ve ever killed more than I did just now.”
(Guild Member): “Nah, this only works in corridors. Luckily, most of the dungeon is a corridor.”
With the endless stream of rabbits going against us, we’re walking forward slowly.
After walking for a while, we found a blue portal in which the rabbits are spawned from along with a lever right beside it. We turned the lever near and the portal deactivated. Rabbits stop coming from that portal after that. We proceed and deactivated more portals that are separated by about 10 meters.
We kept at pulling the levers one by one while walking through the stream of rabbits. The more levers we pull, the less rabbits came rushing at us. We deactivated a total of 10 portals before the rabbits are all killed.
Pudding: “Finally~ I felt bad killing all those creatures T_T”
(Guild Member): “It was good exp flood though :/”
We went and searched the stairs to the second floor. Because the labyrinth is reset after each try on it, we can’t use the old map.
We found stairs with a magic treasure box beside it. The treasure box is a reward for deactivating all of the portals. I opened the treasure box and retrieve a magic grade enhance stone.
There was the option to go ahead to second floor while ignoring the streams of rabbits too. But we won’t get the treasure boxes. Dungeon monsters can’t go through the stairs because some kind of magical barrier prevents them, so it’s actually fine to ignore them.
Anyway, we are now in the second floor.
The second floor is completed by splitting up and activate 5 crystal. We activated the crystal at the same time using guild chat as the signal. We didn’t fight the monsters guarding the crystal by luring them away and have another person activate it by touching it for 10 seconds. When all the crystal are activated, the floor cleared and all the monsters are gone.
A treasure box appeared again and it had magic grade crafting materials inside.
Onto the third floor.
The moment we entered the third floor, Saturn stopped us and said it’s a trap floor.
She triggered a trap right in front of me by throwing a weight at it.
The floor under the weight clanked and revealed a hole under it. There are spikes inside the hole.
Damn, I almost got caught. The trap was right in front of the stair so I wasn’t cautious at it.
After the hole revealed she pulled a rope that was tied to the weight to retrieve the weight.
The leading player switched, all the rogues are in the front while the rest of us follow.
When monsters pop up, we lure it instead of attacking because there might be traps around it.
Most of the traps are triggered with weights and arrows so there’s no problem.
There are a lot of treasure chest in this floor, but most of them are mimics. There’s no problem with mimics though, if you shoot it with an arrow it would attack you so we shot every treasure chest we found on the floor.
Sadly, there’s only one treasure chest in every floor.
Onto the fourth floor
The fourth floor is a simple corridor labyrinth with a lot of monsters. We’ll have to kill all of the monsters in the floor to get a chest. Of course we could also skip the chest, but we still have enough time to get it.
The monsters here are huge, unlike the first floor of small rabbits. There’s gorilla, rune tigers, were-cat mages and were-cat clerics.
Because the monsters at this floor are elite monsters at level 33+ we need to pull and kill them 1 by 1.
To do that, we’re hiding behind a corridor turn and prepared a little trap. A sword-man is assigned to hide near the ceiling using the slight protrusion out of the walls near the ceiling as a footing.
I peek at the corridor from behind a corner. I used [provoke] on the monster closest to us which is a gorilla. The gorilla turned its head suspicious, but then approached the corner where we hid at. I gave the signal to the party and backed away from the corner.
When it turned and saw us the sword-man jumped down while positioning his sword onto the gorilla’s neck. The sword stabbed accurately and the sword-man backed away immediately after the strike.
The Gorilla flailed frantically as the scream it’s supposed to shout is dampened by the damage on his throat. I gave the gorilla a [provoke] and it obediently dashed toward me. I and another tanker quickly activated [Guard’s Aura] and [Blocking Stance]. We slowly back down as he hit both of us which disperse the damage between us.
While the gorilla is attacking us, it is hit by all the 13 DPSes at once which kills it very quickly despite our level difference.
When the gorilla dies, the sword-men stick back to the ceiling and we repeat it to other monsters
By the way, cat mages could attack the ceilings and rune tigers could jump up to the ceilings so we can’t make the ranged DPS stick there and attack from above.
We kept at repeating this over and over against the monsters. We would sometime miss the throat and the monsters scream which called upon other monsters, when that happens we would lose more HP and MP in the fight but it’s not much of a problem.
Rune tigers are quick and fierce monster, but we could push it toward a corner with [Blocking Stance]. The clerics are easy kill if it’s alone, if we happen to fight it with other monsters we would kill it as first priority. We treat the mage the same way as the cleric.
We also run into a large rectangular room. When we run into those, I would [provoke] them into the corridor and we would fight there.
We eventually found the corridor that leads to the next floor, but as we planned we are going to aim for the treasure chest by killing all of the monsters in the floor.
We carefully mapped the labyrinth and thoroughly cleaned the monsters within the floor. The treasure chest appeared when all of the monsters died.
The chest that we got contained a magic grade crafting material.
Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.
By the way, when we move to the next floor, the previous floor would reset and monsters would re-spawn. This means that the guy who we PK-ed needs to do the labyrinth from the first floor if he wants to reach us and it also means that we can’t get out of this labyrinth unless we clear it or go back upstairs while clearing the labyrinth again.
Within the 3 hours of 4 floors labyrinth, I got my level up by 3. I’m level 27 now.
With that done, we’re heading to the fifth floor, the boss floor. We reapplied the buffs before heading down the stairs, including [shield] the new buff pudding just got after leveling up. We also drank the stat potions.
[Raid Boss]Corrupted Prince of the Jungle level 35
Despite the opponent’s high level, we came here prepared with consumable items to balance the fight.
While I’m still on the stair down, I charged into the boss room. The boss awakens and started to dash toward me.
The boss is a huge cat, the size of a tiger. This boss is an agility type boss. It’s super quick but the damage is not as great as the strength type boss, it only has about the same strength as a lv 50 mercenary.
The tankers [provoke] the boss with healers by our side.
The ice sorcerer spammed her ice spells, the monk used [Palm Strike] that induce [Numb], Kur0oO the evil cleric used [curse], [entangle] and [cowardice]. These de-buffs would decrease the boss speed and stats.
The others went separate way into the corner of the boss room to set up our traps.
Despite the stacked de-buff, the boss is still very fast. I had to struggle to block its attacks with my shield even when I know its attack pattern. Dodging just doesn’t work when fighting 1 vs 1 against agility bosses, unless someone have at least twice its level and fully spent their stat on agility.
One reason I could defend against its attack is because of my inflated vitality. Normal players would usually distribute their stats into 2 or 3 different statuses. So, I would roughly have twice the vitality stat compared to normal players. That means I have about the same vitality as a lv 50 normal players that distribute half their stat into vitality. My defensive passive and active skills, and the [Shield] buff makes my defense even tougher.
When my health got low enough, the other tanker would [provoke] and we switched tanking. The healers used [Heal] on whoever got his health lower and they would also cast [Area Heal] on both of us continuously.
Despite having 2 tankers and 2 healers, our health are slowly but surely drained. But thankfully, the setup for the plan didn’t take long. The explosives and the sword-man are set.
I lured the boss into the corner where we set up the explosives while the boss kept on scratching my shield. Right now, that corner is behind me and the boss is in front of me. The rest of the guild is behind the boss.
Rando: [Spirit Boost]
Timing…. Timing…………..
After some scratching attacks, it did a different kind of attack. It lowered itself, readying to lunge toward me.
There!
The instant the boss lunged toward me, I quickly shield charged while ducking underneath the boss to pass by it. In that same instant, all of our DPS-es attacked at the boss butt with their strongest skills, pushing the boss toward the pile of explosives. This would be impossible without the speed buff from [Spirit Boost]. Some of us got the timing a bit wrong though, just the usual mistake.
The cat is engulfed by explosions and caused it to lift up. At the same time, the sword-men who stuck on the ceilings dropped down and tried to pierce the boss’s vital parts. The goal this time is to inject the boss with bad status inducing poisons coated by the sword blade. The swords cut the flesh, but it doesn’t reach the vital parts. It would still induce the poison of course.
The poisons and explosives are crafted item by the way. It induce [slow], [weak] and [brittle].
That went well.
In boss battles, status de-buff has as serious effect as buffs are. De-buffs are as if the shadow that would look darker as the light (Buffs) brightens. With our status heightened and the boss’s status lowered, we could properly fight it.
[Freeze], [Numb], [curse], [entangle], [cowardice], [slow], [weak] and [brittle].We’re going to exploit its status de-buff to the extreme.
The tankers hold the boss into a corner so that it won’t move freely. It’s hard because of the boss’s tenacity, agility and original speed, but 2 tankers could do the job. Its attacks are still deadly too but with 2 healers, we could hold on.
Sword-man, Thieves and Archers went and attacked its eyes. It needs a lot of tries because of the cat’s nimble-ness and speed, but it’s doable nonetheless. After that, they rapidly hacked at its jaw aiming to amputate the part. Attacking boss’s eyes became one of our habits now.
The 3 thieves also alternate in giving [Spirit Boost] so that we could keep up with the boss’s speed.
When the cat attacks me with a front paw shove, I counter attack by nailing its paw with [stomp]. When the paw gets pinned, the Mercenaries and monks attack the base of its left front leg continuously. I can’t nail it for too long though, it’s a boss after all.
The sorcerers who can’t do much precision attacks just bombarded the boss with their spells. So as to not nullify their own spells, fire mage attack the boss’s back and head while the ice mage generally attack its belly and limbs.
The boss would only need 1 strike to kill the non-tankers but with the constant provoke and careful attacks by the melee, its attack only reach the tankers.
Before the poisons wore out, it’s blind and its jaw is almost chopped, it had the left front leg cut off by a third.
Because its jaw is almost chopped, one of our thieves daringly attacked its jaw but was returned with claws to his death. He died but he successfully chopped its jaw…
…..There goes our perfect score
With a lot of its flesh bleeding, it was easier to reapply the poison so we did just that.
The battle continued in the same manner for more than 1 hour, we consumed quite a number of potions. Tifa who was unaccustomed to prolonged fight looked tired.
After two left limbs are cut off, it can’t stand up no more. It’s blind and it can’t even bite with only its upper jaw. There’s its tail it could use as a whip but it can’t reach the guys who are hacking the cat’s head.
The boss cat dies :(
But then, it was enveloped in light. The light shrinks until it’s the size of a normal cat.
The light dissipates, leaving a sleeping normal sized cat behind :) (and lots of monster drops).
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