Solace stared through the entrance for a while, weighing the pros and cons of attempting to tackle what lay before him. Rift challenges were a relatively rare occurrence, a result of its esoteric logic determining that a delver or delvers’ combat capabilities were higher than a normal rift generation but not high enough to warrant a decrease in monster spawns to preserve essence. If the logic determined that there was a net gain in essence from the kills, the rift would then bolster the instance in an attempt to kill the delver or delvers while using the promise of vastly improved rewards as bait. The information packets warned against trying to clear a challenge, claiming that they only had a success rate of one in a million.
One in a million…
That was the big question as he considered leaving or trying the challenge: did he think that he was more capable than that many other people? The number was a bit inflated in that it was the chances of someone completing the challenge rather than surviving it, but the odds would still be unfavorable.
But then again, what was the worst that could happen? He would probably die a horrible death. Which was terrible to be sure, but he’d definitely died worse in the past for less. In fact, weighing his life against a harder fight with marginally better rewards had been a common feature of the Spire.
After a minute of deliberation, he decided to take a half measure. He would delve until he noticed something he felt he couldn’t defeat. Of course, with how the rift was currently looking, he might not even sense his end, but that was part of the risk too.
“Xu Wei, I think you should leave,” Solace said. Making the fourteen year old boy witness a potentially grisly death up close and personal was definitely not good for him.
“What? But I want to see this!”
“This rift may be beyond me. You’ll be in a lot more danger.”
“Then I’ll stay far back and be really careful. Please let me stay!”
He turned around and inspected the boy. It wouldn’t be that hard to force Xu Wei back through the rift’s entrance. A shove, maybe even lift the boy and toss him back. He was about to move and do just that but then stopped himself.
Since when did I make these kinds of choices for other people?
Xu Wei knew what he wanted and knew himself better than Solace did. Besides, the boy’s presence had no real bearing on Solace anyways. Kicking him out might even damage their interactions, something that would affect his future delves if he survived this. Logically, if Xu Wei wanted to stay, Solace should let him stay.
“I’ll be focusing on myself,” Solace warned him.
“That’s fine, I can take care of myself,” the boy said resolutely.
Solace sighed and turned back around. “Then stay quiet and do what I say, like normal.”
“Yes! I mean, yes.”
With that settled, he focused on the task at hand, defeating this challenge. It was an unknown, and when facing the unknown, one had to throw away every assumption. The enemies could be smarter, stronger, faster, tougher. They could be using invisible webs and other manner of things previously unemployed. They could wait for him to pass and then box him in from both sides.
As he cultivated every last drop of essence in his spirit from his last rift’s delve and allocated it accordingly, he ran through every possible trick and trap he had ever seen, done, or experienced. He even resorted to something he hadn’t ever wanted to do.
He opened up his spirit and peered into the stored memories.
Screams and shouts. The sound of laughter and pained cries. Marching of feet, trampled underfoot. Hanging by a thread, hanged with a thread. Singing zeal, sting of steel. Gnashing of teeth, bite of cold. Always, the cold. It poured in as his blood flowed out, welcoming him into the—
Solace clamped down hard on the images, pushing them from his mind and firmly back into the feather. That had been a terrible idea.
Guess I’m not sleeping well tonight.
But there would be a tonight, because now he was going to make sure he lived through this rift.
Solace stripped some of his regeneration allocation and put it into mind. Then, he activated his spiritual senses. His work with Edison had expanded this ability, allowing him to take in far more detail than before and in all directions at once. The amount of information would have been overwhelming if he hadn’t bolstered his mind and reduced the range of the senses.
It also let him see the Tier 2 webs and through them. There were indeed hidden strands strung up in the tunnels to snag him. In addition, he could “see” three spiders hiding in holes near the end of the threshold. They were the same size as before, but had thicker exoskeletons. They were also peak Tier 2 instead of the usual mid-Tier arachnids.
He checked his gear, making sure everything was in place and easy to draw.
“Antivenom in hand?” He asked.
“Yes.”
“Good. Stay back until I clear. Leave all of the supplies if you must exit the rift. I’ll need everything.”
“Okay.”
No more delays. Glaive in hand, Solace studied the strung up strands immediately in front of him before stepping forward.
Two of the spiders leapt, one from below and the other from the left. His shield on his left arm blocked one while his glaive took the other. Steel met chitin and the sounds rang out as his weapon’s blade slid on the exoskeleton before slipping through a chink in the spider’s protection.
Same weak points as before.
He slammed his left arm against the wall, shield, spider, and all. There was a crunch and a hiss, but no rush of essence to indicate its death. While it was pinned, he thrust his glaive upwards at the third spider, which was still lying in wait. He hit it right in the mouth and flung the thing down from where it was hiding. A twist and hard pull sliced it in half. When that one was dead, he finished off the last in much the same fashion.
So far, the spiders were much the same. A bit tougher, a bit stronger, but not much physical difference. There was a key behavioral difference, however.
Solace looked at his shield and noted the globs of web attached to it. Rather than try to get on him, bite, and then web him, they were now trying to attach webs from the onset. A dangerous change, if he let the sticky webbing build up and impair his movements.
Fortunately, the supplies brought into the rift had an answer.
“Xu Wei,” Solace said, stepping back into the threshold. “Blowtorch.”
There was a bit of rustling before the boy brought it out of the bag. Solace took it, flicked off the safety, set it to its lowest setting, and then turned it on. He had initially gotten it from Edison a week ago thinking that he could burn away all of the webs coating the cave in a glorious fire. Unfortunately, webs didn’t burn very well; they were only moderately flammable and trying to get a flame going strong enough to catch everything on fire would cause suffocation in a poorly ventilated place like this.
So, instead, he now only used the torch to remove webs on specific things. The ones on his shield quickly smoked and sloughed off as the heat denatured the silk’s proteins. He then brought the torch to bear on the strands of web meant to be invisible and trap him. When done, he turned off the fire and handed it back to Xu Wei before asking for another item in their supplies.
“Flour.”
Bringing cooking flour had been a hairbrained scheme to try to reduce the amount of webs stuck to his gear during delves. It ultimately hadn’t mattered before because the normal spiders were bad at webbing him, which made the dust relevant only for a few of the bosses. Because of this, he rarely used it, but now was the time to get his money’s worth from the purchase.
Taking the bag of flour from Xu Wei, he dipped a gauntleted hand into it and spread it over his shield and key parts of his armor that he didn’t want gunked up. Maybe it would help, maybe it wouldn’t. He risked nothing by trying.
And then he continued delving, only occasionally stopping to clean off webs. As he progressed the complexity of traps increased to a level he had never previously seen. Pitfalls hidden underneath the webs, trapdoors to cover the holes in which spiders hid, hair trigger wires which caused rocks or bundles of sticky web to fall on him. The cave itself shrunk in dimensions at times, forcing Solace to switch to his sword or knife. In other sections, the cave had none of the dim glowing crystals and he had to fight in the dark.
It made fighting the spiders unpleasant, because on top of making the average arachnid stronger, the rift was also supplying more of them, doubling and sometimes tripling their numbers. Not a single spider could hide from his spiritual senses, however, and his spacing prevented him from ever getting dangerously swarmed.
At a point barely two thirds of the way towards where the rift normally ended, Solace was met with a surprise. It was an obstacle so unexpected that he stopped for several moments staring at it in confusion.
The boss doors.
It was a concerning development. Rifts created monsters by spending the essence that it generated. With the bolstered numbers of spiders per section of the cave, there was an argument that this was the penalty for expending all that extra essence. Or…
It had cut all of that essence so that it could give it to the boss.
“Break time,” he said decisively, walking back towards Xu Wei who was more than twenty strides away and meeting him in the middle. He didn’t dare risk opening the doors in case whatever was inside wasn’t bound by its threshold.
The sandwiches and water bottles were quickly brought out and the two sat down to eat after cleaning their hands on a cloth.
“Solace, you were using spiritual senses to see everything around you, right?” Xu Wei asked.
“Yes.”
Solace took a bite of the food, chewing it thoroughly.
“When I try to use it, it’s very hard to pay attention to everything at once. How did you get so good at it?”
A swig of water.
“Practice, over time you get better at filtering through the information to the point where it’s usable in combat. It also helps if you have additional essence allocation in mind.”
“What do you mean?”
He paused, remembering that directed cultivation was not publicly available knowledge for people at his tier. He quickly explained.
“When you allocate essence, it’s also possible to choose what specific facets of cultivation can be improved rather than a general boost to everything. This information is hidden from people below Tier 3 because doing it improperly can leave a person unbalanced and incapable of fighting normally.”
“But you’re doing it,” Xu Wei noted.
“Well, I know what I’m doing in a fight,” Solace replied.
It was a partial lie. He honestly wouldn’t have done directed cultivation if his Talent wasn’t what it was. But he also didn’t want Xu Wei to know the details of his Talent.
Xu Wei seemed to accept it though, and nodded earnestly. “Then what about…”
The questioning went on for a bit, as was the norm for these breaks. Xu Wei would ask Solace about his fighting style and decisions, and Solace would answer to the best of his ability. It was a useful pastime, as going over the logic sharpened his fundamentals. He cut it short this time, however.
“That’s enough for now, I need to focus on the boss. Write any questions down for later, if you feel like you’ll forget.”
“Okay.”
Solace finished his sandwich and then turned to clean up his gear. He took it off before wiping away spider remains and burning off the webs. At some point along the delve he had given up on the flour idea. The dust was ineffective, he was pretty sure; and it made burning off the webs on his belongings more dangerous since the powder was highly flammable. He checked for any cracks or dents in the metal, but found none and eventually put everything to the side to cultivate.
It’s time.
With the amount of essence he had collected so far, he was able to reach Tier 2. Closing his eyes, he first willed all of his essence already in his cores to compress as much as possible. Tiering up would make his first Tier’s worth of essence much harder to compact, so he had to do it before he broke through. Gradually, he funneled the uncultivated essence floating around his spirit into his physical core, making the layers denser and thicker until—
The rush made him feel light headed as everything became more than it was. His body felt lighter, his mind a bit clearer, and his senses sharpened.
“Tier 2!” Xu Wei cheered. The boy’s voice was louder than normal.
Cultivated essence was only half as effective as it actually was. It was only by Tiering up did one get the complete efficacy of the previous Tier’s essence.
In other words, his fighting capabilities had become twice as effective.
After allocating the rest of the essence, he stood up to get a feel for everything. He stretched and paced about, noticing that the near-negligible strain from his once higher Tiered gear was now actually negligible, further freeing up his movements. The Tier 3 shield still weighed him down, however.
Several minutes of testing later, he had internalized the extent of the growth and began to put back on all of the gear he had taken off to clean. It was almost time to take on the boss.
“Xu Wei, you need to go further back, at least fifty paces. I don’t know if the boss will be anything like the normal ones, which were unwilling to exit their room.”
“But—”
“If you really want to see, you may return after a minute. But you can’t stay when I open the doors, you will almost certainly get in the way.”
“Okay…”
The boy took their bags and moved, leaving Solace to contemplate what was behind the doors. Would it be a higher Tiered version of one of the eight normal variations, or something else entirely? He readied his shield, gripped his glaive, and opened the entrance.
Beyond lay a circular antechamber well lit by crystals far brighter than the ones in the cave. The bright light illuminated the room and glinted off of the polished floor. The interior of the boss room stood in stark contrast to the exterior cave. He could make out a huge mural of an arachnid on the floor. Its eight legs were ebony filigree that spidered outwards to the walls. At the end of each limb, on the wall, was a picture of one of the eight boss variations underneath an arch.
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But there was no actual boss in sight. It looked like he would have to reach the center before it showed itself like usual.
Spiritual senses active, he began to walk. There were no traps he could detect. He kept every step shorter than full stride to have full control of the center of his mass in case the boss showed up prematurely as a trick.
One step. Two, four, eight, and then he was at the center.
And nothing.
He turned, searching this way and that. But there was no sign of anything. He began to take steady steps in a loop, thinking that the creature was invisible.
“Where’s the boss?” Xu Wei asked.
Solace wheeled at the sound of the boy’s voice. Apparently a minute had passed already. He had a sudden realization which sunk to the pit of his stomach.
“Xu Wei…”
The boy panicked at his tone.
“What, what? Is it behind me? Please tell me it isn’t behind me!”
Solace paused, taken aback.
“What? No, get in here,” he said with a wave.
The boy tentatively stepped inside and towards Solace.
“Do you see all of those pictures on the walls?” Solace asked.
“Yes, it’s the eight possible bosses.”
“They’re not just pictures,” Solace said. “They’re doors.”
Comprehension dawned on Xu Wei’s face. “You have to beat all eight.”
“Yes.”
Each boss presented its own problems and solutions. If they were now higher Tiered and had extra tricks, well, mentally hyping up the fights was getting dull. Suffice to say it’d be harder, perhaps impossible.
“I’m going to take the bosses on in the order of easiest to hardest so that I can cultivate the essence I get between each fight. That means I’m starting with the brood mother.”
“I understand.” Xu Wei ran back once more, out of the antechamber, and to a safe distance.
Solace gave the boy thirty seconds before he moved to the brood mother’s image, a large spider surrounded by dozens of tiny ones. It was unmistakable. There was a clean line dividing the image into two, an obvious door if one looked closely.
He transferred dexterity and senses essence allocation to mind as well as sent a bit to strength. Then he pushed on the image. The stone doors swung open.
Solace walked in slowly, taking everything in with his senses. It was a massive cylindrical room. He could see and “see” spiders and egg sacs peppering the walls, the arachnids watching his movements. The brood mother hung above, a hideous, hairy thing set apart not by her size but the orange markings on her form.
Normally, the monsters wouldn’t move until he reached the center. It was a pattern that held as he neared the middle. The moment that his foot touched it, the spiders predictably began their attack. The smaller arachnids leapt from their spots on the wall to the ground to box him in as the brood mother slowly descended.
Solace bravely turned and fled the room.
He had done so the moment the spiders were in motion. The monsters tried to block his retreat but he was faster. When he reached the doors, he ran past them and towards the caves.
The brood mother normally would not generate more spiders or follow him if he left the room, but the arachnids already present did not follow that rule. As such, it was more efficient to bait the starting creatures away and deal with them in a chokepoint before coming back to fight the actual boss and her spawn.
When he was satisfied with the distance that he had run into the cave, he turned around to fight.
They came at him, fourteen in all. Down the tunnel in twos and fours on their eight legs. High Tier 2s, but not peak. He fought safely, prioritizing preventing himself from being surrounded. Killing strikes often required more than normal attacks, that bit of extra force, reach, or contortion of the body to get the proper angle which would leave him open. So he gave ground as he took lives. Not every blow was lethal, but each was with the intent to give him space.
It took four minutes to kill them all, a longer battle. He quickly cleaned up the gore and burned away the webs like before. The essence he gathered was swiftly cultivated into strength as he returned to the entrance to the brood mother’s room.
But rather than casually walk in like before, he paused at the entrance, staring in. The brood mother was still out of sight, possibly having retreated further above. He eyed the egg sacks on the walls, noting their positions. When satisfied, he took a deep breath followed by several shorter ones in rapid succession to oversaturate his lungs. Solace then sprinted in.
He ran at a diagonal into the room, aiming for the egg sacs that he could reach. When he neared one such bulbous bag, his glaive swung in an arc. The weapon sliced through it with ease and there were tiny releases of essence as he killed the unhatched spider young within.
Above, he could hear the brood mother give out a loud hiss but he continued destroying the eggs. This was his standard procedure against the boss and he hadn’t seen a need to deviate from so far. The spiderlings within the sacs didn’t hatch until actual combat with their mother. So, it was optimum to kill as many as he could before she descended.
It also had the added benefit of angering the brood mother for some reason; even in a rift where every creature was generated rather than birthed, the boss still had protective instincts.
He ran to the side to get at another egg sack, and then another. Before the fourth, however, there was a hefty thump onto the ground. It was the sound of the brood mother dropping. He turned around to meet his foe.
Mid-Tier 3, only a bit bigger than the other monsters. On its furry hide squirmed dozens of spiders the size of his palm.
There was a brief moment as they stared at each other. It seemed neither wanted to make the first move.
Even though there was still only a single Tier difference between him and the monster like it was a normal rift, the numerical disparity in capabilities was much greater since every Tier doubled. That was why he wanted the brood mother to be the one to close the distance, to see how fast it could move with his own eyes.
To make it do what he wanted, he exaggerated movements to another egg sack, garnering another hiss from the boss before it sprung into action.
The distance was covered in less than two blinks, which made him nervous.
If she’s this quick, what about the actually fast bosses?
He had no time to answer the question, and shifted some essence from flexibility to mind before meeting the spider’s charge with his glaive.
The boss dodged his blade with contemptible ease. It made its way past the spear and tackled his leg, causing him to step back a bit to avoid stumbling. The spider’s fangs loudly scrabbled against the steel as he brought the glaive back for another attack. Again, its speed prevented him from getting a clean hit and it merely retreated a pace to dodge the downward thrust.
Several infant spiders jumped onto him during the brief moment of contact with their mother. They too moved with shocking speed despite their low Tier 2 cultivation as they crawled up his lower limb. Their fangs were ineffectual, but the tiny webs they attached as they moved would add up if left alone.
He gave an initial stomp to dislodge them followed by several more to kill the spiderlings.
The brood mother came rushing back in before he could finish off all of the small ones, and he met her in another similar exchange which left more infant spiders attacking him.
Around him, he could hear the sounds of eggs hatching.
He mentally cursed. The boss was too fast to safely retreat. And if he didn’t kill it soon, he’d be dealing with a swarm.
Time to change strategies.
The next time the boss charged in, he gave a wide sweep with the glaive to ward it away instead of trying to kill it. He began to reallocate essence from senses and flexibility to strength. He needed to be faster.
The process to reach the levels of strength he wanted would take at least a minute, so he dealt out more sweeping swipes to zone the brood mother out.
At this point, the spiderlings on him had gotten to his helmet. They obscured his vision, trying to squeeze through the visor. Fortunately, they were too big. He continued fighting relying on his spiritual senses, occasionally sprinting to the side as the newly hatched and yet surprisingly fast spiders tried to surround him.
His allocation finished right as the brood mother gave another charge. He angled the spear strike, crouching a bit to lower his center of gravity. His movements forced the spider to tackle his left leg.
Got you.
With his balance lower and with greater strength, he took the force head on. He quickly slipped fingers underneath the chitin of its cephalothorax and used it as a purchase to grab it with his gauntleted hand. It was difficult, but trying to hold onto a leg was foolish since some spiders could self-amputate.
It struggled and squirmed but he held firm. Pound for pound, mammal muscles were stronger and he now had enough strength to challenge its Tier advantage provided he abused positioning and leverage, which he did.
Solace dropped the glaive and drew his knife, swiftly delivering a flurry of furious stabs.
He felt a rush of essence on the seventh attack. He promptly threw the corpse away before tearing the spiders off his helmet while running around to prevent the ones on the floor from reaching him.
After that, cleaning up the first boss room was a matter of squashing all of the spiderlings. With their mother dead, it seemed they were now moving at normal speeds which made killing them easier. He collected his glaive before leaving.
Xu Wei was waiting outside, blowtorch and water bottle in hand.
“Which is next?” The boy asked.
Solace heaved a sigh as he sat down, leaning against the wall. He motioned for Xu Wei to do the same. He moved all of his cultivation allocation to regeneration to recover.
“Hybrid,” he said as unclasped the helmet. It was a pain to do because of the way the armor was designed to prevent anything from slipping past, but better an annoyance than spider bites.
The rest of the armor was painstakingly removed, burned free of webs, and cleaned of anything else. When finished, everything was re-donned and he cultivated all of his newly acquired essence while waiting for a complete stamina recovery. It took a total of twenty minutes.
Xu Wei asked more questions during that time. Like before, Solace eventually cut off the questioning to instead focus on internalizing the physique of his first Tier 3 monster. He used that as a baseline for his next fight, taking another five minutes to adjust his cultivation to what he felt he would need. An emphasis on mind with some extra in strength and dexterity at the expense of senses and regeneration.
And then he was up. It was time to face the second boss.
He silently made his way to the doors and pushed it open. Within lay a cavernous area filled with stones the average size of a fist. In certain areas they formed piles which ranged from shin high to waist height. It was dimly lit by crystals and, as expected, the boss was nowhere to be seen.
The hybrid boss was normally an easy fight. An androgynous humanoid above the torso and a large spider body below it, the main dangers it presented came from the weapons that it spawned with. Thus, its Tier 2 version was easy to deal with since Solace was generally more skilled with weapons than the creature.
At Tier 3, however, the fight would be different. It would almost certainly come equipped with Tier 3 weapons, things possibly capable of piercing the plate and definitely able to cut through the weaker parts connecting them. The only he could truly rely on was his Tier 3 shield.
It would be an important thing to keep in mind, among other things.
He spent several moments studying the terrain, memorizing it like usual, and then entered. Glaive in hand, shield on arm, his shadows cast in multiple directions in the light. It took seventeen steps to reach the center. On that last step, Solace walked backwards four paces while he watched a tall figure emerge from the shadows.
It was mid-Tier 3, as expected. It towered over him by a head and walked on a spider body one wingspan wide. The hybrid held a net in one hand woven from webs and a two pronged spear in the other. Unlike its Tier 2 counterpart, it wore an armor composed of chitin which covered most of its normally exposed flesh. It stopped several strides away.
Through his helmet’s visor and the creature’s own, they locked eyes. It had normal human ones and three pairs of tinier ones spaced right above the cheekbones.
He briefly wondered if it was intelligent, if it knew its existence and purpose, if it had a life before this fight. The brood mother had children and tried to protect them, so perhaps such a ponderance wasn’t complete nonsense despite what others said. Was it also an unwilling creature forced into something they never wanted?
The thoughts were set aside in short order. They didn’t matter.
Solace raised his spear and retreated backwards, still facing the boss. It made no move to chase or stop him as he left the threshold of the room.
Now at a safe distance, he quickly swapped the gear in his hands. Solace was ambidextrous, and for this fight wanted his shield to be on the same side as the monster’s net and his glaive to match the spear. He also moved his knife and sword to be accessible by his fighting hand, restrapping the weapons’ sheathes accordingly.
Satisfied that he was better prepared to face the boss before him, he reentered.
The start of the actual combat was a game of cat and mouse. He dashed from side to side, took a step forward or backwards, all in an attempt to gain information.
The net it wielded was not sticky, as the threads would have become tangled during the jerks of movement that the boss did to always face him. There were tiny chinks in the layers of its armor which he might be able to exploit, and some critical flaws in the protection’s design. The hybrid itself—
The monster quickly scuttled forward, its eight legged form covering the rocky, treacherous terrain with ease, and threw its net at him. The moment he raised his shield at an angle to stop the net, the boss stabbed with its spear from the other side.
He took a step forward, angling his body sideways such that his opponent’s thrust slid along his armor. There was an ugly scraping noise as it did so. His arm, raised above where the enemy’s spear was, clamped down on the weapon, trapping it. He advanced while changing his grip on the glaive and then thrust the blade right at the gap above his opponent’s visor. The hybrid turned its head and his weapon struck its helm instead. The chitin cracked but held.
Solace’s attack meant that the boss’ spear was no longer trapped. But rather than pull it back, the creature tried to push Solace over with the haft and its superior strength.
He moved with the force rather than resist it, tucking into a roll on his shield arm. As he moved, his dexterity and flexibility allocations allowed him to snatch the net where it had fallen on the floor, taking it with him as he rolled away from the monster.
All in all, it was a good first exchange. He had better estimations of the speed and strength of the hybrid’s attacks. He also now had possession of one of the monster’s weapons.
But as he finished rolling onto his feet in a crouch, his spiritual senses detected a large mass of something hurtling towards him. He dove to the side.
A massive ball of fire crashed into the ground through where he once was.
Thats—!
The whooshing sound of more projectiles made him roll furiously on his side to get away from the volley of flames. Eventually he reached and scrambled behind one of the taller piles of rocks for cover.
Solace cursed. It was a [Skill], a bona fide [Skill], in a Tier 2 rift challenge. The hybrid was using what was probably some sort of fireball, a classic ability in all realities.
It couldn’t just be eight Tier 3 bosses…
The presence of [Skills] would explain why the brood mother’s spawn moved faster while she was alive, a useless fact to Solace in the moment as he lay pinned behind something too short for him to do anything but lay down while tucking his legs in to be safe from a fireball.
With the boss outside of his spiritual sense range, he peeked his head a bit over the pile of rocks to see where the monster was, only to quickly duck back down as another fireball splashed onto his cover. The stones briefly glowed red from the heat. A clean hit from one of the projectiles would be debilitating, armor or no.
He quickly assessed his situation. The distance to the exit was just as far as the distance to the boss. He considered retreating, confident that his Tier 3 shield would be able to block the fireballs. The issue was that the projectiles would almost certainly cause warping in the metal from the high temperatures and rapid cooling, and a retreat followed by subsequent re-engagement using the shield would just introduce more faults into a key part of his gear, which he did not want to have happen. This was only the second out of eight bosses, afterall.
I have to fight.
Speed, he needed speed. He made rapid adjustments as a plan formed in his mind. His senses cultivation dipped to nearly no allocated essence as he moved what was there to strength and flexibility. Even an unawakened mortal could tell where his opponent was anyways. He let go of his spear, leaving it where it was as he drew his sword. He couldn’t afford to let the flames damage the wooden haft of such a valuable weapon either. He took the net, folded it roughly in half once, and loaded it with a few rocks.
The hybrid was now approaching him, taking cautious steps as it entered his spiritual senses’ range. He needed to wait until it got close enough such that it wouldn’t be able to retreat even with its superior cultivation. He began to take rapid breathes in preparation for the sprint.
At six strides away, before it could have an angle to shoot him behind the rocks, he made his move. The net and rocks were thrown one way as a decoy and he emerged from the pile on its other side, using all his limbs to push himself up, over, and forward.
The boss didn’t fall for the trick like he had hoped, and a fireball came sailing at him. He batted it aside with his shield, feeling the heat singe his hairs. He swiftly covered the remaining distance, his strength empowered limbs moving at the most optimum stride he could manage with his flexibility.
The hybrid’s spear came whistling in, but the attack was telegraphed such that Solace was able to use his sword to block and deflect the weapon in a way that brought the spear’s head out of line for a proper attack. His blade then arced towards a chink in the monster’s chitin, but its free hand shot out and clutched his wrist.
Uh-oh.
At this range, a fireball would splash back onto the boss so it was unlikely to use the [Skill]. But with a Tier 3’s strength, it wouldn’t matter. Solace tried to wrench his hand free but the monster’s grasp was like a vise. It brought its spear back to bear.
He quickly changed tactics. Rather than struggle to get away he stepped forward and began to use his flexibility and body weight to physically sway his opponent. His efforts along with his proximity made it so that the monster could never land a spear attack at this range that would punch through his armor. It tried several times to no avail. In the windows during those attempts, Solace would bash at the monster with his shield arm.
Eventually, the boss gave a frustrated growl and punched him with its fist before throwing him to the ground. It didn’t do anything to his armor, but the force traveled through it enough to make his vision blur. With his spiritual senses, however, he could still “see” the monster as it reared up on its back four legs to deliver a weighty stab with its spear which would definitely cut through his Tier 2 gear.
The two pronged weapon came down and his shield shot up to meet it. His arm went a bit numb at the hit but he willed himself to take advantage of the moment. The shield was angled to make the spear slide and the monster fall closer, allowing him to wrap his legs around the boss’ torso and his shield arm to grab the monster’s upper limbs in a lock.
The hybrid strained to break free but Solace was already allocating every bit of regeneration and dexterity into strength and durability. He didn’t need those at the moment. The boss was right here and his shortsword was free to do its work.
It took thirteen stabs to kill the thing, various wounds in all of the chinks of chitin. It tried its hardest to break free during that time, a brutal test of muscle and will that felt like an eternity. He could barely feel the rush of essence as the boss slumped as it died, taking him to the ground with it.
Solace stared at the ceiling, unmoving as he sucked in huge gasps of breath, almost too tired to even shift essence allocation to regeneration. He hadn’t wanted to fight the boss like that at the end, instead preferring to use his bladework to wear the monster down, but the [Skill] had trumped his skills and forced him into a dirty fight that left him bruised and battered.
It would take many minutes for him to recover and he would also have to retrieve his gear, but he was content to lay there for a while and think. He was only at the second boss, afterall.
And it would only get harder.