I yelped and rushed to stand up to avoid the giant’s charge even as my good hand fished out the potion from my backpack.

I jumped to the side, ignoring the pain in my side from the landing, and used my teeth to pry off the vial’s cork. Then I shoved the vial into my mouth and bit down on the opening to keep it in place.

I had no time to wait for the stupid thing to drip down again, so I simply extended my tongue inside it and licked the ooze.

But the stuff was so much like jelly that barely any of it transferred to my tongue. That, surprisingly, was a good thing, since I still immediately felt more energized but now without getting overwhelmed.

Was this how you were supposed to get small enough doses of it?

I didn’t have time to dwell on it much, because the titanic monstrosity reached the spot where I’d been just a moment ago and slammed its hand covered in thick gloves at the ground, causing the surroundings to shake.

I yelped into the vial and my first instinct was to spit fire at the titan, but I obviously couldn’t do that at the moment. I’d also left my sword behind in my rush to dodge.

This was bad.

But somehow, even though my mind was racing to figure out a way to deal with this and my elbow hurt like hell, I remained relatively calm as I analyzed the situation.

I was at a major disadvantage here. I needed to wait for the potion to heal my arm and I needed to retrieve my sword.

I needed to stall, then.

The titan turned as it recovered from its ground punch and then charged at me once more.

I did a very quick scan of my surroundings, idly noting the giant wooden seats, wooden floor, and wooden walls on all sides, and ran out into the open while cradling my bad arm. The monstrosity followed.

Part of me expected it to start growling or roaring, but just like all the smaller zombies, it made no sounds at all save for its loud stomps.

I didn’t look behind me as it chased, but the moment its stomping pattern changed, I hurled myself to the side, just in time to avoid being splattered by its open hand like a mosquito.

By now, the pain in my side had become more or less manageable and I could somewhat move my right arm again without gasping in pain.

I briefly let go of my bad arm, took out the potion from my mouth, breathed in, and shot a maximum-power Flame Bullet at the thing’s center of mass before jamming the potion back like a damn pacifier.

The titan, to my surprise, jerked its upper body backwards and completely avoided my attack, but then quickly lost its balance and fell on its behind.

I barely hesitated and used the opening to run around and back to where I’d left my sword. By the time I reached it, my right arm was good enough to hold the weapon again, although I wasn’t sure whether I should be swinging it around already.

After re-arming myself, I quickly took stock of the situation, noticing that the titan had recovered in the meantime as well. I belatedly realized that this had to be the boss of floor two. And if that was true, it probably wouldn’t be a pushover despite its appearance. The twin coin bosses from floor one were a serious challenge compared to the rest of floor one, after all.

As if to prove me correct, the titan did something other than blindly charge at me. It raised its hand and then did a vague tossing motion, making its glove come off and fly at me. The glove began moving on its own in mid-air and opened its fingers into a grabbing position.

It flew through the air way faster than the titan charged so I had no chance of dodging it. Instead, I ignited my sword on fire and hurriedly made a downward slash. My arm screamed at me for the abuse since it hadn’t fully recovered yet and I nearly dropped it again.

Worse still, I’d completely whiffed my attack, slashing through empty air a split second before the glove barreled into me, aggravating my arm again and causing me to scream into the vial. I bit down even harder to prevent it from falling from my lips.

The giant leather glove quickly wrapped around my lower body, preventing me from running. I immediately ignited my whole body with Flameguard to counter it.

The glove went up in flames along with me, but still hindered my movement enough so that I couldn’t immediately run from the titan that had already restarted its charge.

Worse still, Fire Breath was still on cooldown so I couldn’t use it to slow the titan down.

Thinking quickly, I reached into my backpack, found the wallet, reached into that, and pulled out a single copper coin. I poured as much Ether as I could into igniting the coin using Flameguard’s Channel Fire and then hurled it in the titan’s direction while continuing to struggle to free myself.

The coin nailed it in the shoulder despite its attempt to sidestep it and proceeded to ignite the cloak it wore.

I felt the pain in my elbow gradually vanish and remembered that… Oh yeah. A healing tank using fire and the blessing was the whole point of my build, wasn’t it?

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With my right arm functional again, I tore through the glove with my sword and finally freed myself before running around the room to get some distance from my opponent.

Then I realized that my vision was getting blurry. My eyes were tearing up, I was breathing heavily, and now that I wasn’t using Flameguard, I felt way too hot. The room had already been very hot when I’d first entered it, but my fireball – which had set the wall on fire – and copious usage of Flameguard slowly turned it into a sauna.

Wait. No. This room was a sauna, wasn’t it?

I felt stupid for realizing that so late, but I had no time to dwell on that as the titan shed layers of the burning clothing off itself, which proceeded to skitter on the ground toward me like cockroaches.

I ignited my sword and slashed in an arc while backing up. I hit a few of them, but the rest quickly surrounded me and began jumping on me, forcing me to ignite my whole body once again to avoid getting smothered.

They all went up in flames and I successfully dodged another one of the titan’s hand smacks. Unfortunately, the moment I turned off Flameguard, the chokingly hot surroundings hit me like a hammer. My vision spun and I felt lightheaded for a brief moment before I instinctively turned Flameguard back on.

Fuck.

Who would have thought a purely fire-based build would have such a weakness? This was so unlucky!

Regardless of my inner protests, I needed to keep Flameguard up at all times unless I fancied getting a stroke. But the longer I kept myself on fire, the worse it would get. Not to mention the constant drain on my Ether because of it.

I was on a time limit now. I needed to finish this fight as soon as I could.

The titan unrolled a muffler around its neck, threw it at the ground, and the thing proceeded to slither my way like an anaconda.

Why was this thing wearing a freaking muffler in a sauna anyway?!

I easily took care of it with a swing of my sword and a burst of fire.

The clothes minions weren’t too hard to deal with, but I was yet to deal any significant damage to the boss itself. It was surprisingly agile and the layers of clothing served as protection. I would need to burn through all of that if I wanted to have a chance at dealing any damage to it.

I only really had a few options. All of them sucked, but I had to do something.

So, against my better judgment, I slashed at the floating hand warmer, dodged another strike from the boss, and then beelined straight for the toppled locker again.

How ironic that after trying so hard to not ignite the whole dark room again, I was about to do just that.

I didn’t hesitate as I jumped straight into the locker into the hordes of skittering clothes inside, and since I still maintained Flameguard over my whole body for the resistance, everything around me went up in flames.

Then I took the vial out of my lips with my free hand, breathed in, and mentally prepared myself to use Fire Breath to slow down my fall like a rocket trying to land.

But to my surprise, I barely fell two meters before my feet hit the ground. It was so unexpected that I stumbled and fell on my butt. I immediately scrambled to get on my feet again and glanced up to see the entrance to the boss room far away, just like I’d seen it before jumping into it.

Weird physics. Right.

Then the race was on. I shoved the vial into my mouth again to keep refueling my Ether for Flameguard and dashed forward through the burning hordes of clothing, slashing and scorching my way through to the entrance again. A few seconds later, I heard a loud crash behind me and whipped my head around.

I spotted the titan, slowly rising from a crouch, as the burning monsters all around us illuminated the bottom of its featureless face. It had shed all of its clothing at some point, apparently. I didn’t care to gawk much, but the rest of its body was similarly featureless, save for very distinct black wavy hair.

A beat later, the damn thing rushed at me, faster than before.

At this point, I didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell to both keep dodging the boss while also having to deal with the flaming hordes of monsters all around me for much longer, much less actually beating the boss and surviving this crap.

I needed to end this. Now.

I forcefully sucked on the bottle on my lips, making all the ooze fly into my throat. I nearly choked on it, but the stuff quickly dissolved and filled me with a crazy amount of energy. I wasted no time in ripping the bottle out of my mouth, pouring as much of the Ether I’d just gotten into igniting the damn bottle with Channel Fire, and then hurling it at the titan just as it got close enough to try and swipe at me again.

The freaking bottle exploded as soon as it left my hand, engulfing me, and probably a good portion of the room in white hot flames. Even with Flameguard still on, Phoenix Blessing healing me, and the residual regenerative effects of the ooze, I felt the searing heat cut into me as the blast launched me across the room.

I bounced with a grunt and rolled on the ground for a moment before stopping motionless. I couldn’t see anything but pure whiteness, couldn’t hear anything but loud ringing, and my entire being hurt. The tiniest twitch of my fingers sent me into a spiral of agony and even though I feared being ganged up on and smothered by the monsters again, I stayed put.

It took a good few minutes to blink the white out of my eyes and for my ears to stop ringing. Thankfully, gobbling up the entire rest of the potion must have helped. I still didn’t quite understand how it worked, but I could only assume that my body used the excess Ether to heal me up. Truth be told, I probably would have died without the regeneration effect, but… I didn’t want to think about that too much.

When my vision finally cleared, I saw nothing but darkness. A moment later, my hearing returned as well and I realized that the only sounds I could hear were my own strained panting and heartbeats.

The boss and all the monsters in the darkness were gone. Either the blast or the residual fire must have killed them all.

It took me a good while before I could do more than twitch my fingers without hurting all over. I slowly, carefully, turned to lie on my back and then used my shaky arms to help myself sit up.

I sat there for a little while, staring into the complete darkness and listening to my own shuddering breaths.

Part of me still felt like something was going to jump out of the darkness and attack me again, but after so long of nothing happening, I finally managed to relax and look over to where chat was completely freaking out once again.

I wanted to cry, complain about the stupid dungeon countering my fire build, murmur about nearly dying again and the pain of nearly blowing myself up and burning myself alive.

Instead, I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and put on the calmest voice I could manage.

“...So, anyway, chat. Did you know that Flameguard and Channel Fire don't have a cap on how much Ether you can put into them like Fire Breath…? Now, you would think that’s an advantage… but, you see, Flameguard only protects against itself and not against any explosions caused by overloading objects with Channel Fire.”

The reply to my overly calm post-battle analysis was a single system window popping up in front of me.

‘Oops, sorry. Were you important?’ achievement unlocked!

+8 Skill points