"Kara, back off to the far end of the room! William, kite the boss to the other end! Sleepy, start charging!" I issued my orders as I aimed at the silver spheres.

I found it odd that they weren't protected by the boss's HP. It was as if they were equipment. Each of these orbs, when burst, delivered a burst of lightning but we tanked it on our HP. It was just business as usual.

William's humongous forty-seven thousand HP pool was down by half already. The boss was getting minutely faster and William couldn't parry all of the blows with his ram horns.

But, for the first time, one of my arrows pierced his flesh after breaking one of the minor orbs. Next, William gored the boss with his Mithril-laced horns, causing the undead flesh to sizzle. Mithril was a Truesilver alloy and was extremely potent against the undead.

The energy on the remaining orbs started to sizzle even though nobody had touched them. Fearing what was to come, I focused on them and rapid-fired arrow after arrow. Most of these shots gave me between one and three Experience points. Marksman was a really awesome synergistic subclass for me.

> Your knowledge and experience have increased your Marksmanship skill to rank II: Treat enemies' HP threshold as R*3.4% lower per rank.

At rank ten, that Skill would lower the HP thresholds by a third. Since I didn't have any Features to increase my arrow damage, my Damage Per Second, DPS for short, was underperforming what a pure archer my level could output.

Only two orbs were left intact once they became unstable enough to burst. They were located behind his massive shoulder blades and it was hard for me to snipe them. A burst of flesh came out of behind the boss, painting the room behind it with gore. The spots where the other spheres were buzzed with static. They released sparks of energy coursing over the boss' flesh, causing the upper layer to slough off, dropping it as a heavy dust cloud of flesh particles. They also immobilized the boss. William went intangible to dodge the downpour of undead flesh.

"Sleepy, now!"

Sleepy created a bright arc of crackling lightning around his budding antlers, which rose and grew above him until an act of will pushed the lightning arc toward the boss. Twin lashes of electricity forked as the metal in the room drew it but most of the power was delivered straight to the boss' chest. The snake-ribs hissed and moved as the bones in its open ribcage opened, tendons frying and shrinking under the scalding heat from the lightning. William appeared next to me. The boss writhed and roared for the first time. The lightning burst kept going for six or seven seconds before Sleepy discharged all the energy he'd gathered up.

We saw a massive void inside the boss' chest. If I looked at a certain angle, I could see the front of his spine at the bottom of the ribcage. Two dozen hissing bone-snakes hissed and lashed at us. As the last of the flesh flake cloud fell, we saw that the boss had become leaner. The crisscrossing sinew network that seemed to cover the boss was gone, and now the boss was mostly dried muscle and bones.

Then the boss dashed. His speed had quintupled, at least. The boss came straight at me, mouth open as if grinning.

I parried one claw with Scout's Oath but the other came at my right side and launched me toward the other corner of the room. William tried to use his eyes to cut the boss' momentum but was too slow. He did slow the boss down but I was already being buried under a shower of necromancy implements. That blow ate 900 points of my HP, almost to my threshold.

"Charge!" Kara shouted.

I snapped back on my feet after a few seconds of disorientation. As I assessed the situation, I saw Kara and William facing off against the much faster boss while Sleepy was firing bolt after bolt of lightning at its back. The boss now used both claws and its hideous mouth to attack. The undead boss was overpowering the frontliners with his superior speed.

If that was the case, I had to cripple one of these natural weapons to reduce the damage we were taking. I focused my fire on its right elbow joint, using the remaining Holy arrows first.

William dropped to a quarter of his maximum HP. Kara was taking some scratches from the claws. A higher HP divider actually helped one stay in the fight for longer. Since the HP dulled the attack, the damage that remained was applied to one's Endurance-enhanced body, turning what could be a fatal blow into a grazing hit. People with a low threshold divider like me could take bigger hits but also fewer hits before the damage was entirely applied to one's body.

One particularly nasty blow caused Kara's shield arm to snap as the force twisted the joint too much. It didn't break any bones but the torsion put that arm out of commission until she could use a potion. She needed to disengage to do that safely.

The boss' was about to capitalize on the weakness when William's square eyes flashed a deep purple. The boss shifted his attention to that and froze on the spot. It was stunned even if momentarily. Kara withdrew two steps as she sheathed her sword and pulled a potion. She bit the cork, pulled it with her tongue into her cheek pouches like a squirrel, and sucked the potion like one of those competitive speed drinkers. The whole action took less than half a second. As the boss regained his motion, Kara coughed and spat the cork as she tossed the vial and drew her sword. I guessed she had choked a bit on the potion. It didn't matter.

While that happened, I seized the moment of paralysis to cripple the monster's elbow with the remainder of my Holy arrows. With the bicep tendon severed, the triceps pulled the forearm back, making the arm go stiff as a club. Another pop signaled the return of the function to Kara's left arm. She rushed back into the fray.

I moved to the other arm, trying to repeat the feat and remove yet another of the boss's weapons. Undead were a bother to deal with because they felt no pain and suffered no shock. A rapier through the heart would incapacitate a person because of these two factors but some berserkers could fight for a minute with a punctured heart until the blood on their heads was no longer sufficient to keep them awake. For the undead, that effect was an order of magnitude bigger.

Without Holy arrows and unwilling to use Fire, I switched to Air elemental arrows to attack the second elbow tendon. These Air arrows had what was known as a Kamaitachi effect, which added slashing damage to the arrow, making it ideal for cutting stuff. They worked worse than the Holy ones but were my best call given I was out of the latter.

The battle raged on. With six Air arrows, I slashed the tendon, forcing the boss to slam with his stiff arms instead of clawing. The undead monstrosity tried to use the snake-ribs to attack but their reach was too small, less than half a meter out.

William went down to his last two thousand HP. He too suffered from a low threshold divider. His wool had defensive properties and his Endurance was sky-high. But he still took all of the damage on his HP.

Sleepy ran out of MP. I sent him five hundred of mine but paid seven hundred and fifty of mine to keep the lightning assault going. I circled around to get a better firing angle to minimize the odds of friendly fire and then I saw my mistake.

The two remaining orbs had carved big chunks of flesh out of the boss' back and shoulders. I could see the back of the ribs and the spine, charred black by the explosions. Connecting the dots, I realized that the orbs were not part of the boss. Instead, they should be a sort of parasitic organism... yes! That's why the orbs weren't protected by the boss' HP! And they were sapping the monster's energy, that's the reason it couldn't use its full speed at the beginning of the fight. The boss didn't just speed up as part of his "second phase" mechanics.

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But wait... if the orbs were parasites, then exploding was part of their lifecycle. I looked around the room and found flakes of silver among the skin flakes that sloughed off the boss. And some on Sleepy's fur. They probably caught on him when he flew to the boss' back.

"Sleepy, come!" I shouted. "Jump, don't fly! Avoid the glittering silver chips!"

The Wolfertinger bounded across the tables and jumped in my arms. I had to stow Scout's Oath and leave my two other companions to tank the boss while I examined him. AT closer inspection, the flakes of silver were writhing and slithering into his fur. Some were already burrowing into Sleepy's skin.

I took an Ice arrow out of my quiver and pushed MP into it. The tip was instantly coated with frost and I pushed it into one of the silver flakes. When it didn't react, I instead used the arrowhead as a scalpel to carve into the insertion point and dig the silver flake off. Sleepy's nose shone bright red as his Reindeer trait activated. He was immune to cold damage so only the sharp metal digging at his flesh bothered him. The little guy whined but I could feel his determination. He also wasn't feeling any pain from the location, which led me to believe this parasite had some sort of anesthetic effect on its hosts.

"Beware of the silver glitter shards! They're a parasite." I shouted. I also remembered that one of Sleepy's traits made him immune to parasites. In any case, this thing could not be classified as one by the System. Nobody but Skip the System god knew exactly which one was which.

The cold didn't seem to harm the silver flakes but they surely stopped moving. I ripped tufts of fur as I removed them. The silvery substance wasn't solid and could seep between hairs to better anchor itself.

I removed ten and glanced at the fight. William was out of HP but he was better off than Kara, who was on her last wisps of HP protection. The speed with which these parasites latched and reached Sleepy's flesh told me I had to act now instead of finishing the boss first.

When the Ice enchantment sputtered out, I took another instead of trying a Fire arrow. The reason was that these orbs absorbed Lightning and exploded. It stood to reason that they would be resistant to, or even worse, absorb Fire damage. Even so, it was worth wasting an arrow to try. I ignited a Fire arrow and launched it with my hand like a dart.

The fire burnt the flakes of undead flesh like a pile of dried leaves on a windy autumn morning. The silver parasites remained behind, now exposed and clearly visible but unharmed. Next, I tried to poke them with an Earth arrow. The reaction was immediate. The parasites became agitated and avoidant of the Earth element. I used the arrow like a poker and crushed the parasites that fell on the table. They became stiff and cracked, losing their luster.

Now that I knew its ecology, at least regarding what elements affected it, I spent a minute cleaning Sleepy. It was an eternity in the fast-paced boss fight happening to my side. But the defenders were tough enough to withstand it.

I shoved all the necromantic instruments off the table and set Sleepy to rest. My little guy was lethargic and had lost a lot of blood due to the parasites feeding off of his blood and energy. Then it was back to the boss fight.

I used the rest of the air arrows to sever the overgrown right-side trapezius muscle. With that, the head lost side motion and was bent to the left by the other trapezius. The boss now had only the slam attacks and the snakes. Both were highly ineffective.

"Kara, back off. Let William tank."

The blows did nothing to William's fluffy winter wool coat. And the snakes didn't want to be parried by his Mithril horns for obvious reasons so they only hissed and bitched from a distance. I drew two glaives from my quiver and handed one to Kara. From out of the boss' reach and behind William, we hacked and slashed at the boss' flesh until it and the snakes stopped moving.

> For killing level 50 Parasite Juggernaut Ghoul (boss), you gained 14,860 (x4) Experience Points. You paid 14 levels worth of debt. You gained 70 Attribute points.

With that huge Experience award, William advanced a level while Sleepy gained two. I split my points into Dexterity and Intelligence. I needed more speed in combat. Kara also repaid a lot of her subclass debt.

Soul-Binder Ranger (Epic) / Sharpshooter (s) Level 35 Attribute Base Bonds Efficiency Total Strength 325 73 140% 557 Dexterity 287 102 150% 583 Endurance 250 158 170% 693 Intelligence 250 19 130% 349 Wisdom 220 30 140% 350 Clarity 155 46 130% 261 Charisma 85 21 130% 137 Health (HP) 490 231 5717 Mana (MP) 280 59 1223 Stamina (SP) 245 63 2063

Name: William Olɿ Species: Silver-Square-Eyes Phantom-Thief Tityron Rarity: 2xLegendary Level 37 Strength 967 Dexterity 1239 Endurance 2396 Intelligence 275 Wisdom 249 Clarity 149 Charisma 259 Health (HP) 49795 Mana (MP) 1226 Stamina (SP) 1895

Name: Sleepy Species: Wolfertinger Rarity: Legendary Level 36 Strength 351 Dexterity 672 Endurance 756 Intelligence 129 Wisdom 278 Clarity 668 Charisma 49 Health (HP) 5863 Mana (MP) 3287 Stamina (SP) 2071