"Ohhh lord. Oh fuck." For the first time since the beach, I had no idea what to do - other than try to attack. But attack WHAT? Karkinos was spraying its own body down with jets of boiling water, filling the arena with foul-smelling steam. No matter where I looked on it, every part of the creature was dangerously hot, covered in spines, submerged, or all three. Where the fuck were the weak spots? Its back?
A giant claw blurred out toward me. This time I saw it, barely. Chitin smashed into the wall beside me crushing stone instead of ribs. I ran up along the length of the claw and held on as Karkinos lifted it, pincher snapping in a futile attempt to snatch me. From across the chamber, I saw Angel sighting down from the bobbing, pitching earth raft. She fired, and a bullet zinged off the crab's armor, flying wide of her intended target: its eyestalk, which she hit on the second try.
[Angel deals 15 reduced damage to Karkinos.]
[Karkinos HP: 74,985 /75,000]
"Holy shit, that's a lot of HP." Panting, I used my tentacles to vault up - then partly ran, partly climbed through the forest of spikes on Karkino's 'head'. It almost irritably reached up with a claw, snapped me around the waist, and smashed me down into one of the floating platforms.
Oww. That hurt.
[You have lost 617 HP.]
I crunch-bounced into the steaming lake swiftly rising for the ceiling. Lulu inflated herself like a lifevest, keeping us on top of the surface. I dove to avoid another ponderous claw swipe, pulsing through the water until I found another piece of flotsam.
"That THING is not a crab!" Yelping, I clung to the swaying raft - and realized I could steer it, surfing it across the muddy currents. The timer was counting down in the corner of my eye. We had seven minutes before... something. Probably death.
"Bullets don't hurt it! What do we do!?" Angel had figured out the same thing - but she was a desert girl, and not much of a surfer. For her, there was a lot more clinging and a lot less steering.
I was at a loss until Karkinos reared up out of the water, and I finally spotted the weak spots. They WERE on its legs: four round, glowing sacs behind its knees, the armored joints seething with light. The cross-sharped marking on them looked just like the harpoon targets on the first door.
"Behind its knees! We have to harpoon it behind the knees!" I grasped the edge of my raft and swung my body weight to the right, veering sharply across the raging water. Lulu squealed as the massive pair of claws came down, but we were inside Karkinos' guard now, and the claws only drove up the waves behind us and pushed us forward.
“HOW THE FUCK ARE WE SUPPOSED TO DO THAT?!” ASL had a lot of different swearwords, some of them quite colorful. Angel was pretty far into the catalogue by the time I managed to get in close to her and leap across to join her on her platform. I dumped the harpoon gun onto it: the platform was just big enough for it and her.
“I don’t know, but we got six minutes before something bad happens.” The gun’s weight didn’t sink the rock. In complete defiance of all known physics, it actually stabilized it. “Good luck. I’ll keep him busy.”
Angel gave a curt nod, and I left her to wind and load.
Lulu and I steered our next rock right for Karkinos’ body, dodging the next claw smash. As soon as we were close to one of his inner knees, I lunged for it with my tentacles. The monster let out a thin steam-kettle hiss as barbed claws burrowed into the soft flesh. I reeled us in with them, figuring that even if Angel couldn’t harpoon the crab, I could.
The crab whipped around, terrifyingly fast for a creature of its size. While it tried to get a claw underneath itself to dig us out, I fell on the inside of its knee like a starved wolf: biting, tearing, rending the glowing weak spot with my tentacles, and discharging Needlegun to try and do extra damage. Lulu, terrified, lashed out repeatedly with water saber - and within minutes, the joint exploded and Karkinos sagged on that side, screeching in protest. It spun again, dragging us and the raft along with it - then simply dropped belly-down into the water.
"Oh FUCK-" Two hundred tons of crab body slammed me and Lulu right into the drink.
[You have taken 1120 damage. 8,524/10,571 HP.]
We whirled over and over as Karkinos clambered back to his three working legs. Miraculously, I had still managed to hang onto the flimsy raft - which was getting flimsier as the battle took its toll. We had three minutes left. But as the veil of water tumbling off Karkinos cleared, I heard the familiar CHUNK-THHWIP of the harpoon. The bolt sailed past me and nailed Karkinos right under his back knee.
“SCREEEEEEEEE!” The sac exploded from the single hit. As the line caught and jerked taut, Angel swung around on her platform like a jet-skier. It yanked Karkinos leg across, staggering him. His ass lifted out of the water for the first time... revealing a cluster of soft, bulbous green-glowing nodules. The REAL weak spot.
"ASS! ASS! HIT IT IN THE ASS!" Lulu and I ducked the edge of Karkino's carapace as we were pushed out by the backwash, our heads scraping chitin. There were two more weak zones left to take out. Karkinos was struggling in the mud now, flailing to find its balance, and could no longer spin. We fell on the third leg, and when that collapsed, we went for the butt. This time, I plugged my tentacles into Lulu and called on Water Saber as I locked my jaws onto the exposed glowing flesh. Sweet coppery blood flooded my mouth, just before energy pulsed through me and sent a shearing blade of cold water deep into Karkinos' flesh. Karkinos, a creature of fire and earth, did not enjoy this. His health dropped a little below 70% as the green sack froze and ruptured, sending its contents tumbling into the muddy water.
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The timer, down to 29 seconds, vanished... and Karkinos shrieked with enough volume to bring down the house. Literally, as he stretched his claw up and punched a hole right through the ceiling of his cavern. Instead of being crushed against it as the water finally reached, the stone exploded outward: carrying us, the boss, and the debris into the open ocean.
Boss fight, stage two.
As the geyser collapsed, we fell. I dived toward Angel and caught her in my limbs, shielding her with my body against falling water and rocks. Below us, Karkinos curled his many legs inwards toward its body - then launched himself past us into the fucking sky. It blasted up from the water into the air, arched back around, then hurtled toward us, mouthparts gaping.
I frantically hauled my confused human partner away from the shadow forming on the water. Karkinos boss crashed into the ocean like a meteor, throwing waves up and out - they caught us and tore Angel from my grip, sweeping her away. Concentric rings of water emanated out from Karkinos as he lunged up out of the water, snapping at the empty space before he dove again. There was a pause just long enough to splash over to two floating platforms and catch our breath... before more rings, gentler but growing in power, formed right underneath Angel.
"Get out of those rings!" Snarling, I struggled up onto a platform and threw my weight to the right to ride the surf toward her. Angel was trying to do the same, but she was too light to get a whole lot of speed on her sheet of floating pumice - especially when the rings, now increasing in speed as well as size, began to suck her toward the center. I saw her stumble, disorientated - and launched myself at her from my raft, knocking her off into the water. Grappling her with tentacles, I dragged her away as Karkinos launched himself up from the water, mouth-first. Mandibles big enough to swallow an SUV snapped and clacked behind us.
"My rifle!" Angel cried aloud. "I dropped one of them!"
"Don't fucking worry about your rifle! If we get dragged into that thing's mouth, we're dead!" Reapers were strong swimmers, but Lulu and I were barely able to fight against the enormous current trying to drag us back into the crab's jaws. My stamina was throbbing red by the time the current abated enough that I could catch another piece of pumice. I dropped Angel onto it and clambered up after her, heaving for breath... only to see Karkinos rise up over us, revealing the next set of weak spots under his other four legs.
"Balls... here we go again. Angel, help us counterbalance!" Panting, I hunched my shoulders and hooked my tentacles into the side of the platform, and veered us toward the Daeva's belly. But this time, he wasn't going to let us reach his legs as easily: vents on his armor opened up, blasting gouts of gas-fueled blue fire that threw up clouds of boiling steam from the surface of the water. Angel cried out and tried to shield her face as we veered right into one of them. Even my skin peeled from the heat.
[You have taken 536 reduced Fire damage.]
"Start shooting, if you've got any weapons!" I ripped into the closest weak point. Lulu threw everything she had at it, while Angel - scarlet, her hair plastered to her skull, helmet long gone in the tempest - gritted her teeth and pulled her other rifle around. She began to load and fire, load and fire at the opposite leg from us. Karkinos' HP drained sliver by sliver with every hit while he raged, turning as he tried to swipe at us with claws now burning white-hot with shimmering heat. I summoned Water Saber again and channeled it through my jaws as I bit into the boiling flame-red sac beneath Karkinos' knee joint. Icy water pierced into the fluid and it ruptured, sending the crab reeling back with a metallic squeal. Waving its flopping leg, it launched itself high into the air again.
This time, we knew the pattern. I wrapped Angel's waist and shielded her as the titan hit the surface of the ocean behind us, tunneling in with white-hot claws. If he grabbed either of us now, he'd cook us alive - revenge for all the crustaceans who'd suffered a similar fate at the hands of humanity. The heat was now so intense that the air was full of steam and the surface of the water strewn with dead boiled fish. The ripples signaling Karkinos' return boiled, too: a froth that rose to a peak as he launched himself at us, mandibles grinding. Lulu and Angel had figured out how to steer the pumice raft by now - all three of us leaned right, skipping across the water driven up by Karkinos' bulk. And as soon as he was up, we harried him. One leg, already weakened, took three bullets before it exploded in a gout of lava-like blood. The other we tore apart with tooth and claw, ripping into the soft hot flesh beneath.
Any illusion of Karkinos being a Water-element boss evaporated once that third leg went out from under him. He toppled into the water, screeching with rage and pain. His HP was down to a quarter - but those tantruming claws were now blazing, smashing into the ocean again and again as we fought to hold into our bouncing raft. Angel screamed as she lost her grip and flew into the air - only to be snatched back by Lulu, who caught her before she could go tumbling into the boiling water that threatened to kill us all with one wrong move.
"We got this!" I signed telepathically to Angel. "Keep going! We're almost there!"
There was one more leg to drop. Steering was harder now that the water was churning, bubbling erratically instead of forming smooth waves we could surf, but I was able to get us into position by rocking. Angel, her eyes pouring with involuntary tears against the heat, resolutely sighted down at the throbbing red orb under the gargantuan crab's knee. She fired a shot past my head and nailed it, even as I channeled White Noise to form a spear of psionic energy that I flung at it. We did it over and over, the world focusing in on that red spot until it burst.
"SCREEEEEEEE!" Karkinos lunged up and away from us like a jumping whale, teetering, then collapsing onto his back with his limp legs twitching in the air above him. As he sunk into the ocean, water frothing around him from the heat, his shell split around the front as it began to turn red and cook. Steam vented out through the fissures - revealing tender, vulnerable flesh. And suddenly, I remembered something about crabs. The heart was almost right in the middle of a crab's body, right below the thorax.
A new timer appeared. Two minutes.
"Lulu: pull Angel onto my back." I was panting, lungs scorched from the ambient heat. My HP was down to a third, legs trembling... but the end was in sight.
"Ooh huu!" Lulu huffed with determination as she glued Angel in place, just behind my shoulders.
"Here." Without asking, Angel reached around and jammed a potion vial into my jaws.
"Thanks. I don't know if I can make this jump... but we're about to find out.” I chugged it, spat the jar into the ocean, and bunched myself to launch.