The Centi-wing boss’s sinuous body was twice as long as Rick’s own, and its wings were several feet across. The buzz of its wings sounded like a hundred angry mopeds. A swarm of blue sparks flew around it, much larger than the previous; each spark a blue glowing centi-wing the size of a hand.

"New plan, new plan!" Rick shouted. "Stay close. Nia, focus the little guys. Daniel, stay on the boss, but don’t hit its wings." He wasn’t sure if the thing would be deadly on the ground, but with all those clashing legs dangling below, he suspected it was. "Gambit, keep it off us. When it gets near, focus its legs."

Daniel and Nia were backing away rapidly, and Rick had to shout at them again to stay close. The boss charged right at them, but Gambit was there, swinging his razor blade. Rick threw a Force Wave into the bug and hit Gambit with Protection as the hand-sized glowing minions of the boss started dive-bombing him. Several bounced off his shields and careened erratically away through the air —hurt but not dead.

The boss slammed into Gambit’s shield, and his bubble popped. His sword was swinging in flashing arcs. Severed centipede legs flew in all directions. Blowgun darts and arrows whistled past Rick. He briefly regretted telling everyone to stay close, though it was still the best strategy. An arrow bounced off the centi-wing’s carapace and nearly hit Rick as it tumbled away. Several more struck, sinking deep into the gaps in its armored segments.

The boss rose back up and circled away, before swinging around for another pass. Several glowing minions still looped around it in crazy orbits. Rick thought perhaps half of them were still alive. One of the injured ones had landed near Gambit, and he stomped it into the ground with a satisfying crunch.

Daniel’s arrows kept whistling up to meet the boss as it started its dive. Rick’s Protection was not off cooldown.

"Scatter! Run!" he yelled.

Rick himself dashed several paces to the right and then glanced back to see which way the boss would go. Gambit had dashed a few strides in the opposite direction, then held up. He waved his sword and yelled, apparently trying to attract the boss’s attention, but it didn’t work. It swooped toward Nia.

Gambit dashed back in, ready to defend her, and Rick threw a Force Wave. "Bring it down! Bring it down!" he shouted. Hopefully, they had done enough damage to its legs to fight it on the ground, but at least down there, they could keep it away from the ranged DPS.

The boss slammed into Nia and knocked her sprawling. Rick threw Soothing Mist, and then Gambit was there, sword flashing. He lopped off one of its gossamer wings and went back to hacking at its legs. The boss crashed down next to Nia, and she desperately rolled and scrambled away from it. Rick threw another Force Wave, trying to keep it away from her. It didn’t seem to care, but it did notice the damage Gambit was doing, and it turned to attack.

All the while, Daniel’s arrows kept whistling in to ricochet off its carapace or thud deep into the joints between the plates. The boss’s health was well below half now, with arrows stuck out all over like an enormous multi-legged hedgehod.

Rick’s Protection came off cooldown just as the boss lunged for Gambit, and he slammed it onto the Mongolian man. The shell pushed the boss away but did nothing to stop the swings of Gambit’s sword, which hacked great chunks of carapace out of the boss’s face. Snapping mandibles were chopped away in a spray of bug blood. The boss’s health dropped into the red.

"Ah, get them off me!" Daniel yelled.

Rick turned and saw the blue glowing minions were swarming the DPS. Nia was on her feet near Daniel, and the blue bugs made passes at both of them. Rick hit Daniel with Soothing Mist and then followed up with a Force Wave to knock one of the bugs away. The others were too close to them for him to get a clear shot. But then Nia was there with her blowgun whistling. A cloud of darts knocked one of the bugs from the air, and then Rick got the angle on another and knocked it down with a Force Wave. This only served to stun it, but Nia and Rick raced over to stomp on its body while it lay twitching on the ground.

All the while, Rick kept half an eye on the health bars on his interface. Gambit was taking damage, but so was the boss. With the downed bug crushed underfoot and its blood soaking into his space boots, Rick turned and threw a Soothing Mist at Gambit.

Gambit gave a mighty shout, and suddenly the boss exploded in a cloud of ichor. Its health, which had been around 15%, evaporated all at once as the body was ripped apart. The last of the blue sparks came down in a hail of darts, and even one that Daniel hit with an arrow.

Then they all stood gasping.

"Congratulations," Nia said to Rick.

Rick looked at her, confused. "What?"

"Congratulations, you leveled up during the fight."

Rick pulled up his character sheet. Sure enough, he had hit level seven and somehow hadn’t noticed it. He was too distracted to play with his points just yet, so he closed it again.

"I think that might be enough bugs for a while," he said, and everyone agreed.

"But first, I gotta see what I can do with these bits," Daniel said. He was already busy picking up severed legs. It was icky work, as Daniel and Rick set about tearing pieces off the boss’s carcass—what was left of it. Nia grimaced but eventually started helping, picking up bits and pieces that seemed big enough to be useful and bringing them to Daniel.

When Rick came to the largest piece of the boss’s carcass, it was glowing.

"Hey, this thing’s lootable." It yielded up two items. The first was an absolutely hideous insectoid helmet. The other was a bug-scale vest. Both gave boosts to dexterity.

Daniel thought the helmet was hideous, but Nia didn’t care. "What difference does it make? It has great stats for me. Plus two dexterity and a chance to inflict poison with each attack. That’s amazing with my blowgun.”

Rick agreed that the helmet was amazing for her, but they all averted their eyes when she put it on.

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

"Egads. That doesn’t look anything like the head that thing had. And besides, I chopped it to bits," Gambit said.

"You know you can turn off your helmet display in the interface, right?" Nia pointed out, and suddenly her head looked normal again.

"Oh, thank goodness," Daniel said.

Nia rolled her eyes at him.

Rick brought up his character sheet, and most importantly, his ability points. He had been thinking about what to do with them for a while. More points in Protection would be great, but what he really wanted was the fifth point in Soothing Mist.

The skill tree danced in front of his vision like a spinning strand of DNA made of glowing balls with lines between them. He selected Soothing Mist, and its sphere turned from blue to a much brighter green as the fifth point went in. The skill description changed to a pair of options. Soothing Mist, irst upgrade. Choose, Healing Cloud or Aura of Healing.

Both options sounded interesting. Rick inspected Healing Cloud. [Area of effect: hits up to three party members within 15 feet.]

Aura of Healing was also nice. It gave a long duration Heal over Time to a single target. It was nice, but he needed more punch. Rick grinned as he selected Healing Cloud.

The party left the atrium where the smashed levistone lay, and ventured back into the tunnels, deeper into the city.

They continued seeking passageways and stairs that led them higher and higher. Rick regularly consulted the map as they went, turning it in his interface this way and that, trying to understand the three-dimensional labyrinth.

They heard the boss before they saw him—a deep, rumbling voice. At first, they couldn't make out the words. The sound rose and fell, like neighbors arguing in the next apartment.

As they got closer, Rick could make out snatches of what the boss was saying. "Where are my... I demand... Traitors!"

The words were interspersed with rumbling. The boss continued to rant and rave as they turned a corner. With his map open, Rick saw the name “Levistone Forge” appear as they entered the chamber.

Three huge blue crystals flanked a wide, open rectangular area. On one end was a raised dais, where a Rork boss—huge and six limbed—paced, ranting to himself as he gesticulated with all four arms.

The stones were affixed to massive metal arms with hinged joints. It looked like they could be swung into the chamber, two on one side and one on the other. If swung inward, it looked like they would form a line down the middle of the room. On the dais, where the boss paced, was a large table. At first, Rick thought it was an altar. As he looked closer, he realized it had a broad top, curved sides, and a horn at one end. It was an enormous anvil.

Gambit pointed upward. “What do you suppose those are?” An assortment of circular glass panes in metal frames were suspended from the ceiling above. After a moment's study, Rick realized they were lenses that could be lowered down. If they dropped almost to the floor, they would be positioned in a line between the shifted-in levistones and the anvil itself.

“Bet it’s a fight mechanic,” Rick said, as Daniel frowned and studied the arrangement.

"I think you could focus light from those stones through the lenses onto the altar? Maybe?”"

That kind of made sense. The stones themselves were dim. Barely glowing sparks danced inside, even weaker than the stone in the atrium where they had fought the insects.

"What's our plan?" Gambit asked after they had stood at the edge of the chamber, staring at the ranting boss, for several minutes.

"We're going to have to kite him," Rick said.

Nina nodded. “Definitely. That anvil thing looks like the focus of a boss mechanic. We need to keep him away from that.”

Daniel scratched his head. "That's where we drag him around, right? To get him to go over the traps?"

Rick nodded. "Yeah, basically. I haven't been able to tell in the fights we've had so far, but usually whoever does the most damage to a boss will get its attention. That’s not always the case. Sometimes people in melee get more aggro." And sometimes healing brought more aggro than anything else, though he didn’t want to bring that up right now.

"Aggro," Daniel said slowly. "That's where it attacks you, right? You explained that before."

"Exactly," Gambit said.

Rick tried to explain further. "It's a shortening of aggression or aggravation. Actually, I'm not sure which. But the point is, aggro determines whoever the boss is trying to attack right now. So you're going to have to shoot it with arrows, and if it gets too close to you, someone else will have to hit it and get its attention."

"Probably me," Gambit said.

Rick nodded. "Or Nia. If you both pepper it from range, we could get it to ping-pong back and forth across the room. If we do that right, it'll walk over traps as it goes."

Daniel was nodding. "That seems easy enough."

Rick shook his head. "It won't be. There's all kinds of mechanics that could interfere. It could drop aggro. The system could work differently than we think it does. Or it could have some kind of ranged attack. Or worse, something that pulls us all in close to it."

Daniel frowned. "It can do all those things?"

Rick shrugged. "We have no idea. Until we fight it, there's no way to be sure. And something that big might kill any of us with one hit. Even if we can survive a hit, my heals aren't going to get you up fast enough to survive more than a few hits in a row." He remembered something and checked. “My mantle does give me the ability to raise you as a zombie –”

“Cool!” Gambit said immediately. “I volunteer my body for the cause.”

“—and more importantly if I can then heal you up all the way you’ll be restored to life.”

Nia whistled. “If we’d had that when Theo and I were in that dungeon with Sam….”

“The problem is my heals take time to get someone up to full, and if we are in enough trouble that someone dies, we’re likely to lose more than one. So don’t do anything stupid counting on me to bring you back.”

With no big single target healing skills yet, Rick really didn’t want to use the ability on his mantel. There was too much at stake if he couldn’t get them fully healed in time. And did he have to keep them fully healed the whole time? That wasn’t clear from the description.

“Got it,” Nia said.

"Gambit's been able to take a lot of hits," Daniel pointed out. “Let’s have him stand in front of the boss and -- what is the term? Be a tank?”

Rick shook his head. "Those were normal monsters, and this is a boss.”

“Even that giant bug queen we fought?"

Nia chimed in. "That was a mini-boss at best. And we had already wounded it before Gambit started tanking the damage."

Daniel frowned. "I don't understand. You keep saying we need a tank, but you're saying that Gambit was tanking. What's the difference between what he's doing and what you think we need?"

Rick sighed. It had been a long time since he tried to explain the very basics of gaming concepts to a complete noob.

"It's like this," he began. "Tanking is the job. If you're between your party and the damage, you're acting as a tank. But to actually be a tank, to have that role, there's certain things a player needs. A big health pool, for one. Like two or three times bigger than everyone else’s. You need enough armor or mitigation to take a big hit and survive. And you also need skills that get the boss's attention – aggro again -- and hold it on you. Usually, if a boss goes after the damage dealers or the healer, the fight's over very quickly as the whole party gets slaughtered."

Daniel's eyes had gotten wide. "And you think we can do this without one of those?"

Rick hesitated. Did he really think they could pull this off? A kiting strategy for a boss fight was usually a very advanced tactic. It required good coordination with the group and a good understanding of what the boss was going to do. He honestly didn't know if they could pull this off.

"We'll give it a try," he said finally. "If I start shouting to run or to escape, that means we're done. Everyone needs to get clear of the boss and get back here."

"Won't it chase us?" Daniel asked.

Gambit pointed out something that had been bothering Rick. "We don't even know if he can be kited. A lot of game developers on Earth would prevent that kind of strategy. And if it goes sideways, what happens if he just keeps chasing us?"

"Well," Rick said, "we're not on Earth. We're going to have to take chances. He can’t chase us into smaller tunnels, so we slow him with traps and keep running. We know other mobs leash, so we should be fine." He exhaled deeply, his eyes fixed on the pacing, four-armed boss. "Let's do this."