It turns out that dashing straight toward a snake-type raid boss fifteen levels higher than you is a fucking terrible idea. I groaned as I pulled myself out of the Arthur sized hole in the wall of the bakery kitty corner from Mindy and Marie’s shop, which I’d just learned was called Barriers and More as the sign was slammed into my chest as the hydra used it as a paddle.

My HUD showed I was still over fifty percent health, but I’d only taken a single hit! This thing was way stronger than even Arlo or Dad. I was outclassed and I knew it.

I don’t have to win, I just have to survive until Mindy and Marie can get the cannon ready. I can do this!

Popping an Uncommon [Healing Potion] was enough to get my HP headed in the right direction, just in time as a pair off the hydra’s heads streaked toward my slight form. With a surge of will, I triggered [Mana Slide] and just barely dodged the acid dripping fangs. Pulling my daggers out, I tried digging them into its necks as I flew underneath its belly, but they just bounced off like they were cheap eating knives instead of hand-crafted Rare daggers.

“Shit, if that’s the case…” I spun the blades in my hands and returned them to their sheathes in a single, well practiced, motion. I popped up behind the raid beast without a plan and before I knew it I’d placed my fingers against its body and triggered the glove Mindy had given me, sending a bolt of water deep into the trunk of the creature.

It hissed in pain and I mentally slotted [Hydrosphere] as a plan formed in my mind. A notification in my HUD confirmed my choice with [Hydrosphere].

[Prototype Hydromatic Blasting Glove - Charges: 14/15]

With a quick trio of hops, I found myself fifty feet above the street, or twenty feet above the raid boss, which was far more relevant to my plan. I used [Hydrosphere] and anchored it to the brass disk on my hip where the water inlet for the glove was connected by a thin brass hose. With that in place, I began to kite around the hydra in a wide circle, being careful not to drop low enough to risk the beast shooting acid at me and having it land on a random shop.

For the better part of a minute, that actually worked. I was sending bolt after bolt of water down into the creature and it wasn’t able to reach me, or so I thought. Just as I got into a rhythm I learned first hand why Dad always said to change things up around monsters. I was mid-leap on my fifth loop when instead of shooting a globule of acid at me, the creature used three heads to send a cloud of acid instead.

I hadn’t planned for that and just before it engulfed me, a huge gust of wind pushed it back toward the creature like someone slapped a return to sender tag on it.

“Artie!” Raiju’s sleek pearly form slammed into me, sending me bowling through the air until she darted underneath and caught me. “The party interface said you were in a boss fight and wouldn’t let us talk to you, so I came as fast as I could.” She growled and lashed out with a lightning coated paw at one of the heads of the creature that was trying to bite at her leg.

It hissed angrily as it jerked back toward its core, mostly uninjured but instead chastened.

“That was a lot of Mana and it didn’t do anything.” She sounded concerned. “What are we going to do? What’s the plan?”

I lay down against her neck and kept my brass coated glove wearing hand away from her head as I explained what Mindy and Marie were doing as I continued firing upon the monstrosity. Riding on Raiju’s back felt like cheating with how well she was able to dodge the creature’s strikes and ranged attacks. That all changed when we got its health under seventy percent.

[Raid Boss - Ashen Devastator Hydra - has Reached Seventy Percent of its HP

Combat Phase One has Ended and Stage Two Begins Now]

The raid boss threw back all five heads and screamed into the air, a sound like a thousand angry toddlers mixed with the same number of angry cats. The second it began, Raiju and I fell from the sky like a pair of stones. She was agile enough to bounce off the edges of buildings around us to bring us down safely as I checked the new notification we all had.

[Raid Phase Two - Flying and teleporting Skills are sealed.]

Apparently, [Air Step] and Raiju’s [Swift as the Wind] were both considered [Flight Skills] as neither of us were able to use them. Not only did losing access to [Swift as the Wind] bind Raiju to the ground, it also decreased her land speed by a significant margin.

While she’d been able to effortlessly avoid the snake hydra’s strikes before, now she was only narrowly avoiding being struck and eventually that luck ran out thirty seconds into us both attacking it with all we were worth, me with my water glove and her with [Thunderhead] as it loomed over the pair of us.

While one head bit down on her foreleg, another did the same on my non-gloved arm. The pain was intense as it pumped my body full of acid. It almost felt like my body was filling with magma instead of acid as it picked me up and held me in its second head before the central, bigger, head.

Despite the danger it represented, in the pain haze it almost looked majestic with its tan scales dusted with a peppering of black and gold around the eyes. It opened up its frill to reveal a hood like a [Dust Cobra] as it drew back its central head to finish me off, not that its other head wasn’t well on its way to doing so, but it obviously wanted to watch me die.

‘Don’t forget your less conventional weapons.’ A faint voice flooded into my mind, snapping me out of my near death fugue state.

With a grunt, I reached toward the grenade pocket of my potion bandolier and produced my least conventional weapon, [Megara’s Big Stink]. I depressed the button on the side of the greyish-blue egg and pushed it all the way in to trigger it immediately instead of after two seconds like usual before tossing it in the center head’s gaping mouth.

The resulting smell defied all logic. Trying to describe it would be like trying to explain color to a blind person or the complexities of a good wine to someone with no sense of taste. It somehow went beyond smell into some other realm I hated to be the center of, but I loved the fact that my sense of smell was a hell of a lot worse than the snake monster in the middle of trying to kill me.

The moment the gas from the grenade started pouring out, the creature dropped me like a hot rock, but not before catching the hose attached to my glove and ripping it apart. I lay on the ground, HP cratered, and bleeding profusely for a few moments before I closed my eyes and reached for one of [Megara’s Healing Potion V]s. I popped the cork from the small vial and sucked it down in a single gulp, not taking the time to relish the effect of the Pseudo-Legendary item as I rolled over to retch out the acid the potion was forcing from my body. My whole body ached as gallons of acid left my body through my mouth as well as my pores.

My armor was destroyed, along with most of my clothing, leaving me in my underwear and a pair of rings. With a thought, I passed the somehow still intact [Hydrosphere] over my body to get the remaining acid off my body before summoning a simple black set of robes Dad insisted I have for stealth missions from my ring directly onto my person.

I rolled away from the [Ashen Devastator Hydra] as fast as I could until I bumped into something white and furry. It was Raiju and she wasn’t in nearly as bad a shape as I was, but her nose was way better, so [Megara’s Big Stink] was a lot more debilitating to her than it was to me. I checked her HP in the Party Interface and found it was over eighty percent and quickly rising, so I didn’t bother giving her a potion.

Struggling to my feet, I looked up at the monster and found it was slowly recovering, mostly by having the central head keep its mouth shut. With only a little bit of the Big Stink leaking out from its nostrils, the creature now looked even angrier than it had before and it’d already been trying to kill me.

Now? It was going to enjoy eating me.

With a roar, it proved me right as three of the five heads lurched out toward me faster than a whip crack. As I’d been on guard, I did a quick flip back and, for a half a second, debated landing on the extended neck.

If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

You know what? Might as well do it. At least if I’m up its head it won’t have enough space to do an effective bite at me.

With a burst of [Haste], I launched myself up the creature’s neck. It was all I could do to avoid the other two striking heads, but I quickly found myself seated at the crook of the creature’s lowest neck on the right side. Knowing my normal daggers wouldn’t help, I produced a pair of [Psyknives] and went to town on the base of said neck. They may not have had any real physical presence, but they sure as hell did one thing right, they royally pissed my target off.

The thing went berserk, thrashing all over as it tried biting down on me repeatedly with its three other unoccupied heads. It took every trick Dad ever showed me to avoid the berserk boss’ attempt to murder. I rolled, ducked, dived, and spun all over the thing’s necks to avoid getting attacked and was relatively successful. I caught a few abrasions from the thing’s eye ridges catching on my skin, but its teeth never got close to me for the better part of two minutes.

As I spun over the central head in the air with a grin I spotted something both amazing and horrifying. Mindy was standing in the door to Barriers and More with a six inch wide pipe with runes wrapped all the way around it tucked under her left arm while her right hand was on a short handle poking out the side. [Mystic Eyes] showed the connection between the run on the end of the handle and the rest of the device. As soon as she touched it, I was in deep shit.

Behind Mindy stood Marie and, from where I stood I was surprised I’d been so besotted with her before.

Must be some kind of aura that makes… Now is not the time! Her sister’s going to kill me if we’re not careful here.

‘Raiju,’ I hoped that, despite the Party Interface being muted, our Bonded communication would still work. ‘I need you to tell the lady in the door of that shop to fire when she sees me leap off the centermost head.’

It was faint, but I heard her response after a short delay. ‘Can do. I can’t hurt it anymore like I am now, my Mana’s almost dry.’ I watched as she darted over to Mindy, who nearly dropped the water cannon when the huge wolf darted into view and she displayed admirable judgement for not discharging weapon and killing my bonded companion.

In hindsight? Maybe I shouldn’t have sent Raiju, a monster, to talk to someone who’s never met her while fighting a raid boss. Something to think about for next time… I hope I’m around for the next time, to be honest. This thing’s been getting closer to catching me the whole time I’ve been mounted on it and I don’t think I’ll last another thirty seconds, let alone a few minutes, as it is. We have to end this now or I’m screwed.

Summoning the dregs of my Mana, a mere one percent of my total, I stabbed the base of the snake’s central neck slightly to the left, which might as well have been tickling it for all the effect it had, before leaning back and using [Mana Slide] to slip along its neck and head to launch myself up into the air above and to the right of the creature.

I’ll never forget the image of Mindy, a pale faced tiefling with eyes like gemstones, blasting the [Ashen Devastator Hydra] with a four inch beam of water at speeds far exceeding anything I’d ever seen besides teleportation. The moment it struck the boss it tried resisting with a barrier, but the water cannon was too much for it, tearing through it like tissue paper.

Wherever the water struck the creature, that bit was removed from existence. She started it low, aiming toward the base of the snake where it touched the ground, before sweeping her fire up along its body, just like she showed me to do with [Raging Torrent] but a hell of a lot bigger. When she got up toward the creature’s heads the beam of glowing blue water had reduced to be closer to three inches across and was shrinking fast, even as she took its left two heads from it in one swift arc. As it finished, she fell back and dropped the smoking contraption, but before I could celebrate a new screen filled my vision and panic filled my soul.

[Raid Boss - Ashen Devastator Hydra - has Reached Ten Percent of its HP

Combat Phase Two has Ended and Stage Three Begins Now]

[Due to Devourer’s influence, the Ashen Devastator Hydra’s regeneration will increase in effectiveness by one thousand percent until the boss is fully healed.]

To my horror, I could see the healing taking place as the wide swaths of the creature’s body that’d been removed just a few moments before started regrowing before my very eyes. Mindy started to do something before her eyes rolled back into her head and she passed out. Her sister, ever the watchful minder, pulled her back inside the shop and slammed the door after throwing me a weird look I couldn’t quite place.

What can I do? This thing’s regeneration was already damn near instantaneous, what am I missing? What did Gramps say about the time he killed one of these? My mind blurred as my increased [Wits] stat showed off how useful it could be as I reviewed an old memory.

***

The whole family, grandparents, cousins, aunts, uncles, my parents, and I included, were seated in the main hall of the Ironwind Clan and Gramps was bragging again about killing the [Ashen Hydra] when Mom had had just about enough of it.

She slammed her hands on the table hard enough to shake the goblet in front of her. “Why don’t you talk about how your caster saved your ass?” She seethed. “All this talk about warriors and their glory, but you neglect to mention the only reason you came home. Your caster stopped its regeneration long enough for you to kill it.” Her shoulders shook with anger and she turned to Dad. “We need to leave, I won’t have Arthur’s head filled with this kind of idiocy. I–”

Gramps cut her off by clearing his throat. “I ken what yer speakin a lassie.” He chuckled. “Mine bes’ friend were da one yer speakin a. A [Glacier Magus] ‘e were. Saved me arse more times ‘en I’ll ere admit.”

“See?” Mom’s shoulders stopped heaving and she smoothed out her sundress before sitting down beside me once more. “Casters are vital when fighting hydras, without hitting their weaknesses when they’re near death, they’re basically unkillable no matter how hard you hit them.”

***

“That’s it!” I yelled as I pulled up the creature’s status once more, but this time there was far more information on it because I’d been fighting it so long.

[Ashen Devastator Hydra - Rank A Raid Boss

Levels: 52

Vulnerabilities: Ice

Immunities: All except Ice and Water

Chosen of Dominus: Devourer has invested more of himself into this creature than is proper, granting it stats unbecoming of something this level. A System report has been sent anonymously regarding it. Killing this creature may grant a small percentage of its overly inflated stats as payment.]

“Hit it with Ice!” I howled, only to see Raiju pinned by the remaining two uninjured heads of the creature. “Raiju!” The snake heads started to pull and Raiju started to whine as her body was slowly being pulled apart.

As I fell down behind the boss, I realized I only had a single option to save her… but it’d require me to break my rule against casting combat Spells.

She’s worth it. She’s worth anything.

“[Ice Bolt]!” I howled as I converted HP into Mana to fuel the barrage of ice spears I peppered the creature’s necks and heads with. Unbelievably, each spear tore through the creature as well or better than the water cannon had and before my feet hit the ground I got the notification I’d been waiting on and another pair right behind it.

[Ashen Devastator Hydra, a Level 52 Raid Boss, has been slain. Those who took part in this creature’s death will each receive one percent of its stats as long as they removed at least ten percent of the creature’s base HP throughout the battle.]

[As the Chosen of Dominus, you and your bonded will receive an additional four percent of the creature’s boosted stats in addition to loot befitting your deeds. This has set Devourer back in no small way, which greatly pleases your goddess. Keep it up.]

[Please select one of the following Passive Skills for your exceptional valor:

Lordly Aura – Those who follow you into battle will have increased HP, Mana, and Stamina regeneration. This aura’s range is equal to your Charm stat in yards. In addition, your Charm stat will be treated as if it were twenty percent higher than it is for all purposes.

Tactical Targeting – Tactical Targeting allows you to pinpoint specific weaknesses in your enemies, identifying their most vulnerable points for maximum damage. Hitting those spots will deal double your normal damage, but as a tradeoff, you will deal twenty-five percent less damage when not targeting a weak point.]

Before I could really think about the boons that’d been presented to me, my eyes went wide at the stat gains I’d received from killing the hydra.

[Might: 17 → 54

Agility: 105 → 128

Toughness: 65 → 110

Charm: 100 → 107

Wits: 115 → 124

Perception: 100 → 130]

My body felt red hot as it was torn apart and rebuilt in the space of a few seconds. I felt my armor start to strain at the seams before, with a supreme effort of will, I banished it to my storage ring as muscles unlike any I’d ever dreamed of grew all over my frame. I was under no illusion that I was as tough as my dwarven family members at that point, but at least now I wouldn’t embarrass myself when I went to visit with my “twig arms” as Durvin liked to put it.

How high were this thing’s fucking [Might] and [Toughness]? Five percent gave me thirty-seven [Might] and forty-five [Toughness], so that’d be… 725 and 900 respectively?! This thing was so damn overpowered. What was Devourer thinking?

With [Toughness] jumping over a hundred, I knew I’d have a stat boon to look at, but before I could glance at it my ears cleared enough for me to hear screaming coming from Mindy and Marie’s shop.

With utter disregard for my barely clothed form, I sprang over the disintegrating form of the [Ashen Hydra Devastator] where Raiju was tearing bits off it for snacks later before they could disappear. My face went white when I saw the state of the front of the shop and my heart sank when I realized what might have happened.

Please Dominus, don’t let this be a repeat of the last time I used combat magic.

The same small voice popped into my head once more and my heart dropped to the ground. ‘I’m sorry, Artie. Sometimes things like this happen. Trust me, not all is lost.’