Chapter 21

Big Mama

Arrows immediately sprouted from the Matriarch’s eyes. One even exploded. Within moments, the arrows fell out, and her eyes were fine. Shit, this was an enhanced regen boss. Bosses with massive regeneration were hard to put down. Hopefully, mana or stamina fueled it, and not an inherent effect. This would be an awfully low level for inherent regeneration of that level.

More arrows struck her, but she was moving her head and had formed a sheet of clear ice across her eyes like a visor. Only one in six arrows penetrated her armor, most of those being the runic ones from Fox.

With a blast of thunder, a bolt hammered into her as she was shaking parts of the hillside off. It actually blew away some of the armor on her chest, a fact our archers took advantage of. Fox landed a triangle formation of arrows that pulsed with yellow light. Rocky hit with two smog-shrouded projectiles that just kept slowly leaking more. The smog seemed to be a damage-over-time effect.

That was all they had time for, because the bear reformed her armor in an instant, locking the arrows in place. The howl of Hyde’s summons was heard as he sent four to harry the beast. As they attacked, the wolves turned to slush as they slowly froze from mere proximity. Sadly, her armor wasn’t letting them do much damage and their fumes were likely freezing.

Doc joined in with a rain of purple droplets and a flash of poisonous light. Uh oh, that just made her madder. The light enveloped her and caused her to give out an even louder roar than before. I even got a notification about taking sonic damage. The droplets burned through her armor and into her skin, causing her to rear up. The Mother of the Frozen Den must have been forty feet tall when standing. She was way bigger than anything I would have expected at this level. I’ve fought things a hundred stories high, but they were also much, much higher leveled than a damn level 94 Den Mother.

At least her size told me that most of her stats were in Strength and Constitution. Monsters often gave away their stat distribution by appearance, at least the bestial ones did in the early game. As long as we could dodge and kept hitting her, she would go down eventually, as long as we did damage with each attack, that is.

Rose came to the rescue with her armor-piercing bolts. A constant stream of small orbs peppered the face of our adversary, blasting bits of ice off with every hit and inflicting minor damage. The Matriarch crashed back down onto four legs, and a circular wave of ice shards blasted out from her armor.

“Hit the deck!” Sarge called, not even pausing his charge towards the beast, just using his shadow echo to punch the ice headed toward him out of the air.

I didn’t have enough mana to make a lava wall. It would have been horribly inefficient anyway, so I dropped to the ground with most of the rest. Fox was nowhere to be seen, probably up a tree again, and Dollface had her armor conjured and just did a baseball slide under the wave. A few shards still hit her, but they were either deflected or cut by her armor. Shin pulled the same trick as Fox and was somewhere unknown. Cuddles proved her mettle by just holding out a hand and making a massive heat distortion in front of her. More of her invisible flames, I guess. The ice shards melted when they entered the distortion, but the invisible flames seemed to be almost completely extinguished.

Cuddles didn’t even flinch. Damn, the stones on that one must be diamonds. I guess this isn’t that different from a bombardment, still impressive though. As impressive as it was, it was a waste of mana and any true AoA veteran would have dropped to the ground like the rest of us, although I guess there were only a couple other AoA veterans now, so it was excusable. Sky would learn soon enough.

Getting to my feet again, I realized where Shin was. He was standing on top of the damn thing’s head. He clutched the crystal on his necklace, and it gave off a white light. The ice armor around him destabilized and turned to water, running off onto the ground. The radius wasn’t great, but he had free access to actual flesh and made use of it, slicing and stabbing for all he was worth. When he hit bone, it stopped him cold, and he turned away to cut a path through flesh towards the spine. It wouldn’t be fast, but it would be helpful when he got there.

I finally had enough mana back to do something, although I didn’t have a prayer of restraining the rampaging beast. She was now thrashing and slamming the ground hard enough that the shockwaves caused minor damage and regularly dispersed Hyde’s wolves. He had to keep sending new ones in.

My oil minions would be frost resistant because of the ridiculously cold temperature needed to freeze oil, but I also didn’t think they would be very effective. Instead, I launched myself up on a pillar of stone to join Shin. The enraged mother tried to swat me out of the air but missed when Shin stabbed something sensitive, possibly a nerve cluster. Shin was fast, but so was the Matriarch’s regeneration. The areas he cut up healed as soon as he stopped cutting and as he moved locations, he left patches of new flesh covered in fresh armor in his wake. It completely covered his black outfit in blood.

I took over cutting into the sections he abandoned in his search for something vital; the flesh was harder than stone and my sword could only cut through it because of the fire mana I was reinforcing it with. Shin must have an easier time because of that crystal of his, or maybe he just had some stacking bonuses to cutting power.

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The next roar from the beast was a skill. It immobilized every single one of us for three seconds. This gave the bitch time to sweep the ground with her paw, destroying the wolves and sending Sarge and Dollface flying. I was a bit concerned for Sarge until I saw that half his body seemed made of shadows, some sort of defensive skill, I guess. Dollface went through one of the weak trees in the area and rolled. She didn’t look good, but soon both she and Sarge were enveloped in golden light. Doc was on the case.

I had to duck to avoid a paw that was trying to dislodge me. Our presence on her back was the only thing keeping her from rushing the rest of the group. If she got angry enough, it wouldn’t even do that. Luckily, they were smart and had spread out to keep from making a suitable target. Fox’s arrows finally blew in a wonderful display of runic lightning, blasting a section out of her chest the size of a small car. The team was quick to take advantage of this with ranged attacks, another lightning strike from Cuddles, and even a slushy wolf from Hyde jumping into the wound before ice covered it up.

This was enough to make the Matriarch charge our ranged combatants, but before she could get to them, she got a Cavitation Blow to the knee. Since she was running, this made her plow face-first into the frozen ground, throwing up a mass of dirt and stone. Her aura was unleashed, and a persistent cold damage effect applied to everyone. My stone form barely blunted the effect. The only one unaffected was Shin with his anti-magic crystal. His next class unlocks were going to make him a complete magekiller. I just knew it.

With our frontline back in action and dodging her strikes, it was up to the long-range group and Shin and I to put her down. Bear riding was not as much fun as you would think. It was bloody and cold, but eventually, I cut into a spot that fountained freezing blood all over me. I hit a vein.

While I was dissecting the Den Mother, I constantly had to break fresh ice that tried to grow over the wounds, trapping me. This automatic defense had given me an idea based on her other automatic feature, her regeneration. Sure, we would eventually run through whatever resource she was using to fuel it, but it would take way too long. It was time to put the mechanic to work in our favor instead. I even received the Surgeon Profession and Anatomy skill while I was using my anatomy knowledge to plan my cuts. Switching out Teacher immediately and getting rapid Surgeon experience for performing such a massive operation was an easy decision.

“Hyde, I need one of your wolves up here, with the highest potency you can manage!” I called. Moments later I had a Boozewolf freezing into slush next to me on the Matriarch’s back. I sliced open the vein again and directed the wolf into the wound. It was mostly slush, but it forced its way into the foot-wide vein and disappeared into the body of the massive bear. It would cause problems that would need fixing and the regen would be constantly taxed, when the wolf completely froze it would cause a blockage and that should cause even more damage.

I started manifesting small rocks and inscribing them with mana collection runes and shoving them into the vein one by one. The damn thing kept healing, and I had to cut it open again. Fighting against the healing flesh and the encroaching ice wasn’t working, so I just shoved one hand into the vein and let the flesh heal around it. I started to conjure oil directly into the bloodstream of the Matriarch while I beat back the ice.

“Hey Shin, stop with the cutting and just use that crystal to destroy as much of the armor as you can.” I called. That would slow down the intruding ice and buy me time. It would free up a bit of the regeneration, but that was an acceptable tradeoff.

My allies were still blasting parts off the armor and dealing minor damage here and there. The regeneration of both flesh and armor slowed after a few minutes. The entire time I was busy pumping oil into the bear. Highly concentrated alcohol and half a truck’s worth of oil all in the bloodstream of a giant bear causes problems, and that was before I started heating it up.

As it turned out, its regeneration was based on stamina, and the bear’s attacks got slower and slower, making it easier to wear down the beast and dodge its attacks for the rest of my party. It started stumbling a bit, because of the incredibly potent magical booze that had certainly suffused its body by now. I switched from conjuring oil to just pumping out fire mana, conjured lava would be better, but that would be too mana intensive. Fire was cheaper. Eventually, the armor stopped repairing itself and the liquid running through the veins and arteries of the Matriarch became warm, then hot.

“Shin, get the hell out of here and tell everyone else to stop attacking and back the fuck up.” I called. Once I was sure he was away, I triggered my ultimate skill, Primal Form.

I had chosen not to use it at the start because the bear was just too tough and its regeneration too powerful. I would have blown my mana on superficial injuries at best. If this was my past self, I could have used an exploding bone curse and its regeneration would have kept replacing them just in time for them to explode again. I was very good at killing regenerators that couldn’t remove curses. Then again, by the end there, I was very good at killing just about everything.

I didn’t need the form for its power now either, I just needed it for the discount to elemental conjuring it seemed to give and the free lava that dripped off my claws. It should also provide some protection. With my hand still in the bear's vein, the transformation ripped the vein apart; I shoved my other claw in to plug the gap and started making lava, lots of lava. The already hot liquid mixture of blood, alcohol, and oil boiled. It boiled and then the vapor from the alcohol burned, lighting the vapor from the oil. The reaction raced throughout the bloodstream and the entire vascular network of the bear exploded.

I found out from the others later that it looked like a glowing orange spiderweb covered the beast in an instant. Then the thing blew up in a rain of steaming meat and bone.

I was a little occupied at the time with being blown into the air and summoning stone and earth in a wide plane around me to limit my airspeed, both going up and coming back down. If I had been working on air magic instead of earth derivatives, then this wouldn’t be nearly as much of a problem.

As I reached the apex of my flight, I saw a strange shape gliding through the air in my direction; it gleamed in the sun, which made it hard to look at. It looked vaguely like a bird and was coming from the north. I lost sight of it as I fell back below the tree line and formed my makeshift parachute of stone into as soft of a cushion as I could. Being stone and dirt, it wasn’t very effective.