“Hahahaha!” I laugh as the light comes near to us.
Hey, isn’t the sun a little bit too strong today? Everything it touches vanishes, disintegrates… Well, it doesn’t, because the corpses remain, but it does kill everything in its path…
The beam advances and swallows the ranged golem player, followed by their support mobs.
A fun fact about the monster’s AI is that they can’t follow complex or unusual actions unless they’re specifically modified to do them. This means the two players can make them run away, but they can’t give them the order to do the same as Laura and our elite monsters did: jump into the passage below. It is mainly because jumping into the lower passage means taking falling damage, a thing they avoid by default.
The other players could give them the order to run away, but… it’s impossible to escape from the beam unless you leave the whole area, which means jumping and taking damage. Something they won’t do unless they were programmed to do so.
In contrast, our elite mobs only needed to ‘follow Laura’, a basic thing every monster can do - as long as the monster has at least 3 INT, which means the Stitched can’t. This is the easy way to make them move through or jump into dangerous areas. Something the enemy players can’t do because I’m grabbing one and the other one is charmed.
So… yes. All the support units they brought with them to stop our advance towards the big machine, can only shiver in fear or run around like headless chickens until they find their inevitable death to the light beam. And at the same time, all our units are safe from it.
…except for me, but this and that are different things.
The beam finishes swallowing the enemy monsters and is about to swallow me and the other champion too. We have the privilege to see everyone dying before us, I mean… ‘not see’ everyone dying before us, because the light is too bright to see anything.
“Aagh, shit! I never thought I’d be killed by our own plan!”
He assumes he’s already dead and stops struggling. But not me. I don’t plan on surrendering yet. I’m not sure if it’ll work or not, and it doesn’t matter at all, but I’ll struggle with my all until the very end!
I have a plan that might or might not work… About 50% chances to survive I would say. I first thought of using the RATT, but the light covers everything, so it wouldn’t save me. But I do have another trump card hidden. …not like the RATT can be called a ‘trump card’ at all, but I’ll call it so anyway.
By now, I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. I wait for as long as I can before I activate the Grand Finale skill. This is the first time I use it in this tournament.
‘Why do I reveal the skill now?’, and ‘What do I intend to use it for?’, you ask? Those are indeed very good questions, my friend.
First of all, it doesn’t matter if I show the skill right now because the light beam released by that machine is so strong and wide that it’ll hide the Grand Finale visuals completely. This means I don’t have to worry about the other teams discovering our trump card and thus ‘wasting’ this opportunity.
And also, you might’ve forgotten, but before the explosion from the Grand Finale happens, the user has two seconds of invulnerability. The skill has a two-second delay so that there’s a way for the enemies to avoid the explosion damage (by running away), but getting killed after activating the skill would be too lame for a ‘champion exclusive trump card that cripples you after using it’ skill, that’s why the devs added the invulnerability during those two seconds.
This adds counterplay both by the enemies and by the user, but it doesn’t matter right now… What’s important right now is that if I time it properly and the beam takes less than two seconds to pass through my position, I’ll survive! And if it doesn’t, I’ll die.
I’ll be crippled anyway, so the only real difference is that if I survive I can command the support units to defend our dungeon, assuming I can return safely, that is.
In fact, if I’m lucky, I might even mislead the other enemy teams into believing I have some kind of safety skill that prevents me from dying, like the God’s Intervention skill… and that I can activate it at will. After all, I died miserably against those Mad Cultists, so it can’t be an automatic skill like God’s Intervention because it would have triggered then.
Anyway! Enough internal monologue!
The light beam reaches me and the enemy champion, who’s right next to me as I activate Grand Finale. Let’s see if I survive or not…
One second. The beam doesn’t show any sign of disappearing yet. I can’t see anything at all, only white.
One and a half. Maybe I’m going to die regardless of what I did? Maybe I should have said an epic dying phrase instead of trying to survive… If I die now, it’ll be too lame…
Well, at least I managed to kill two enemy champions with me, plus about fifteen or so enemy mobs. Quite a good exchange if you ask me.
Two seconds. The Grand Finale light explosion happens and the invulnerability disappears. The light merges with the light beam and I can’t see anything, but this time I don’t know if it’s the Grand Finale’s visuals or the light beam.
There’s no time to say anything in just two seconds, but there’s enough time to think. Because the brain works a lot faster than the mouth. I’m currently thinking about what’ll we have for today’s dinner. Yeah, I know. Totally unrelated stuff. But I don’t know what will happen, so what else can I do? Plan about the future, which might be a wasted effort? No thanks.
The light finally disappears and I’m… still alive?
“Hahahaha! Not even your death machine can kill me! Hahahaha!”
I immediately start to laugh, to stay in character, as I look around. There are a lot of corpses, including the two from the enemy players’ champions.
All went according to plan! I can’t believe it! It’s as if, as if…
…maybe I really am the Evil Mastermind, as so many players like to call me? Fufufu! Hahaha!
Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.
As I continue to laugh, I retreat from the enemy dungeon, limping in our dungeon’s direction. I must reach a safe place before any enemy finds me or I’m dead. I mean, after having my stats reduced I have like 2 speed and a little over 100 maximum HP. And even less HP, at… Oh my god! I only have 23 HP remaining!?
It makes sense… The stat reduction is calculated on a % of the current HP, minus the damage I take from the Maniac skill… I’m lucky I didn’t kill myself.
Imagine how ridiculous it would be to kill myself to avoid getting killed by the enemy… I would then have to kill myself again to bury the shame.
I run as fast as I can. With the reduced speed, which is almost as slow as a fucking stitched - how ridiculously slow must they be so that even with 1/4th of my original speed, I still move faster than them!?
As I was saying, I run as fast as walking. It looks as if I’m ‘walking’ from the outside, but if fact I’m ‘running’. Only that it’s so slow, the animation looks the same as walking.
I already said it, but if I can, I don’t want to let the other teams know I have the Grand Finale skill yet. The only option left is for me to pretend like nothing happens and I’m leisurely ‘walking’ back to our dungeon.
“Let’s see… Now that I’m alone, I’ll leave the destruction of the giant machine to Lily and look for reinforcements… I opened the path for her, and the machine’s now on cooldown, so it’s our perfect opportunity to destroy it and settle this match. They’re also two players down… We almost have this match! Fufufu! Hahaha!”
I’ll keep pretending for as long as I can.
----------------------------------------
Meanwhile, Laura has reached her destination and is ready to smash the giant machine to pieces.
“What’s wrong with this…? There’s some kind of protective field around the machine…”
Around the machine, there’s an invisible force field. It only shows itself when somebody touches it, revealing a translucent bluish film with a spherical shape for an instant, before fading away.
“This is bad… how am I supposed to destroy it if I can’t get close enough? Well, at least it goes in both directions: we can’t go in, and they can’t go out.”
True to her words, inside the invisible force field, there are a few dwarves looking in her direction. They are looking at her and the elite monsters she brings with her, a void expression on their faces. Those must be the dwarves that operate the machine when it’s about to fire.
“Maybe with Blink, I can cross it…? No, this way I’ll be alone, if I get surrounded by the dwarves I might die without accomplishing anything. And who knows if there’s something else that’s nastier there…”
“The shield must come off when shooting, so I could wait until then, but who knows what can happen during five minutes. There must be another way…”
Laura looks around the force field for any clue and notices two giant cables that connect to another machine situated at the exact center of the invisible force field. Those must be powering the shield.
“Aha! That’s it! I only need to follow those and I’ll find out how to disable this!”
Not wanting to waste time, she and the elite monsters that accompany her everywhere, follow the rightmost cable at maximum speed - Laura’s maximum speed, which is the slowest of the bunch.
The cable goes into a side cavern, where a few more dwarves and two golems are protecting something that looks like a dungeon core, except it’s green instead of purple.
A fight breaks down between the two groups. But with their superior numbers and higher stats, plus the support of a champion, the dwarves are quickly dealt with and Laura breaks the green glowing crystal with her hand.
Exactly the same as with a dungeon core, it dissolves into smaller crystals that slowly disintegrate into the air as the light fades. And as with the dungeon core, the green crystal too was invulnerable for as long as defending units remained close to it.
“Hmm… I’m sure this weakened the barrier, but to be sure it’s best to destroy the other one too…”
Now that she knows what she’s looking for, when she returns to where the giant machine is located, she notices a very faint green glow coming from the tunnel from where the other cable vanishes into.
“Yes, that must be it…”
Then she goes in that direction, but before entering that tunnel, she sees something else.
“This passage… it looks like the ones that connect to our dungeon. Maybe, this one connects to the enemy’s dungeon core…?”
Like the other three passages, this one also leads to the giant machine. It too is as long and straight as the others. But it leads in the opposite direction.
Laura looks at the timer and talks to herself.
“Hmmm… we lost some time already. If I go and destroy the other green powering crystal, the machine might be ready to fire once again… should I risk everything going there…? Hm… I think it’s worth taking the risk.”
She decides to go through this other path instead of disabling the force field. If she succeeds and finds the dungeon core, they’ll win the match. And if she doesn’t succeed, she can always come back and cross the straight corridor taking advantage of their fast speed when the machine is on cooldown again.
When they reach the end of the corridor, the giant machine is already powering up, and soon it releases a light beam in their direction. But they manage to reach the end of the corridor before it finishes charging up, and the light hits nobody.
“Like this, if the others send reinforcements, they won’t have to worry about the beam anymore…”
Thinking about Andreu and the rest, Laura continues to move forward. The path continues, sometimes turning to the left and others to the right. But there are no split paths whatsoever.
“I don’t understand… why did they add this part? To win time? Maybe there are hidden passages somewhere?”
She touches a wall for a moment but decides to continue after finding nothing. And a few meters after this, a faint purple glow can be seen from the end of the tunnel.
“No way… Can it really be this easy?”
Sure enough, when she reaches the end of the tunnel, there’s an empty room with the dungeon core sitting alone, on top of a pedestal engraved with runes. Just in case, she checks for traps but finds nothing.
“Fufufu! It was too easy!” As she breaks the enemy’s dungeon core, she strikes a victory pose. “They got too greedy on the giant machine, and it was their undoing! Their last defenses must have been the ones Mad Rat baited before, giving me an easy way to the core… Fufufu!”
Soon after, the victory or defeat screen appears on every player involved in the match.
“Amazing plan, Mad Rat! Though I don’t know what would have happened if it backfired…”
This marked the end of the third match for The League of Evil. By the way, Andreu was ambushed by a few dwarves on his way back and died a miserable death. Though he didn’t forget to ‘feign’ to be doing alright until he died… as if he didn’t have his stats reduced to a quarter.
[https://i.imgur.com/ZGSK4Pl.png]
“Did you REALLY think you UNDERSTAND what’s happening in this damned dungeon, and that there’s NO NEED to worry at all!?
Then I ask you to share your ‘strategy’ with me. Because if there's ONE SINGLE FUCKING THING you should never assume, is that you know how this dungeon works! The player who designed this dungeon is the master of deceiving people! The greatest liar! The most unpredictable player you’ll ever find!
Every time you think something works in a specific way, you’ll find it actually doesn’t, and only get yourself killed. Or the other way around, when you think something is dangerous, it’s actually harmless. It might even be that something looks exactly what it is… maybe, I don’t know.
If you believe I’m wrong, PROVE, IT, TO, ME. I’m sure the Evil Mastermind is chuckling at your futile efforts.”
- Extract from the Chapter ‘Relearning exploration’ from ‘How to Stay Sane in The Mad Rat’s Lab’.