They didn’t have the time to take note of their surroundings before, but now they realized that webs had covered almost the entirety of the cavern arena, leaving only the high ceiling; enough for the spider queen to fly.
The giant monster recovered quickly from the pain. It let out an earth-shaking cry as its focus shifted towards the person who’d taken out its leg. Silas remained steadfast and fired off several magic missiles. As the spells struck the creature’s face, Ruelle went on the move.
She swiftly navigated around the battlefield, weaving around the spider’s blindspots and delivering precise slashes to its joints. The alternation between a blast to the face and the annoying, yet painful paper cuts made for an effective strategy.
Only if Arachne’s health points had reduced at all.
In Dungeon Regime, only Elite and Boss Monsters possess an HP bar, while it normally appears on the very bottom of the screen for the players to see clearly, the spider queen’s health indication manifested as a floating icon above its head.
And the red bar hadn’t even gone down 20% yet.
Their most effective attack seemed to be RetiZn’s
“This isn’t going anywhere!” Ruelle’s words directed at Silas as she avoided a massive stomp from one of the queen’s legs. As she got back up, her daggers struck directly at the wound she’d made before, this time severing it clean with a critical hit. The monstrous shriek left ringings in her ears while she continued to move.
“Should we just burn it now?” Silas suggested. By the time his sentence ended, Arachne had already steadied its balance. A violent jet of venom fired from its mouth, but this time it continuously spewed the attack even when he dashed away from where he stood before.
[Stat Points distributed.]
Good thing he saved up his remaining stat points just in case. While he may not know a lot about the dungeon aspects of the game, he knew enough that a measly five speed wouldn’t cut it if he wanted to dodge a boss monster’s attacks.
With his increased mobility, Rez managed to avoid the spider’s corrosive venom by the skin of his teeth. Crow didn’t just stand there and watch either, her desperate hacking and slashing against the creature’s legs simply proved futile in interrupting its skill. But at the very least, when the venom spray ended, the spider queen lost another one of its legs.
“SCKREE!!”
Getting rid of the supports meant that Arachne could no longer hold itself properly upright. The boss toppled forward, though still managed to stand by digging the front claws deep into the stone.
Crowfest didn’t give RetiZn a verbal response. Instead, she swapped out one of her daggers for a torch in her inventory. Seeing that, he summoned one of his own into his free hand.
“Alright, arson it is.”
They both threw their torches into the cobwebs around them, and they instantly caught flames. The spider queen screeched in anger as it launched a ball of venom at Silas. Since it’d been aimed in a straight line, he dashed to the side without much thought.
But the ball suddenly split into several smaller orbs, hurtling toward him far too quickly to evade. Desperate to avoid the projectiles, he flung his body to the side, crashing onto the ground and losing grip of his staff in the process. The weapon skidded across the floor, coming to a stop just beyond arm’s reach.
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Looking behind him, the deadly spheres had bore several holes into the ground, one of them still sizzling ominously beside his leg. The close brush against misfortune sent shivers down his spine, if he’d fallen a little bit closer to the attack, he could’ve lost his foot just now.
”REZ!”
Crowfest’s cry garnered his attention, and his eyes snapped onto the sight of the massive monster crawling towards him. Its two giant claws dragged dust and pebbles along with them. He tried to push himself to his feet, but a sharp pain in his ankle sent him tumbling towards the ground once more. “Shit.”
Arachne shrieked, raising its wings in preparation for flight. There was nothing that Silas could do, even if he’d managed to fight through the pain and get up, he wouldn’t be able to outrun a giant flying spider with an injured foot.
But he wasn’t alone; Crowfest had managed to climb onto the boss's back and set Arachne’s wings ablaze with another torch. As the spider was mid-flight, the loss of its wings caused it to crash back to the ground.
“…Crow?” Rez’s brows furrowed as he took notice of the ropes coiling round the spider’s limbs and body. The girl had dismissed her weapons, freeing her hands to hold the other end of the cord.
While Arachne struggled to lift its own body weight, Crowfest inserted the rope into the gap between the spider’s exoskeleton. “Fire in the hole, bitch,” she muttered to herself as she retrieved a torch from her inventory and stuffed it into the crevice, setting fire to the straw ropes.
The boss screamed in agony, violently shaking and throwing Crowfest off balance. With the loss of a foothold, she crashed against the hard ground below, landing painfully on her shoulder with a sickening ‘crack!’. Her frustrated grunt got muffled by the spider’s shrieks as she rolled out of the way of its wild stomps. Unable to move effectively, nothing could stop the fire from spreading throughout its wrapped body.
[The Boss Monster
Seeing an opportunity, RetiZn carefully crawled over to his fallen weapon. Using the staff’s pole to support himself upright, he cast several magic missiles and launched them all straight at the fallen spider’s face. The collision created multiple explosions, the flames further increasing the damage dealt against its tough hide.
[Critical Hit!]
“SCREHIEKKK!!”
”Please don’t have a second phase at half hitpoints…” Rez spoke in between his spells. Upon feeling his good foot losing strength, he took out a mana potion and drowned the entire content. It tasted like blueberries.
“Arachne doesn’t have a second phase, don’t worry.” Crow walked over to him with one hand clutching her injured shoulder. The white of her dress had been tainted green from the spider’s blood, ash dabbled dark spots near the hem of her skirt, and her violet bow became loose and crooked. “Is your foot okay?”
The condition of Rez’s clothing wasn’t much better either, his fall from earlier didn’t just injure his foot, but also smeared dust all over his shirt. Whatever nobility remained in Silas Salvador had disappeared along with his hygiene. “I’m alright, I just twisted my ankle, that’s all,” a small smile crept to his lips before he even continued. “But what about you? You tested for fall damage just now”
“Haha.” She responded with a dry laugh as she took out and drank a health potion. A soft green glow shimmered around her figure. When the light dissipated, she flailed the once injured arm around, only to yelp out in pain a second later. “Ow…I guess it’s not a universal cure.”
RetiZn drank his own potion too, and while his hit points did refill to max, the pulsating pain in his ankle only lessened slightly. Risking a world of agony, he pushed his bruised feet downwards to test for the potion’s efficiency. The hiss that came after spoke a thousand words. “Might be because it’s low-grade.”
“Probably,” Crowfest turned her attention towards the fallen boss. Unlike in the game, the monsters here react to attacks more realistically, if they’re in pain, they stagger or stop moving, just like Arachne. “Those ropes won’t burn forever…and I can’t tell if it’s overheating even with all this fire around either. Do you have a plan?”
“Uh, how did you beat this one in the game?” Silas raised a questioning eyebrow. Being the dungeon player out of the two, he thought that she should know the answer to her own question.
“Arachne is—was an easy boss.” Ruelle started as she took out a haste potion from her inventory, contemplating whether or not to drink it. They’d spent their 100 DCs on the buff for her and use the rest to buy two more health potions and a coil of ropes with 15 DCs to spare. “By the time I meet Arachne, I already have all the necessary gear and skills to beat it. It’s weak to magic, fire, and piercing…Oh, and it can only move in a straight line…but that’s just the usual insect-type monster weakness.”
“…You once told me that the enemies we meet in dungeons scale with our level,” After seeing Crowfest nod in confirmation, RetiZn continued. “You don’t reckon Arachne got nerfed to our level, don’t you?”
“If it was, then my daggers could’ve certainly gotten through the skin,” She instantly disputed his words. “I thought I was hitting a rock when I struck it.”
“Then I guess the only thing to do now is to hit it until it dies?” Following his own words, Rez shot another magic missile into the spider’s face. The boss did not make a single sound and quietly took the attack without a fight. “I think it’s down for good this time. It must’ve gotten roasted alive inside that armor.”
“Great,” Ruelle resummoned both her daggers as a satisfied grin crept to her lips. For some reason, she appears most alive at the thought of killing monsters. “This is exactly what I want on a date.”