Maya crawled through the doorway to the boss room, then got to her feet and sprinted as fast as she could around the half-constructed runway.
Flashes of light burst behind and ahead of her, minute adjustments to her speed the only thing that kept her ahead of the boss’s predictive algorithms. Thank you, high luck. She snapped off a Spark any chance she got, firing them haphazardly in the boss’s direction just to maintain his aggro on her.
Runescale and Andy had both already died attempting this task. Star and Ben refused to try. So it was up to Maya to finish the construction. Which, now that she was here, she didn’t mind so much. The curved catwalk they’d painstakingly constructed gave her much more room for evasion than the back of the throne had, even though the boss’s attacks were coming faster than ever, not even a second between them.
Then Rominian ran in again, sliding through on her runway before jumping to the boss’s broad shoulder again. Maya was surprised his weight didn’t topple the boss over, and even more surprised the boss tolerated someone balancing on him. But he paused to look up at Rominian, accepting a thick bundle of flowers this time, which gave Maya a few precious seconds free of attacks.
She placed the last two curved struts, lashed them together to the others, and secured them to the stalagmite with thick leather bands. It didn’t look like it should be strong enough to support her weight, much less survive constant battering by a boss monster, but from what they’d tested so far nothing had scratched it. This was the final section, furthest from the entrance, and most difficult to reach without dying. Luckily, Rominian’s presence provided a helpful distraction at just the right time.
Maya ducked and slid out the entrance, feeling satisfied with their progress. Hunter wagged his tail as she returned, and she smiled at him, but didn’t retract her order to stay in the antechamber. He had a lot of running and jumping and biting attacks which would only get him killed in this particular environment. Snappy could sneak in and snap at the boss’s ankles, she was short enough to be safe from the knives as long as she stayed low, but Hunter whined pitifully when she tried to separate them. Snappy would probably only get in one or two tiny attacks before being killed anyway, so Maya left them both to wait while they fought.
It had taken too long to set up, but now it was in place. They only had to wait for their missing team members to respawn, then they could resume.
She’d have to go first, as the entrance was terribly treacherous to get through. The tiered nature of the room meant that what was a waist-height blanket of death by the boss was head-height at the entrance. And while the high ceilings gave plenty of room to walk and run around even at their platform’s elevation, the door did not reach all the way to the ceiling. Thus, the crawling to enter above. They could have theoretically also crawled in and stayed crouching at the outer tiers, targeting the boss’s legs, but that would limit their vertical mobility and crawling would hardly be quick enough for proper evading.
Rominian had somehow slipped past her again; she saw him disappear down the hall toward the dead minotaur’s room. One of these days she’d have to get the Kalyx guard captain set up another meeting. She had a lot more questions for Rominian now that she understood what was going on a bit better.
But not today. Today, she had a dungeon to solve.
Unfortunately, the time they’d taken had done more to hurt their chances than just spending precious minutes of Maya’s luck for the day. While the boss’s enrage was fully active and he hadn’t gotten any faster, any time he was not actively engaged in combat allowed his health to regen at its usual slow and steady rate.
By the time they were all in position, he’d recovered to nearly half his original health pool, which was not inconsiderable. With the stalagmites’ magic already expended, that meant it would probably end up being another die-respawn-die race against time, running around and around, trying to evade long enough for the next person to come in.
Maya chuckled at the memory of the last dungeon she’d run with her fellow mages, which had ended much the same way. But despite the Crimson Flame dungeon being in the same zone, it had been much easier than this one was proving to be.
Despite her outward confidence, she didn’t actually have any clever plan to beat the boss. Yes, she’d expanded on the others’ idea of building a platform of some kind to allow them to enter the room without instantly dying, and now they had a relatively safe elevated track to run around on. But right now her best hope was to pull a Rominian and jump on the boss physically, then hold Chill of the Depths on him while Star hit him with Frost Bolt as fast as possible, and that wasn’t much of a hope. If the boss had any sense at all, he’d toss her down into the glowing spinny knives of doom long before she’d kept in contact with him for four seconds and that would be that.
Andy reappeared, the last one who’d been missing due to his unfortunate run-in with one too many blasts of light to the face.
"Alright, everyone ready?" Maya asked.
Runescale grinned. "Ready! Remember, I’m going to wait for you to grab aggro and then do my lightning thing."
Maya resisted the urge to roll her eyes. "Yes, your secret lightning thing. Got it."
"I’ll follow you at a safe distance," Andy said. "Go."
Maya glanced at the other mages. Star nodded and Ben scowled. "Then here we go."
She climbed onto the scaffolding they’d built, then took a running start and slid through the gap under the top of the door, imitating Rominian. The moment she crossed into the boss room, he turned his random flashes of light toward her. She ran, trusting the faint impulses of her luck to guide her as she sprinted around to the opposite side of their track. She had to keep his attention away from the rest of the party.
She readied herself to jump, but something warned her not to try it. Instead she clapped her hands twice, inverting direction each time, then spun to face the boss as she slowly spread them apart, inflating a bubble of lightning in front of her, then shoved it out at him. The sizzle of lightning froze her in place, and stopped him dead still. She had worried that he might be immune to stuns after Runestrike didn’t do anything, but Storm Grasp was a much more powerful spell.
Andy fired arrows into the boss from his position to her left; Star blasted him with Frost Bolts from the right. She didn't see Runescale, he must not have come in yet. Ben stood with his arms crossed, staring across at her as though in challenge. She wanted to scream at him to do something, but what could he do? Sparkburst didn’t have the range to reach the boss from the elevated runway.
Then she heard a crack of lightning. She spun to see a whole section of spinning knives abruptly come to a stop, falling to the floor in a circle around the crouched and grinning - and paralyzed - Runescale.
Maya really had to stop underestimating that boy. He’d sneaked in underneath and used Runestrike to stop the deadly spinning weapons. As soon as he unfroze, Runescale blasted another hole in the knives. Each time, the remaining blades moved in to fill the gap, but Maya began to see the layer of missiles thinning out noticeably.
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Between her holding the boss still - unable to replenish the weapons as he had been doing - and Runescale knocking them down every few seconds, they were making actual headway on clearing the floor. It wouldn't be enough. The boss’s health dropped painstakingly downward a single sliver at a time. Too slow. She couldn’t hold him forever.
And then she saw it, the gleaming lump of magic she’d been carrying when she died last, resting atop the broken remains of the throne. Her thoughts spun into overdrive, trying to think of a spell she could make to save them all.
She could only think of one. As much as she’d love to create a frost-hybrid of Chill of the Depths and Storm Grasp, she knew that it would be a week-long endeavor to combine those. But she had a simpler idea. Light was vulnerable to Stone. She had Stone Ward, and Stone Blade. Stone Ward surrounded her with stone armor; Stone Blade added a stone edge to a blade. If she could invert Stone Ward and turn it into a sharpened blade shell on the boss? That might do something.
It didn't feel quite right though. However much she ran over the concept in her mind, no set of motions ever clicked into place, there was no moment of certainty. She needed to be sure. She'd only have one chance at this. Once she grabbed the magic, she’d be too close to the boss. Whatever spell she created in that instant would be the only one she got.
Runescale took out another cluster of the bouncing blades, and Maya’s energy ticked down toward half. The boss’s health was still barely below half.
Then Maya mentally smacked herself for being stupid. Runescale could target the blades with his AoE.
She had an AoE too. A very, very large one.
She dropped Storm Grasp and triggered Inferno. The moment she did, she worried it had been a mistake. What if it required her energy to be at 100%, rather than just using everything available?
But luckily, her instincts were correct.
Fire rippled out in a wave, stopping the spinning blades in their tracks, even as the boss started throwing more. But he was only adding five a second, and in the nearly empty room that left plenty of space to evade.
Maya jumped, rolled on the landing, scooped up the blob of magic, and leapt back up onto the runway.
Stone was wrong. She couldn’t make it click. But there was something she’d worked with much more recently.
The steps for Runestrike were still fresh in her thoughts, the pieces of the puzzle she’d painstakingly assembled for Runescale. The lightning strike, the area, and more importantly, the paralysis.
She knew how to shift elements; she’d done it with fire, she’d done it with frost, she’d done it with stone.
It wouldn’t quite be Storm Grasp/Chill of the Depths, but Runestrike/Frost Bolt may be the closest she could get right now.
Runestrike was a self spell. Frost Bolt was targeted. She ran blindly, trusting to luck to keep her safe while her thoughts raced. She had to merge the somatic requirements, maintain the intent…
No. This wasn’t going to work either. They were too different. There may be a middle ground between them, but she wouldn’t find it in time. It would take hours, not seconds. Already, she felt the weight of aggro beginning to fade, the will penalty of the boss’s focus on her lessened as she’d gone for so long without acting. Much longer without her doing something to draw his attention and he’d start taking out her teammates.
Maya growled, frustrated with herself. Even with almost sixty luck, even when the pressure was on and everything relied on success, she couldn’t quite force the spells together. Why had she spent so long messing around with building a track to run on? If she’d just realized sooner that she could clear the area with Inferno, she could have spent that hour figuring out her spell instead. Wasted time, wasted effort, wasted luck.
She needed something fast, something simple. She kept cycling back to Runestrike, as the most recent spell she’d worked on. But it didn’t work on the boss. Runescale had already proven that.
But, then again, she’d never created Runestrike with the intention of hitting anyone but the caster. It had been a joke spell, not one meant for combat use. What if she nudged the intent a little bit to the side? It was already based on Magestrike principles, which was a targeted AoE. She could reverse some of the adjustments that went into making it an on-self AoE, but keep the single-target focus. The incidental splash stun wasn’t consequential.
Star’s health dipped suddenly. Maya realized she’d lost aggro, but her energy was still coming back at its glacial in-combat regen speeds, giving her only 3 to work with. Not enough to even cast Spark. She did have plenty of stamina, so she started throwing her soulbound daggers again until the boss’s attention returned to her. But the distraction had cost her precious seconds, disrupting the flow of her thoughts, scattering the half-formed spell from her mind.
Fire, frost, lightning, stone. Wind, light, dark. She didn't actually know any light or dark spells, though bosses or even standard enemies tended to have them. She glanced down at the spinning ricocheting blades below, not nearly as plentiful as before but repopulating the area at a startling pace. Runescale sat on the ground below their level on one of the lower tiers, hands together and eyes closed as though he was meditating. Ben, as far as she could tell, was just standing inside the room with his arms crossed, his Sparkburst floating over his head uselessly. Star and Andy were still chipping the boss's health down, but at this rate it would take them all day.
Maya discarded the idea of a stun. She was the primary damage dealer. She needed to deal damage. Fast damage, slow damage, long damage...
What she really needed was some kind of bleed. If she could stack a lot of lingering damage over time debuffs, that might be able to do what her party members couldn't.
(Why couldn't they? This was an on-level dungeon. They shouldn't be this useless. Even The Trickster had noticed the dungeon was harder than it should be.) No, think about that later. She had to figure out a spell, a game-changer, right now.
If only Chill of the Depths didn't require a four-second chargeup! That was an insane amount of time to stay in touch range with an enemy.
Why hadn't she spent some time, even on a low luck day, dissecting the higher level spells? If she at least had their component parts in her head, she could have re-combined them when it mattered. She made a mental note to do that ASAP, even if it meant 'wasting' a chance to make something new. And as soon as she got back, she was going to bug the department heads for their spells. She needed to know everything available, everything anyone had figured out, and she needed it fast.
No, she was getting sidetracked again! She paused to throw her knives a few more times, as aggro started to slacken. Her health was down to half - even her high luck wasn't enough to let her evade every attack. She could only play this dodging game for so long.
Think, Maya! There has to be something. Something simple, something that doesn't require hours.
Could she go to The Trickster's domain again, spend some time there researching? Or just thinking? No, that would only get her party killed, and lose what little progress they'd built up here. Besides, she only had so many consultations for the month, what if something more important came up? She'd already burned one today.
She mentally ran through her spells again. Fire, wind, frost, stone, magic, lightning, cold, fire...
Heart of Magma. The most damaging spell she had for single-target. But it required you to be stationary. Charge up the power, channel it and hold a reservoir of ethereal magma within you, then hurl it at your enemies until it's depleted. But did it really require being stationary? She'd followed the instructions in the book, learning the spell as it was meant to be. But the base spells were just there to give examples of how things worked. The rest of the spells were meant to be discovered.
The chargeup time for Heart of Magma shouldn't require being stationary. The casting shouldn't require remaining unmoving. The rooted stance added stability to the power, helped it compress smoothly and quickly. But it wasn't necessary. It could be substituted.
Maya's breathing was coming faster, the exertion of the minutes spent running and dodging and leaping, the pressure of her health bar dropping and her stamina running low.
She needed a mobile high damage single target spell.
But it didn't have to be magma.
The pieces fell together in her mind. Heart of Magma was rooted to stabilize the mix of fire and stone required to make its attacks. But she didn't need to attack with fire and stone, and in fact she would be better off with only stone.
Earth beats Light.
Maya gathered the magic from where it rested on her one hand, split it evenly between her two hands, then clenched her fists around the power, arms instinctively moving to precise angles. She crossed her arms in front of her, squeezing the magic still tighter, raised her hands, then threw a double handful of compressed sharpened power-turned-stone straight into the boss's face.
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