Lester didn’t have time to reply to the quip as a gigantic version of a volcanic appeared center-stage in the arena. The immense Volcanic’s swirling lava rose nine feet, dwarfing Jay and the other players. The creature’s form also seemed more chaotic, with lava flows bubbling and roiling with loose stones it pulled from the arena’s dirt floor.
Lester moved straight ahead to intercept the creature, attempting to ward off bludgeoning clubs of condensed lava with his large sword. He started taking damage much more quickly than against even the horde of smaller volcanics.
Jay inspected the details of the creature.
Volcanic Lord [Boss], Level 25. Health: 5,500/5,500.
The creature’s health was almost double what The Maragon had during the dungeon’s final battle. The creature’s turbulent lava flow intimidated Jay much more than the plant creature, even setting aside its high health. He activated Analyze.
System Message: Analyze successful. Volcanic Lords are elementals just above typical specimens in the hierarchy. Volcanic Lords are tasked with spawning minion volcanics and can summon them as long as their mp remains. Volcanic Lords suffer the same vulnerability to Ice and Temperature magics.
“Same weaknesses,” Jay called out as he activated Rapid Fire. He manually loaded a regular ice trap bolt into his repeater using the increased speed. He blasted the bolt at the feet of the boss, sending tendrils of ice spiraling beneath it. The move did not slow the creature but started slowly damaging the boss monster’s health.
The creature’s health was high enough to make damage-over-time effects incredibly valuable. Jay swiftly loaded a necrotic bolt and fired that into the creature.
System Message: Your ammunition has been consumed by the Volcanic Lord’s ability, “Roiling Lavas,” granting it a 50% chance to destroy missile attacks. Your target remains undamaged.
Jay’s mouth gaped at the ability. He didn’t want to be caught dead in melee with this thing, but it would draw the fight out if half his bolts were ineffective. The crowd roared, causing Jay to look around.
Taylor Lynn bolstered her magic, throwing an icicle three times the size of her previous spells, but it didn’t end there. She summoned a veritable chain gun of a dozen icicles that slammed into the boss. Since the boss was so vulnerable to the damage, the icicles froze chunks off the boss. The cooled lava fell to the ground.
Jay almost didn’t notice what happened to the loose, cooled lava. He expected it to shatter on impact, but instead, the shards transformed into five perfectly formed volcanic creatures. That was something else for him to do. Cursing under his breath, Jay loaded an ice trap bolt.
Taylor Lynn paused in her blasting to chug down a mp potion. “Jay, the Adds.”
“On it.”
Taking aim, Jay found a place in-between the volcanics and traced their path forward. They were running straight for Carlos and Maria. The process of healing Lester from the boss’s attacks was drawing the ire of the minions. Jay fired, creating an instantaneous ice trap that caught all creatures except one.
He chased after the errant enemy, unable to draw his sword while running at full tilt. He flicked his foot toward the creature’s center when he came into range. His kick struck the volcanic; although he had never kicked a hot stove, he imagined it would feel akin to kicking volcanics. The burning sensation shot through his foot, causing him to tense his entire body.
The creature soared through the air from the impact of Jay’s momentum, landing a dozen feet away. He turned to the healers. “Back up.”
Maria shook her head. “We can’t. Any further will take us out of range to heal Lester.” To highlight her point, she immediately cast a heal on Lester.
While she spoke, Jay quickly loaded another ice trap bolt. It was almost a waste, but he needed to buy more time, and the extra damage would help. The volcanic he had kicked slowly rose back to its feet, so he fired another ice trap bolt directly at it. The maneuver slowed the creature down.
The field was marked with ice traps, making it difficult for Jay to find safe places to move. He dropped his crossbow, drawing Purple Haze and moving to stand at the edge of the conjoined ice traps. As each enemy approached the edge of the ice trap, he swiftly stabbed the volcanics until they came apart, relying on the healers to repair the damage.
While Jay was destroying the minions, Taylor Lynn and Lester forged on with their epic battle against the Lord. It continued to bludgeon Lester with clubs made of condensed lava, although Lester was slowly learning how to avoid its attacks. Dodging was the only way. The overwhelming force of the attacks was impossible to stop without the defensive boost Jenny usually offered the party.
Taylor Lynn’s icicles continued to deal impressive damage against the boss. She tried to find a weak point in the roiling lava of the creature but found that the strikes dealt nearly the same damage regardless of where she struck the boss.
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Lester’s attempts to dodge allowed the healers enough reprieve to drink potions, but the Champion still had a difficult time. He was accustomed to easy patterns he could memorize. Instead, the Volcanic Lord could attack from numerous different angles and seemed to do so—without rhyme or reason. He was relying purely on his instinctual reactions.
With Jay mopping up the minions and the other fighters facing off against the boss, the battle fell into a steady rhythm for a short time. The crowd continued to roar and cheer. In particular, they seemed to love the tide of minions created by damage to the boss.
After Jay finished the last surviving minion, the battlefield shifted. The Volcanic Lord was down to half its health remaining—its threshold ability was activated.
The boss threw off half its mass, which sailed to land at the arena’s edges. The construction of trees was protected magically because it took no damage from the bubbling lava. Jay expected this mass to turn into another wave of minions.
Instead, the various fragments of lava from the creature, including the remnants of the minions, heated again, creating pools of lava on the ground. The ice traps quickly melted, sending a rush of condensation into the air, which the great heat evaporated shortly after.
The pools of lava from the minions spreading out in front of Jay forced him to step backward, bumping into Maria’s avatar. The pools were growing, and to make matters worse, the ring of lava around the arena was slowly making its way toward the center. The lava ring closed in on the party.
The gravity of the problem became evident as Taylor Lynn laid into the boss with another icicle spell. The evolution of the battlefield became a mixed bag of horrible. The Volcanic Lord was no longer dropping minions when it took damage. However, whenever lava spilled from the boss, it was instantly converted to a lava pool on the ground.
Those lava pools made it difficult for Lester to move around the boss, forcing him to take more hits. But worse, those lava pools were expanding, too. The lava was closing in on the party from both sides.
Fortunately, the boss was determined to strike Lester down, which allowed him to pull it from the lava pools in the center of the arena. But every pool was expanding, and every attack dropped more pools of lava.
A brilliant idea occurred to Jay for dealing with the lava, so he loaded one of the enchanted muck bolts into his crossbow. Taking aim at the edge of the arena where the ring of lava was slowly expanding, he fired the enchanted bolt into the roiling mixture. He had hoped the muck would eat up some of the lava, slowing the advance.
It would have been clever if it had worked.
The muck wasn’t consumed by the lava because it never appeared. The bolt was simply burned away before it could impact. He tried the same trick with an ice trap bolt for good measure. He didn’t have high hopes since the original traps were burned away.
The ice bolts were burned away before landing, the same as the muck bolts. That left Jay with his only option being to help burn down the boss, even though it would increase the quantity of lava on the battlefield.
The combat turned into a game of “the floor is lava,” where the floor was actually lava. Fortunately for Jay, he had some practice with the game. On the other hand, it had been about 21 years since he had last played.
He was the first to get hit by one of the lava pools. As he was loading a fresh bolt, his Rapid Fire buff expired. Loading the bolt took longer than he expected, and a pool near his feet expanded to swallow his foot.
Furious at the horrendous building pain, he pulled his foot free. Running didn’t hurt, so he adjusted his position and fired the bolt. It was eaten up by the Volcanic Lord’s ability. Fortunately, his game character still had a foot. He wasn’t sure that would have been the case with genuine lava.
But Jay was also carrying a debuff called “Overheated.” A quick inspection told him the health lost from stepping into the lava couldn’t be recovered while the debuff was active. The pools would slowly kill the party and render them unable to heal the damage.
Maria tried to activate a cleanse on Jay, but the ability failed. “Looks like that one can’t be cleansed. Must be a boss-specific mechanic.”
Wordlessly, Carlos cast a spell that added a buff called Hope to Jay’s character. The buff created a small shield, which would absorb some of the damage the next time he took a hit. Jay continued his sluggish stream of bolts against the boss without his Rapid Fire ability.
As the battle continued, no one made the mistake of standing in lava again. Jay knew he should keep a better watch on the timers of his buffs. The realization brought him into a combat-focused trance usually reserved for intensive raids. In a sense, the Turmoil Arena was an intense raid. Just a small one.
Icicles fired in a machine gun burst from Taylor Lynn once again, bringing the boss to critically low health. Lester had used a cooldown to bolster his defense, giving up on dodging the boss entirely. He focused on landing attacks to make the Volcanic Lord concentrate on him. The healers were consistently throwing out spells to Lester. Jay slowly fired bolts into it, afraid to overburden the healers by getting into melee range.
The fighting wore on for another twenty seconds until the boss finally fell. The killing blow was struck by Lester’s sword, glowing with power, as he landed a final ability. All around the arena, fireworks were shot, somehow coming from inside the living Burlen trees that composed the coliseum.
The fireworks coalesced above the fallen boss, spelling a message: stage one complete. The arena around them shifted as another teleportation effect activated, bringing them back to the very same challenge room they had entered the first round through. The message from the game sent them into a flurry of activity.
System Message: The next round begins in one minute. You have accumulated 20,000 experience. Prepare for Turmoil!
Jay quick-reloaded his clips with his original ammunition setup. Potions were traded around. Taylor Lynn remembered to hand Jay his Zinger Bolts; she had seven for him. Jay offered Lester two damage reduction potions, which he accepted. The whole party was still stocked on healing potions—courtesy of Maria and Carlos magnificently managing their mp. However, the coliseum was slowly draining that stock of potions. Everyone agreed they would need to restock before the island.
“What do you think is going to be next?” Jay asked.
Maria was the first to offer something up. “Sharks?”
“I don’t want to be a minnow,” Carlos said.
“It’s definitely going to be orcs,” Taylor Lynn argued. “First, we killed a bunch of goblins. Now orcs. Games love to throw orcs at you.”
It wasn’t orcs.