The party faded into Turmoil Arena’s center with monsters surrounding them. There were a hundred green bugs, standing tall at size matching any human, encircling the party. Each monster closely resembled a praying mantis but with bladed appendages made of actual metal. The bulbous eyes also held a metallic sheen.
Beetler, Level 25. Health: 400/400.
The light caught the strange metallic eyes, creating a beautiful refraction. The creatures turned their heads, watching the center of the arena. None of them moved to attack. After a few moments, the insect monsters focused on exploring their strange new environment.
Lester made a move, slicing into one of the beetlers. The creature screeched its indignation and attacked back, using its front blade arms to attack. Lester parried the blade, catching it on his own giant sword, and struck back at the creature’s midsection, swatting it off-balance.
As the fighting began in earnest, Jay became very worried the monsters would swarm at the screech. All their heads turned back on the party. Instead, the bug creatures seemed to simply spectate on the combat. No other creatures made moves to charge into the melee.
Still, Jay needed to Analyze the creature and find any weaknesses.
System Message: Analyze failed. To obtain data on this creature, the Catalog ability must be used. All subsequent Analyze attempts will fail.
The response from the came deeply surprised him. The ability had never failed before. He hadn’t even known the ability could fail. Still, the creatures did not seem dangerous as individual entities.
The first beetler fell quickly to a whirlwind of attacks from all the party members. Although the players were not gaining experience, and the beetlers outstripped them by several levels, they became more deadly over time. This confirmed individual beetlers did not create an issue.
The beetlers, however, took much more offense at their fellows being killed. The remaining horde did not charge forward all at once, but more than Jay could count in an instant made a break for Lester. Jay checked his abilities, finding that the minute break between rounds had refreshed the cooldown timers on his abilities.
Briefly, Jay considered using the Maragon Blossoms ability every round, which would undoubtedly make the rounds a lot easier. However, if he were going to use it in front of Lester, he would need to develop a story to explain the ability to Mr. Georges. He didn’t have one yet. He cursed himself for that since he had plenty of time to think during his monster-slaying bender.
Jay quickly activated the Catalog ability on the fallen creature as the rest of the party began fighting. Skimming the entry, he learned two interesting facts about the creatures. Firstly, beetlers were blind, relying on shared hivemind senses spanning each hive. Based on Jay’s observations, he quickly surmised there were a few different hives present.
Secondly, the beetlers were evidently extremely weak to necrotic-type damage. The entry listed it as a “double weakness.” He didn’t know, technically speaking, what a double weakness was. The technical definition also didn’t matter since the conclusion was obviously to blast the monsters with it.
All this passed through Jay’s head in mere moments. He loaded the clip with ice trap bolts into his repeater as he returned to the fighting at hand. He fired the ice bolt into the hive the party was currently fighting, taking care to land the bolt away from where Lester was actively maneuvering.
The ice trap exploded from the bolt and—did absolutely nothing. The ice didn’t cause the beetlers trouble since their anatomy, especially the bladed limbs was well-suited for dealing with the ice. The horde harmlessly passed over the ice trap, continuing to threaten Lester.
Jay traded the clip out for the ones utilizing a necrotic bolt with regular bolts. He shot one beetler with the necrotic bolt and used the other four bolts, combined with a Wild Shot attack, to take down a second beetler.
The necrotic damage on the first beetler destroyed the creature from the inside out. Each tick of the necrotic poison wiped away chunks of its health until the creature died. Impressed, Jay repeated the process to take down another two beetlers.
The healers were burning through mp faster than before, needing to weave in some of their other abilities to mitigate damage and ensure a smooth fight. Everyone else was okay, but Lester took vast swathes of damage as every creature focused on him.
Taylor Lynn had her own struggles since the beetlers weren’t vulnerable to her lightning, fire, or ice spells. She used her chain gun ability, which was actually called Instant Evocation, and her Overcharged Spell to significant effect. But Jay could see on her face she was feeling let down after how essential she had been to the previous fight.
This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.
When the first hive was killed, the other beetlers still just watched on in curiosity since the party wasn’t creating a threat to their own hives.
“Let’s pause for a second,” Jay said. “If they’re going to let us press the stop button, I want to try reloading.”
“Be quick,” Lester said gruffly, currently protected by the shield that Carlos created. “I don’t want to waste all our buff timers.”
Jay checked his inventory and was able to quickly reload his clips through the interface. Pumping his fist in celebration, he loaded two clips full of necrotic bolts.
Lester pulled the mobs, causing them to focus on him again. The beetlers didn’t err from mindlessly throwing themselves against him, squirming for a way to get to him through the hordes of their fellows. Lester was much more comfortable now that there was an easy pattern, and the second round passed easily.
As the party worked their way through fighting off the rest of the beetler hives, they quickly determined there were four total hives present. Each hive was around 25 beetlers. The necrotic poison made quick work of them, which made the fighting relatively easy for the number of creatures they needed to deal with. However, Jay did end up burning through thirty of the special bolts.
As the last beetler fell, a familiar message appeared.
System Message: The second boss approaches. Prepare for Turmoil!
The monster appeared in the coliseum along with the message.
Beetler Queen [Boss], Level 30. Health: 3,500/3,500.
The Beetler Queen, reaching roughly the height of an adult giraffe, opened the back half of its body and spread its wings. The creature took flight, soaring into the air above the party. A flying boss monster was definitely a problem.
The second problem was the powder being released from the wings of the Beetler Queen. The powdered coating gently floated to the ground, dusting across all the fallen beetlers in the arena. The party was staring at the boss soaring through the sky when they heard all the buzzing.
From every single beetler, a swarm of beetles erupted from the eye sockets. Those beetles flew as a giant, cohesive plague swarm, lancing toward the party.
Without thinking, Jay activated his Maragon Blossoms ability. The familiar encasement of vines wrapped around him, blocking him from the outside world. He watched the stacks climbing on his buff, confirming that the beetle swarms were attacking him.
His party companions were gaining and losing health rapidly when he emerged. However, the shard creatures released from the ability did their job well. Fighting plague against plague, the shards brought Jay a steady stream of healing and eradicated all the beetle swarms.
With a satisfied grin, Jay turned back to the other problem. The Beetler Queen was staying high enough in the sky that firing his crossbow at it wouldn’t be a sure thing. He would definitely end up wasting some of his bolts. He tried to Analyze it but couldn’t activate the ability at the range.
Something about the boss was odd like it was changing size.
“Does anybody else have any options against flying creatures?” Jay asked. “That thing is really up there, so I’m not sure I can hit it with my bolts.”
“My spells won’t go that far,” Taylor Lynn said, twirling her hair around one finger. “And I don’t really have anything but spells. Or abilities that modify spells.”
The healers shook their heads. Lester was about to speak when he was interrupted. The boss dived rapidly, taking a swipe against Lester. He lost a massive amount of his health, leaving only a quarter remaining.
Jay aimed his crossbow to fire off a shot before the boss could fly out of range again. Fortunately, the queen couldn’t climb as rapidly as it could dive. He landed a horribly aimed blow at one of the rear limbs. The metal bolt tip struck against metal, which dealt no damage to the boss. However, whatever quirk of their anatomy weakened the creatures against necrotic damage still worked against their metal limbs. The necrotic poison started attacking the Beetler Queen’s health.
A few moments later, the queen landed on the ground. The monster was already missing ten percent of its health. Hissing at the arranged group, the creature swiped at Lester with a deadly scythe. The scythes were still very dangerous, but with the queen on the ground, Lester had a much easier time soaking up the attacks.
The party fought against the Beetler Queen. Jay made liberal use of his necrotic poison bolts during the second boss battle. His aim was much better with the creature on the ground, landing hits in the center of its torso. It didn’t affect the poison, but it made Jay feel a little better.
Lester slugged back one of the damage reduction potions Jay had given him, which lowered the damage the queen did even further. He activated his powerful charged sword attacks to increase damage output on the boss.
Since the particular spell didn’t have much effect on the damage, Taylor Lynn rotated through all of her attack spells. Maria focused on an interesting ability, which lowered the damage of a single attack. The power was an extremely short defensive buff, lasting only half a second and protecting the target party member. It forced her to activate the ability with precise timing, but she was highly skilled with it.
Carlos was healing the accumulating damage that Maria’s ability couldn’t entirely block. The vicious scythes of the Beetler Queen were highly deadly but didn’t seem to be causing issues for the party. All in all, the fight was a pretty boring one.
The weirdest thing was that the queen didn’t even have a single threshold ability. Its unique ability had been the swarm of beetles, which had been a real problem.
When the boss fell, Jay activated his Catalog ability on it. The entry popped into his Bestiary, and the party was quickly pulled out of the coliseum. There was no real looting to do since the arena simply assigned items. Landing back in their waiting room, they received an update from the system.
System Message: The next round begins in one minute. You have accumulated 53,000 experience. Prepare for Turmoil!
Jay also had 20 items in his inventory called “Beetler Metal,” another Blacksmithing item. There was a second item this time, which was called “Calcified Beetle,” and was listed as an Alchemy ingredient.
The accumulated experience was an extraordinary amount. With the increasing experience from each round, Jay was looking forward to clearing the third round. He expected the party would close in on a hundred thousand accumulated experience when they completed round three.
And then he did one of the worst things a player could possibly do.