The boss battle went rather…uneventful. Despite receiving the unexpected power up in the form of an early rage mode, Royal Guard Captain Barkas couldn’t even put up a proper fight against Maria and her party.
The flow of the battle went in a completely unexpected fashion as the boss monster was completely helpless against Maria and her party. It couldn’t put up a proper defense against the party, let alone a proper attack. This was all due to Maria's unconventional method of attacking the boss monster.
In a normal dungeon raid party, the players in the party would have long since established roles that each of the respective members had to do.
Lizzy was the party’s main tank, so she would be the one to set the pace of the battle, since it was her job to tank the boss monster’s attacks. The secondary tank, Sky, was there as a back up to the main tank.
Maria, Lilith, and Rafflesia doubled as the party’s damage dealers as well as crowd control. Crowd control, or CC for short, were players who could use skills and spells that inflicted status effects on targets, such as [Silence], [Stun], [Blind], [Root], etc. They set the tone of the battle’s highs and lows. The 3 of them held the role of dealing damage to their target as well as controlling the monster and preventing it from inflicting too much damage onto the main tank, Lizzy.
Cindy, the healer, probably possessed the most important role in the entire party. She had to match her pace with Lizzy and not blunder with her healing, cleansing, and debuffing spells.
She needed to manage her mana properly and make quick on-the-spot decisions about when and where to use her spells, so she wouldn’t break Lizzy’s pace of controlling the battle. If Lizzy needed healing, Cindy had to use the correct healing spell to restore her health and she had to make sure that she didn’t overheal her. Overhealing would be a waste of mana and this wouldn't matter too much if the team had more than one healer, but it mattered quite a lot if there was only 1 healer.
The party did have Maria, so she could act as a secondary healer. She possessed the necessary skills to act like one if she wanted to, but no one would look at her in the current situation and tell her to embody that role.
So, as the only healer in her party, Cindy couldn't make the mistake of overhealing the main tank. If she did overheal, it would impact her mana management. While in battle, a player can recover their mana through their battle recovery, but their skill output will make the recovery quite minute, so the only proper way to recover mana, while in battle, is through potions or other items.
Mana recovery potions and items had cooldowns that needed to be properly managed. Potions usually recover a fixed amount of mana depending on their quality and overhealing yourself with a potion–especially a mana potion–was never a good thing. Managing cooldowns was super important and messing them up could jeopardize the entire battle because Cindy might find herself out of mana and on cooldown for her potions during a moment that could make or break a boss raid.
If Lizzy’s rhythm broke because of Cindy’s mistake, this would allow the boss monster to dictate the battle’s pacing and the party would have to dance to the boss monster’s tune, which would usually end in a team wipe if they couldn't regain the pace of the battle's flow.
They would have to start all over again from the beginning and this was quite tedious. Boss monsters were all known to have extremely hefty health bars and dying to them once would put a mark on their head because the combat AIs for the boss monsters inside a dungeon had minor learning abilities.
This meant that if the boss monster fought against them again, then it might pick up on their battle plans and turn the battle on their heads again because of a change–big or small–to the boss monster’s attack pattern, which it learned to do from the experience it got from the previous battle it won.
No one knew how much better the combat AIs for boss monsters in a unique dungeon was, but everyone in the party assumed that it would be hard for them to continue raiding the dungeon if they lost even once to one of the bosses.
Unique dungeons were known to not have progress resetting like normal dungeons because they would disappear after being conquered once. In normal dungeons, progress will be reset if all of the players inside the dungeon exit it. The reset included the boss monster's combat AI, so this meant the boss would return to its normal attack pattern.
Since progress didn’t reset inside of unique dungeons, this meant that the boss monster’s combat AI would still retain the knowledge it had from its victories even if everyone from Maria's party left the dungeon. Naturally, this also meant that Maria could just start the raid again from where they left off if her party decided to take a break midway and left the dungeon.
It had its ups and downs, but that’s why no one would recklessly challenge a unique dungeon unless they were completely certain that they could win against the dungeon’s bosses without losing to them even once. Taking breaks and preparing all over again from the start was fine when tackling unique dungeons because their progress would be saved, but players needed to do a perfect run in order to have any hopes of fully clearing the dungeon, since every time they failed, the more powerful the boss monster would become until, eventually, it would become unbeatable until later in the game when the players have the stats and gear to completely overwhelm the monster.
These were the worries that Cindy, Lilith, Lizzy, Rafflesia, and Sky had brought with them when they dove into this unique dungeon with Maria. Their friend, however, completely broke all of their worries with this boss battle.
Their roles were still more or less the same, with the exception that they no longer needed a main tank, a secondary tank, and a healer. Also, the person who was setting the battle’s pace was Maria and not the party’s main tank, Lizzy.
“Hahahah! Keep at it! Don’t let this mutt stand up!” Maria cried out to her friends as she slammed and threw the boss monster around with her weapons, punches, and kicks.
Rafflesia nodded in response while Lilith continued to parallel cast her spells and launch them at the boss monster once they were ready.
“Y-Yeah!”
“[Ice Lance]! [Icicle Storm]! [Frost Nova]! [Cold Snap]!”
Sky was confused because she had never seen something like this happen before and shot one of her skills before raising her voice, “[Aqua Spear]! Uhhh, what the hell is happening right now?”
“I don’t know, but who cares! Just keep fighting! The boss’s HP is at 70% already!” Lizzy exclaimed as she stabbed, slashed, and whacked away at the boss monster with her spear and greatsword.
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She had changed her off-hand weapon a moment ago when she noticed that she didn’t need a shield in her other hand and opted to dual-wield her weapons since it didn’t seem like she would be taking any damage from the boss.
“Alright!”
“U-Uhhh, guys, what the heck am I supposed to do???” Cindy frantically asked, as she really didn’t know what to do right now.
She had already cast her buffs on her allies before the fight started, so she didn’t need to do that anymore. As for healing, the only person taking damage was Maria, but her HP was filling up on its own due to her various lifesteal effects and HP-recovering skills, so she didn’t need any support from her.
Casting barriers or magic barriers seemed pretty pointless as well, but she did that for everyone just in case something happened. However, after doing that, Cindy didn’t know what to do anymore and found herself just standing around clasping tightly onto her staff in confused panic.
“Use that–urgh–staff of yours and–hyah–help us whack this guy!” Lizzy exclaimed.
“A-Alright!”
It was a rather comical scene to see a proper priestess–unlike Maria–walking right next to a boss monster and swinging her staff to help the rest of her party deal damage to it.
The party was worried for a bit since Barkas was only taking a one-sided beating from them. Everyone, except for Maria, thought that Barkas might use some kind of skill that would stun all of them and push them back, giving himself a chance to recover and mount a counterattack on all of them.
If something like that happened, it would be really bad. However, what they feared never came to pass.
Even after Barkas’s HP fell below 50 percent, nothing happened. Although it was better to say that something was about to happen and Maria quickly shot it down by using one of her unique skills. Namely, her [Sundering Steel Sword Art], Second Form: [Full Counter].
Name: Sundering Steel Sword Art, Second Form: Full Counter Description: Enter a defensive stance, buffing oneself with [DEF UP++] and [Counter]. The user will only receive 1% damage while in this stance and all incoming attacks will be reflected back to their owners. Reflected attacks deal 99% of the attack’s damage back to their targets. Duration: 3 seconds Cost: 5000 DE
At the 50% HP mark, Barkas entered his second phase and was momentarily buffed with invincibility. This allowed him to cast a skill that seemed to have the purpose of pushing the party back and stunning them, but Maria used her sword art to quickly counter it back to the poor Royal Guard Captain.
Instead of Maria’s party, it was Barkas himself who was hit by the effects of his very own skill. It knocked him back onto the ground, stunning him for a good 3 seconds, which was more than enough time for Maria to restart her attack and make him immobile again.
When Barkas’s HP fell to 10 percent, something similar happened. He tried using a skill to launch the party away to give him a chance to recover, but it was all reflected back onto him again by Maria.
Maria had many skills–both active and passive–that helped increase her damage output, shooting it through the roof and nearing the end of the battle, she was dealing 6-digit damage numbers onto Barkas and this surprised all of the girls.
When they finally cut down Barkas and defeated him, everyone fell to the floor, exhausted out of their minds. It wasn’t the usual exhaustion that players would experience after completing an extremely difficult boss raid due to the pressure from their demanding actions.
Instead, it was exhaustion caused by them having to mindlessly swing their weapons and cast their abilities repeatedly on the boss monster without any rest. Their stamina bars were still more than half full, but the mental exhaustion they experienced was quite great. Not to mention it was stressful following Maria's pace in battle, since her fighting style was quite...unorthodox.
Every time Barkas tried to get out of his entanglement with Maria, this made the girls anxious as their hearts skipped a beat, thinking that something bad might happen at any given moment.
Thankfully, nothing of the sort happened, but the mental pressure they felt from this thoroughly exhausted them. It wasn’t that they didn’t have any confidence in their friend. It was just because the method Maria was using was completely out of the ordinary and was never even heard of or seen before, so it was natural that they behaved like that.
“M-Mary, next time…t-tell me if you’re gonna do...something crazy… At least let us…prepare ourselves…f-for it…” Lizzy said in between her breaths.
“Hehehe~ loot~ loot~ We've got a lot of loot~” Maria didn’t seem to have heard her words as she was busy claiming their spoils from the battle.
After Maria gathered the loot, she went over to her friends and sat down next to them. Just as she was about to share with them what she had found, Sky quickly interrupted her and asked, “Maria, you be straight with me, alright?”
“Hm? Sure?”
“What the heck were you doing back there, girl???”
“Uhhh, what do you mean?” Maria replied with a tilt of her head.
“What you did back there with the boss monster! That was nothing short of crazy! Damn!” Sky involuntarily let out a curse, but it was because she was seriously impressed by what Maria did.
“Really?”
Lizzy quickly spoke up and said, “Yeah! That’s usually not how any of us would fight against a boss monster! Heck, I've never even seen you do that before when we were exploring the Underworld, Mary!”
Lizzy unconsciously let out information about the Underworld, but no one in the party seemed to have picked up on it because they were so focused on Maria and waiting for her to explain.
“Ohh! Are you guys talking about how I handled the boss?”
“Yes, exactly that!” Cindy joined in and exclaimed.
“Well, it’s really not that hard? It’s especially easy to do when you fight against humanoid monsters. It’s harder to execute it when fighting against monsters that aren’t humanoids, so I haven’t been able to showcase the technique much," Maria explained. "And usually, the humanoid monsters I fight just die within a few rounds of my attacks, or they're either too large for the technique to have an impact on or too small for it to be worth using.”
“Can you explain how you did it? You made the boss monster dance and stumble around you like a toddler. Most of the time, it always had its face in the ground too!” Lilith said as she brought up the video of the boss battle that she had recorded and replayed it for everyone to watch.
“...You’re always aiming for the monster’s legs, joints, and…his face…” Sky said while watching the recording with complete focus.
Maria nodded at her words and replied, “Mhm, it’s easy to aim for a bipedal monster or NPC’s legs and joints if they aren't overwhelmingly bigger than us. You can make a monster constantly stumble around if you do that and if you do it like me, you'll even have them sitting on their faces throughout the battle, but you need to have sufficient STR and AGI to pull this off!”
“Don’t forget you also need mad hand-eye coordination as well. If you missed even once–”
“Then the boss would’ve been able to break away~”
““Mhm…””
“Un…”
“...yeah…”
The girls only nodded as Maria finished Sky’s words. They all had their eyes on the recording and watching every move that Maria made. Every attack was perfectly timed and placed. There was a certain rhythm to it and Maria always had to make minute, but extremely important adjustments to where she placed her blows because Barkas’s body was never perfectly stationary.
It looked simple just from the recording, but they could tell it was an extremely high-leveled fighting technique that could never be easily mimicked.
“When did you learn to do this, Mary?” Lizzy curiously asked as she forced her eyes away from the battle recording.
“I learned it while training with Odin in the Void Plane. I never got to use it properly before, since it was safer to use my skills and normal monsters just weren’t worth the effort. Players even more so since they die so easily~”
“S-So what you did here was just an experiment?”
“No, not really. I have already mastered how to do this in the real world and, since I could do it in the real world, I can easily do it in the game because my stats here are…pretty buff~” Maria said with a slick smile and a wink.
Lizzy shook her head helplessly with a laugh and said, “What the heck…”
Maria then puffed out her chest with pride and continued on saying, “The movements of the [Sundering Steel Sword Art] help me stay in shape in the real world and I really like swinging something around after studying! It relieves all of the tension in my body and helps me relax!”
“...You sound like you’re practicing yoga and not some deadly sword technique!”
“Hehe~ anyway, take a look at the loot from the boss! We got quite the haul! Does partying with people make the loot drop more lucrative or something? My previous dungeon runs never gave me this much loot before!”