The party split up from there. Maria and Sky’s teams both went to explore the deeper areas of the garden past the center region, while Lizzy’s team returned to the garden entrance to sweep the area their party had already passed through.
Maria mowed down every lycan that stood in her way and the other girls helped her out. Since they were more focused on moving than fighting, the girls quickly arrived at the other end of the garden where they found a locked door that led to the next area that they needed to explore.
“Alright, let’s get to work ladies. Cindy and I will take the left side and you two can take the right side,” Maria said to Sky and Rafflesia.
The two girls nodded and they quickly moved. Maria saw them off before turning to Cindy, “Let’s go?”
“Yeah, but I think you won’t be needing my help, right?”
“Well, you’re the party’s healer, so it can’t be helped. Just stay behind me where it’s safe.”
“Okay.”
Maria snapped her fingers and a shadow puppet emerged from the ground. This gave Cindy quite a surprise and she nearly jumped in fright after seeing the fearsome summon appear behind her.
“O-Oh!”
“Oops! Sorry about that.”
“I-It’s fine, haha…”
“Big Red here will protect you just in case! Anyway, let’s get going! I wanna finish this quickly!” Maria said before she dashed toward the nearest lycan and began attacking it.
Cindy scratched her head and eyed the shadow puppet Maria had just summoned up and down before mumbling to herself, “...Just which part of this guy is Red?”
All of Maria’s shadow puppets were pitch black in color, so Cindy was a bit confused why she named this one Big Red when it was obviously black. There was a history behind this obviously, but she didn’t ask Maria about it.
The shadow puppet that Maria had summoned to protect Cindy was the Red Orc that she had made into her first shadow puppet because it was a unique monster a long while ago on planet Gaia.
It was the one puppet in Maria’s shadow army that had been with her the longest, so it was her strongest puppet too. Since the orc was red when Maria defeated it, she had decided to name it Big Red despite its color changing after it was converted.
Even Cindy could feel the power emanating from the large shadow monster as it looked around vigilantly and doing its duty to protect her.
“Gerald’s little sister is a lot more scary than I thought she’d be…” She turned to look at the girl in question and saw that she was laughing a little maniacally as she cut down one lycan after the other as they made their way through the garden.
“Ugh, I wanted to have a conversation with her, which was why I paired up with her, but if she’s so focused on killing monsters, I don’t think I can…”
Clearing the dungeon was more important to Maria at the moment, so she didn’t pay too much attention to Cindy even though the latter clearly wanted to approach her to start up a conversation with her.
Whenever Cindy tried to get too close to Maria, who had just finished fighting a lycan, she would immediately pounce on another enemy so Big Red would stop her from moving any closer.
Maria didn’t notice this since she was too busy killing lycans. The only attention she gave her was the occasional quick glance every now and then to see if Cindy was following behind her or not. She didn’t worry at all about her safety since Big Red was next to her, which gave Maria the peace of mind to go all out with her hunt.
Their team made swift progress and since Maria was okay on her own, Cindy would sometimes go over to Sky and Rafflesia, who spoke up in the chat that they needed her to come heal them, so they continued with their hunt.
Since they didn’t have a healer, the two of them would have to rest in between battles once their HP and MP or Rage bars got a little too low.
Naturally, Big Red would follow her around, so she was safe from any lycans that just so happened to come across her way. The powerful shadow puppet easily dealt with any lycans that appeared to threaten Cindy, so the girl couldn’t help but wonder why Maria didn’t summon more of these guys to sweep through the garden instead.
To her knowledge, Maria had an army of these shadow puppets. If she summoned her Shadow Army, their jobs would’ve been finished much sooner and they wouldn’t have to go through all the trouble of sweeping through the garden themselves.
After about a half hour later, Maria finished with her side of the garden and swept her area one last time to make sure that she had killed every last lycan in the area. Once she was sure of it, she quickly went to help out Cindy, Rafflesia, and Sky, who were still clearing their portion of the castle’s garden.
With Maria’s help, their work progressed much quicker and easier. It didn’t take too long for them to clear their portion of the garden and they quickly met up with Lizzy and Lilith, who didn’t make too much progress in exploring the garden’s new areas after they made a sweep of the previous area.
“Woah, you guys sure got here fast!” Lizzy said after the party regrouped.
Sky smiled and said, “With Maria’s help, we were able to hasten our progress. It sure is convenient to have the game’s strongest player around.”
“Hehehe~”
Maria laughed and let out an embarrassed smile at the compliment. Cindy sneaked up behind her before nudging her on the side and saying, “I think we could’ve done things a little bit quicker if you summoned your shadow army, right Maria?”
The other girls were finally reminded of Maria’s portable armies that she could summon just about anywhere. Upon realizing this, Sky quickly said, “Hey, that’s right. How could we forget!”
Rafflesia also chimed in and said, “T-That completely slipped my mind.”
“I was reminded of it only after she summoned that big fella to protect me!”
Lizzy looked over and saw that Big Red was standing nearby. She then turned to her friends and said, “Ah, I don’t think we should rely on Mary’s soldiers. If we do, all the experience points will go to her and not us. We’re also part of the team raiding the dungeon, so it’s only right that those experience points go to us as well, and for that, we have to kill the monsters ourselves.”
“Yeah, Lizzy said that I should restrain myself from using my shadow and undead soldiers since it’ll look like I’m being greedy and hogging all of the experience points for myself. Sure, it’ll be much faster, but I don’t want that,” Maria explained. She knew just how important experience points were for everyone, especially since she needed a whole lot of it due to her race’s leveling penalty.
Since it was an extremely important resource, she shouldn’t deprive the rest of her party of it when she was the one who invited them to join her in the dungeon raid. Sure, she could also use that excuse to hog all of the EXP, but that wouldn’t be so nice of her.
The girls nodded in understanding and Cindy pointed out that it would be fine since they were in a party, “But aren’t we in the same party though?”
“Ahh, it doesn’t work like that for my soldiers. The EXP of the monsters my soldiers kill will only go to me even if I am in a party.”
“Ohh…well, that’s too bad. We would be able to sweep through the dungeon a lot faster if we could use your soldiers, Maria. Unfortunately, we all need the EXP, especially since the monsters here give a ton of them.”
“Yup, and that’s why I didn’t summon any of my soldiers until now, since I needed Big Red to protect you. I’m sure you saw that he would always let you have the last hit on any of the lycans he took down, right?”
Now that she said that, Cindy did recall that everytime Big Red was about to take down a lycan, it would always stop at the last moment and let her deal the finishing blow. She didn’t realize it was so that she could get the experience points.
“Ah! That’s right! I guess I should give him a big thank you!”
“Hehe, don’t mention it~ He’s just doing the job I assigned him!”
Lizzy was glad that it had been cleared up. Cindy didn’t mean any harm and she only spoke up about it after remembering that Maria could summon an army to aid her. This unique dungeon seemed like it would take a while to complete, so anything that could help them do it faster was something they needed to take a look into.
It did seem like everyone had forgotten about Maria’s army-summoning ability–even the person herself–but it turned out that she had a good reason not to use it and it was all because she was thinking about everyone else in the party. Maria could've easily just let her greed take over and, since she was the one who found the dungeon, she could have just said to everyone that all of the EXP should go to her, but she didn't do that.
“Sorry to put you on the spot like that, Maria. I just thought that it would help us complete this dungeon a lot quicker. Judging by how long we’ve taken just to get to the castle’s second area, I reckon it’ll take us even longer for us to finish! Maybe even another day!” Cindy said.
Maria shook her head and replied, “No, it’s fine! If it wasn’t for the EXP problem, I would’ve summoned my two armies to help us right from the very start! I even feel that it's a shame that I can't do that, since it'll definitely make our run a lot easier and quicker!”
The party returned to the pedestal that they found at the entrance of the garden’s locked area and Lizzy clapped her hands to get everyone’s attention, “Good job, everyone. I’m sure the whole ordeal was quite tedious, but I’m sure we’ve finally gotten all of the Broken Fragments now. Hand them over to me and let’s see if this will work!”
Maria and Sky were the team leaders, so they were in possession of the Broken Fragment pieces. They quickly traded it all to Lizzy and once all the Broken Fragments were gathered, they magically fused together into a tablet shaped just like the indentation that was on the pedestal.
“Nice! It worked!”
“Thank goodness! Our hard work paid off!”
“Yay!”
Lizzy quickly placed the tablet onto the pedestal and it started glowing. A breeze kicked in from out of nowhere and a moment later, they all heard the sound of something shattering.
If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
*Crash*
“That was the sound of the barrier shattering! Looks like the way forward is open now!” Lizzy exclaimed.
Lilith looked around and nodded, “Yes, the magic barrier should be down now! I don’t feel any traces of magic in the air.”
“Let’s rest for a moment, I think a boss might be waiting for us inside of the locked area,” Cindy spoke up and said.
Sky nodded in agreement before saying, “Agreed. We’ve been at this for a few hours now…Since this is a unique dungeon and we can continue our progress, how about we take a real break and eat something before continuing later? Not gonna lie, I’m a bit hungry.”
“Let’s kill the boss first, then do that?” Maria asked. She was feeling a bit hungry too, but her enthusiasm to fight and kill the boss monster in the castle’s second section was getting the better of her.
“Alright, let’s do that. It’s a good checkpoint to take a break at,” Lizzy said. “We’ll kill the boss monster and then take a break. No one can enter the unique dungeon anyway, since they need to be in a party with Maria, so we have no fear of anyone trying to sabotage our run.”
“Yup! I’ll also make sure to station as many of my soldiers to guard the castle’s entrance just in case.”
------------------------
After resting for a bit, the girls quickly began their pre-battle preparations. It wasn’t much, but having Maria and Cindy’s buffs on everyone was always good.
The party marched into the newly unlocked area which was the final place that they had yet to explore and they only found a large tree there. They didn’t see anything else besides that and a few benches, statues, and bushes.
All of the statues were rather peculiar though. They were those of Lycan warriors wielding a large variety of weapons and after observing them for a bit, Lizzy quickly told everyone to step away from the statues.
“Guys, back away! Those statues look a little too realistic, don’t you think? I think they’ll come to life and become the monsters we’ll have to fight!” She warned.
“O-Oh!”
Cindy quickly backed off as she was extremely close to one of them. However, even after everyone moved away, nothing happened.
“Huh? What’s this? They aren’t moving? Usually, it’s about now that they'll start attacking us or something…” Lizzy scratched her head in confusion.
“Instead of those statues…I’m a little bit more worried about that tree…do you feel it as well, Maria?” Lilith said as she eyed the tree in the middle of the enclosed area with trepidation.
“!”
Maria’s eyes widened in surprise after Lilith pointed that out. She didn’t feel it at all before, but now she definitely can. A storm of mana was circling around the tree and it got stronger and stronger with each passing second.
“G-Guys! It’s the tree! The tree is the monster!”
Just as Maria yelled this out, the tree’s branches began to bend and crack before they suddenly turned flexible and started whipping around back and forth in the air.
“Formations everyone!” Lizzy commanded before giving Maria a glance and saying, “Mary, I don’t suppose you can do the trick that you did with the previous boss on this one, huh?”
“What do you think, Liz? That thing isn’t even humanoid!”
“Figures…”
*DING*
The Garden’s Central Guardian has awoken!
“[Inspect]!”
Name: Weeping Willow Spirit, Magradas Level: 400 HP: ???????/???????
MP: ???????/???????
SP: N/A
“W-What the heck? The level jumped to 400 already? This is only the second boss!”
“Don’t worry, we got this!”
A spooky looking face appeared on the tree’s trunk and it began glowing with a yellow-greenish flame. Magrada, the Weeping Willow Spirit, let out an ear-piercing cry and the girls had to brace themselves from the incoming sonic attack.
“Agh!”
Everyone in the party was inflicted with the [Silence] and [Deafened] debuff, so this somewhat disoriented them.
Lizzy tried pulling up the party’s chat window, but she couldn’t say or type anything because of the debuff.
‘What the heck? This has never happened before!’ She cried out in her head.
She quickly gave everyone a look before gesturing with her hands to Maria and Rafflesia. Although this was the first time the girls were in a party together, they had been cooperating for quite some time now, so they had established quite a bit of teamwork with each other.
They didn’t need Lizzy to verbally give them orders and quickly understood what she meant just through her gestures.
‘Proper formation this time! I’ll tank, you two attack and make sure to cast your CC on it!’
Maria and Rafflesia nodded at Lizzy, who then turned to Sky and Lilith before giving them her orders.
‘Just attack but make sure the aggro stays on me!’
They gave a nod to her and Lizzy just eyed Cindy, who nodded back at her immediately because she already knew what she was supposed to do.
While Lizzy was giving the girls their orders, the boss monster, Magrada, had extended its flexible branches over to the statues nearby and crushed them into dust. The weapons the statues were holding dropped to the ground and Magrada quickly picked them up with its branches.
Lizzy didn’t wait for the monster to gather its weapons and charged at it with her shield in front of her. This time around, Lizzy had her shield equipped because this boss battle wasn’t going to go as easily as the previous one.
For whatever reason, Magrada was already in its rage mode even though it was still at 100 percent HP. No one questioned it though–not like they could at the moment since they were all muted–and just did as Lizzy commanded them.
Once Lizzy properly established the monster’s aggro on her, the rest of the party rushed forward and began attacking the boss monster. Unfortunately, none of them could use their skills or spells because of the [Silence] debuff, so they only attacked the boss monster with normal attacks.
This proved to be much more challenging than they had thought. Maria’s damage output with her normal attacks was much higher than everyone else, including Lizzy, so the monster’s aggro would sometimes switch over to her and she would have to back off to let Lizzy re-establish the aggro back onto her.
Coupled with the monster’s rage mode, however, it would still attack someone else other than Lizzy, the party’s main tank, at random.
The [Silence] debuff didn’t look like it would disappear anytime soon, so the girls were really struggling, especially Lizzy, who had to tank the monster’s attack from time to time if she couldn’t block or parry it.
When one of the branches that was holding a stone ax suddenly pushed Lizzy away and another one with a stone hammer tried to flatten her, Maria rushed over and pushed her away before emulating a [Full Counter] with her movements and partially triggered its effects, in a way.
The monster didn’t receive 99% of the damage from its attack and Maria didn’t come out of the exchange completely unharmed, but she did, however, manage to reflect the boss monster’s hammer-holding branch right to its face.
-18,203
Being hit square in the face from its own branch, Magrada let out an angry shriek that no one in the party could hear, since they were all inflicted with the [Deafen] status ailment.
She did have to pay a small price for pulling off that stunt, but it was only a small amount of her HP which she easily recovered with her lifesteal after giving the monster a few chops of her ax.
Maria then turned to Lizzy who she had pushed away earlier and quickly pointed at herself, to which the latter responded with a subtle nod before downing an HP potion and rushing back into the fight.
The two of them switch roles because Lizzy just didn’t have a way to keep herself alive without her skills and Cindy’s healing.
Since Maria was the only one who could sustain herself despite not being able to receive any healing, Lizzy let her friend do her thing. Unfortunately, Maria didn’t show the girls anything too crazy like before, but she did show them that her evasive capabilities were top notch.
Maria didn’t tank the boss monster’s attacks like any normal tank would do. Instead, she dodged all of them.
There were 10 stone statues in the central area, so Magrada, the Weeping Willow Spirit, had 10 branches holding the weapons of those statues, but it had many more that were just whipping at Maria indiscriminately.
However, despite the numerous branches attacking her, Maria was able to evade, parry, and strike them all down with her Calamity that was constantly changing forms.
One moment, Maria would be cutting a branch with her Calamity’s scythe form, but in the next instance, she’d be blocking an attack with her weapon’s greatsword form. Since all of her weapon’s forms didn’t share a cooldown with each other, Maria was constantly able to spam [Calamity Cleave] over and over again as she switched between their forms.
Weapons and equipment skills were apparently still usable despite being under the infliction of the [Silence] debuff. It was the weapon’s features and not something she personally cast, like a spell or skill. Maria guessed this was the reason, so it made sense that she could use [Calamity Cleave].
This wasn’t the case, however. This was only possible because Maria’s weapon was an ego weapon that had a spirit of its own. Her daughter, Cali, wasn’t affected by the boss monster’s AOE silence ability, so Maria still had access to all of her weapon forms’ skills.
Seeing her friend continuously use her skill in front of them repeatedly and cutting down the boss monsters’ branches, the girls tried to see if they could as well, but unfortunately, it didn’t work.
They wondered why, but after giving it some thought, they arrived at the conclusion that Maria’s weapon–Cali–was a unique weapon that could bypass the [Silence] restriction placed on them by the boss.
Their friend was only using that single skill that came from her weapon over and over again as she switched her weapons’ forms, but she never used anything else, so it was safe to say that she was still under the effects of the boss monster’s area [Silence].
They weren’t going to complain, however. Since Maria could use her weapon skills, this was great because it made the boss monster hunt a whole lot easier for them as everyone’s skills and spells were locked.
Cindy didn’t know what to do in this scenario, so she rushed back and forth between the players and shared her potions with them. This allowed everyone to keep their HP bars up during the battle, but it was tough on Cindy who had to constantly move around.
Also, healing with potions was extremely limited. The highest grade potion could only heal 40 percent to 45 percent of a player’s total HP, but this was if they used it themselves. If another player used a healing potion on another player, the efficacy would drop by 50 percent.
With her two healing spells, [Cure] and [Hi-Cure], locked behind the boss’s status affliction, Cindy couldn’t optimally heal the party, but she still did everything she could to help everyone out.
Cindy felt a little useless in this party because it was already the second boss battle where she couldn’t fulfill her role to the best of her abilities, but it wasn’t her fault.
The first boss battle was just Maria doing her thing, while the current boss battle was really a complete counter for her and any mage class player. Even Lilith was completely useless in this fight.
She couldn’t even use her normal attack, which was a basic [Magic Bolt], since it was still regarded as a spell that needed to be cast before use.
The only members that were actually doing anything were the other 4. Cindy and Lilith both had to sit this battle out. Since Lilith didn’t want to get in anyone’s way, she opted to leave the enclosure and once she was out, the [Silence] debuff disappeared.
“Oh hey! I can hear and talk now!”
She tried entering the enclosure again, but quickly found herself inflicted with [Silence] and [Deafen] again.
“Damn, it really is the boss monster’s special feature. We can only fight it using normal attacks…”
Lizzy looked around for a bit and decided to head back into the enclosure to help Cindy, who was frantically moving around and splashing potions onto anyone who needed them once her potion usage was off cooldown.
“Welp, I guess she isn’t the party’s healer for nothing.”
While the two girls were running around the back area and avoiding any attacks from the boss monster as best they could, the other 4 in their party weren’t having a splendid time at all.
Lizzy, Rafflesia, and Sky followed Maria’s lead to dodge, parry, and chop off the boss monster’s branches. Following her lead seemed easy enough, but it was completely far from that at all.
Trying to track down ALL of the numerous branches waving in the air which were poised to suddenly attack them at a moment’s notice was no easy feat. Even Maria couldn’t do that. She could at best keep track of 15 or 20 branches at one time, but it was impossible to keep track of all of them.
Maria only kept an eye out on the ones that seemed like they would suddenly strike her. As for the ones she couldn’t take note of, she just let her instincts and body do the work. Her friends didn’t have the battle instincts that she had, so they were struggling–immensely.
Lizzy’s condition was quite precarious as she was the slowest one in the team, being the main tank and all. She was wearing heavy armor which greatly slowed her down and if it wasn’t for Cindy’s help splashing some potions on her, she would’ve died a while ago.
Rafflesia was doing the best among the 3 as she was a thief, so she had to be light on her feet and, since she was a spy-branch thief, she was extremely observant. She could actually track more of those branches than Maria could, which allowed her to be more successful when dodging and counterattacking, unlike the rest of them.
She wasn’t doing the most damage in the party as Maria’s attacks were quite heavy every time she landed a strike on the boss monster, but Rafflesia did have more of her attacks connect to Magrada than Maria.
20 minutes into the fight, the boss monster’s HP had only fallen to 90 percent despite all of the effort that Lizzy, Maria, Rafflesia, and Sky had put in. Their progress allowed them to lower the boss’s HP by 1 percent every minute, but with the boss’s battle recovery kicking in, that was further lowered to just 0.5 percent instead.
This battle proved to be extremely tiresome. Not only were the girls’ stamina draining from all of the actions and quick movements they were doing to dodge Magrada’s attacks, but their focus was also draining really fast as well.
Fighting at that level of intensity was extremely taxing to a player’s mind and it seemed almost impossible to defeat this boss. In the end, the girls had to retreat because everyone felt way too tired–and hungry–to continue fighting it.
Maria felt unwilling, but with everyone else completely drained from the fight, she had no choice but to disengage from the battle.