First thing first, getting advice. I have no knowledge about the enemy what so ever and rushing in blindly would not be advisable.

“Ralph, do you have any advice for me? Since you are so certain that I can survive it means that there must be at least one kind of advantage I have over the boss and the minions”

“You are right. You have several advantages. First, treat the boss and the minions as one whole entity. The minions have no free will at all and are completely under the control of the boss”

“Does it mean if I kill the boss, the minions will not attack?”

“Yes. But don’t bet on a successful blitzkrieg, the boss is aware of you and will naturally prepare the means to survive against even the wildest attacks you can offer for long enough to surround you with the mob and kill you”

“Okay. Thanks. Anything else?”

“As you remember, the boss is not a humanoid being. Since it’s not humanoid, it’s understanding of the optimal ways its minions should fight is limited. The minions will not be able to use their abilities to the full extent of their potential”

“How limited are they in their means of attack then?”

“Charging, hitting, slamming, biting, clawing, swarming and such. Nothing exquisite or hard to guard against”

“…Alright. Hm… Would my new method of attack be effective against the mobs and the boss?”

“No”

“As expected. It must be because the structure involved in operating those monsters is much more stable than the one in the small fry, right?”

“Yes”

“Then the methods of attack advisable would be… physical? Using Stone Spear and the Stone Bullet spells?”

“No. Not really. Despite them being magical in nature, they still will succumb to high temperatures and low temperatures, changes in the temperature and various other attacks that would be useful against, say, a human opponent. You are fighting monsters, not solving theoretical problems after all”

“Then let me see… Hm… That and that… Hm… I see. Anything else?”

“You opponent is lacking in intelligence. It will fall for the more sophisticated traps and feints and it will not use advanced tactics when dealing with you”

“What is considered an attack against it?”

“If you want to try and abuse the rules, you should stop. The beings who created this dungeon are much much wiser than you. Or pretty much any human in general”

“…So it means that all the possible ways I could try and cheat have been accounted for?”

“Sigh, yes. Please trust me more and don’t try and nitpick my words”

Heh. Yeah, sure.

“Can you calculate for how long my Multitask skill will last if I use it with moderate intensity?”

“Just don’t use it. This skill is harmful to your sanity and your perception of yourself. It also might explode your brain. Literally. In the first place, because of many overlapping factors and the irregularities in your soul and body caused by your reincarnation and my involvement, several skills you have acquired don’t work the way they were meant to work. The system treats you as an otherworlder, meaning that it has at best only a vague idea on how to work with you and it may go in a wrong direction entirely at worst, so there will inevitably be bugs and flaws. I’ll help you sort it all out after you are out of the dungeon but for now, I’ll simply restrict the use of the skills that could harm you in the long run”

After Ralph said it, I felt a very uncomfortable feeling, as if my soul itself was violated. It actually might’ve been.

The use of the skill “Multitask” is restricted

The use of the skill “Adrenaline Rush” is restricted

The use of the skill “Mana Insight” is restricted

By the way, the announcements in my head had a very “not-system” flavor. I guess Ralph just informed me in this way.

“Any other advice?”

“Exercise your body before going in and don’t be stingy with MP”

Stolen novel; please report.

“Is that all?”

“This is enough. Meaning: I won’t give you any more advice on this, if you want to check just in case”

***

I won’t be moving out immediately. I have to slowly go through all I know so far. And by slowly, I mean it. Without multitask and with the general mental exhaustion that I’m experiencing just thinking of nothing feels more natural than forcing them gears in my head to move.

Sigh. First, the enemies.

They use primitive tactics with little understanding of their own abilities. The cowtiger thing is a non-humanoid not bipedal undead, meaning it’s relatively stupid at its level and it has no idea about how the bipedal humanoid minions it has should work. While Ralph said that the minions have little to no independence, I reckon it only goes as far as not being able to take conscious decisions. The motor functions should be controlled at the subconscious level and the cowtiger would need the broken Multitask skill to control so many undeads on its own, so I guess it simply issues commands to the minions like “#9 move towards that place” or “#3 and #10 do a claw swipe”.

It should have a general feeling for the minion’s positions as, as I remember, it only has one pair of eyes and it uses those eyes to observe its environment.

“Don’t be stingy with your MP and exercise, huh”

It would do well to do it wisely, that being to break that gang up into smaller groups and create general confusion in the terrain and among the minions.

For that I would have to manipulate the terrain of the arena to create uneven surfaces and walls to block the cowtiger’s and the minion’s sight.

The walls don’t have to be hard, they need to block sight and leave a lot of nasty rubble. I also have to prepare spells to clear my own path lest I wanna die in a pathetic way, which I might do anyway. Well, let’s be honest, my chances are pretty low when it comes to surviving.

Fog, fog and fog would be great. Dust… would work too. A spell to raise dust sounds quite simple… if given sooome thought. Yep, I get the general outline of the spell.

I also have a few prepared matrices that I could use like controlled mines. They emit light on command and would come in useful.

The enemy has only melee types of attack and I would die with a light swipe of the arm of a minion. I should keep distance and prepare some emergency spells to protect myself if a minion or the boss gets too close to me. Spells to quickly make distance would do well too.

Footwork, footwork… Footwork, your sister! I can stumble while walking, not to mention fighting. Alright, it’s not that bad. It’s still bad. How do I stay light on my feet while fighting?

Do I even need to move too much? Well, it would be highly recommended. If I stay in one place, it would be GAME OVER for me.

Let’s go over all we need and have:

* I have this idea: I don’t have much MP left, to create a massive spell, but I can rework what I already have.

I had the dream of being a high DPS glass cannon mage and subconsciously made a few more spells for offence than defense. My Autumn spell hasn’t been used and it’s not fated to, until I rework it.

It’s packed full of dense MP and if I add some more and restructure some parts of the matrices in it, I would get tons upon tons of randomly placed walls that would be easily broken, always get in the way and disappear in some three hours.

Reworking a matrix requires a lot of practice first though.

* Fog and dust. Easy. Consider it done! Too simple! Too much Mp required, need a day or two to make… Well, what about reworking those spells too?

Winter was based on water mana mostly. It doesn’t last for too long and, like Autumn, is jammed full of MP in order to achieve a quick burst of deadly frost. Simply reworking most of the spell matrices like a slave would give me the desired results, hopefully.

* Protection and distance-making spells… I have a few stone wall spells, but they aren’t that reliable. How about I… sigh. How about I rework them into a semi-offensive spell that would create a small explosion of stone bullets a certain distance away from me outwards? A quick stun to make some time and maybe hurt the enemy…

Distance is a measurement of my chances of survival. I can’t throw myself out with a violent collision, I can’t launch myself into the air, I can’t do many things… My ability to realize spell designs is severely limited. I can’t make myself “run with the wind”, for example.

I’ll think of something.

* Footwork… I can only do a short training montage and ask the evil malevolent demon inside my head to give me pointers. Can I cry? I can, right?

Now, as for fighting. It’s much harder to come up with ideas here. I don’t know how much damage the minions and the boss can take, I don’t know if they are affected by pain and injuries, which is unlikely. Since the cowtiger monster doesn’t know the humanoid body’s inner workings, instead of killing the minions, making them unusable would be much more efficient.

Ruining the balance, so that they would stumble whenever they make a step, maybe, weakening the connections between joints, so that with every attack, they would ruin their bodies…

Spells that would deal damage slowly, hindering the activities of the minions? All of that would have to be thought through and finalized. If I had access to Multitask, it would take some five to six minutes… Am I becoming an addict? I feel that without accessing Mana Insight at a low intensity like I always do I am bare and helpless… Is it an addiction? Can I be saved?

As for the Boss… I can give it a few “debuffs” that would try to ruin its body too, but the instincts that I have developed after performing hundreds and maybe even more than a thousand of experiments are telling me that its mana structure is much sturdier than the minions.

It may sound pretentious but I do have a feel for how a magical structure of a spell is made. Whether it's hard or easy to make, whether it's fragile or sturdy, whether it's flexible or rigid, whether it's efficient or eats MP like a pig... I might actually have a talent for these kinds of things.

I saw it only once, but despite its minions being sixty in numbers and all of them being visually menacing and evil af, I would prefer to battle two hundred of those things at their potential best than two of the cowtigers at half of their peak.

When I saw the minions, I could feel that given enough time and leisure, I would be able to take them apart like a very complicated magical lego-puzzle. When it came to the cowtiger, I felt that it was like a living being, its structure close in complexity to my own. Messing with it would yield little results.

I could create more brutish traps and “debuffs” for the cowtiger, like a bear trap or something similar that would ruin it in a more obvious mechanical way, but it seems hard. It would be more expensive when it comes to MP and it’s easier to get rid of such traps.

I guess physical impact, lots of physical impact can bring it down best.

Well, to work, I guess.